The duality of FPSdom.

Sandbox vs. corridor-crawl.
by AC - permalink

I've gone back to Halo recently, and I'm making progress. I thought I was stuck for a while in that tower deal shortly after encountering the Flood for the first time, but it turned out I'd just somehow managed to miss a progress-mandatory waypoint. I had to backtrack a long way before I could convince the game to let me keep playing by triggering the next cutscene. This game is getting really repetitive. Even after continuing, I'm still running down the same hallways I was running down a week ago, just with different things to shoot at. Every now and then Halo lets me think about switching one of my two weapons by depositing a bunch of rockets in front of me, but that's really the end of the variety. Otherwise, the only way to affect the gameplay is deciding whether to use grenades to clear my path, or just running past to the next checkpoint.

In that way, it's not so dissimilar from Half-Life 2, but at least in Half-Life 2 the environments are constantly shifting and changing, and the whole feel of the game is altered. And you can always play every moment with nothing but the gravity gun, which was probably never intended but can be done, because it's such a robust game.

I also started Far Cry from the beginning a little while back, and I've reached the not-so-fun parts in that. Again, it's corridor-crawling, this time against melee-fighters (the early trigens) that can kill you with two hits, even through catwalks and from seven or eight feet away. That's a hit-detection issue, but it's also gameplay-related. Melee fighting plus FPS equals shit. It just doesn't work, ever. It's no fun. The only exceptions in my experience are chainsawing pinkies in Doom and chainsawing zombies in Doom 3. But that's it. Throwing melee fighting into a shooter for variety is just about the worst thing you can do. Look at Quake IV; everything shoots, and you can shoot back at everything. Hence, it's fun. Same deal in UT 2004, Half-Life, Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, and I could go on and on and on.

The corridor-crawl missions in Far Cry are particularly irritating after mission after mission where the maps are so massive that you can do just about whatever you want. You can blast your way through, via several different routes, or you can sneak your way to a gun emplacement and mow down everyone you bypassed, or you can just sneak your way past everyone. Or you can highjack a boat and use machinegun fire and rockets to take 'em all down from offshore. And that's just one mission. The campaign in Far Cry is enormous, probably the last PC FPS of that size we'll ever see.

They call that "sandbox" gameplay, but that really isn't accurate. You can't do whatever you want, just whatever the game will allow you to do. But in Far Cry, the limitations are so low that you don't notice them.

You might use stealth and a silenced MP5 (if you decided to pick one up - again, up to you), to make your way undetected onto a high point overlooking a couple of enemy strongholds. Then you can use your binocs to lock the position of all the enemy sentries into your HUD's radar screen. And you'll realize there are two or three dozen mercs out there. But without even thinking about how you're doing it - in other words, without breaking the "fourth wall" and thinking outside of the game's rules - you can use stealth to find a good position, then use loud weapons to simultaneously kill nearby mercs and draw in others farther away who heard something but don't know they've been drawn towards your protected and well-armed position. Before you even know it, you've wiped out all the significant resistance between you and your goal.

That's good gameplay, especially when you realize on your next play-through that you could have gone prone in the bushes, taken out a patrol or two, and then snuck past the remaining guards to kill the last few sentries to get to the objective.

But again, it only lasts for so long. It must be either good luck or insane diligence to come up with a shooter that good, which probably explains why there are so few of them out there. Far Cry is one, for a while. Ghost Recon is another. You can probably put Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in that category for select missions, and Half-Life 2 for the same reason.

But corridor-crawling can be fun. Anyone old enough to appreciate Doom II knows that. I'm not talking about Doom 3, which would probably be crawling at it's worst if it wasn't for the suck-you-in visuals or those awesome hell maps. I'm talking about Quake I-style shoot everything five or six times, and if it's still moving, shoot it some more, then keep running and shoot some more. That shit can work very well when it's done right, even in a single-player game. Call of Duty fits into that mold, and the CoD series is in the pantheon of all-time great PC shooters. You can throw in Quake II, the original Doom games, Elite Force, the Half-Life expansions Opposing Force and Blue Shift, and the Serious Sam's.

So which is better? There's no answer to that. I can only tell you that games like Halo drive me fucking crazy because they can't make up their minds. Halo pretends to sandbox by giving you huge maps that let you pretend you're making your own way through until you realize the enemies are just going to keep spawning until you make a beeline for the next checkpoint, tactics be damned. That sucks, and no strategy you come up with will help you until you figure it out.

Can't get enough FPS.

I likes the shooters.
by AC - permalink

The great thing about PC gaming is no matter how old the game is, as long as it will run in your OS, you can play it. I mean, if you drop $400 plus tax for an Xbox 360, you can only play 360 games plus a small percentage of Xbox titles. But I spent $650 plus tax, plus another $250 for a good video card on my PC in January, and I can play virtually every PC game ever. So I've invested in some more recent games like Quake IV, Doom 3, GTA San Andreas, and Half-Life 2. But I can also pick up older games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Quake III, Ghost Recon, Far Cry, and GTA Vice City, with the bonus of knowing that not only can I play them, they'll look better and run smoother than their developers can have imagined.

