More thoughts on Tomb Raider: Anniversary

It's good. There, now you don't have to read all this.
by AC - permalink

I've put in some more time with Tomb Raider: Anniversary, and I realized pretty quickly that it's a damned addictive game. It's actually hard to stop playing it. Most of this is probably because it's my first play-through, so I'm having to figure out all the puzzles (lot's of "Oh, I see" moments). Very few -- if any -- of the puzzles I've seen so far have been lifted straight from the original. I'm in the early stages of the second episode, taking my time and looking around a lot.

The combat is still a little wonky. I was more than halfway through the t-rex battle by the time I finally started to get a feel for the "adrenaline dodge" mechanic. In crowded quarters, against multiple enemies, it's even trickier. In fact, other than the rex fight, I think I've only managed to pull it off three times. Then again, like the original, the majority of the gameplay is exploration and solving environmental puzzles, which is definitely a positive. But there's a bright side to the combat, courtesy of Dragon's Lair: several cut-scenes feature quick-reaction controls, where you'll have to stab a direction to dodge an attack. It took me off guard at first -- I got my face torn off by a velociraptor (though judging by its size, I think it may actually have been a utahraptor). It's a new gameplay element for me, but I like it, and I think it bridges TRA's engine-driven cut-scenes with the gameplay brilliantly.

On the graphics front, the motion blur is becoming less distracting, and it's worth it for the distance fogging effect that makes the larger areas just stunning. In fact, I'm more and more impressed by the visuals the more I play. There's a slight bloom effect in open-air areas that works beautifully. TRA is so resource-light that I can run with all the eye candy enabled and a little anti-aliasing with 8X anisotropy at well over 60 FPS. It's just a really well-optimized engine, because it still looks great even without any bump-mapping (if there is some, I haven't seen it). Water effects are subtle and realistic, both from above and below. Poseidon's key room in St. Francis' Folly is particularly notable for that reason. Lara has a ton of animations that are generally pretty seamless, and her character model doesn't lose any quality the closer the camera gets to her.

TRA is also notable for its load times, or lack thereof. New levels and saved games load exceptionally quickly, and not just as compared to recent games. I'm talking three to four seconds, better than Quake III, and for the record, that game is eight years old. It's a far cry from games like Far Cry, or Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and Quake 4, where loading a new map can take upwards of twenty seconds, and even loading a quicksave can take as long as five or six. While TRA has no quicksave function, checkpoints are numerous, and if you die or take a wrong step soon after finding one, it takes only moments you quit your current game and continue from the last via the main menu. More evidence that this new engine is just brilliant.

Digressing completely, I want to mention a work-around for Half-Like 2: Episode One that seems to be working, though I'm not terribly happy about it. After beating HL2 with only a few crashes by, apparently, unloading WindowBlinds, I decided to try my luck with HL2 E1. First try, I watched the opening cinematic, Dog pulled me from the rubble, and it crashed. Classic looping-sound crash. I noticed a texture setting that was different in my HL2 and HL2 E1 config files, so I changed it, completely syncing up the settings for the two games, and tried again. This time I got a looping-sound crash during the black screen before the cinematic even started. Lovely.

I didn't want to do it, but I tried running the game in DirectX 8.1 mode (as opposed to 9.0c) and it works. There's no bump-mapping, which is okay except when pointing your flashlight at things in the dark; Alyx in particular looks downright creepy. There's also no HDR, although bloom works, and Source HDR is so system-taxing that I tend to just use bloom anyway. Other than that, the game looks just fine, although running in DX 8.1 mode means the graphics settings reset themselves every launch, so you have to reset resolution and just about every advanced setting each time you start the game. But that only takes about thirty seconds.

As an added bonus, with no bump-mapping the game runs at what seems like nearly double the framerate (I was playing with v-sync enabled, and didn't run any benchmarks). Just lightning quick, even in big, complex areas with a lots of light sources, and even during combat in those areas. It's a trade-off, and may be worth it if you prefer high framerates to having every possible graphical extra turned up.

The bottom line is that I was able to play through the entire game without a crash, and that's kickass. Alright, almost the entire game. For what I think was the third consecutive time, it crashed during the train ride at the very end of the game, immediately before the citadel blew itself to hell. I don't know what that's about, because it used to work fine. Whatever.

UPDATED: June 23, 1:00am-ish

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.

How to not crash the Source engine.

Are you kidding?
by AC - permalink

After putting it off and putting it off, after playing all the way through nearly every game I have, I finally gave in and just had to try to play some Half-Life 2. I love this game. It's one of my favorite shooters ever, but the instability that seems native to the otherwise brilliant Source engine makes it hard for me to even launch it. I know it's the engine and not just the game because Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life: Source have the same problems. Source games have crashed my PC more spectacularly than any games I've ever played. But I may have found the problem.

Before starting another HL2 campaign, my first with my new CPU and PSU, I tried, yet again, to troll through the Valve support site and forums for some overlooked magical cure-all. In the middle of this year-old post, I noticed the following:

"Tuneup WinStyler Theme Service has been found to cause a crash with the Steam client application and WindowBlinds may cause crashes with Source games."

It can't be, I think to myself. WindowBlinds? Seriously? I've been using WindowBlinds for almost a decade. I'm a registered user. I paid twenty goddamn dollars for WB 5 (now 5.5), I look for new themes literally every day. I've never had it interfere with any game I've ever played. But I unloaded WB, shut down a couple of iTunes-related running processes that I've never been happy with (ituneshelper.exe and ipodservice.exe [I don't even have a fucking iPod]), and launched the game. And I played for two hours and it didn't even blink. Later in the day, after a reboot, I went back into HL2 and played for about 15 minutes before it crashed, and once again locked up my PC in the process. Then I realized WB is in my startup. I rebooted, unloaded WB again, and started HL2. I've been playing for over an hour.

This is insane. "Game freeze or crash with looping sounds" has got to be the most common Source issue ever, and of all things, I can fix it by disabling WindowBlinds? What the fuck? Obviously, I'll keep playing the game, and I'll update if anything else happens (like a crippling crash with no obvious cause).

Moving on. Seems Ars Technica agrees with pretty much all my complaints about the new Windows-compatible Safari 3 beta. They also raise an interesting question: if Apple is hoping apps like Safari (and iTunes) will sway Windows users toward switching to Macs, this is not the way to do it. Sure, Safari behaves on Windows just like it does on a Mac. But it's weird and inconsistent with the rest of my OS. That makes it annoying, not attractive. And releasing it with at least two downright dangerous security flaws is not especially compatible with Mac OS's image as the most secure mainstream operating system on the market. Don't get me wrong, gaming aside, I'd love to have a Mac as a second computer. But I think I'd rather run Firefox or Camino as my main browser.

Thoughts on the Safari 3 beta.

Hey, look. It's another web browser.
by AC - permalink

I've had some time to dick around with Safari, and while it hasn't crashed or anything, it also hasn't done anything spectacular. The bookmarks manager that I mentioned earlier is still a little odd. By default, Safari appears to stick a big mess of links into the general bookmarks pool, along with any Mozilla and IE bookmarks it imported during installation. But only a few are listed under the bookmarks context menu in the menu bar. You'll have to manually drag links or sub-folders into the menu or to your bookmarks toolbar. It's not difficult by any means, but it isn't particularly intuitive either. I wouldn't expect, say, my mom to be able to figure it out.

