Never pay full price.

Steam is in the midst of a summer sale, and this is what I wait for. I can't remember ever paying full price for a PC game, except for the occasional retail bargain, like a boxed Painkiller trilogy or Half-Life 1 compilation. This week I nabbed the Grand Theft Auto IV complete pack for ten bucks, Assassin's Creed II for less than seven, and Bully for three and change. That's three full AAA games plus two expansions for the price of four Arby's value meals. I win.

I've got something like sixty games on Steam now, all but a handful purchased while on sale for a deep discount. Risen, a game I really, really want, is on sale today at 66% off. That still puts it at a little over ten dollars, so I passed. Discipline is the name of the game with Steam.

In other news, the lovely Jenny got a job with my company today, and she starts tomorrow. This is awesome. We'll be on the same sleep schedule now, and can carpool, saving tons of money on gas I won't spend on my 19-year old Explorer, since we'll take her Accord. And we can eat lunch together every day (double bonus points). Well, every day that I'm not out of town or on a PM, which is most days (minus 50% on double point bonus). Still, it will up our combined income hugely (financial stress level minus 60%). And I won't have to sweat in the heat all day and then drive home in a truck without air conditioning that's been sitting in the sun all day long (endurance level increased 50%).

On the downside, it's critical that we get her Accord serviced ASAP for all the warning lights that have been coming on lately, and I have no idea what repairs they might require. But that should be an affordable expense once she gets settled. Probably.

KOTOR makes for a happy Jenny.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was on sale yesterday for $2.49 as a part of Steam's five-day Thanksgiving special. I got up late, but Jenny was sick and wanted to sleep even later. So I came downstairs, let the dog out, started the obligatory Weekend Coffee, and sat down at my PC to check Steam, because I knew they were running specials every day for five days. I figured I'd find something for The Lovely before the sale ended, but KOTOR for $2.49 was beyond anything I expected. So I bought it via my Steam account on Jenny's rig and downloaded it for her. By the time I got her out of bed it was ready to play. Yeah, I'm thoughtful like that.

Anyway, she's diggin' it, as you can see. Having beaten in on XBox years ago, she insists that it's one of the best RPG's ever and that if I'm ever going to see eye-to-eye with her on this whole "RPG's are worth your time" thing that I have to play -- and beat -- this game. It's not a small request. I have a whole post on my experiences with RPG's, and if you've read it, you know how picky I am.

I started KOTOR while Jenny was at work yesterday. I downloaded it to my rig because I wanted to try it, and because I knew I could max it out in every way with my specs. It runs great, and I'm a few hours into it. It looks like the sort of action RPG I like, but it doesn't play like one. It's a story-driven tale with lots of talking and quest-hoarding, punctuated by semi-interactive fighting. So far, it's very JRPG-ish, which is not good. Being set in the Star Wars universe helps, so I'll keep playing. I have to admit that it's addictive.

Going back to that old post, I should point out that now that I have the specs to run it well, I do intend to try to get further into S.T.A.L.K.E.R. than I did before. I liked a lot about that game, but the fact that it was so goddamned ugly didn't exactly make me want to stick with it. It looks much better with my 4870, and I do want to try it again. I also have The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion now, which I haven't tried at all. It came bundled with BioShock, which is why I bought it: BioShock for me, Oblivion for Jenny.

She's still playing KOTOR, by the way. I'm looking to my left, and, yes, there's Jenny playing KOTOR. So at least she's enjoying her little gift. Now I just have to upgrade her entire computer so I can get her Spore for Christmas.

I heart Steam (finally)

Prey was on sale over Steam this weekend. At five bucks, it was an impulse buy for me; my download is at 78% and counting. I've already posted my thoughts on the Prey demo. Looking forward to playing the rest of the game.


Steam has matured a lot over the past year. My biggest gripe with the system, mandatory patching, was remedied with the option to disable updates on a per-game basis. The catalog now includes games by id, Rockstar, Atari, Majesco, Epic, Sega, Eidos, and more. They have blockbusters like Bioshock and The Orange Box, and entire franchises like the Grand Theft Auto, Civilization, Call of Duty, Unreal, Doom, Half-Life, and Quake series (except Quake 4, for some reason). Throw in indie favorites like Darwinia and AudioSurf, community features that track game stats and award achievements for some games, a click-and-buy system, and seamless multiplayer for Valve's games, and you have one of the slickest PC gaming apps ever created. I hated Steam for a long time, but Valve has put in a huge amount of work to make it a viable and painless system for gamers. Oh, and did I mention the spec surveys?