Which is why I finally got around to buying Unreal Tournament 2004. I've been meaning to get this game for a long time now, but I wanted a new copy, and Atari is still selling it for $40, which is way too much for a two-year-old game. Then I stumbled across UT 2004 Editor's Choice DVD edition at Newegg.com for $15. Ordered, done. Three days later it was on one of my hard drives, all ten gigs of it. And now I'm realizing that it might have been worth the forty clams. There's just so much damn depth here. No, the single player game isn't perfect. The difficulty scaling has issues; it goes from way to easy to way, way too hard with no warning at all, but the fact that a multiplayer-centric FPS has such a robust single-player mode at all is pretty amazing. It's much more than I was expecting, and even after almost a week I haven't even popped in the second DVD, which is supposed to be full of free apps and tutorials for modders.

To get back to the game, it's basically bliss for anyone who cut their PC-gaming teeth on FPS deathmatch, like me. I started with Doom deathmatch, then Duke3D, then Quake. At this point, I have to compare UT 2004 to Quake III Arena, and I honestly can't pick a winner here. The biggest beef I have with UT 2004 is the scaling. The maps are so big that the players seem too small. Quake III scaled down the maps to a more realistic size, with slower moving combatants. It made the arenas more realistic. In UT, the maps are more impressive in scope and scale, and certainly in grandeur and wow-factor, but it's harder to pick out the tiny little folks running around in them. Which is important when you're supposed to be shooting them.

But the controls are hyper-responsive and accurate, and the visuals are varied and impressive, at least when it comes to the maps. Weapon models are fairly crude, and the weapons themselves aren't that impressive. Nothing really original or game-changing, like Duke3D's shrinkgun or Half-Life 2's gravity gun. And the variety of gameplay modes can be a little over-complicated and overwhelming at first, but that does testify to the complexity and depth of the game. Then again, the more team-oriented modes like Assault and Onslaught, and even CTF, which give UT it's depth, are made almost more frustrating than fun by obstinate bot AI that requires you to do all the heavy lifting yourself.

I'll give you an example. In a Bombing Run map, you might throw out an order like, "Cover Me," because, I dunno, if you have the bomb, you're completely defenseless. And if they're around, one or two bot teammates will dutifully run along behind you as you try to get to the enemy score zone. But they don't look around. A single enemy bot can take you down because he's shooting you in the back and your dumbass bots aren't really paying attention. This makes certain Bombing Run and CTF makes virtually unwinable unless you get really, really lucky and use the right adrenaline power-up at the right time. That's frustrating.

But overall, UT 2004 may not offer the kind of immediate, visceral combat you can get by jumping into a deathmatch on q3dm7 or q3dm17 in Quake III, but there are just so many things you can do with the game out of the box, at least in the Editor's Choice edition, which is still being printed, that it's probably worth whatever price you find on it.

And it's great for me that I found it at $15, since I'm going to be quitting that stupid, dangerous job I have. Hopefully I can stumble across a few more cheap, quality FPS's soon, because I'm not going out of my way to find good games anymore. I just can't afford it. But that's the beauty of PC gaming, isn't it? Good games get cheap, and you can always run them, no matter how old they are.

I quit.

Is it worse being broke or being dead?
by AC - permalink

So I'm probably going to quit my job next week. There's something about having a shotgun pushed into your face that makes you reevaluate whether it's worth $45 net a day to do... well, anything, if there's a chance of getting your brains fucking knocked out of your skull for four hundred bucks. I moved off the graveyard shift because our security was so bad, only to get a death threat in broad daylight. Time to move on? I'd say so.

I think this was the first time I'd ever had a gun pointed at my face, but it was amazing how quickly I reacted to it. It was an instantaneous, gut reaction. All I think I could comprehend in that thousanth of a second was that there was a large-bore shotgun four inches from my face and a semi-automatic handgun right next to it in the hand of a second guy, who also seemed to be wearing a skimask, and that I should back up and get as low as possible as quickly as possible. There's no thinking, no second-thoughts. You just get the fuck down and point in the general direction of where the cash is.

I mean, even if I'd been armed, what could I do? I'd been talking to a regular guest, a friend of mine, who was also in the lobby with me with her four-year-old boy. I was thinking, in those adrenaline-juiced seconds, about that kid, when I suddenly realized that I was basically fucked. If this asshole squeezes the trigger on that shotgun while his fuckwit buddy rifles through the cash drawer, there's nothing I can do about it. I'm just dead. At that point, I calmed way down. I don't really even remember what happened after that moment, until they were gone. Probably the trippiest moment of my life when I wasn't actually tripping.

It's the fact that these guys got in and out in under 60 seconds with no trouble that makes me want to quit this job. Tomorrow the cash drawer will be back to $300 plus income, and security will be no better. So why not hit it again? I don't need that shit in my life. As soon as the manager finally got back from his dinner break I walked out the door. I'm off til Monday afternoon anyway, but when I come in, I'm telling him it will be my last week, if not my last shift. Last night, someone fired a .38 through the window of one of the rooms. We dug the round out of the wall. Two nights before, two guys muscled into the room of a 70-year-old guy staying in the hotel right next door and took four grand from him. Again, in broad daylight. There are pimps, dealers, thieves, and thugs to wade through on a daily and nightly basis who want to rent rooms for the night.