Safari is definitely fast, though. It appears to start drawing a page on the fly, as it's loading, as opposed to Mozilla browsers, which will display the page after the page data has been downloaded, then start filling in the images and embedded media. But customization is limited. In the beta anyway, there's only one theme and not much can be done with the toolbars. Extra buttons can be added and rearranged horizontally, but toolbars can't be moved. Tab customization is even more limited. There's no "new tab" button, and the only way to add a blank one is to right-click the tab bar and add one from the context menu. Which means the tab bar needs to be enabled even if there's only one open tab. And there doesn't seem to be a "single-window" mode, or a way to redirect links that open new windows into tabs instead. The RSS viewer is not bad at all, although it doesn't have a universal feed menu, as in Flock or Firefox's numerous RSS extensions. To keep them centralized, you'll have to manually create a feeds subfolder in your bookmarks, then put all new feeds into that folder.

Finally, Safari, or the beta anyway, doesn't seem to work with the Java runtime environment at all. Games at Pogo, for example, just don't load up. I ran into an issue earlier today after uninstalling Netscape 8 and K-Meleon 1.0 where my JRE seemed to be broken, so I uninstalled it and upgraded to JRE 6.1. It's working again in Firefox and IE7, but it's still a total bust in Safari.

On top of not having the option to block ads or even create a blacklist for cookies, all these issues are enough to keep me from using Safari for anything other than a novelty, at least for now. I uninstalled Netscape and K-Meleon today for the same reason. I already have Firefox, Flock, Opera, IE7, and Avant Browser 11 installed on this rig, and with no unique features that I can see other than a slight speed boost, the Safari 3 beta looks a little redundant right now.

Safari ported to Windows.

But will anybody use it?
by AC - permalink

Apple has released the Safari 3 public beta, and for the first time it's available for Windows XP and Vista. This might actually be kind of a big deal. Safari has been recognized for a long while as one of the better browsers available, but being limited to the Mac it's been dominated by Internet Explorer and Firefox in the market share reports. I believe Safari 2 was the first major browser to pass the Acid2 test, followed by Konquerer, Opera 9, and the Firefox 3 alphas.

Apparently it's fairly buggy on Windows, but that's not unexpected. I'll hold off installing it for a more stable beta or the final release, but I'm looking forward to playing around with it. There are a lot of browsers out there, but unfortunately most of them are either useless or made obsolete by the elites. The only ones I use on a consistent basis are Firefox, Flock, and Opera. The addition of another high-quality browser to the Windows market should help push the others to get even better, which is good for everybody.

UPDATE 11:53PM -- I went ahead and downloaded it a couple of hours ago. Seems decent enough, but it isn't blowing me away. I don't know what to make of the bookmark interface, which seems to hide most links from you, forcing you to open the full bookmark manager. It's weird. On the security side, Safari has reportedly already been compromised in several different ways. This doesn't mean exploits are already in the wild, of course, but the potential is there.

Linux eludes me.

It's not me, it's the computer that's stupid.
by AC - permalink

I'm been dicking around with VirtualBox for a couple of days now in an attempt to get Ubuntu 7.04 running as a virtual machine. I've never used any form of Linux in any way before, and it's not working, and I'm not sure why. One thing I am sure of is how much easier VirtualBox is to use than the merciless chasm of an app called Virtual PC. The documentation is also worlds better, but that's not so surprising, considering it comes mainly from the community. In any case, I downloaded the AMD64-flavored ISO, verified its integrity, and burned it to CD. I should mention that an hour into the download I realized I should probably have gone with the 32-bit i386 version, because I doubted my 32-bit version of Windows would be able to deal with a 64-bit VM. But whatever, it was almost downloaded, and in the meantime I couldn't find anything one way or another in the docs. So I created the VM, gave it a partition, mounted the drive, and successfully started Ubuntu. And it told me I needed the other version.

So OK, fuck it, live and learn. I dumped the VM and started downloading the i386 version. To pass the time I drove way the hell out Kirby/Whitten to pick up the lawnmower from the shop. So that was fun. I had Definitive Swim in the CD player.

The next time, didn't burn the ISO, I just mounted it as a virtual virtual drive or whatever, and again it started up fine and didn't even give me an error message. It didn't do anything at all, in fact, which is actually worse. I get the Ubuntu splash and the boot menu, but when I select "Start or install Ubuntu" or "Boot from first hard disk" or anything else, it shows me the "Starting the Linux kernel" dialog, and then a blank screen with an underscore in the corner. And it just sits there, indefinitely. I dunno what the hell is up, and I'm only slightly inclined to try to figure it out.

I suppose I can always take my shiny new Ubuntu CD and set up a dual-boot situation with it, but I've never done that before either, and frankly I don't have any idea how. I'm sure I could figure it out, but do I want to?

Anyway. Both DirectX and Catalyst have been updated in the past week, and I haven't installed either. I'm in one of those rare windows where all of my games and software seem to be completely free of glitches, crashes, and bugs, and I'm not about to tempt the Gods of Fucking Shit Up by updating anything that doesn't seem to need it. Source engine games are always iffy, of course, but I've been so frustrated by how buggy they are now after, if I've counted accurately, 6.7 million unnecessary patches that I don't even try to play them anymore. Those goddamn games have produced the most spectacular system crashes I've ever experienced, and I would just write it off and move on if they hadn't once run so beautifully before Valve started screwing with them.

But whatever. IFC played Kill Bill Vol. 1 tonight, and Vol. 2 is on tomorrow night. I'm just looking forward to that right now. The hell with Valve and their Orange Box clusterfuck.

More flashback gaming.

Plus, the dumbass guide to troubleshooting.
by AC - permalink

The gaming press was all a-titter when Crystal Dynamics took over the Tomb Raider franchise not too long ago, probably because they couldn't possibly make things any worse. I didn't think much about it at all, since the only Tomb Raider game I really liked was the first port of the first one, and it was pretty unlikely that a change in developers would do anything to resurrect an eleven-year-old Saturn game.

CD first produced TR Legend, which got decent reviews for being better than the last half-dozen TR releases, but it was short and had unnecessarily high system requirements, so I passed. But now out of nowhere I find the demo for a new game called Tomb Raider Anniversary on Steam, and took my pessimistic view of how CD would treat the origins of the franchise and kicked it in the ass. This demo is fucking awesome.

Anniversary is a sort of reimagining of the first game, with a few more modern gameplay additions and a reworked camera system. For a die hard TR1 fan, it has its pros and its cons, but overall it looks fantastic. The original stuck with a rigid behind-the-character camera that occasionally pulled directly back during gameplay. You could always take direct control of the camera, however, to look around. Anniversary gives you constant control of the camera via the mouse, but frequently moves the perspective around to help you out during various gameplay sequences. It feels console-oriented, and can be frustrating at times, as the directional controls change when the camera wheels around. But it works most of the time.

Movement controls have been streamlined from the original, which used all nine of the Saturn controller's buttons. The jump and crouch keys are now context-sensitive and multi-functional, and elements like drop-to-hang and climb now happen automatically. The new grappling hook is easy enough to use. Really, I can sum up the new control scheme by saying I got the hang of it in about 15 minutes with no documentation at all.