Switching gears, the Tigers are in the Final Four for the first time in over 20 years. I would be prouder had I managed to graduate, but hey, I wore the blue for three years, I figure I have more cause than most people around here to be excited about it. I envy the kids in the band this year; all they managed to do when I had the Sousa strapped on was lose some NIT games. Whatever happens against UCLA, I'm happy for the school and the city, and I hope Rose stays in the Forum next year (grab him, Chris Wallace. Don't think, just do it).

Pointless post.

Bored? So am I. Here's something to read.

Spent some xmas gift-card goodness on, among other things, a giant, decent-if-not-great pair of over-ear headphones. They have a switch that lowers the bass; I don't know who that's for. Half the point of buying a good set of cans is to get some appreciable bass, no?

Couple days later I went by Cat's expressly to blow some cash, and found myself holding two records called B-Sides & Rarities, one by Cake and one by Deftones. Although I do have a man-crush on Cake's music, and despite the fact that the Deftones record cost twice as much, that's the one I bought. I'll get the Cake LP eventually, until then I'm satisfied. Deftones is just a brilliant fucking band, and this is a great set (CD, DVD, booklet/mini-photo album). Almost picked up a Damien Rice album while I was there, but I think Jen may already have it. Need to check her library.

Quick Steam update. Valve's landed another major developer in Rockstar Games. The entire Rockstar catalog is live, check it out if you're a PC snob like me. GTA San Andreas is one of my all-time favorite PC games, console-origins be damned. When and if some more disposable cash comes my way I'd like to finally get around to checking out the Max Payne series.

Oh, I thought this was funny. So there's a drug store in Raleigh I go to sometimes. There's an older black lady who works the register in the evenings, and she used to bust my ass about my ID before I got my new license. I get it, I look way younger than my 31 years, and my old ID was nine years old, beat up, and the picture didn't really look like me anymore. But she would go all out, looking for a second opinion on it, asking for secondary ID, the whole deal. Just for a damn pack of smokes. This happened at least a half-dozen times. At a certain point you'd think she would fucking remember me, but no.

Anyway I went in there tonight. I'm really not a douchebag, but I was definitely wearing a douchebag's uniform: baggy jeans, a black knit cap with a big skull printed on it, and a bright orange t-shirt that says 'Show me your Titties' (don't ask). Guess who was working the register. I walked up dressed like a dick, and she was clearly already unhappy with me, and proceeded to buy nothing but beer, cigarettes, and condoms. I don't know why, but there was something liberating about being, superficially, a complete and utter asshole for once. That's so not who I am, but I think I could grow to like at least pretending to be one every now and then.

id Software on Steam. Oh my God.

Best news ever.
by AC - permalink

id Software's entire library is now available for purchase and download on Steam. This is officially the greatest day in the history of Steam. I'm fighting very, very hard not to buy every game I don't already have, especially since it's all 10% off right now.

It's a battle I'm already losing, as I just bought the "Wolf Pack" and I'm downloading it now. Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein for $18? Sold. The other temptations are Master Levels for Doom II, which is a little pricey for me at ten bucks since I already have Doom II, and the Heretic/Hexen Collection, which is a goddamned steal at ten bucks and which I'm probably going to buy as soon as I finish writing this. The only other id games I don't already own are Commander Keen and Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil. I really want RoE, but apparently it requires that Doom 3 be activated and installed via Steam to work. That's fucked up, since virtually zero non-Valve games can be activated with Steam with an existing key.

Well, Return to Castle Wolfenstein is at only 8%, probably because of all the id nerds like me downloading it. But Wolf 3D finished almost immediately, so I'm going to start playing it.

Another developer joins Steam.

The list grows.
by AC - permalink

Earlier today Valve announced that THQ is the latest developer to hock games via Steam. Several games are already available for direct-download purchase, including Company of Heroes and the Full Spectrum Warrior series. More of interest to me, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is coming to Steam as well. Hopefully a demo will show up at some point; I would have bought it already if I knew my rig could handle it. Half-Life Fallout has the full press release.