Fuck that. I'm done. I'd rather be flat broke than flatlined.

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.

Halo, Half-Life, headaches.

You take the bad to get to the good.
by AC - permalink

I'm taking a break from GTA this weekend to get back in touch with all my first-person shooters. I started by finally getting around to downloading Half-Life 2: Lost Coast via Steam. With dial-up, that's a long, long process, so we'll come back to that. After getting that going on Thursday morning I started playing through the Call of Duty expansion pack United Offensive again. Compared to more recent games like GTA San Andreas and even Half-Life 2 and Quake 4, United Offensive is still a damned good looking shooter. At 1280x1024 I can max out all the AA and AF settings, and I continually stop to look around at all the pretties. The Quake III engine is just one of the all-time great shooter engines.

Anyway, I also decided to revisit Halo PC. I started over with a new profile, on a lower difficulty setting. I dropped it to Normal, not because it was too hard, but because it was too hard with a 70-degree FOV with those crappy Halo guns. I'm sorry, but most of those weapons are all nifty and whatever, but they're inaccurate and too short-ranged. So I finally got around to looking for an FOV mod, and thirty seconds later I had this FOV/third-person mod I found at Filecloud. It's just a little executable you launch before running Halo. It lets you toggle between the default FOV and one you select in the app (like 90, the gold standard since, I dunno, fucking Doom), and also lets you switch to third-person with on-the-fly camera adjustment. Finally, Halo for PC is playable and fun. Still too resource-heavy, but a resolution like 1152 is good enough, I guess.

Eventually, after almost three days of off-and-on downloading I had Lost Coast. So I launched it, and... Error: "Failed to lock vertex buffer in CMeshDX8::LockVertexBuffer." Then, "The instruction at '0x241fe49b' referenced memory at 0x0dacf438'. The memory could not be 'read'." Oh, that's cute. It's actually almost the same error I've been getting when trying to run Half-Life: Source. So I checked the Steam support site and got a long list of fixes I'm not going to try, because I know enough about this shit to know they won't work. At the bottom, though, was this:

14. Put this CVAR in your HL2 launch properties and see if it helps:

-window +mat_forcehardwaresync 0

It helped. It's enough to get the app running, anyway. I can then just go to the video options and set it back to full-screen at whatever resolution I want. So I played through the first 45 minutes or so of Half-Life: Source, because it's still so damn fun even after, what, eight years? I only played through Lost Coast once, with HDR on full, because I know it was really all about the HDR. Unfortunately, this shit monitor I'm trying to use now made it way to dark to really appreciate. I got the odd sensation of appreciating how cool it should probably look, but doesn't quite. The more muted HDR in CounterStrike: Source's de_dust looks a lot better. But visuals aside, there were some really interesting gameplay moments in there that I didn't see in Half-Life 2, and have me looking forward to Episode I more than ever.

Oh, and I also downloaded the Darwinia demo via Steam. Again, it's overly dark with this monitor and the app has no brightness settings, but I played through the tutorial, and it's just like nothing else I've ever played. Of course, the last RTS I played was Centurion: Defender of Rome for the Sega Genesis, so I might have missed something. The entire game is under 40MB, but I'm not yet sure it's actually worth $20 to download.

And one last note. Apparently I'm still in my compulsive DVD buying mode, because last week I picked up Jarhead, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World for no real reason. I used to have a copy of Master and Commander and I thought I had it out of my system, but no. I just love that movie. It's in my all-time top ten, I think. I put off buying 9/11 for a long, long time, because I knew it would just piss me off. All of Michael Moore's movies are terrific, but they piss you off because you wonder why someone had to make a movie to point out all this awful shit that's happening right under our noses. Well, except for Canadian Bacon. That pissed me off because it was just kinda stupid. I bought Jarhead because I just love war movies that don't actually glamorize war, and I think Jarhead could be this generation's Full Metal Jacket. Sure, it would've been better with R. Lee Ermey, but we can still get our Ermey fix with Mail Call on the History Channel.

By the way, the Title tag on his web site, rleeermy.com, says, "Welcome to R. Lee Ermey.com NOW DROP AND GIVE ME 25!" That's fucking awesome.

Rock radio is still alive in Memphis.

We gave you Rock 'n Roll. You're welcome.

by AC - permalink

There's a radio station in Memphis broadcasting at 92.9 FM called 93X. Right around when they lost Howard Stern they were playing a pretty stereotypical mainstream rock playlist. Any current top-40 rock or alternative track was given six or seven rotations a day. At any given moment you could find the song currently playing on 93X running simultaneously on two or three other crappy Memphis stations. It had been the only station I could tolerate in this town for years, the station that introduced me to Deftones, and it was finally letting me down. The whole thing was just really depressing. And the fact that it was so hard to find good rock in the town that first broadcast Elvis Presley's "That's All Right, Mama" in 1954 and basically gave birth to rock 'n roll was absurd to me.