What I was most concerned about when I realized what this game was attempting to do was the music. Tomb Raider 1 has some of my all-time favorite game music, and the major themes are present, if slightly reworked, in the demo. The graphics, obviously, have been significantly enhanced and look great, thanks mostly to performance. These are not state-of-the-art visuals, but more toned-down, high-framerate fair, with great animation and a few flairs, like motion blur and bloom. It runs startlingly well on my 16-month-old hardware, and that performance is probably going to be the tipping point to get me to buy this game when it becomes available on the 5th.

One other note tonight: I ran into a really nasty Far Cry bug where the game would reboot my PC as soon as it finished loading a map that kept getting more and more frequent until I finally fixed it by installing the latest (1.4 cumulative) patch. It also seems to have fixed that hideous rainbow-colored shadows bug that's been a problem in some maps since I first installed the game. I should point out that "Install the most recent patch, dumbass," is troubleshooting step #1, and I didn't try it for weeks. For whatever reason, I thought I had Far Cry all patched up, but it seems to have been running OTB all this time. Oh well, lesson learned.

The San Andreas sweet spot.

I love it when hardware and software meet in the middle.
by AC - permalink

I think I may have finally found the perfect set-up for GTA San Andreas for my PC. Before upgrading my CPU, something about the way the game handled the in-game shadow and fog effects forced me to run with the "visual fx quality" set to low to get over 45 fps at any resolution. It's probably the 1MB L2 cache, but whatever the reason (and I don't really care), with my new 4000+ I can hover right around 60fps with any fx quality setting. Unfortunately, my cheap and rather shitty monitor can only manage a 60Hz refresh rate at 1280x1024, which makes enabling vertical sync, which I almost always do in all my games, not very effective, as the framerate keeps jumping back to 45.

But I found a lovely solution. In a game like San Andreas, with rather low-quality textures and low-poly models, dropping to 1152x864 makes no difference at all during gameplay. You do lose some clarity and aliasing becomes more pronounced, but the upside is my monitor can hit 75Hz at 1152, which means I can turn of v-sync and get very little noticeable tearing because the framerate, even with that visual fx setting turned all the way up to "very high," stays well over 60fps almost all the time now. The only slow-downs are in the middle of Las Venturas, for whatever reason, but even then it's only in the 45- to 60-fps range.

To sum up. In-game, all settings maxed, except resolution at 1152x864, and AA at "1," which means 2x. This is very low, obviously, but moving up to 4x doesn't look much better and it's dramatically slower. Hardware side, anisotropy is at 8x, and refresh rate forced to 75Hz (after checking that my monitor can support said refresh at said res). End result: seamless framerate way over 60 90% of the time with virtually no evident tearing, and no jarring fps switches from 60 to 45 to 30 and back, while the game looks damned good compared to the console versions. And keep in mind, high framerates means easier gameplay.

I should have bought a new CPU a long time ago.

Blogged with Flock

Quake, '96 style.

Old school is the new school.
by AC - permalink

Quake was an important game for me. Even more than Doom, Quake is what converted me from a console gamer to a full-on PC shooter fan. The first game I ever played on my first new PC, a smokin' Pentium 133 rig with 32MB of RAM and a huge 1.6GB hard drive, was the shareware episode of Quake. I learned to play it online, with a 33.6K modem, which meant I was lucky to find a server that gave me a ping lower than 350.

What's more, Quake was my introduction to Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor composed Quake's soundtrack, which is still one of the all-time creepiest original scores for any shooter. He actually went further than that, recording sound effects for what would become the Quake alpha test demo, most of which were replaced by the time the game went gold. But my point is, if I hadn't become so enamored with that eerie, haunting Quake soundtrack, I never would have picked up Broken from my local record store (because it was the cheapest NIN album there), which led me to buy Pretty Hate Machine, which led to The Downward Spiral, and so on to today.

Not so much for musical reasons but for nostalgic gaming reasons I finally ordered Quake, in a download-only form, from id Software's online store yesterday. It took some work to get it to run properly in WinXP. It came with the WinQuake and GL Quake ports, but WinQuake runs software-only, and the version of GL Quake shipped barely worked. I tried an older GL Quake I downloaded years ago, and it works fine. It even works with my old Quake Mission Pack CDs I bought a decade ago, which means I've finally (nearly) completed my Quake collection. I have Quake and its two official mission packs, Quake II and its mission packs, Quake III Arena, and Quake IV. What I'm missing is Team Arena, the only official Quake III expansion.

And there's one other thing I don't have: Quake's soundtrack. The downloadable Quake I bought was only 24MB zipped, which obviously didn't include the ten-track Reznor score. I have no idea why, but it sucks all kinds of ass. Fortunately, a Google search ponied up the tracks immediately, but I still have to go through the bother of burning them and manually starting the tracks while playing the game. What the fuck, id? Twenty bucks is a lot to ask for an eleven-year-old game in the first place, but stripping out the soundtrack, that's just fucking cold. I suppose I owe you for including Quake II and both mission packs with the DVD edition of Quake IV, but when are we going to get a similar package for Quake 1?

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will be out soon, but honestly I have no plans to buy it. It looks to be a sort of Battlefield 2042 in the Quake IV universe game, which doesn't interest me at all, unfortunately. I know id is working on a new IP, and assuming my hardware can run it, I'll be first in line. But ripping a historically great soundtrack from a monumentally important game does not set a great precedent, especially for hardcore id Software fans. And I know I must be a harcore id guy, because Doom 3, which most people seem to consider a huge let-down after all the hype it generated a few years ago, is one of my all-time favorite PC shooters.

I'd ramble on some more, but I'm halfway through Scourge of Armagon, and I haven't even started on Dissolution of Eternity...

Living with a working PC.

Shouldn't something be going horribly wrong?
by AC - permalink

A week after installing my new CPU, its cooler, and my new power supply, I'm adjusting to life with a PC I don't have to constantly monitor and mollycoddle. I've been watching my CPU, GPU, and ambient temps closely, and finally felt comfortable enough to run closed-boxed for several hours this morning. I'm still popping the case open and employing the desk fan when running games, as it still lowers the GPU temp by a good 10 to 20C under load, and my vidcard, running solely of the PCI-e slot's power, doesn't have much of a fan. The good news, though, is that the new AMD 4000+ CPU has made for some noticable improvements in some of my games over the old 3500+ chip.

I've seen the most gains with GTA San Andreas and Call of Duty 2. They both hover right around 60fps at high resolutions now with all the bells 'n whistles on, which means annoying drops to 45 and 30fps with v-sync on. My cheap monitor can only handle 60Hz at 1280x1024, but a sudden brainwave led me to try running them at 1152x864 with a forced 75Hz with no v-sync, and they look fantastic. This doesn't work for slower-paced games, like Doom 3, when the tearing is much more pronounced, but with my new CPU it's even more rock-solid over 60fps, so it still looks badass.


Going back to GTA, though, I did a little more research into the LOD issue I was having with Vice City, and eventually I came across this thread at PlanetGTA, which pointed to this thread at the DriverHeaven.net forums. And as unlikely as it seems, altering the shortcut to run in Win98 compatibility mode worked perfectly. Unfortunately, while I'm in love with Vice City for its ambiance and music, San Andreas makes the control scheme and mission layout feel frustrating and limited. But whatever, I only paid ten bucks for it.