THQ is a good pickup for Valve. They have a solid RTS pedigree and a huge number of kiddie games in their inventory, which could help Steam's demographic if any of them are headed for digital distribution. They're joining an increasingly impressive list of publishers already on Steam. Among others, Valve has Activision, Eidos, 2K Games, and PopCap, although all but PopCap are offering only portion of their software line-up. I'd really like to see a partner like Ubisoft (Ghost Recon, Far Cry, Splinter Cell), Rockstar (GTA, Manhunt), or Epic (UT, Gears of War) come on board with their full libraries.

I have my gripes with Steam, but most of my complaints have been with Valve's own games and their long tradition of forcing often unneeded patches that seem to do more harm than good. But Steam now lets you disable automatic updates for individual games, and registering a game with Steam eliminates the need for a CD-check, which I absolutely despise. Unnecessary wear-and-tear on my DVD burner just to play a little Call of Duty or Tomb Raider = not so fantastic.

Oh, Steam also has Penny Arcade now, accessible from the front page. That's cool, I guess.

Lara Croft, '97 style.

This is why my PC is better than my Saturn.
by AC - permalink

Since playing the demo of Tomb Raider: Anniversary last month, I'd been kicking around the idea of buying it via Steam. At $30, it seemed like a fair enough deal, and although I have a bunch of games already registered with Steam, I've never actually used Steam to buy anything new. But this afternoon I happened to run across a retail copy of the game for the same price while picking up a big fat sack of food for my dogs. Same game, but with cool box art, the game media on its own DVD, and not tied irrevocably to Steam? Sold.

So far, Tomb Raider: Anniversary looks like a good buy. As I said, it came on a single DVD, and that alone merits at least a half-dozen cool points. I'm still completely baffled by modern games -- Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, for example -- that come packaged on four or five CD-ROMs when the vast majority of gamers have at least one DVD drive. Valve's Steam hardware survey proves this (scroll down to "Drive Type"). Anyway, installing TRA took a long, long time. Windows' task manager informed me that the TRA installer was updating my DirectX, which I had deliberately not updated, not yet anyway. Minus several cool points.

But once it was installed, TRA delivered. The game has run fast and smooth, no crashes, no hiccups of any kind. It's moderately tweakable in-game, but you'll want to force your desired level of anisotropic filtering hardware-side. Like the demo, it runs very well on my oldish hardware. I'm not big on the motion blur, but I like the depth-of-field effect, so I'm putting up with it for now, as you can't have one without the other. Gameplay-wise, it's the original Tomb Raider, so it's brilliant. The only sticking point is going to be combat, but there are three modes to chose from if you're playing with a mouse and keyboard, and one of them should work for you. The game is still obviously designed for a controller, however, and I had to push the mouse sensitivity all the way up to "20."

I've barely started the game, but I'm glad I bought it. Tomb Raider is one of my all-time favorite Saturn games, and TRA looks to be a PC classic itself. I'll let you know after I've had some more time with it.

Half-Life 2 and Ep. 2 news.

The joys of not crashing. Sort of.
by AC - permalink

I'm about three quarters of the way through my latest Half-Life 2 play-through, in the midst of Anticitizen One, and so far I've run into four crashes. That would be a lot in any other game, and it would have been a lot for HL2 a couple of years ago, but these days I think I've been pretty lucky. Early on I ran into what would have been a typical looping-sound crash, but I was miraculously able to alt-tab back to the desktop, where I was able to use the Windows task manager to manually close HL2 and Steam. That's a first for me, and the sort of crash I can live with.

Later, during Highway 17, I ran into consecutive crashes at the same place, which was somewhat ominous. Just after downing the first gunship, while loading the map with the mag-crane, it stalled out on me, and forced a shutdown. I don't know why. Then it happened again, but I realized I'd forgotten to unload WindowBlinds, so I was a little less worried, but all the same I went ahead and upgraded from Catalyst driver set 7.4 to 7.5 (again using NGOHQ's Catalyst + Control Panel installer).

I tried again, this time taking no chances and setting my desktop resolution and refresh rate to the same I'd be running in the game. I made it through the map transition and played on.