But 93X turned it around. Their playlist now is as good as any I've ever heard. Just now, as I type, they're following up "Punk Rock Girl" by Dead Milkmen with Metallica's "Master of Puppets." This weekend I've heard them play the new Tool single from 10,000 Days, but they also ran track 10 (I forget what it's called) just for the hell of it. To put that in perspective, the last Tool single, "Parabola," from Lateralus, was played on 93X so rarely that I heard it only once. Under this new format, they've already played a deep track from the new album, and by the way, they just played "Sex Type Thing" by Stone Temple Pilots. I think that was on Core.

They're still playing too much Saliva, I guess because they're from Memphis. The only Saliva track I actually like is that acoustic version of "Your Disease." Which they do still play sometimes. And do I want to hear "Lump" by the President of the United States of America, which it playing now? Yes. Yes I do. Thank you, 93X. You don't suck anymore, and I salute you for that.

Update, five minutes later: "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" by Pearl Jam. You see? That's good shit.

Computers are complicated.

I can type fast. Doesn't really help me, though.
by AC - permalink

Turns out if you look hard enough, you can still find a decent CRT for a decent price, but you're going to have to mail-order it. I think I've settled on this ViewSonic 19-incher for $220 plus shipping. I realize that if they'd had this thing during the Great War they would have used it as a runway for Sopwith Camels, but it does 1600x1200 at 77Hz, and the user reviews beat any other sub-20-inch CRT on Newegg. You can get a 19-inch, 8ms LCD for less than $300 now, but I want to be able to push as high as 1600 and as low as 1152 for various games, and you can't do that without a CRT. Plus, I can get a .21mm dot-pitch instead of .296, which is about as good as a mid-range LCD gets.

Meanwhile, I'm stuck forcing the brightness up to max in all my games so I can actually see what's going on with this damned second-hand NEC monitor. Tomorrow I'm going to drop some cash into checking, then I'm ordering that ViewSonic, or another, similar CRT. I've got to do something about this.

I'm thinking my next hardware upgrade will likely be a new vidcard. I just got this Radeon X800 XL, and I love it; it's significantly faster than the newer-generation X1600 cards. But at some point I guess I'll need a new one that's DirectX 10-compliant. That's probably about a year down the road, though. Before that I might want to swap out my CPU (AMD64 3500+) with either a 4000+ or an X2 (dual-core). The 939 socket is insanely diverse, which is one of the reasons I bought this PC in the first place.

Oh, and I need an add-on sound board, because the popping I'm getting from the onboard RealTek is absolutely maddening. And at some point I still have to get a gamepad for the flying missions in San Andreas and all the emulated 16-bit games I have. But that's it. Really. That's all I need.

Or I could sell everything and get two or three consoles and a dozen great games for 'em.

Nah. I'm off to play some Pogo games now, looping my entire CD collection in the background with musikCube. Try that on your precious PS2. For that matter, try updating your blog with your Xbox.

Update 4:26pm: By the way, when did PC game demo downloads get so completely out of hand? I remember when a demo was just over five megs. You know, because it's just a demo. The Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter demo is out now, and it's just under five hundred megs. Half a Gigabyte? For a demo? Jesus Christ, I just keep feeling older and older.

Putting off the inevitable.

Why spend money when you can wish you had? Wait, what?
by AC - permalink

I'm getting really tired of this old borrowed NEC monitor. I can't seem to do anything to get the brightness/contrast high enough, and the refresh rate is so low that the ache has moved past my eyeballs and into my soul. I mean, it supports a really astonishing array of resolutions for a 15-inch CRT, but it's just killing my brain. But I can't find a good CRT anywhere, and I hate to mail-order something so big and so fragile. But that's what it's going to come down to eventually.

At work I've been training a new guy to take over my graveyard shift so I can work the much busier 3pm to 11pm slot. I like working nights for a lot of reasons, but one of them isn't crazy motherfuckers who smash all the goddamned lobby windows with an aluminum bat, and that was the final impetus to get off that shift. The security we have is, at best, pathetic, and in that part of town you should have professionals. I make peanuts, and it's not worth getting my brains blown out over nothing. But this week's training combined with not taking a single day off, ever, and in fact never being more than two minutes late, while working a minimum of 20 minutes extra every day is starting to push me towards the schizoid side. I need a vacation. Now.

Unfortunately, I don't get paid days off at this place. What I do get is a wide range of nicely numbing first-person shooters on my hard-earned, fast-as-hell PC at home. And Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter is looking so good right now I'd kill a guy (the guy who smashed the fucking windows at work) to get it. Not only is it more aligned with the original Ghost Recon than the console version, early playtests indicate than it runs well enough even with a Radeon 9800-series graphics card. I'm drooling a little just thinking about this thing.

I've also tried to set aside a little of my free time to keep up my plucking skills on my bass guitar. I've picked out most of American Idiot, my new favorite bass CD. And by the way, have you heard the new Tool single yet? Oh my god. I thought progressive rock peaked around 2001, but this plus the new Korn track plus what System of a Down is doing, and throw in Nine Inch Nails' With Teeth, has me thinking that prog might be back. I hope so. All we need now is a new Deftones album...

Serenity and San Andreas bugs.