Not to digress completely, but I want to mention the new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, which I bought last week. It's fucking awesome. If you've heard With Teeth, it's sort of like that, only much more awesome. And it... well, it's hard to say this about a NIN disc, but it's got a groove to it. Not a groove on par with something like Definitive Swim, but it's definitely the most accessible NIN album since Broken. I still think The Fragile is the best NIN LP ever, but Year Zero is now easily third behind The Downward Spiral.

Up and running.

So far, so good.
by AC - permalink

All the parts I ordered from Newegg showed up at 5:30pm on Wednesday, almost exactly 48 hours after I placed the order. They shipped out that morning at 8:30, but I was the UPS guy's last delivery of the day. Which wouldn't have sucked quite so hard if I hadn't gotten up at 8:30 and seen that my shit had just left and was "in transit for delivery," giving me a good nine hours to wonder where the hell that stupid brown truck was, already. But at least everything was in one piece. I was disappointed in the packaging, though. My new AMD 64 4000+ CPU came from the OEM and not retail, which meant it was in a tiny plastic square sandwiched between a couple of quarter-inch pieces of foam. It worked, but it was slightly disconcerting. And nothing I ordered, including the cooler and PSU, came with any documentation of any kind, not even a registration card. If I wasn't moderately familiar with how to put a PC together I wouldn't have had even the slightest idea where to start.

Everything plugged in and seems to be working fine, except the Kingwin CPU cooler. Apparently it wasn't designed with my particular motherboard in mind, as there's no way to attach it. The clips sort-of fit across the old cooler's base, but only enough to keep it from sliding around. Which means that until I can jury rig it all together somehow, I'll have to keep my tower on its side indefinitely; if I stand it back up, the whole thing will pop off the CPU and crash down on top of my video card. So... yeah.

In any case, the CPU and power supply are working, and my rig hasn't crashed, so I guess one or the other was the problem -- probably the CPU. It's a good thing I'm not pushing the PSU anywhere close to its limits, because it unexpectedly has a big, fat fan built into the top of it. My case doesn't have a gaping hole back there, so I had to mount it with the fan pointing down, where its air-flow clips the back edge of my CPU's new cooler. As far as I can tell, though, it's only been running on its lowest setting, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Anyway, with my vid card seemingly cleared of being the cause of my overheating issues, and my new CPU holding a steady idle temperature of around 40C whether the case is open or not, I looked a bit more into what the acceptable temps are for a Radeon X800 XL. With the case shut up, mine hovers around 38C, which is apparently decent considering my case's layout and cooling setup. The GPU is on the far side of the single case fan, which I helped a little by digging up some tin-snips in the garage and using them to cut away the unnecessarily dense stamped-out grill that was covering it. It's still running hotter than I would like under load, but for the most part I'm finally comfortable with shutting up my case again, and it's nice not having that ridiculously loud desk fan blowing into it three feet from my head all the time.

I'll keep toying around with things, and update as needed. I also picked up the new Nine Inch Nails disc today, so I'll be posting about that after I've gotten a feel for it. And, I think I've finally got GTA Vice City working again, and I want to write about some crazy performance improvements I've gotten out of GTA San Andreas and Call of Duty 2.

Blogged with Flock

Beyond troubleshooting.

Is ten minutes of uptime too much to ask for?
by AC - permalink

So my PC has basically become unusable now. I've been relegated to using this old Duron-based rig again for pretty much everything while I use the odd ten-minute window to try to troubleshoot my main rig. And I think I've finally narrowed the problem down to either a bad CPU (most likely), a bad power supply (much less likely), or some random bad component on my mobo (god I hope not). As a last-ditch cheap effort I scraped off what was left of the old thermal paste from my CPU and heatsink -- which had turned the consistency of clay -- and replaced it with some cheap Arctic grease, but it didn't work.

So today I finally gave up and decided on some part-swapping. I ordered a new processor, CPU cooler, power supply, and some Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste from newegg.com. While it was tempting to do some real upgrading with a dual-core CPU, I decided it wouldn't be worth the hassle of switching back and forth from dual- to single-core for my older games and just went with a cheaper AMD 64 4000+ 2.4 chip, which is still a nontrivial upgrade from my apparently fubar'd 3500+ 2.2 CPU. The other essential upgrade is the cheap-but-still-better 500W PSU to replace my stock 300W unit that may or may not be itself the cause of the problems I've been having. I threw in the new cooler because it can't possibly be worse than the weak little fan and aluminum piece of shit I have now, and the Silver 5 is something I should have invested in a long time ago. The best part is with a lot of research and careful part selection, the whole lot came in at just a hundred and one bucks, plus tax and shipping. That's $101 for a brand new OEM AMD 4000+ and a 500W power supply and a copper cooler/fan assembly. The only question now is, can I put it all together and still get the goddamned rig to boot?

Something I'd like to mention about using this old Duron box is that I've enjoyed browsing with the new Opera release on it. I had chance to play with Opera 9.2 on my main rig before it went kaput, and I remembered that Opera works well with old hardware, so I installed it on this old box. It's a really impressive piece of programming. In fact, I'd say that it's a tweak or two away from being every bit as good as Firefox 2.

I first tried 9.2 to have a look at the new "speed dial" feature. It's kind of redundant to the favorites list, but looks cool and it's fairly convenient. But the killer feature in my opinion is the Block Content option in the context menu. Basically, it works like Adblock in Firefox, Flock, or Avant. It's a quick way to wild-card-block ads from any given site, and plugs up a huge hole in the reasons-not-to-adopt Opera list. It's still fast, feature-complete, highly customizable, and well-supported. Unfortunately, Java-based applets, like the games at Pogo, still don't seem to work at all when launched through Opera, and when I tried to write this post, I was inexplicably unable to type anything in the big fat blog text box. But for everyday browsing, especially on an older PC, Opera has closed the gap considerably on Firefox, and has nearly caught Flock, at least in my experience.

Great movies, bad vibes.

Dystopian future, or fast-forwarded realism?
by AC - permalink

The whole "dysotopic future" theme is old hat, even cliche, in science fiction movies and video games by now. It's a cliche because for a long time it was a worst-case reactionary reality, as in Terminator or Mad Max. But lately the creators of these films and games are taking a more measured, thoughtful approach to what would once have been boilerplate sci/fi. What we're seeing now is properties like V for Vendetta, Half-Life 2, and the movie I rented yesterday, Children of Men.

These are speculative sci/fi works grounded in the present; what if the U.S.'s vindictive war against terrorism created a global climate of fear and, yes, more terrorism, asks Vendetta. What if an alien invasion led to a cooperative police state where even reproduction wasn't allowed and citizens were treated like insurgents, asks Half-Life 2. And what if a world-wide epidemic left everyone infertile, and coupled with multinational strife, anarchy broke out on a global scale? Children of Men asks this one, and the answer is not contained in just another science fiction flick, it's a genre-bending film that everyone should see.

I'm not going to write up a full review of Children, because (and I know it's cheap and I've done this before) I agree with everything said in the A.V. Club's review of it, and you should just read that. But I do want to elaborate on a couple of points that the Club didn't get to.

First, the immersion factor is incredible. The long, long takes this movie is notable for are restricted to the most tense and/or action-packed scenes, and makes already gripping sequences even more realistic and visceral. In addition, the scenery is just unbelievable. The sets are vast and insanely detailed. This is a dystopian reality with broken, decaying streets that stretch on as far as you can see.

