New tricks.

I don't feel like an old dog. But I am.
by AC - permalink

So obviously the blog has been left to stagnate this month. I've been busy navigating the almost incomprehensible administrative mess that Southwest calls its admissions and registration departments. After hours and hours of being shuttled from one office to another, three dozen unheeded voicemails, and two weeks of limbo after my University of Memphis transcript was lost -- twice -- I somehow managed to get fully admitted and registered, and I've just finished my first week of college in almost nine and a half years.

I'm taking an intro computer course focused on MS Office 2007 (which explains why the book costs $136), a basic (not BASIC) programming course, a web programming course, and a gen-ed cultural geography course. I had planned on taking at least one more, but surprisingly, my U of M record covers 14 hours I can apply to my IT Web Tech major. This semester shouldn't be too difficult, the fun will start later on, when I get into client- and server-side apps, advanced Java, XML, SQL, etc. Since I have virtually nothing else to do, I'm determined to ace every course I take over these four+ semesters, but after a decade, it's going to be hard to retrain my brain for this kind of focus and constant work.

I did get a surprisingly encouraging sign from the deeper recesses of my head when I had to take the math portions of the COMPASS test at the last minute to qualify for the web programming course. I haven't done any sort of higher math since high school, but I managed to get through it with almost perfect scores with no preparation at all. I have no idea how that happened.

The most surreal thing about this whole experience has been wandering around the campuses and realizing that I'm older than a good 95% of the students there. I feel like a high school senior in a school that goes right down to sixth grade. The thing is, I don't look much older than any of them, and in fact I look younger than a lot of them. But I realize much better how different this is from high school, and even in the first week I've noticed that I'm spending a lot more time talking to my professors after class than, say, standing around in the hall talking to my cell phone. If we were all dropped into the Thunderdome, these kids would swagger right up to Master Blaster, absolutely certain that they can kick his ass because, hey, how hard can it be? Meanwhile, I'd be on the outside calculating exactly how quickly I can get at that chainsaw over in the corner, and trying to figure out a way to smuggle in a shotgun, just in case.

id Software on Steam. Oh my God.

Best news ever.
by AC - permalink

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

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

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

Starting over.

Aka, what the fuck?
by AC - permalink

I woke up this morning (okay, afternoon) to an insurmountable drive error that ended up with me being forced to perform a full system recovery. For whatever reason, the sector on my primary hard drive containing all the boot data was irreparably corrupted. So after hours of fruitless troubleshooting and more hours of reinstallation, here I am again, with a clean Windows XP install and all my 120+ GB of whatever-I-had-that-took-up-all-that-space gone. It's actually not as bad as it could have been. At first, I thought my 200GB primary drive was fried, leaving me with my backup 100GB drive. If I'd been forced to reinstall Windows to that drive, not only would my total drive space have been cut by two-thirds, I would have lost all my backup data I was using it for in the first place.

Still, it's going to take me days to restore everything, and a lot of data has been lost forever. The timing is just fucking perfect, as I'm in the middle of the readmission process. I'm trying to get back into college full time, and I'm going to need my PC. The last thing I need is a driver error that wipes out a damned thesis and all my research. So I'm concentrating on getting all my drivers and software updates reinstalled and working together.

The stock-level system restore has brought to my attention all the gradual updates I've made to this rig, and how difficult it was getting everything to work. Since I bought this PC last January, I've added a second hard drive and a new video card, yanked the modem, and replaced the power supply unit, CPU, main cooling fan, and heatsink. On top of the 76 updates I've already downloaded from Microsoft, I still have to re-up the sound and video drivers, find all the Media Center and Media Player updates, and rip my entire CD library again.

Just to get ready for all the re-installations I had to spend an hour uninstalling all the prepackaged software I never wanted in the first place. My favorite moment has to be when my PC suddenly crashed and rebooted during the removal of the AOL software. Now I'll need TweakUI just to remove the defunct AOL entry in the add/remove programs list. But that's the tip of an iceberg, I have Gigs worth of utilities to reinstall, everything from Open Office to Ad-Aware.

Okay, I'm going to microwave some leftovers and start combing through all my backup discs now. 'Night all.

Friday Night Nerd News.

You know you love it.
by AC - permalink

Well, we have to start with Harry Potter, don't we? In an interview with The Today Show, geek superstar J.K. Rowling reveals a few nuggets of Potter lore that dorks like me are eating up. First up is the aftermath of Voldemort's death. Rowling envisions Harry and Ron not only fulfilling their fourth-year fantasies of becoming aurors, but that they "utterly revolutionize the auror department" at the Ministry of Magic, and sees Hermione high up in the department of magical law enforcement. She also reveals that McGonagall would probably be too old to assume the headmistress role at Hogwarts and that a new character would take the job. The Defense Against the Dark Arts position can now be held permanently, as the death of Voldemort has broken his curse against the position, but Harry won't take the job. He will, however, drop in occasionally for a guest lecture. I'm guessing nobody will be skieving off those classes.