I only watch Stargate when I blog.

by AC - permalink

I'm rapidly developing a DVD problem. I bought three used yesterday for thirty bucks, really for no reason at all. I brought Serenity and Domino to the counter, but she told me a third one would be free, so I grabbed Collateral (which was the only one I'd actually seen). Domino was cool. I don't think I actually knew what was going on by the last fifteen minutes, but it was good looking. Serenity, though, I loved. I watched it this morning, and tonight I actually sat through all the bonus features and Joss Whedon's commentary track.

I thought Firefly was a brilliant show, but I wouldn't call myself a Browncoat or anything. I mean, I realize that the entire series can be had on DVD for as little as $20, but I still don't have it. I'd rather walk into a store and buy it than order it on the web, and I've never seen it anywhere.

This is a pretty funny Startgate. Better than the infinite time loop one. Considering I've only seen maybe a dozen episodes over the entire, what, nine-year run, I kinda like this show. Shit, they just did a Kids in the Hall "I'm crushing your head!" reference. That's awesome.

So anyway, I ran into this bug in GTA San Andreas where the game won't launch. Watching the active processes, I could see gtasa.exe run for a few seconds, then go away into computer netherworld. I tried a few things, then spent two minutes online and found the answer. You have to delete gta_sa.set, which is not in the program directory. It's in GTA SA's folder under My Documents. I didn't edit it, but it seems to be the main user config file, because deleting it resets all the options to default and the game generates a new one. It wouldn't be so irritating if I knew what caused the problem and not just how to fix it.

And if I hadn't nearly reinstalled the game, which might have wiped out my progress. I'm at more than 50% now, and I'm knowingly bypassing a number of goals. Right now my progress in San Andreas is being held up by the same thing that's keeping me down in Vice City: those fucking flying missions. In SA, it's both Zero's remotes and trying to fly that goddamn Mustang in pilot school. I can get around well enough in the seaplane you can find in the lake west of Las Venturas, but that Mustang is completely uncontrollable with either the keyboard or the mouse. I'm actually thinking about buying a gamepad just for that one mission.

Well, that Stargate had a really anticlimactic ending. It just sort of stopped. But on the bright side, they threw in a Star Wars gag ("My name is Olo. Hans Olo"), and it looks like the next one will have Wayne Brady for some reason. That's good, right?

Here, have some money.

Everyone else is getting my money, you should get in on this.
by AC - permalink

It's been an expensive week. Last weekend the house next door burned halfway to the ground, melting off all the siding on the north side of this house in the process. It also tore up a lot of telephone and electrical gear and damaged some of the utility-reading gear. So there's a nice, fat insurance deductable to pay. The same night, one of the dogs somehow managed to get a nice big gash on her leg, which meant a visit to the vet and another unexpected bill.

A few days later it became apparent that the condensor portion of the central AC wasn't working anymore. Call the AC guy, get out the checkbook. Then my beautiful Philips computer monitor borked itself into the scrapyard, so now I have to buy a new one. And on my way to look for one this morning I managed to drop over $160 on routine maintenance for my truck.

For the time being, I've borrowed a cast-off spare monitor from a neighbor, and hopefully it's temporary because this thing is just universally crap. It can get up to 1152x864, so that's something. But the dot-pitch is so low, and the image so blurry that it seems like my eyes are out-of-focus and it's giving me a headache.

I'm just so pissed at my broken monitor. It's a Philips 107P 17-inch, and it can hit any resolution you throw at it, from 1600x1200 to 1360x1024. I'd be content to just get a new one, but it turns out Philips doesn't even make monitors anymore, those motherfuckers. Now I might have to toss it in the backyard and fire .22 rounds at it to make myself feel better.

My problem now is trying to find a decent CRT to replace it. I use too many resolutions for gaming to get an LCD, and I can't spend $500 for a good game-grade flat-panel. But even high-range 17-inch CRTs these days seem to max out at 1280. Just this past weekend I played through my Call of Duty games maxed out at 1600, and I absolutely refuse to downgrade with a brand-new monitor. That leaves 19-inchers, which run well north of $200 before shipping. And I really don't have the desktop space for a huge 19-inch CRT anyway. Shit.

All this sort of puts a damper on my plans to pick up a new mini Nintendo DS next month. I decided I'd cave in and get one for the new 2D Mario, plus at work we have Wi-fi and I have a lot of time to kill, so a DS plus the new Mario Kart or Metroid or Tetris would be perfect. If it's not too much more expensive than the current DS, I could still pick one up. That's assuming I don't get an arm chopped off or smash my truck into a bridge pylon or have to buy a new refridgerator or something. Which, at this rate, is right around the corner.

Work, sleep, and GTA

In that order.
by AC - permalink

So I haven't been able to put aside much time for the blog lately. Somehow all my conscious free time has been sucked into a black hole called Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I knew it was supposed to be good on the PS2, but nothing, not even GTA Vice City, prepared me for how all-consuming the PC version of San Andreas would be. It just pulls in your entire life and leaves your brain with nothing but spinning maps of Los Santos and Red County and San Fierro, etc. I got my first GTA: SA girlfriend up to 100%, while my real-life girlfriend -- let's pretend for a moment that I have one -- is left wondering why doing drive-by's is such a great third-date activity.