Second, this particular dystopia is made all the more realistic by the increasingly popular limited-viewpoint. You are tied to Clive Owen's character physically in that you never see anything he can't, and more importantly you never know more that he does, making his character even more empathetic (and cathartic). The same trick was ground-breakingly used by Half-Life 1 back in 1998, and Half-Life 2 uses it even better. It works so well in Children because Owen gives a particularly strong performance, the best I've ever seen from him. Michael Caine may be getting all the attention (not unjustly, he's terrific), but Owen is believable and likeable in Children, playing a character with a sharp sense of humor but who's stained by depression and as floored by the incredible things going on around him as we are as viewers.

The A.V. Club gave Children of Men an A, and I have to agree. If it weren't for one of those endings that wrap things up but don't actually answer every question, and in fact make room for a sequel, I'd give it an A+. It's definitely a must-own on DVD.

Van Gundy can eat it.

Ping-pong balls are overrated.
by AC - permalink

Tonight the hometown Griz played probably the best game I've seen them play all year, gutting out a win in Los Angeles over the Lakers, effectively containing and frustrating the hell out of Kobe Bryant in the process. The Griz outscored LA by 17 in the second and third quarters and held off a charge in the closing seconds, finalizing the win via a beautiful Pau-on-Kobe block as time expired. Memphis walked into the gym without Mike Miller, their second-leading scorer at over 18 a game, starting point Damon Stoudamire, and backup point Chucky Atkins, and somehow still managed to put together a smart, cohesive, intelligent game both offensively and on the defensive end.

Junior Harrington, who played all 48 minutes, and rookie Tarence Kinsey had career nights, and along with Rudy Gay and Pau Gasol they flat-out embarrassed the Lakers tonight. I watch every televised Griz game I can -- I have since they moved to Memphis in 2001 -- and the reason I'm mentioning this one is because of what angry dwarf Jeff Van Gundy said recently. Apparently he thinks it'd be a swell idea if all 30 NBA teams got an equal shot at the draft lottery. Not for some noble, even remotely thought-out reason, but because he thinks this will discourage teams from throwing games in an effort to finish the season with the league's worst record, which would give you a one-in-four shot at the top draft pick. Yeah, he's kind of a dumbass.

I'm not going into all the reasons why making only the 14 teams who missed the playoffs eligible for the lottery, or how much of an asshole this comment makes a guy who has inherited as a coach two number one picks over the course of his career (Yao Ming and Patrick Ewing). I just want to point out that the Griz are currently in the unfortunate position of being in a race for that number one draft position with Boston, Charlotte, and Atlanta. And tonight an undermanned Memphis team fought and clawed their way to an upset win on the road over the heavily favored Lakers, starring a a guy named Bryant who's averaged more than 50 points the last five games, including a 60-point game against the Grizzlies a week ago.

Hey Jeff, guess what? NBA teams don't tank games on purpose. It just doesn't happen. And by insinuating that it does you've managed to make yourself look like a jackass on a monumental level: either you're trying to shame the league into giving you a draft pick now that you're finally back with a playoff-caliber team, or you yourself are willing to roll over and die to move up in the draft -- which probably means you've done it in the past.

Memphis made the playoffs for three straight years, and off the top of my head I know that they won 50, 45, and 49 games, one of the best records in the NBA over that span. This is not a franchise willing to tank games for any reason. There's speculation that Van Gundy's comments were directed specifically at the Celtics, who have won more championships (16) than any other team. Really, dude, isn't it enough that you're tiny and bald? Do you really want to be known as a dumbass and a hypocrite, too?

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.

Living with Flock.

The pros and cons of early adoption.
by AC - permalink

So I've been using Flock as my go-to browser for about two weeks now, and I've run into a few... issues. No deal-killers, but some annoyances. Plug-in support has been iffy. As in Firefox, you will occasionally come across a page that requires a missing plug-in, and the built-in plug-in finding wizard will invariably fail to help you. I was an early adopter of Firefox, so I've managed to manually install most or all of the plug-ins I need over the years (there are less than a dozen), but I was having trouble with Flock. I came across an entry in Flock's online help that suggested finding Firefox's nested plug-ins folder and simply copying its contents into Flock's equivalent directory. This worked for some plug-ins, but not for all of them -- notably, the Windows Media Player 11 plug-in, which is pretty prevalent. For sites using WMP for embedded video, I've had to go back to Firefox.

That was an easy one, though. A few days ago I fired up Flock and all my RSS feeds were gone. I poked around and couldn't find them anywhere. I chalked it up to a growing pains bug and tried to resubscribe to my feeds, but Flock thought every link I fed it was "invalid XML." It also failed to display the little RSS icon in the address bar when going to any site with a feed, which suggested that the browser had completely lost the ability to recognize a valid feed. I couldn't find a solution in the online help (though I didn't look very hard) and decided to completely uninstall the program -- including profile data -- and reinstall it. That fixed the issue, although another bug showed up when Flock's installer failed to prompt me to import any data from Firefox. Now, after install, the import wizard still fails to recognize Firefox as a valid import source.

Later I found this help article which might have helped me with the vanishing feed problem, but not with issue subscribing to new ones, and this article that explains how one Mozilla-based app can't import data from another when the latter is running during the former's installation. I'm not going to blame the Flock developers for this one, because I did have Firefox running when I reinstalled Flock, and I did know better from experiences installing other Mozilla-based browsers (Netscape, K-Meleon, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Browser, etc.). Unfortunately, there's no real workaround.

Other than these problems, I've been pretty happy with Flock. There are some nit-picks, like having the option of opening a link in a background or foreground tab, which I get in Firefox with the Tab Mix Plus extension and in Opera by default. There are also the little details changed for the better in Firefox 2 which haven't been incorporated into the Firefox 1.5-based Flock, although one of the most noticable, built-in spell-checking, is included. Also, as far as I can tell there are no alternative themes available for Flock anywhere. Granted the default theme is no nice that it's being ported to virtually every other browser, but how about some reciprocation?

Overall, though, my revised opinion of Flock has to remain positive. It's still my default browser, with Firefox 2 as backup and IE7 on stand-by. I feel a little guilty about it, because Avant Browser, a former favorite of mine, and Opera, which I've always liked for no reason I can nail down, can't even make an appearance in my start menu's recent apps list anymore. But that's how it works I guess. Build a better browser, and we'll use it. I hope Flock's user base continues to grow, because not only will it get better, all the others will have to keep pace.

Blogged with Flock

Kirk still kicks ass.

Which Kirk? Every Kirk, nerd.
by AC - permalink

I finally got around to checking out Star Trek New Voyages, a series of web-only episodes of the original Star Trek series financed by Trekkies the likes of which you can't even imagine. And it's way better than I thought it could possibly be. When rumors of a Trek movie starring people like Matt Damon and Adrien Brody surfaced I realized that I don't really have a problem with new actors taking on these classic roles. I mean, the Trek canon has existed for so long that it was only a matter of time until new actors were cast in some of them. You have to accept this to watch New Voyages, which is, essentially, a fourth season of Star Trek.

Sure, Scotty only occasionally has a Scottish accent, and yes, you did see the boom mike just now, but D.C. Fontana herself helped get this project off the ground by writing the pilot, and J.G. Hertzler, aka Chancellor fucking Martok, will be directing and starring in a future episode as Harry Mudd. Oh, and did I forget to mention that Walter Koenig showed up for the death of Pavel Chekov? That's in episode 2, bitches.