The last crash was right at the end of Sandtraps, just before entering Nova Prospekt. In the middle of that furious battle against two gunships, the game instantly quit to the desktop as I tried to quicksave. Weird, but as Source-engine crashes go, pretty damn tame. And it's run fine since then. In all, it's something like seven hours of gameplay with three inexplicable crashes, and with HL2's track record, I call that progress.

Moving on, if only laterally, Shacknews is reporting another unofficial release date for Episode 2, this time directly from Valve, of October 9th of this year. With the Black Box canceled, I can't see myself buying the Orange Box with HL2 and Ep. 1 (both of which I have) plus Ep. 2, Portal, and Team Fortess 2 for $50. The word is that what would have been the retail Black Box (Ep. 2, Portal, and TF2) will be available on the PC, but only via Steam, and for a price not yet set.

It would be nice to have the option of buying each of these games separately, as originally promised by Valve's original episodic content concept. As good as Episode 2 looks, from the Shack's new preview of it, it looks like they're incorporating a lot of new tech geared towards newer video hardware than I have, even though Valve's own Steam survey data indicates that I'm practically on the cutting edge with my old X800 XL. So all I really want is Portal, but current Steam pricing leads me to believe they'd probably charge no less than $20 for it. At that price it would make more sense to pay $40 for the whole Black Box.

Steam gets steamier.

For better or worse, Steam rolls on.
by AC - permalink

Valve picked up another high-profile partner today as Eidos Interactive is hocking their games via Steam now. There's some good news here, as this opens up classic games like Tomb Raider, a Saturn favorite of mine, to easy PC distribution. Just Cause is also in the Eidos library, and I'm downloading the demo by way of Steam right now. By all accounts Just Cause is basically Grand Theft Auto, Far Cry-style, which sounds pretty damned good to me, but I've been hesitant about how it will run on my rig.

I'm even more excited about the original Tomb Raider. I have the Saturn version of this game, and I'm completely in love with it. This started out as a Saturn exclusive, and was ported to the much more popular PlayStation and held for a simultaneous release. It plays great on the old console, but it would be great to play it with the resolution and framerate cranked up. I don't know how it will be priced, but for ten or even fifteen bucks, it'd be worth a download.

In other me-related news, I finally got around to ripping my last couple Nine Inch Nails CDs and integrating them into my library. The two domestic Closer CDs and the Head Like a Hole maxi-single are fairly repetitive, but worth listening to, especially with the inclusion of Memorabilia on Closer disc 2. Also I'm supposed to be taking one of my dogs, Lucy, to the vet this week for her yearly round of innoculations, but I can't seem to get around to it. She's sick for days afterwards, and she's always so pissed at me for doing it. I shit you not, yesterday she overheard me say "I guess I'll take Lucy to the vet tomorrow," and she went straight under the bed and wouldn't come out. That dog is so smart it creeps me out sometimes.

Steam is unintuitive.

Installing a game twice is stupid.
by AC - permalink

So now that I've got the high-speed hookup going and Steam is marginally less a pain in the ass, I thought I'd look into registering some of my games that require a CD-check with the service just to avoid having to dig out a CD whenever I want to play them. I figure the Steam-enabled third-party games aren't as likely to shove unwanted patches down my PC's throat at random intervals as Valve is. So I tried Call of Duty and United Offensive, but no go. Apparently it only works with Valve games. That's somewhat annoying.

So I took a look around my stacks of game boxes and decided to try to register Counter-Strike. I got it as part of the Half-Life Platinum Collection a long time ago, but I've never really played it. It turns out that entering a valid CD-key only activates a game -- or, in this case, a set of games -- and enables you to download them into your Steam account. Previous installations are ignored. That's also somewhat annoying.

The good news is, activating my CS CD-key unlocked not only CS and the other games in the Platinum Collection (Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, TFC, and the Ricochet mod), but also Day of Defeat and Deathmatch Classic, which is just the original Quake 1 DM maps and weapons modded into HL1. I downloaded CS and DoD, since they're multiplayer games and you can only find servers in-game for them via Steam. And I guess I'll go ahead and download Blue Shift even though it's single-player only, since it's the only game in the collection that requires a CD-check, and I fucking hate that.

