Category Archives: Videogames

Gaming is not only about winning or losing, it’s about passion

Back and new acceleration

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It’s been while since writing here the last time because I was on a three week long vacation through the western part of the USA and afterwards I got caught by a flu that kept me more in bed than in front of a computer. Anyhow, I’m back to my blog and will start writing as continiously as you know it from the month before my vacation and sickness. Till now I’m not sure if I go to write down some of the experiences I made in the US or if I just leave it up to my gallery, which will be updated within the next 3-4 weeks. We will see…

I’ve made some decent changes to my gaming PC, I changed the graphic card to be exact. I exchanged the Geforce 260GTX with a brand new and just released Geforce 570GTX. Until now the card is still aircooled but will hopefully receive a waterblock within the next few days and more hopefully beforce christmas. The Geforce 570GTX rocks, that’s what I can say as a first impression and after testing some games, demos and benchmarks. The cards wasn’t impressed by games like Crysis, GTA IV and Far Cry 2 in ultra settings. The card moved like a hot knife through butter when it comes to a DX11 test with Metro 2033 and Bad Company 2. The Geforce 260GTX will now move to my media center and will get an airblock (triple fan) instead of the waterblock that is installed right now but I’ll keep the overclocked BIOS on the card because I need some more Megahertzs for Full HD gaming (especially for the jungle stage in Street Fighter IV). Until now I’m not sure if I go and replace the BIOS on the Geforce 570GTX, too. It depends on the coorporation with NiBiTor. Anyhow, the new card was a cool deal and I’m pretty sure we both will have some fun hours together in the future… Metro 2033 here I come…

Borderlands GOTY DLC censorship

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Today I received the Game of the Year Edition of one of my current favourite games called Borderlands. Because I do live in Germany and we have some stupid censorship laws here I had to import the uncut version of the game from good old Britain. After opening the box I saw what I already knew from blogs and forums about the game, that the whole DLC content is not included on one single disc, you still have to download the whole additional content.

After getting to the the proclaimed website where I could download the bunch of software I had to realize that I had to face censorship on the website as well. The patch 1.40 was the worldwide edition though, but by trying to download some international DLC content I got redirected everytime to the censored german version of the DLC. The solution for this problem was gladfully a kind of very easy. Just rename the file you want to download from

http://updates.gearboxsoftware.com/dlc/BorderlandsDLC1_Censored.zip

for DLC number one for example to

http://updates.gearboxsoftware.com/dlc/BorderlandsDLC1_Worldwide.zip

and you will get a fine uncensored version of the DLC. Hope it helps someone out there… and now go on and lift the secret of the vault and kick General Knoxx’ ass šŸ˜€

Bring me the guts!!!

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Finally my conclusion was made that all my colleagues are braindead zombies and remote controlled. Maybe this conclusion was made because the amount of oxygen in my bureau reached a point far beyond point zero and my brain’s dead, too. It’s a heck to share a room with a bunch of freaks that are afraid of opening the fucking window wide open to get the mentioned oxygen. Damn it, my head hurts. So whatever, I wanted to talk about something completely different.

Over the past few years the genre of zombie games gained much popularity and me too is a big fan boy when it comes to brainless hordes of human being that wants to be hacked and slayed and get their bloody head chopped off. A liked “Stubbs the zombie” a lot though the gameplay was a little bit boring but the sense of humor in this game was totally mine. Right after this “Left 4 Dead” got released by Valve and I fell in love with a game for the bazillions time. Yap, I am getting pretty emotional when it comes to games sometimes. Sooo, hopefully my new love will come to visit me by the end of this month, which is called “Dead Rising 2”. Unfortunately did they not release part one for the PC and I don’t want to buy a stupid Xbox 360 for just one game. I’ve seen nearly every trailer, preview and developer diary that was released over the past few month. Yaaaaaarrrrr, zombies, come get some!!!