With the remastered, HD episodes of the original series (we geeks call it TOS), all five Trek series are in national syndication now, and on Mondays you can see every freakin' one of them. I know, because I just did. New Voyages only makes Trek stronger from my perspective, because even when this new "reimagining" of TOS is released in theaters, a lot of us who know and love the swingin' sixties version of the show will have new episodes to look forward to online. So what if the new Kirk is clearly wearing a wig? How is that different from Shatner's Kirk in everything since 1979?

Firefox finally finds an equal.

Flock may have kicked its daddy off the top of the browser food chain.
by AC - permalink

I finally decided to give Flock a try after the release of version 0.7.11. Not because it was a particularly important release, just because I've tried everything else and nothing has really even come close to supplanting Firefox for me. Opera is very good, and getting better. But I've been spoiled by Firefox's extensibility, and the "killer-app" extension is AdBlock. Avant Browser, the best of the IE-based browsers, has native ad blocking, but is not as customizable overall, and still runs on IE's rendering engine. SeaMonkey and Netscape can use ad blocking extensions, but SeaMonkey is unwieldy and Netscape is a cluttered UI nightmare. K-Meleon is under-developed and relatively primitive compared to Firefox.

That pretty much just leaves Flock, which is currently based on Firefox 1.5. And to cut to the end of the story, it's become my default browser. It's as exstensible as Firefox, though with fewer certified extensions. But it has AdBlock, Download Manager Plus, All-in-One Sidebar, and a few others that I like. It looks great, has a ton of really nice included features, is highly customizable, doesn't eat up too much RAM, and it's well-supported. The search bar is limited to Yahoo!, but is feature-rich, fast, and surprisingly useful. I love the integrated blogging tools, and it seamlessly imported all of my history, passwords, bookmarks, etc. from Firefox. Startup time is slightly behind Firefox, but the installer package is a little above middle-of-the-pack (Flock's installer is 9MB vs. Firefox's 5.7MB, Opera's 6.2MB, Netscape's 18.3MB, and Avant Browser's 1.8MB). Flock also has a more than competent RSS viewer that equals the Sage extension I've been using in Firefox for quite a while now.

At first, I used Flock a few times, falling back to Firefox as my default browser, as I've used Opera or Netscape or whatever in the past. But eventually I realized that there was nothing I needed Firefox for that I hadn't been able to do with Flock. And not being hip to all the under-the-hood engineering differences between Firefox 2 and Flock 0.7, I decided that Flock might as well be my default choice.

So there you go. In my experience, Flock is basically Firefox 1.5 plus a bunch of social-network-type integrations like blogging, picture sharing, etc., with all of the same features and with almost equal extensibility, support, and customization. From and end-user perspective, it's an unqualified success.

Theme post: Rock out, bitches.

When did buying CDs become outdated?
by AC - permalink

I went to my (sort of) local Cat's not too long ago to look around and talk to the Record Store Guys. There aren't a lot of places in north Memphis where you can find some Record Store Guys, so you have to take advantage of the situation. These ones were plucking badly at an acoustic guitar and were way, way too into Tool. I love Tool, but at some point you have to realize that you're not actually in the band. Anyway, I ended up buying a couple of eponymous debut albums spanning 25 years: Violent Femmes (1982) and Flyleaf (2007).

The Flyleaf record isn't bad. If you like their singles, I'm So Sick and Fully Alive (tracks one and two, interestingly), you'll probably like the rest of the CD. It's short, though, only a little over 34 minutes. Personal favorite is currently track 4, Cassie. It'll probably be the next single, coming to a college rock station near you.

The Violent Femmes album is, well, Violent Femmes. Almost half the record can be found on the radio now if you count the cookie-cutter Gnarls Barkley cover of Gone Daddy Gone. I never really knew that much about the band and was surprised this record was so old. It's a timeless LP, you should go get it.

What else. Oh, DirecTV is showing the concert footage from the new Nine Inch Nails DVD Beside You in Time on channel 101. It's OK, I guess. Reznor is awesome as always, but these new musicians... I dunno. I don't want to say they suck, but they kinda suck. As far as I'm concerned, the real live NIN is T.R., Danny Lohner, Robin Finck, and Chris Vrenna.

One last vaguely music-related note, you should point your interweb browsing devices to Adult Swim's download page to grab a handful of genuine Dethklok mp3s. Metalocalypse has officially supplanted Aqua Teen as the funniest, most kickass animated show on television, and you get free death metal songs to boot. Beat that, South Park.

More demo impressions.

Try before you buy.
by AC - permalink

Painkiller Gold has just been made available via Steam, and comes complete with a playable demo. It's not bad. Painkiller was released in 2004, and although the promo material brags about the incredible proprietary 3D PAIN engine, it's a pretty underwhelming game visually, especially when you consider that 2004 also saw the debuts of CryEngine, Source, and the Doom 3 engine. Painkiller runs really fast and has nice physics, but it's all very flat and reminds me a lot of the Quake III engine. It doesn't help that there are only a few weapons in the demo, and you get a bonus for beating it using only the stake launcher. Way to add variety there. Three bad guys and optimally just one gun. But it's still kinda fun in a Serious Sam, mow-em-all-down kinda way.

First impressions of the Prey demo are positive. It looks as good as Quake IV and runs as smoothly. Good atmosphere, although it really is strongly reminiscent of Quake IV and Doom 3. Hopefully Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will finally do something original with that brilliant Doom 3 engine. Anyway, the portal effects in Prey are seriously cool, which makes it suck even more that we have to keep waiting and waiting for Valve to get around to shipping Portal only when Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 are done. I could go on a nice, satisfying rant about how Valve's episodic content plan has gone completely to hell (over a year between Episode 1 and Episode 2, and the value-pricing idea is out the window), but I won't.

I've been playing around with Screamer Radio, a nice little freeware internet radio client. It's a tiny app and comes with a decent preset list. So far I haven't heard a single stutter or skip. On the downside, at least a fourth of the presets are dead, and it gives you only a limited amount of customization. I'd have liked a sortable station list, for one thing. But you can't beat the price. So far, Sky FM is the only station I've liked enough to add it to the favorites list. First track was Bjork, second was Soul Coughing, third was Temple of the Dog. Sweet.

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.

Not so good with the shooting.

At least, not anymore.
by AC - permalink

I'm not sure what the intangible It is that I've apparently lost when it comes to online shooters, but whatever It is, I've lost it. Ten years ago, I used to dominate in the only online shooter anyone was playing, Quake. But now... I dunno. In the FPS's I can find a decent amount of players in -- Call of Duty 2, Halo, Quake III mainly -- I'm holding my own, but I'm getting fragged way too much. If we were talking about obscure, overly complicated gamemodes like Onslaught or whatnot it would be different, but I'm playing mostly team deathmatch, and I'm getting sniped left, right, and center, and it's getting depressing. I'm still kicking all kinds of bot ass offline, so I don't think I'm necessarily out of practice... It's like there's been some sort of fundamental, intangible shift in how to win online in these kinds of games that I've missed the boat on since I was last playing a lot around six years ago.