In other news, my PC still hasn't crashed since I decided to pop it open, knock it over on its side, and point a desk fan into it. GPU temps are down and somewhat steady, and I'm not so gun-shy about starting massive downloads anymore. I've also been toying with the demos for the first two Splinter Cell games (the third, Chaos Theory, crashes immediately after startup) and Need for Speed Underground 2. The SC demos are interesting and look really nice, but they're incredibly frustrating. There are about a hundred ways to fail a mission and only like two ways to win, and it's just a huge amount of trial-and-error and not very fun at all. NFS Underground though, is really cool. It's just a demo, and offers no hint as to how much depth the actual game has, but just zipping around, randomly challenging people to short, tear-ass races around town is more fun than it seems like it should be. There's like half a dozen NFS spinoffs out there, and all of them have PC demos, so I'll try out most of them and I'll probably end up buying at least one.

One last thing, how come nobody is playing Unreal Tournament 2004 online? I've got the Editor's Choice edition, and it's fully patched up now, but all I can find are loads of empty servers. Lame.

What the hell is wrong with Valve?

Patch this.
by AC - permalink

I fired up Half-Life 2 tonight after a fun couple of hours terrorizing random car-owning citizens in GTA San Andreas, only to discover a new bug, one unlike anything I've ever encountered before. It seems that now in the world of HL2, I can no longer use my mouse while holding down any keyboard key without almost constant mouse-input cut-outs.

What I mean is, mouse input freezes while using the keyboard. I tried both USB and PS2 mice, and both optical mice and ball mice. I ran dxdiag to see if it's a DirectInput bug, and I tried every other game I own to try to replicate the issue. Even HL2 Episode One works fine. It's just Half-Life 2, and it happened after yet another mandatory Source patch forced on me by Steam. I can't find any reference to this in the Steam support database or in the Steam forums. I could look into this further, but I think I'm just going to email somebody directly about this one.

I just can't wrap my head around why Valve won't implement some sort of opt-in patch functionality for Steam games. At least for their own games. Half-Life 2 is one of my all-time favorite games, but apparently to play it now I have to stand still whenever I want to look around. What the fuck?

It's not just that. I had an issue where Half-Life 1: Source would quit to the desktop as soon as it was launched. This was fixed with a special command-line string I found on the Steam support site. Not only is this no longer working, the same thing is now happening with HL2: Lost Coast. And to start an offline server against bots in Counter-Strike: Source, I now have to be online first. I can then disconnect from the internet and start as many offline servers as I want. Again, this bizarre behavior started after an unwanted and unneeded patch Steam forced me to download.

Attention Valve: I hate mandatory patches. Everyone hates mandatory patches. Steam is the reason I didn't buy Sin Episodes at retail. Don't become EA; I don't buy EA games anymore because I've had such horrible experiences with all the recent EA games I've bought. Steam is rapidly becoming a deterrent to buying new Valve games. I know that Activision has a new deal with Valve that would allow me to update games like Call of Duty 2 via Steam. Well, guess what? I own CoD 2, and I read about the patches available for it, and I was able to decide which patch I needed, and I downloaded it. So fuck you, Steam, and stay out of my CoD directory. Do you see where I'm going with this, Valve?

Anniversary.

Holy shit.
by AC - permalink

God, I almost missed it. I looked at the archives on a whim after publishing that last post and realized it's been 730 days since my first post on this blog. So, happy two-year anniversary, blog.

I should probably write about something. Um. Okay, I got something. Anderson Che has been experimenting with a pretty radical new format for Avant Browser, and you can try out the Avant 11 betas on the development forum. If it means anything, I have IE7 beta 3 and Avant 11 beta 5, and I use the Avant beta all the time, and can't think of a reason to fire up IE7 at all.

What else... Oh, Valve released a pretty massive Counter-Strike: Source update this weekend. I'm not sure why Valve is so stingy with the HDR updates to CS: Source maps, but this time they're also including a major gameplay upgrade involving the HUD radar screen. So like, download it and stuff. You kind of have to, anyway.

And speaking of Steam, I downloaded the trailer for Portal because I couldn't understand what all the damn fuss was about. I get it now. Watch that trailer. There are all kinds of subleties to the portal-generation system that can't really be described in a write-up, you just have to watch it in action. Portal is supposed to be included, along with Team Fortress 2, with Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and I can hardly fucking wait. But apparently, I'll have to fucking wait, because Episode 2 has been pushed back to Q1 2007. Shit.