That 30fps problem was caused by the Frame Limiter in-game setting. It sounds like a vsync setting, but it actually caps the game at 30fps. Which is fucking insane. It's 2006, and I have 256MB of vidram, and I absolutely refuse to play any game at 30fps. Uncapping that, and hardware-forcing 4xAA and 16xAF still gives me over 60fps, so suck on that, Rockstar North. I mean, they're Scots and my people by blood, but come on. I want to kick 'em all in the neck for that shit.

Anyway. A developer-release alpha of Firefox 2.0 was released last week. Don't install it unless you're serious about beta testing and know that this bears virtually no resemblance to what 2.0 final will be. Similarly, don't use Internet Explorer 7.0 beta for any reason at all. It's feature-incomplete as well, but also sports some major security vulnerabilities and can break explorer. I tried to use it once, and it broke my ISP's proprietary dialer software. The latest word is that it won't integrate itself into explorer and will function like any other stand-alone browser (like Firefox or Opera). Frankly, I think that's a load of bullshit. Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I'm just going by Microsoft's track record.

I've dropped both Firefox and Opera on the POS box at work and started using Avant Browser. So far it's been flawless. Just to recap, it's an old IBM Pentium III rig with 64MB of RAM running Win98, and as far as I can tell, it's never been reformatted. Installing AB definitely helped extend it's useful life, and I mean that literally. Another couple weeks of forcing that fucking thing to run Firefox, or even IE, and I would have thrown it into the goddamn dumpster as hard as I could. You have no idea how close I've come to that, or how many times.

I don't really have any new DVD's or games on my radar at this point. Thinking about ordering System of a Down's Mezmerize and Hypnotize, but that's it. GTA III is just ten bucks, but I've got more than enough GTA than I can deal with as it is.

"Job satisfaction" is an oxymoron.

Wasting money I didn't have.
by AC - permalink

Don't you hate it when you deposit a paycheck, then a couple weeks later it shows up in your mailbox with "Insufficient Funds" stamped on it? What, that's never happened to you? Well, fuck you, because it happened to me this week, and it sucks. I got the money back in cash this morning, but somehow on my way from work to the bank I lost a hundred dollar bill, almost a fifth of that paycheck. So that was fun.

Took my mind off of it by buying a 12-pack of Steel Reserve and GTA: San Andreas. They should sell them bundled, because you need the beer as a distraction from the tedium of trying to get your rig to run San Andreas at anything like an acceptable framerate. I dunno what they did to the engine, but I can't get this thing to run over 30 fps no matter what I do. Quake IV runs faster. I mean, what the fuck, man?

Anyway. NIN's With Teeth is kicking ass. I'm going straight to it every time I launch musikCube. Then it's time to power up the bass amp to play along with American Idiot. The neighbors are probably wondering when I'll start improving.

I also dropped twenty bucks for Windowblinds 5 this week. I put it off forever, but I wanted those pretty shadows and alpha-blended transparencies, so I finally put up the cash. Now it looks like I'm running Vista, but I know I'm not because I don't have a pounding headache. Thanks, Stardock!

Too many ways to waste time.

I promise I won't bash Halo in this post.

by AC - permalink

For some reason I've had a strong urge for the last week or so to go back and play some Ghost Recon. I don't think I've run that game even once since installing my new vidcard. I have GR plus expansion packs Island Thunder and Desert Siege, and they're a great way to kill hours at a time. My rig can run them completely maxed out without even breaking a sweat. But other things keep coming up. First, I was trying desperately to like Halo. That wasn't working out so well, so I beat Call of Duty: United Offensive on a couple difficulty settings, which made me feel better. Went back to Halo and enjoyed the next couple of missions a little bit better, then got so pissed at it that I spent an entire morning playing Penguin Blocks on Club Pogo, just to spite that goddamn game. I hope it was watching. Either way, Penguin Blocks was more fun than Halo.

Then Nine Inch Nails' With Teeth and Green Day's American Idiot showed up in my mailbox several days early (via Amazon), so I immediately dumped them into GTA's mp3 folder and spent my next couple blocks of time with my computer driving around Vice City listening to them, looking for hidden packages and "unique" jumps. That was also more fun than Halo PC. And now Valve releases a relatively major Steam update that includes file-system optimization for Source Engine games. In other words, they may have finally fixed that goddamn stuttering. So I spent roughly half an hour downloading that and the next couple hours playing Half-Life 2.


And I think they might have done it this time. I started at the opening of Route Canal and played to roughly two-thirds of the way through Ravenholm. And it's definitely a lot smoother now. There's still a few moments of just-loaded-this-map stutter, but once it smooths out, it tends to stay that way. The sudden jolt at the start of a scripted sequence is now generally gone, unless three or more are initiated simultaneously. Between this and the other tweaks I've put in, HL2 and Counter-Strike: Source probably have the best performance-to-looks ratio of any game I've got right now.

So I haven't set aside any time for Ghost Recon yet. It takes so long to properly play any given mission that you really have to be dedicated and know that you're going to be doing this for at least an hour or two. It's sort of like a subtler, more realistic Far Cry in that way. Sure, you can blast through it, but you'll probably get your head blown off, and you'll definitely miss out on the fun of sneaking around and dropping grenades into people's laps. Then later you can fire up Quake III Arena, get two hundred frags in ten minutes, and go do something else. Something other than Halo, which is not as much fun.