Whatever the case, at least I'm not crashing so much anymore. After the RAM slot-swap, I've only crashed once. I've got my box open and on its side, with a desk fan pointed into it. I think the problem was from my motherboard's orientation. The vidcard was stuck upside-down, with the fan/heatsink pointed down and with very little room for the hot air to escape upwards. Over time, I think the GPU has been damaged and can take less and less exposure to high temperatures. I would have been looking out for this, but I've never had a little mini-tower like this eMachines case before. Anyway, now not only can it vent upwards, I'm forcing the air out of the case with the fan. I haven't tried the Psychonauts demo again, but I've been able to play a lot of CoD2, as well as the F.E.A.R. demo a couple of times without a spontaneous reboot. It's progress anyway.

Back online for the first time again.

It's fast, then it's gone.
by AC - permalink

So I've finally rejoined the broadband world. We ordered the fancypants wireless network package, which meant a box full of hardware with no instructions. Luckily I used to do this sort of thing for a living, and I was able to get the whole setup humming along online without installing all the stupid proprietary software. The downside is that my PC has gone from occasionally crashing due to what seemed like overheating issues to crashing at random almost constantly for no apparent reason at all.

I've been troubleshooting this problem for months, and I finally ran out of ideas today. As a last-ditch effort I pulled out the dual 512MB PC3200 DIMMs, cleaned them off, and re-seated them in the unoccupied slots. And incredibly, it seems to be working. My PC shut itself down unexpectedly four times yesterday, but today I've been able to putter around online, do some gaming, and successfully shut down thrice. That includes an hour-long Call of Duty 2 online deathmatch session, and full-on 3D gaming has generally been a death sentence for my box lately. In fact, one of the first things I did after getting the DSL goodness going was to update my Steam client and download the Psychonauts demo. The game ran great, but twice my PC crashed after ten minutes of it. So long sessions of CoD2, CoD1, Quake III, Quake IV, Halo, and UT 2004 online are good signs.

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?

Bargain bin gold.

Rediscovering my Far Cry addiction.
by AC - permalink

I was looking through the PC games in a massive chain store last week when I saw a jewel case-encased edition of Far Cry for sale for just ten bucks. I was going to buy it, but I already have it. So I didn't. Anyway I couldn't find anything else I really wanted; almost bought F.E.A.R., but I decided not to fulfill the destiny I laid out for myself with my last post. I left gameless, but came home and decided to fire up Far Cry. I had a problem with frequent, almost constant crashes with the game a few months ago, but for whatever reason -- probably a Catalyst upgrade and ditching Control Center for Tray Tools -- it runs beautifully now.

And after committing myself to actually playing it all the way through to the end for just the second time in probably a dozen tries, I think I have to nominate Far Cry for the Second Most Underrated PC Shooter of the Last Three Years award. The winner is Doom 3, because fanboys love to hate it when it's actually a terrific game. Far Cry comes in second because only PC FPS diehards have ever even played it, while a lot of people have played the sub-par Xbox and Xbox 360 ports.

The PC version of Far Cry is just a really impressive game. Yes, it has flaws. One of the worst is the trigen melee damage: they can kill you fully armored in two hits, and bad melee hit-detection lets them whack you from two meters away. There's also the unfortunate choice to put you through a long, hard corridor crawling session half way through the game. But the rest of the game is beautifully open-ended gameplay-wise. I've said this before, but I found new ways to beat several missions during this play-through, even a couple of the early ones I've played many times before.

Far Cry's huge, open map structure gives you such a degree of freedom to explore that you can come up with entirely unexpected -- and unintentional -- ways of attacking almost every mission, aside from those few maps that confine you to moving from floor to floor in some hostile bunker. But even the missions that require you to reach an objective in a free-standing enemy building give you multiple angles of attack, as they all have several entry points you can assault to confuse and draw out the bad guys. One other problem with the game is missions that surround you with trigens, but I suddenly realized there's a way around that: rocks. Tossing rocks to draw away (or draw to you) one or groups of enemies is a really underutilized aspect of the gameplay that makes things a lot more manageable in intense situations where you can get overrun real fast.

Similarly, the waypoint save system is not always ideal, but you can pull down the console and use the "save_game x" and "load_game x" commands to quicksave/quickload at any time -- although you can run into severe clipping problems if you save while crouched or prone, especially in a confined space.

Anyhow, on top of the solid gameplay, you also get visuals that not only run ever-better on more modern hardware, they still look fantastic next to more recent games. Far Cry comes with a configuration utility that gives you direct access to a lot of tweaks that would normally require a lot of console-trolling and trial-and-error. The list of effects and features you'll find in it can humble even Source and Doom 3 engine games, and they're all delivered in a title that regularly serves up massive, sweeping panoramic views that can stretch for a mile or more.

And on top of everything, Far Cry takes days to finish, a solid 20 hours at least, likely more like thirty if you take a stealthy approach to it. That's pretty much unprecedented these days. Doom 3 is a long game, Half-Life 2 is even longer if you take your time and look around a lot. But Far Cry just keeps going and going. An incredible amount of work was put into the game to make it so long, and it shows. It's nearly impossible to find quality gameplay for so many hours, especially in an FPS.

I really think it's one of those hidden gems of PC gaming, something that gets a lot of critical attention but sort of fades from popular attention from all but an enthusiastic underground, like the original Ghost Recon. These days the only place I ever see Far Cry mentioned is in a hardware benchmark study, and that's a shame for a game with such a massive amount of replay potential.

Oh by the way, here's a little technical help. I have no idea why, but the Render Mode option has never worked for me; it just says "Not Supported" for anything other than Default. All you have to do is look in the default Far Cry folder (Program Files\Ubisoft\Crytek\Far Cry\) and open the "system.cfg" file. Find "r_RenderMode" and change the value to anything from 0 to 4. The render mode options are 0 for Default, 1 for Improved (doesn't seem to make much difference), 2 for Paradise (desaturates the colors a little and I'm not sure what else), 3 for Cold (desaturates a lot and gives the game a grittier look), and 4 for Cartoon (tries a sort of half-assed cell-shaded look). This is not to be confused with the Renderer setting, which lets you run the game in either Direct3D (default) or OpenGL. Again, the in-game setting doesn't usually work, and you can change it in the same .cfg file, by changing the "r_Driver" string to opengl. I don't recommend this. It's buggier under OpenGL, as the engine just isn't optimized for it.

Overreaching.

Try before you buy.
by AC - permalink

So I bought Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter last week. I dunno why. I knew it wouldn't run very well on my PC, but I guess I was thinking optimistically. I mean, I figured I could always turn the specs way down to get a good framerate, and the gameplay wouldn't be affected. I was wrong.

First off, I'm a huge fan of the original Ghost Recon. I think it's an all-time classic PC game. It took the tactical elements of Rainbow Six and added a streamlined, real-time control system, then took the whole show outdoors and set it in a military environment. When you consider Ghost Recon and its two official expansion packs, Desert Siege and Island Thunder, as a whole, you've got a good hundred hours of solid single-player tactical FPS gameplay. And the game holds up to this day, five years after its release.

When I first picked up Ghost Recon, it was with an underpowered PC that just met its system requirements. But I was able to play and enjoy the game with a small amount of in-game tweaking. Unfortunately, Advanced Warfighter doesn't scale so well. My PC meets or exceeds the quoted recommended requirements, but to be blunt, it runs like stagnant mule shit. Even after tweaking Advanced Warfighter to get as much out of my hardware as possible, the game just is not playable enough to be enjoyable. It's a game based on precision and reflexes, and jerky, stuttering framerates and jagged, blurry textures are somewhat counterproductive.