-Zombie-

Which leads me to my next topic and reason for a lot of excitement. The Duke’s acoming!!!! I couldn’t actually believe it when I read the first announcement made by the new publisher Gearbox Software. I’ve heard a lot of yelling in the forums and comments of different articles that this is not going to be a real Duke Nukem because it’s not a 3D Realms game, but who the hell cares? Those whiners are simply a good inspiration for birth control. For me personally it’s so glad and nice to see that another vaporware is finally going to be released and that it’s hopefully not wasted. If anyone remembers “Prey” it was declared to be dead too but then it finally returned, got released and was a great game, though. I bet on Duke.

One little foot note at last, after playing a paladin to level 80 in WoW I’m currently working on a death knight which at level 65 at the moment and will hopefully enter Northrend.

Reporting for duty

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Nothing really special happened within the last few days except some nerdy things. The holy equipment for my paladin in WoW is nearly completely epic and I look forward to my first instances as a holy paladin though I have no idea how it actually works because I am a tank since level 25 or something. Probably will I use some non-hero instances to learn before I kick the real shit (yap, yap, yap… the overheal will shine over my healing failures). On the other hand I am busy in WoW with some crafting things that I left on the way while hardcore leveling my paladin. Damn, I hate it when a game turns to a work like thing. I used to start a priest and a warrior for some twinking. The priest plays a little bit lame in low level but the warrior totally rocks and I guess I will play it more often from time to time.

Besides all this were I working on my media center again and it’s in a kind of RC state now. Windows 7 was by far the better choice compared to Linux Mint, though Linux has had a fine performance but due to some screen tearing issues and the complexity that comes into play when using a dual-boot system as a media center, it had to leave the hall. The media center choice itself fell on XBMC. The Windows Media Center is a kind of a rude joke from Microsoft which is absolutely useless in all kinds of ways. The third choice was Moovida but I finally missed some customization features so I switched to XBMC which is more complex in the beginning but very easy to use in the end. I finally made to import all my TV shows correctly to the media library and my movies were found and tagged as well. It’s pretty easy to use and it looks great. I use the standard theme but I guess I’ll give some of the other themes a try in the future.

If you’ll ask yourself what’s up in project “Straight Edge 2.0” can I tell that I follow every rule except the sports rule. Unfortunately. I don’t know when I will do some sport again, probably next week or if everything works perfectly well this week, maybe this weekend. Gladfully am I stuck on a weight around 97kg and it does not increase (Yeah!). So, that’s it for now…

A pain in the ass

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…and on the eighth day God created the game industry and he saw that it was good.

…and on the ninth day God gifted the game industry with paranoia and greed and he saw that it was good…

Seriously? As you may know I am a game junkie and I love video games. I have a collection of nearly 1,400 games for different platforms and unfortunately I do not have time to play them all through. So is comes natural that I order a few games here and then like I did two days ago. I found some very cheap offers on Amazon, some games for around six bucks. One of these games was “Peter Jackson’s King Kong”. Though this game does not look nice compared to nowadays standards I really wanted to play this BUT thanks to the paranoia of the gaming industry the game was protected with my so behated copy protection called StarForce. First of all, the game got installed, then you try to start it and receive a message that you have to restart your system to apply and complete the driver installation. What the fuck?

So, ya, I restarted and something that I already expected happened. My Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit ran an automated recovery and failed. After that I decided to choose the last known good configuration and the system booted. So far, so nice. After login I noticed that I wasn’t able to connect to the internet though my network settings were correct and haven’t changed them for a couple of month. I also needed to reboot to apply some new network setting. What the fuck? Why the hell does a copy protection affect my network adapters?

I tried a few different things to fix the problem but nothing really helped. Not even a crack. After finding no solution I decided to simply uninstall the game to get my old running system configuration back. I also uninstalled to StarForce drivers manually to completely ensure that there’s nothing left of this bullshit. Well the game was able to start but it crashed right after starting the campaign. Now, after uninstalling everything my system works perfectly fine again and I wasted six bucks on a game that could have been good and enjoyable but thanks to copy protection mechanisms I wasn’t able to play it nor to enjoy any other game. Ladies and gentlemen of the game industry, do we really need such a strangulation of righteous gamers? Do we, the gamers, truely need to get such a pain in the ass by buying a game? Isn’t it enough to bugfix the game? Do you, the game industry, really need to implenent such factory default bug in your games? I don’t think so.