Harry Potter movies still don't suck.

Digital video discs? What's next, hover cars?
by AC - permalink

I picked up my copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on blind faith this Tuesday, since I hadn't seen it yet, but it was a good buy. Go get it. I bought the slightly more expensive two-disc edition, but I haven't actually watched disc 2 yet. Anyway, it's not as atmospheric or original as the previous movie, Prisoner of Azkaban, but it stands apart from the previous movies as a solid action/adventure. It's fast-paced, but still easily works in a subplot or two. And it's nice to see Neville getting a bigger role.

Maybe it's just me, but all I want to see in the movie adaptation of Order of the Phoenix is the DA stuff, particularly when they storm the Ministry of Magic. I love it when incidental characters start kicking ass and taking up screen time. Which is why I'm hoping a good ten to fifteen minutes of Half Blood Prince is devoted to Quidditch.

Have I lost any casual 100hc readers yet? Every now and then I need a Harry Potter or Star Trek post to keep me grounded. By the way, the TNG episode "Relics" aired on G4 last night, and I loved every goddamned second of it. Who could have kept themselves alive in the transporter pattern buffer after eighty years? Captain Montgomery fucking Scott, that's who.

Halo is overrated.

Another console-to-PC port? Muy, muy idiota.

by AC - permalink

I finally got around to grabbing the last, battered copy of Call of Duty: United Offensive off the shelf from the Walmart up the street before it was packed off with the other overstock, and for no particular reason I went ahead and picked up Halo PC (also $20). So far I'm not particularly impressed. I beat United Offensive pretty much right away, not because it's so much shorter than Halo (which it is, of course), but because it's just so much faster-paced and more fun to play. Halo has been... underwhelming.

I'm not that far into it, and it's not bad. It's a decent PC shooter. Graphically it's not quite on par with, say, Quake III Arena, which, for the record, is eight years old. Gameplay reminds me of Quake IV, or a spacey, low-rent Half-Life. Art direction and design is original and looks cool, but the big outdoor environments feel artificially constricted. Nearly every metal surface seems to have a shader on it, which is good or bad, depending on how you look at it. There's supposedly a lot of bump-mapping at high detail levels, but I've yet to see any evidence of it. The game itself clearly has high production values and looks nice and polished. It's the presentation that sucks.

That's because everything about Halo PC feels like a console game, from the not-even-close default key bindings to the fact that the newly-printed retail copy I bought contained the original, unpatched version of the game. Virtually every legit review I read said the controls were translated perfectly, but really, there are a lot of issues: the x-axis mouse sensitivity drops when strafing; the FOV is severely limited, forcing my mouse speed up even higher; vehicle control is primitive and needlessly restrictive compared to newer shooters like Far Cry and Half-Life 2.

And it's not just the controls. I know this game is a notorious system hog, but seriously, I've got a Gig of RAM, a CPU rated at 3500 MHz, and a 256MB PCI-e vidcard with 16 pixel pipes, and the v-sync chugs down to 30 FPS when a fair amount of geometry has to be drawn, even with no special lighting or particle effects active. Granted, I've got everything turned up high, but at just 1280x960 and only 2xAA and 8xAF, I should get more from a three-year-old game. It's just a poor job of optimizing an existing game engine for a new platform, and that's especially disappointing coming from Gearbox, who handled the transition. These guys brought us Opposing Force and Blue Shift, expansion packs so good that they did the impossible and actually made the original Half-Life better.

I'm not saying Halo PC isn't playable. It still runs well enough -- if it runs at all. Microsoft's support database for Halo is huge. Not because they're being so thorough, but because the game has so many issues. Most of the fixes are so complicated that an average user probably couldn't even be talked through them. I personally couldn't even start the game out-of-the-box. I spent a few hours tracking down a fix before noticing the auto-update utility in Halo's program directory (no shortcut is created for it). The latest patch fixed the game for me, but if the support forums are any indication, not for a lot of other people.

So I don't know. I haven't actually decided if I'm going to keep this one or not (also $20 at Walmart: GTA San Andreas and Lego Star Wars). I'll play through another couple hours and see if it gets much better. I'm very aware that I've played virtually nothing but first-person PC shooters since about 1999, and the "problems" I'm having with the game can easily be considered "quirks" that I just need to get adjusted to. But for me, here's why Halo is disappointing: it was originally released for the Xbox in 2001 and was ported to the PC in 2003. I have a number of PC shooters that were released before or around the same time as Halo that are simply better games, at least in my opinion (Quake III, the original Half-Life series, Ghost Recon, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Call of Duty). Halo has repeatedly been put into the pantheon of all-time great shooters by the gaming media, but I'm just not getting it.

Grand Theft Auto: Addict

I finally get it.
by AC - permalink

So I ran by the local Walmart on my way home from work this morning to pick up Halo PC. I intentionally left home with only 25 bucks in my wallet because I missed a couple days work this week with chronic migrains and I didn't want to tempt myself with the $40 Call of Duty 2 (see the comments to this post). But there were no more Halo's. Walmart was Halo-less. I wavered for a while, tempted to buy the United Offensive expansion pack for Call of Duty, but I've been dealing with some visual anomalies with Quake 3 Engine games lately, and I just didn't want to deal with that. So I picked up GTA: Vice City for ten bucks.