Anything else? No? Okay, enjoy two years of archived One Hunderd Horseless Carriages, and remember, the Harry Potter books are not just for kids, and our President doesn't really like you. Goodnight.

Mozilla and Valve have been busy.

Unlike me.
by AC - permalink

Yesterday Firefox was updated to version 1.5.0.5. It's another incremental security/stability update, fixing several flaws rated critical. As always,

If you already have Firefox 1.5, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu within at any time.

And this morning, the corresponding update to Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 was released. The auto-upgrade patch for both apps is around 500K. All of my extensions carried over without any problems.

And speaking of Firefox extensions, if you happen to have one called "Numbered Links 0.9," you might want to look into better anti-virus software because it might be a trojan horse. This isn't an extension sneaking a virus into your system via Firefox. It's actually installed into the browser by Downloader-AXM as a delivery vehicle for a virus known as FormSpy or, to the cool kids, Troj/FireSpy-A. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time the extension system of Firefox (or Thunderbird, or Moz Suite) has been used to install malware. The doom squad has been predicting that this could be a problem since day one, and it's always been an inevitability. But this particular horse doesn't look to be much of an issue, and Firefox's extensibility is still nowhere near as vulnerable as, say, ActiveX.

Valve has been busy as well, churning out update after update for Steam games and Steam itself. There have been a total of four updates and four new Steam games released in the past week, plus the availability of the Sin Episodes: Emergence SDK. That last bit is good news for anyone who might like to try actually making an interesting Sin episode. Anyway, among the updates is a major content package for Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. At the same time, it was announced that RO: Ostfront will be available for free via Steam for five days, beginning August 2nd.

I've thought about getting this game, after tinkering with the original RO mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. A major issue with that mod was the dimwitted bot AI, which makes playing it offline not much of an option. RO: Ostfront is supposed to have the same problem, and that makes it hard for me to put down the money. Making things worse, for some reason the game is $25 via Steam but $30 at retail, at least where I've seen it. I know that with Steam acting as download manager, I can actually incrementally download something the size of Ostfront, even with dial-up. I did manage to download Lost Coast and several demos and massive patches. And you can back up games purchased over Steam onto blank CDs or DVDs. But I just like buying games in boxes. The problem with Ostfront is, I don't want to pay five bucks for that box.

And I'm still having all kinds of problems with Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. I left this game alone for a while, and now I remember why. It's just a massively unpolished release. Thanks again, EA. I'm still troubleshooting and figuring this shit out, and if I can get it going smoothly, I'll write a post on it. The game was just twenty bucks when I bought it, and so far it's hasn't been worth ten.

I love Valve, but enough already.

Hey, it's another patch. And another. And... wait.
by AC - permalink

So here's my problem. To patch, or not to patch? Does it matter? Do you have to patch? It depends on the game, and the patch, and the developer's commitment to releasing patches that mean something. I'll give you two examples of why this whole issue makes my head hurt.

I have UT 2004 Editor's Choice. I'm not sure what build of UT2K4 I have, because there's no easy way to know, but I know it's been patched since my version. I've been trying to find the latest patch for the latest retail release, and I can't. The official site has this one patch for me, but the link is broken, like every other link on that half-assed site. Looking around at various game and software oriented download hubs led me to three different patches, all claiming to be the latest. On one site, the link was dead, and on three more all the servers were tied up for up to half an hour. So I gave up on the whole thing, because my UT2K4, ultimately, is working just fucking fine anway.

The other side of this issue is Valve Software. Look, I love Valve. They gave me Half-Life, and Half-Life 2, and Counter-Strike: Source, and more. But they also game me Steam. Steam means if there's a patch for one of my Valve games, I can't play that game unless I download the patch. No matter what it is, or how big it is, or whether I'm on dial-up and never play online and don't necessarily want to spend two days downloading a patch that will mean nothing to me, I can't play the games I've already spent $30 or $40 or $50 on until I download the latest patch that Valve thinks I should. Suddenly, I don't like Valve so much.