…and I saw, that it was bad.

Let the pictures walk…

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Earlier than I actually thought I could finalize my new media center and it’s now up and running. Like I mentioned in a few posts before it’s a dual-boot system running Windows 7 as a “gaming system” and Linux Mint as the real movie and multimedia plattform. The Linux system itself uses to play everything that I tried, even HD movies with nearly no lags. Well, nearly, I noticed a little disturbing vsync problem while watching videos. It’s more noticable in HD movies than it’s in normal SD movies. By now I haven’t found a solution for that but the Ubuntu/Mint community is very huge and I am pretty sure that I’m not the only one with this issue. As soon as I have found solution, I will post it right here in this blog.

I also checked the gaming performance under Windows 7 with Devil May Cry 4 and Street Fighter IV. DMC4 runs at an average FPS of 45 with AA at 8 and AF at 8. The details are mainly set to super high. This is a satisfying result according to the fact that there’s “only” a GeForce 9800GT Green Edition with 512MB video RAM inside the system. I guess, I don’t have to mention that I run the games at a full HD resolution. The Benchmark results of SFIV are pretty similiar to ones I got in DMC4. I’m pretty sure that I’ll do some more benchmarks within the next days and check the performance. Till now I am very happy with the new system and it was a good choice to move the hardware to a new chassis that is not that noisy than the one before…

We’re reaching multimedia, baby!

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After being away in beautiful France for nearly two and recharging my batteries and simply staying away from everything that looks like complex work on a machine simply called computer I built up my new media center after getting back home. And of course catching enough sleep. The hardware moved from my old ‘I-don’t-know-the-exact-name’ case to a ThermaltakeĀ Element S VK60001W2Z case which is much quieter than the one before and can hold much more hard drives. On the final stage the case will hold nine hard drives with an overall capacity of something around 4 – 5 TB.

The media center was built for two things. First it’s a simple media center for listening to music, watching movies and pictures or simply surfing the web. Got it? Yap… Secondly does this PC replace a game console. Thanks to the fact that Xbox 360 controllers also work on Windows very well I can play a lot of games while lying on the couch. Well, of course I will I use other game controllers as well because I’m gaming nerd I have special controllers for every game genre.

For gaming I use Windows 7 Pro 64bit as operating system and for the whole multimedia thing my choice fell on Linux Mint because it’s pretty lightweight, got a great multimedia performance and I just like the overall file handling under linux because I can arrange a variety of disks much more comfortable.

The hardware itself is not very luxurious but will fit the matters. It’s an AMD 9550 CPU built on a Gigabyte DDR2 motherboard stuffed with 4GB RAM. The graphics accelerator is a Gainward 9800GT and the sound will be put out through a cool SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium. By now there’s only stereo output because I don’t have a surround speaker system but this will follow within the next two or three month. I am going to stuff the machine with multimedia content within the next days and then I will finally see how it works and give it a review right here in this blog.

Finish it

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This week is the week of the finishing line. Project “Straight Edge” in version 1.0 is going to end on 15th July and on the other side I am pretty sure that my paladin in World of Warcraft will reach level 80. He’s level 77 right now and I’ll kick him up to level 79 this very evening. I bought my first part of the tier-9 set, some real nice shoulder armor that I can send the old shoulders to my undead warrior. Yep, yep, yep account bound items rule

But back to straight edge and a preview of version 2.0 of the project. There’s no doubt, version 2.0 will last for twelve month and there will be some rule changes. I was recognizing a lot of rule breaks when it comes to nutrition. You might remember the change to rule #5 because there was a kind of backdoor in consideration with sweets. So I decided to introduce the exception meal where I can whatever I want but only if rule #7 is fulfilled. I personally think that this kind of connecting rules with each other will make the whole thing more interesting and a little bit exciting to me.