Rowling also revealed that Arthur Weasley was scheduled to die in Order of the Phoenix, but was given a permanent reprieve because she just couldn't kill him (he is rather likable, isn't he, what with his fascination with batteries and parking meters?). Instead, another parent had to take his place in Deathly Hallows. I have to assume this means Lupin and Tonks. Rowling also said that she was leaning towards writing a Potter encyclopedia, as she still has reams of back-story and information about the universe that couldn't be worked into the books. I'm sure this will eventually be published, but don't be surprised if someone else is given the assignment with J.K. as a consultant.

Moving on to Trek, it was revealed at Comic-con that Leonard Nimoy will be reprising his role as Spock in some form in the J.J. Abrams-helmed Star Trek 11 project, and that young-Spock will be played by Zachary Quinto, best known as Sylar from geek favorite Heroes. It's currently unknown whether Spock will be slicing off the top of anyone's head to gain their powers in the new movie, but I'm guessing that yes, it will be an integral plot point, and only a meek Japanese guy serendipitously named Hiro can stop him.

Finally, movie nerds everywhere are flipping the fuck out about the DVD release of Hot Fuzz next Tuesday. The last Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright project, Shaun of the Dead, was not only a veritable geekgasm put to film, it was also one of the most feature-packed DVD's ever released. In related news, I'll be buying Hot Fuzz next Tuesday.

Harry Potter comes to the close.

Almost.
by AC - permalink

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows finally went on sale Saturday, and I'm nerd enough to admit that by Sunday evening I'd finished it. A book review here would be pointless, as this will be the most heavily commented-on novel so far this millennium. But I'll give it the highest praise I think a book so highly anticipated, by myself no less than anyone else, can receive: it works.

SPOILERS START HERE! -- you've been warned

It's a worthwhile end to the saga. And after seven novels, it is a saga, easily transcending childrens' lit, and earning a place in the fantasy pantheon. All the stray plot lines are neatly tied up, and all of our beloved characters' arcs are given satisfying finishes, assuming they survived what can only be described as a bloodbath. By my count, no fewer than ten regular characters are killed off in Deathly Hallows, more than the other six books combined. At a certain point it just became numbing, and I started to question whether the finale could be worth losing so many characters.

SECOND SPOILER WARNING -- stop now, you fool!

Fortunately, it was, though how we got there was a little too calculated for me. I loved Harry's final stand-off with Voldemort, and the inexorable duel between them was awesome, brief though it had to be. But it seems like Harry got off on a technicality, and one that doesn't follow the logic of six books worth of Potter lore. If the Elder Wand really belonged to Harry, then every time anyone successfully disarmed anyone, a wand changed ownership. Harry's wand would have rightfully been Lupin's since year three, for example.

It can be argued that this logic only applies to the Elder Wand, but if that's so, there's no precedent for it, and it isn't expressly laid out anywhere in the book. Still, it's the only explanation that makes sense, and I'm willing to accept it because I love the series so much.

Moving past my quibbles, I'm fucking thrilled at how fully Neville came into his own as the leader of the underground at Hogwarts. My favorite moment was when he pulled Gryffindor's sword out of the Sorting Hat. After all, no matter where the sword is (or which goblin has his hands on it), "Only a true Gryffindor could have pulled that out of the hat," and Neville spent his first few years at school worrying that he didn't deserve to be in Gryffindor house at all.

It was also awesome to finally get the Hog's Head barman, who we all suspected to be Aberforth Dumbledore, in on the action. And finally, I was right about Snape. I know a lot of other people have suspected this as well, but I'll say it again. I knew he was a double agent, not a triple agent! He killed Dumbledore at the end of Half-Blood Prince on Dumbledore's orders, and spared Harry's life again and again because he was on Harry's side all along. We didn't know it was because of his love for Lily, and not just his remorse for the Potters' fate, but of course we never believed that completely anyway.

As for the epilogue, I don't have much of a problem with it. As I read Deathly Hallows, I checked in a couple of times with Tasha and Genevieve's liveblogging at the A.V. Club, and neither of them were happy with it. But honestly, I was hoping for something of the sort. If Rowling is sincere about not writing any more novels in the Potter universe, I wanted some sort of look into the main characters' future, and contrite as it may be, she gave it to us. Personally, I thought Harry would end up as a teacher at Hogwarts, if not headmaster, but at least we know Neville is still there, teaching herbology, and he's probably head of Gryffindor house, assuming McGonagall is still headmistress.

I could ramble on forever, but there's no point, really. If you've read this far, you've read the entire series for yourself, and you can draw your own conclusions. But I'm glad that we still have the last two movies to look forward to. Three, in my case, as I won't see Order of the Phoenix until I pick it up on DVD. The movies are only cinematic reimaginings of the books, of course, but that doesn't make them any less valid. As a Tolkien fan who also loves the Rings films, I know how to appreciate both. In a few years, I'll have seven Harry Potter books sitting next to seven Harry Potter DVDs, and I'll be content.