Some of the more recent patches for Half-Life 2 have gone a long, long way towards reducing, and at some points eliminating that infamous stutter. The game became quicker and more immersive. In addition, patches were forced on me that gave a few CS:Source maps HDR, and it looked good. I also downloaded, via Steam, the demos for Darwinia and Rag Doll Kung-fu and Shadowgrounds, and Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Project Gordon and other misc. freebies I get for buying HL2 retail. This all took days and days and days of background downloading over dial-up. But I did it, and thanks for the opportunity to download stuff in random increments, Valve, because it's very helpful.

But why was I forced to download the latest Steam engine update that has not only undone all the previous patches' effort to reduce that stuttering problem, but made it worse than ever? Half-Life 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, and now it lags and stutters so badly that half the cutscene NPS dialog is unintelligible, and the game seems to randomly stop and start, as if it's loading new content into memory. But it isn't, because I've tweaked HL2 to use half a Gig of my RAM, and I know from playing the game for the last several months that this is plenty of damned RAM. It's this newest patch, one that I never wanted, and certainly would have surfed around looking for user feedback on whether it was worth it or not before downloading on my own.

Here's the main issue. If you release a game, it's out. It'd better work. If it doesn't, you have to make sure your users know that there's a patch that will make it better, and where they can find it. You can't just keep throwing out patches, then wait and see how it works for us before forcing more patches on us in case it's shit.

Are you listening, Valve? We are not your play-testers. We are your end-users. We've already paid good money for your games, and that exonerates us from unwillingly beta-testing for you.

As for Atari and Epic, fix your goddamned web site. Three quarters of the links to the MSU contest winner sites are broken, many due to improperly-written HTML code. And all the official download links throw up a tiny pop-up window that either goes nowhere or links to Atari's main site, which is less than helpful.

Look, I just want to play games. It's why I bought a fast PC and spent even more upgrading it. Obviously, it's why I've spent so much on games for it. Is it really too much to ask that they work? I know everyone's PC is different, but if you're going to release patches, tell me where they are, and for fuck's sake, test them. Don't make me your lab rat, and don't force me to download patches for games I already own.

Doom and Metallica, Heller and Vonnegut.

Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter!
by AC - permalink

I've switched to a different old monitor while I work up the guts to throw down a few hundred dollars for a new one. This one has much better color and brightness than that last piece of shit, but even at 15 inches, its max resolution is just 1024x768 at a depressing 60Hz. But that's not so bad, really. I've discovered that just about every game I own runs so well at 1024 that I can jack up the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering as high as my vidcard can go without dropping the framerate below the refresh rate (I always enable v-sync). 6x AA with temporal enabled does a very good job of eliminating those 1024 jaggies in games like Half-Life 2 and GTA San Andreas.

So anyway, I started playing Doom 3 again, and I think I really do like this game, overall. It's still just a lot of, "walk into that room, shoot those teleporting baddies, walk into the next room, shoot some more," but it's so fucking pretty I still like to play it. I started over from the beginning with a duct tape mod, but I ditched it early on. I really think it works better in the dark. And with a radio playing in the background; this weekend 93X decided to go back to an old gimmick they had years and years ago. They're playing every Metallica song ever recorded in alphabetical order. They call it Metallica A to Z, and it's really cheesy, but it's still awesome. How often do you hear "Disposable Heroes" or "Of Wolf and Man" or "Trapped Under Ice" on the radio? The last time I heard "Trapped Under Ice" it was on a cassette I used to have, and I'd taped it from a Metallica A to Z weekend in like 1996, when we were still playing Doom 1.

I managed to download the Rag Doll Kung Fu demo via Steam this week, and it's weird. Definitely unique, but I don't know about the fun. I'll keep toying with it anyway. I don't think I'm going to try to buy Half-Life Episode 1 over Steam. I'll just look for a retail copy. I'm working on downloading the Shadowgrounds demo now, but God knows when that will finish.

Which reminds me, I'm reading God Knows by Joseph Heller now. It's fucked up, but that's what we love about Heller, isn't it? You only have to read Catch-22 once to love him. He invented a character called Major Major Major Major and we bought it. After God Knows, I think I'll finally get around to tackling this whole Kurt Vonnegut shelf I have but have never gotten around to reading: Jailbird, Galapagos, Deadeye Dick, and Bluebeard. Vonnegut is tough for me to get into. I always liked Slaughterhouse-Five, but then a good friend of mine found out about that and told me it was bullshit. And I suddenly realized that she might be right. You either totally buy into what he's saying or you can't fucking stand it. But then that's the mark of great fiction, isn't it? It's why I love Chuck Palahniuk's books. Because I get it. But Vonnegut? I'm still working on it.