I knew in advance that this game's engine, inexplicably, does not support any anti-aliasing whatsoever. The problem is, unlike the Doom 3 engine, this is one that really needs it, especially at low resolutions. And on a system-heavy game like this, you have to run at a low res to get a good framerate. So it pretty much just has to look like shit, HDR or no.

Still, I don't necessarily consider it a bad buy. Eventually I'll upgrade my video card or CPU or whatever, and the game will run like a champ. What's disappointing is that this game was released with visuals so demanding that they virtually eliminate 90% of all PC owners from even being able to play the game at all. I mean, according to the back of the damned box, my PC should crush this game, but in reality it's so hard to find a compromise between framerate and sharp visuals that I've actually uninstalled and shelved it.

By the way, I realize that there's an official patch for Advanced Warfighter that addresses a few performance issues, including the one where the game assigns itself a high CPU priority, making itself unplayable (way to play-test that one, guys). But it's 273MB, so I'll have to borrow my neighbors' bandwidth for that and burn it onto a CD. I'll try the game again once I have it, but I really don't think it's going to make a significant difference.

Next week on One Hundred Horseless Carriages: I buy F.E.A.R. and then uninstall and shelve it.

Optimizing Quake 4 for an X800.

Radeons aren't just for Half-Life.
by AC - permalink

I did a little more tweaking to Quake 4 recently and found a nice little sweet spot for my hardware. It's the best combination of high frame rate (45 to 60+ fps 90% of the time) and high-quality visuals I can come up with. This is basically a distillation of all the performance tweaks from the TweakGuides.com Quake 4 tweak guide, hand-picked and tested for this hardware:

• AMD 64 3500+
  
• 1024MB DDR 3200 SDRAM
• ATi Radeon X800 XL PCI-e 256MB
• Win XP Media Center, SP2
• KDS 17" CRT
  

If your hardware differs slightly, you can guesstimate up or down accordingly. Here's my in-game setup:

As a baseline, I set the game to medium graphic quality. This sets up a good value for texture compression in addition to a number of settings (like AA, AF, etc.) that I overrode. Under Settings > Game Options, I disabled Show Decals, and under Settings > System > Advanced Settings, I enabled everything but anti-aliasing. After that, I opened the Quake4Config.cfg (by default, found under C:\Program Files\id Software\Quake 4\q4base) and made only five changes. You'll find three of them together:

seta image_useCache "0"
seta image_cacheMegs "100"
seta image_cacheMinK "30"

I changed these three strings to:

seta image_useCache "1"
seta image_cacheMegs "196"
seta image_cacheMinK "3072"

I also located 'seta r_multiSamples' and made sure the value was set to 0. It's a little counter-intuitive, but you really don't need any anti-aliasing in the Doom 3 engine at any resolution over 1024x768. Unlike any other game engine I have, you just won't notice the difference between 2X and none at all, aside from the significant framerate boost. The last change was finding 'seta image_anisotropy' and setting it at 4. This is a good compromise value at 1152x864, keeping fps high without the floors and walls looking like shit in the distance.

Everything else I implemented in an autoexec.cfg, which you should place in the same folder. Here's my entire autoexec:

seta com_allowconsole 1
seta com_videoRam 256
seta com_systemRAM 1024
seta g_brassTime 0
seta image_preload 1
seta r_orderIndexes 1
seta r_useShadowCulling 1
seta r_useStateCaching 1
seta r_useVertexBuffers 1
seta r_useCachedDynamicModels 1
seta r_useTwoSidedStencil 1
seta r_useTurboShadow 1
seta r_useOptimizedShadows 1

I'm running Catalyst driver set v. 6.8, controlled by ATi Tray Tools. I don't even have Catalyst Control Center installed anymore. I'm not using Tray Tools to change anything other than forcing vertical sync. With this setup, I'm running Quake 4 at 1152 with barely a hitch or stutter. The game stays at 60+ fps almost all the time, the only exceptions being some indoor areas with a lot of dynamic lights trying to interact with each other. The best part is that I'm making almost no sacrifices in visual quality.

Anyway, this is what works for me. Your mileage may vary.

Call of Duty 2 vs. Call of Duty.

How do you feel about bump-mapping?
by AC - permalink

I've been playing Call of Duty 2 for a little over a week now. It's pretty damn good, but I have a problem with it. I've played Call of Duty and its expansion, United Offensive, to death. I love that game, and I'll probably be playing it until, like DOS games, an OS comes along that won't let me play it anymore. And it's hard to shake the feeling that CoD 2 is just another expansion for its prequel.

Just looking at the gameplay, there's no real upgrade at all. Healthpacks are gone in favor of a recharge system. I like it, because it gives you the freedom to charge into a fortified position - provided there's some cover nearby - without first scouting around for health you can backtrack to. But it's nothing that couldn't be done in the first game with a simple mod. The tank missions are back, and haven't changed at all. Using binocs to call in artillery strikes, and manning a mounted gun during a car chase on rails? Both back unchanged from United Offensive. Three episodes, one each with the American, Russian, and British forces? Check. And there's a total of two new weapons, both of which are exremely rare in the single player game. That's not counting two new mounted machine guns that are functionally indistinguishable from the old ones.

So what's new? Pretty much just the visuals, and that's only if you can run the game at a reasonable resolution and frame-rate in DirectX 9. In a very nice touch, Infinity Ward gives you the option of rendering the game with DirectX 7. This makes the game look virtually identical to Call of Duty 1, but also doubles or triples your framerate.

In DX7 mode, the game really does look like another CoD 1 expansion pack. But the good news is, it would be a really goddamn good expansion pack. While nothing really new is introduced, the maps are big and beautifully detailed, there are usually a number of varied objectives to each mission, and both friendly and enemy AI is much, much better. For the first time in a PC Call of Duty game, enemies won't just spawn indefinitely until you manage to advance to some magical, invisible waypoint. Instead, the maps have been carefully crafted to require you to advance to get the right angle or vantage point to knock out a finite, believable number of defending troops.

Now, if you can run the game under DX9, you'll see why it's more than just an expansion. I'm not sure why, but in DX7 mode, Call of Duty 2 actually runs better on my system than United Offensive at high resolutions. Under DX9, it runs even worse, forcing the res down to 1024x768. But it looks better that way, even with AA at just 2x and no AF at all. The bump-mapping brings all the map textures to life in a way the Quake III engine never could, but it's the character models that really sell the experience. Bump-mapping and specular lighting, combined with shadows you don't get under DX7, bring a feeling of realism to the game you just can't get from the original game.

But there is a catch. Out of the box, the game runs horribly on most hardware in DX9. You can either use an annoying in-game workaround or install the 1.3 patch. Going back to gameplay, there are a couple of reversions from United Offensive I don't understand. First, you can't "cook" a grenade anymore. You just toss it with its full three-second delay. This sucks even more given the new AI ability to pick it up and throw it back at you - which you can't do. Second, there's no mode-of-fire toggle now, so the Thompson and MP44 can't be switched to single-shot.

But it's still fun. I mean, look, it's more Call of Duty, and it's every bit as good as the original and United Offensive. It's also slightly longer, which is especially nice, as CoD 1 is so short it sometimes feels like an expansion itself. Overall, I say if you have a PCI-e vidcard with 256MB, just go buy it. It's worth playing, even in DX7.