Another developer joins Steam.

The list grows.
by AC - permalink

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

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

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

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

Flock jumps a fraction.

Too bad about the site, though.
by AC - permalink

You'll have to forgive me for not delivering the promised Avant Browser 11.5 review, because Flock was updated the day of my last post, and frankly, it's better. The last stable Flock release was 0.7, but apparently the new version was close enough to the target for 1.0 that a skip in version nomenclature was warranted. The beta, 0.8.99, had some notable bugs, most of which have been ironed out for the Flock 0.9 release.

From what I can see, the new release appears to be based on Firefox 2, giving it a number of new features its Firefox 1.5-based predecessor didn't have. The new theme is the most obvious improvement, along with much more comprehensive customization options. In addition, you can now place folders on the bookmarks toolbar, an old Firefox feature that was oddly missing in Flock until now. The range of toolbar buttons has expanded and encompasses all of Flock's custom features, but isn't completely overwhelming as in Netscape. The default toolbar layout is fairly cluttered, though. Click the image below for the slightly modified layout I've settled on.


The integrated blog editor is much better now. I've only used it in conjunction with this Blgger account, so mileage may vary and all, but in my case it now features nearly every Blogger posting feature, including images, tags, and most formatting options (no justify options, though), as well as source editing and preview functions. The new Web Clipboard is similar to Opera's, but with more functionality, and it's directly accessible within the blog editor window.

Bookmark management is also vastly improved, this time using Firefox 2's native UI, much better than the previous Flock's overly complicated and somewhat unintuitive in-tab manager. The RSS viewer, already the best in-browser feed reader I've ever used, is slightly better as well. A major new feature is My World, a browser-generated portal, intended as a homepage, that lists new RSS articles, media subscriptions, and recently accessed bookmarks, along with a search bar and some feature quicklinks. Looking closely into it, the My World page is ultimately redundant, and it doesn't help that it takes a curiously long time for the feed list to fill out.

A few other things still need to be addressed before 1.0. In less than a week's worth of use, I've come across a few bugs that should be fixed ASAP, including a couple from the beta that I didn't think could possibly persist to the stable release. There's still only one theme available, and there are only a handful of extensions. A new official site was launched along with 0.9, and unfortunately it's ugly and weird compared to the old one. Flock is still an open-source project, but you'll have to dig around for a while to find any sort of information about getting involved in its development, or to even find the source at all.

Still, the positives dominate the problems with the new release, and of all the major browsers on the market, Flock may well be at the top of the list now. Not bad for a product that hasn't even hit version 1.

Blogged with Flock

Tomb Raider wrap-up and browser news.

Boredom Post™ ahoy.
by AC - permalink

I finally got around to beating Tomb Raider: Anniversary early this morning. I got a little sick of the game just after reaching the final chapter (the Lost Island) and took a detour into some Call of Duty 2 before plunging back in for the final laps. I'll admit that I ended up referring to a couple of guides at GameFAQs (this one by ipino and this one by rikku4788) when I got stuck. For more than three-quarters of the game I wouldn't let myself do that, and I made it through fine, but eventually the jumping puzzles get so ornate and Mario-esque, and the combat becomes so frequent and tedious that I just wanted it to be over so I could start going back and replaying the earlier levels for more unlockable content.

Just like the original Tomb Raider this is based on, combat is far and away the worst part of the game, and it sucks that it becomes more and more focused on the fighting late in the game, I guess in an effort to make it progressively harder. It all culminates in a couple of big, fat, 16-bit-style boss battles. The first is actually pretty fun, but the final one, against Natla herself, is the gaming equivalent of root canal: it went on forever, was painful as all hell to get through, and left a very bad taste in my mouth. TRA is a beautiful, simple game with a lot of depth and exploration-oriented gameplay, and it's polished off by a long, idiotic combat sequence and a short, forgettable cinematic.

So that sucked. But the good news is, there's still a lot of replay value here. You can replay every level individually to try to find all the artifacts and relics for some really nice unlockable content, and try to beat the time trials for even more. There are developer commentaries accessed by using crystals styled after the save points in the old games, and while they're scarcer than I'd like, they are fairly long, and surprisingly fun to listen to. It's like a two-man DVD commentary, much better than the scripted (if informative and much more numerous) commentary tags in the Half-Life 2 series. To sum up three posts worth of rambling about the game, it's easily a buy at $30 considering its relatively generous length and above average replayability.

Okay, moving on. I finally got around to upgrading to a new build of Avant Browser (11.5 build 12), and I like what I'm seeing. The overhauled UI from the 10 series has been significantly tweaked, and the integrated ad blocking is even better. It's just a remarkably full-featured and polished browser for such a small project. Once I've had more time to play with it I'll post a more detailed review.

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.

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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.

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