First things first. I stand by my stance that the GTA games look like shit on the consoles. I will never back off that point. On the PC, however, the visuals get upgraded to "mediocre." At 1280x1024x32, even the max draw distance is way too short, models are blocky, and buildings are all blurry and rectangular. But force AA to 6 and AF to 16, and things look up somewhat. The framerate stays at 60-plus on my box (AMD64 3500+, 1GB 3200 DDR, ATI X800 XL 256MB), gameplay is still tight and fluid. There are a lot of little things that annoy me about GTR, but I'm fucked if it still isn't pretty damned addictive. For the first couple hours I honestly didn't know what was going on or what, exactly, I was supposed to be doing, but it was still way too much fun.

I'm still planning on posting complete rundowns of how I've optimized performance for all those newer games on this midrange rig. I might save it for when that new Google pages web service goes live, because it should allow for about a hundred megs of free webspace for screenshots, etc.

Oh, and I picked up Troy used on DVD the other day. Not bad, but not great. Still worth owning for great scenes from Peter O'Toole. Also, General Veers is in it. Look for him, he's in there.

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.

Power hungry.

The two-step guide to neglecting your blog.
by AC - permalink

No posts in a while, but I have an excuse: I work full time, and I've spent every minute off basking in the warm, comforting glow of my new video card. I added an ATI X800 XL to my new PC a couple weeks ago, and I haven't done much but play with it since. Sure, it's last-gen, but that's why it cost me just $250. And the specs are so good, why spend twice as much for a marginally faster X1800? I only have one PCI-e slot, so Crossfire capability does me no good, and the X800 series doesn't need a dedicated power connector, which would have forced me to upgrade my power supply. The X800 XL has 256MB GDDR3, 16 pipes, DX9.x/OGL2.0, DVI, etc. I spent over a week looking at benchmarks - which makes for a long fucking week - and decided this card is well matched with my box (Athlon 64 3500+ and 1GB 3200 DDR).

And damn if it isn't the best $250 I've spent in a long time. Call of Duty, which ran surprisingly badly under my onboard video compared to Quake III Arena and Medal of Honor, is absolutely crushed by this card. I'm running 1600x1200 with every single setting maxed out, and it's locked in at my monitor's 1600 refresh rate of 70fps. Benchmarks indicate it's moving at around 150fps gross. Only the first Stalingrad map show that the X800 is actually working, as the fps drops into the mid-thirties, which is better than the 4fps I was getting previously (no, really). Quake III and MoH run so fast - nearly 300fps at 1600 - that they're having trouble synching up with the refresh rate and chopping up somewhat. Dropping to 1280x1024 fixes that issue, and they're still gorgeous.

I'm finally able to run Doom 3 to it's potential, and I have to say that it's the best-looking game I've ever played. At 1280x1024, with all graphics turned up and with 4xAA and 4xAF, it's solid at the 70fps v-sync cap. Online benchmarks indicate that it should be worse than that, but it ain't. And Half-Life 2... what can I say. At the same settings as Doom 3 it runs even more smoothly (especially in a firefight), and I just end up sitting here in front of the greatest gaming experience I've ever had.

Ghost Recon is also running flat-out. With all settings turned up full, 1600x1200 is no problem at all, and enabling AA and AF via Catalyst doesn't slow it down a bit. Even the heavy GR: Island Thunder maps can't tax this vidcard in the slightest. This morning I picked up Far Cry (it was that or Halo, both $20), and it's running as well as any of my other games. Again, it seems to be well above the Far Cry benchmarks I've seen with the X800 XL on machines generally slightly faster than mine.

I'll update again after I've picked up Quake IV Special Edition and maybe Call of Duty 2... I know I won't be able to run it under DX9, but I can live with DX7 if it's even remotely as good as CoD 1.

Sony is on the road to Sucktown.

Or: How to make the worst possible decision.
by AC - permalink

BetaNews reported a few days ago that Sony has decided to replace Internet Explorer with AOL Explorer as the default web browser on all new VAIO desktops and notebooks. Holy crap. That's like trading in a first-gen Kia Rio with 200,000 miles on it for a retired right-hand-drive mail truck. You have to give AOL credit, though. They talked HP into distributing the ironically Firefox-based Netscape 8, which will also be included on the VAIOs, along with IE6 and a bunch of other AOL software.

According to the article, "the browser directs users to a Sony-branded AOL.com homepage." I don't know about you, but to me that sounds like web-based bliss. If you're trying to get the end-users pumped up, you can't go wrong with a phrase like "Sony-branded AOL.com homepage." Not included on new VAIO PCs: a good web browser. There are so many out there, but apparently only Dell and Apple know about it. Dell UK is still reportedly scheduled to start shipping PCs with Firefox, and Apple of course has Safari. But what about Avant Browser? What about Opera? I have to wonder how much these deals are costing AOL, because these decisions cannot be based on anything but money.

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.