Unfortunately is the weather absolutely exhausting these days because the temperature increased drastically but the humidity did not decrease. This like a murder to sports especially when you’re overweighted and your stamina is not as good as it should be. I was on a good way to get a better stamina but with conditions like these I definately have to do a step backwards and I cannot do sports at least four time a weak. If I am able to have two gym sessions a week I could very happy. It’s more a torture than an amusement. I guess I can do two sessions this week and then my vacation and trip to France will start.

If I’ll ever get the chance to do some kind of sports on my vacation I’ll definately grab it by the hand and do it. Meal exceptions are not allowed though it’s my vacation and it mainly there for recovery and fun. Hopefully I’ll be able to do some nice pictures with my Canon EOS 500D. I haven’t touched my baby for nearly two month and before it comes to vacation I have to shoot some pictures on a marriage. I fucking hate taking pictures of people. Portraits are okay but only if it’s a person I like or I feel comfortable with. But these stupid snapshots of a dumb ass party crowd are what really pisses me off. I haven’t bought my camera to do stupid snap- and mugshots, this is what grannies and old daddies do with their ugly ultra-compact cameras.

It’s Ziiiiiiim…

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After getting hacked for a few times I finally got back to World of Warcraft to continue levelling my paladin. I was a kind of disappointed that I was not able to play this char to level 80 as fast as possible. On the one hand my good old Throll hunter bores me and on the other hand I must say that the paladin is a lot of fun to play. It’s strange to get directly to the first row in combat when you were watching every encounter from the last row for years. Seeing some of the dungeon bosses from this close in combat makes me feel like, “Hmm, I never realised that this boss actually looked like this.

Playing hunter in combat makes you feel as if you are doing damage but you do not get this feeling as if you are completely smacking the mob while playing a paladin. With a hunter the mob feels a few pricks from your arrows but with a paladin you totally beat the shit out of him, especially with this one attack spell that makes this beautiful emboss sound.

If there’s one thing a paladin always forget – it’s dying. In one out of ten dungeons runs we actually wiped and when we wiped the healer was mostly a complete dumbass, a rogue felt as if he was the tank or I simply pulled too many mobs. Last but not least, the highest fun factor as a tanking paladin aka Tankadin is the power of total control. You say when to continue. You say when stop. You say when to pull. And you say how fast to get through the instance. I had a lot of disappointing dungeon runs with my marksman Throll hunter, mainly because of lame tanks or the healer was crap. Well I guess I’ll also level the hunter to level 85 when Cataclysm is out, but for now the paladin is my main and hopefully level 80 pretty soon.

New media experience

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I bought me a new TV a few weeks ago and yesterday was the first day where I integrated my unused but very powerful third PC into the whole multimedia system. By now there is no OS installed but in the near future I am going to install Windows 7 and Fedora on this PC. Windows 7 will be a kind of gaming console replacement system (DMC4 on a 40″ TV will kick ass) and the parallel installed Fedora will be the media center and “internet-machine”. I have chosen Fedora because the overall performance of the system is way better than Windows 7 and I don’t like the MC which is integrated into Windows 7 very much.

Actually I am not very sure about running two systems on a media center but the file handling sharing options are much easier than they are on Windows. Like I said Windows 7 will only be there for gaming, such as a nice Street Fighter IV session or a competition in Pro Evolution Soccer and Fedora will be the movie master. Another thing I am not sure about for the moment is, which media center software I should use under Fedora, mythTV or moovida, or if I should completely leave it and just use VLC or SMPlayer and customize the GUI of Fedora in that way that it is minimal but ultra functional.

One thing that is really annoying and disturbing is that the case, where the whole hardware is installed, is pretty loud and noisy. I am going to fix this in the nearby future by simply moving to another case that uses less but bigger fans and includes more 3.5″ slots. By now I have a lot of cooling boxes built in to the case for my hard drives but all these 40mm fans do too much noise so you’re not able to watch a movie in a friendly and silent environment. Well, well… there’s still a lot to do, but there’s no hurdle that cannot be taken…