ATI, AMD, and the Doom 3 engine.

Finding the balance.
by AC - permalink

I think pretty soon I'll have to write up a detailed post on the performance I'm getting out of the Doom 3 engine on my box, and how I got there. I know it's the kind of thing that would have helped me a few weeks ago. I went ahead and picked up Quake IV Special Edition Tuesday morning, and I'm impressed with how well it's running. At the same detail settings in-game, and with nearly all the same config tweaks, Quake IV at 1152 is running as fast, maybe slightly faster than Doom 3 at 1280. I'll go into all the software and hardware details later.

I've run into two problems, though. Around 15 minutes in, the game started crashing to the desktop as soon as I tried to use the machine gun's secondary fire (zoom). It's still doing it, and I don't know why. It doesn't matter if it's bound to a key or a mouse button. Combing through the forums -- which I fucking hate doing, by the way -- it seems like others are having the same problem but I can't find a fix. Otherwise the game has run beautifully. It's snappy and responsive, though it's weird how it can be so smooth at 1152 and unplayable one step up at 1280.

Anyway, my other issue is with Quake II, which is half the reason I spent $40 for the DVD edition. I can't load savegames. Again, seems like virtually everyone has this problem with Quake II (and both the mission packs) under Windows XP. Apparetly this was just never fixed. The only answer seems to be using a source port. Great.

Gecko-based Mac browser Camino has reached version 1.0. It's a nice app, but I'm not sure who the target user is. Probably people like me who get bored using just Safari and Firefox. The again, I've gone back to using pretty much nothing but Opera on this old box here at work and Firefox at home. In fact, I've been using my old Duron PC exclusively for internet access for a while now; I don't think I've had my new rig online at all since finishing the Counter Strike: Source Steam update a few weeks ago. Partly that's because of laziness -- I have to physically move the line from one room to another. But mostly it's because I don't want to give Steam a chance to see that there might be a new update out there, so it can refuse to let me play CS or Half-Life 2 offline until I've finished some massive download via dial-up. I really hate that about Steam. If I don't want the patch, I shouldn't have to download the goddamn patch.

Hey, I wonder if that Quake II savegame thing will be a problem on my old PC. It's still running WinXP Pro SP2. My new one came with MCE. Bah, probably doesn't matter.

I need an upgrade.

Can I borrow a couple hundred bucks?
by AC - permalink

My new T6425 can multitask the shit out of just about anything I throw at it. New apps open almost before the Start menu can hide itself. Windowed DVD playback is seamless no matter what I'm doing in the foreground. Older games like Medal of Honor and Ghost Recon run fast and smooth even maxed out. But goddamn do I need to upgrade.

First, the audio. The onboard 6.1 capable sound generates random, sparse pops no matter what it's doing. MP3 playback, game audio, movies, whatever. I can't make it stop, and it sucks. Second, newer games like Doom 3 that are designed for an independant GPU don't run well at all. Even Call of Duty is giving me problems, and I just don't get it. Given nearly identical graphics settings, Half-Life 2's Source engine runs way smoother and faster than Call of Duty's modified Quake III engine. I don't understand this because Medal of Honor and Quake III blaze right along on this system.

I knew going in that I'd need to add a new PCI-Express vidcard to this system, but I didn't think the onboard ATI Xpress 200 would need this much help this soon, especially with a Gig of system RAM and an AMD64 3500+ to work with. The only question now is how far to go. I'm thinking that I'll wait one more paycheck, then take a ton of cash to Best Buy and just buy the best I can afford. Picking and choosing the right card is just too fucking inconvenient these days. If you pinpoint what you want, you end up having to find a distributor that actually has one in stock, then have it shipped to you, if they ship at all.

Backtracking to Half-Life 2 for a moment, it turns out turning texture detail back to max creates almost no obvious framerate hit, which was just stunning to me. The Source engine would be my favorite ever if it didn't mandate constant downloads to play even single-player games offline. I've been trying to play Counter-Strike: Source, but after two hours of downloading I've gone from 91% updated to 92%, and of course I still can't even play the goddamn game. Thanks, Valve.