Video Games

[cthulhu]

World in conflict is maybe the best RTS I've ever played.

Also my tf2 team has finally got its shit together and we are rocking and rolling. In div3, true, but we can beat some f the div 2 teams in scrims which isn;t bad for seasons 1!

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I'd just like to bitch about the fact that I had the chance to get my very own deoxys and I missed out because I'm a pansy, and now the gamestop promotion is over and I won't be able to get one.

[Angry_Pessimist]

My dad played it, and enjoyed it, but I couldn't help but notice that a huge amount of riding through vast empty landscape was needed. That's a cunning way of claiming "60+ hours of gameplay".

In one quest, he had to get thrown in jail to talk to a guy. Except the guards liked him too much, so even punching them in the face wouldn't work.

You can meet the Thieves' Guild Members in the Waterfront at Midnight, even without the note.

[CatharzGodfoot]

The Temple of Elemental Evil is the most D&D D&D CRPG I've ever played. There's a little radial menu that you can pop up in the turn-based combat, which gives you the option of making 5' steps, casting defensively, tripping people, and whatnot. The only flaw I've found so far is that you can't use a charge attack to trip.

It's seriously D&D 3.5 to the point of absurdity.

[Koumei]

I'd just like to bitch about the fact that I had the chance to get my very own deoxys and I missed out because I'm a pansy, and now the gamestop promotion is over and I won't be able to get one.

Just use the solution I did (except here in AU, to the best of my knowledge, we only had the Mew promotion, no others): get an Action Replay. They tend to cost the same amount as a game, and while you can use them for complete cheating (infinite HP, one hit KOs, maximum money every time you press the shoulder buttons), you can also use them just to say "No, Nintendo, screw YOU instead!"

Popular options include:
-All balls have 100% capture rate
-All wild Pokemon are shiny (note: this isn't 2nd generation, Shiny no longer equals better stats)
-Add (pokemon of choice) to the encounter possibility in the area (see: find Deoxys, Mew, Celebi, Ho-oh, Lugia, Jirachi and any other non-4G event-only I forgot. Multiple times if you want)
-Activate (event of choice) to get Arceus, Shaymin and Darkai "legitimately" - as well as Manaphy if you don't have Pokemon Ranger
-9999 Rare Candy (I figure I'd level them up to maximum eventually, why not just skip the endless wave of battles?)

You can even use a code to teach any move to any pokemon, though apparently it's buggy and will often cause the game to freeze up (without hurting the saved data).

Catharz: I've heard that too. Very good reviews from some major D&D fans. One complained, however, that units had a tendency to go "Huh? 5' swindle? Nah, I'll just make a 5' move action."

[JonSetanta]

The Temple of Elemental Evil is the most D&D D&D CRPG I've ever played. There's a little radial menu that you can pop up in the turn-based combat, which gives you the option of making 5' steps, casting defensively, tripping people, and whatnot. The only flaw I've found so far is that you can't use a charge attack to trip.

It's seriously D&D 3.5 to the point of absurdity.

It's turn based only, right? I've seen some ex-roommates play it briefly but not much farther than the character creation menu.
Gives NWN a run for its Canadian money even though NWN does have the 3D aspect going for it.

[PhoneLobster]

Yeah it was about as faithful as it got. It put never winter nights to shame on several levels. Except for stability and graphics.

Which is sad because never winter nights wasn't exactly a paragon of those virtues.

Mind you it is important to remember that being more faithful, more fun and generally better than never winter nights is faint praise, and as much as I somewhat enjoyed toee, faint praise is about all it deserves.

Still more fun though.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I just got spore.

The good: The first phase of the game is literally the most surreal and engaging game I've ever played.

The bad: It keeps crashing after I finish the first phase and move into the second.

[PhoneLobster]

The only major technical issues I've had with spore are graphical ones.

So I'm going to suggest the thing that is suggested to everyone in all these cases and they have always tried already.

Update your graphics drivers.

Other than that spore pretty much delivers what it promises.

Space stage is a bitch. Make friends with EVERYONE, or else.

[Koumei]

My PC isn't even good enough to run the trial of the creature creator.

I'm tempted to get the Creature Creator for DS, but I'd rather rent it first, because I have the feeling it might be a bit on the crap side - it looks as though the actual creature creation bit is very simplified, and the game itself could largely be a collection of minigames, ala Tamagotchi and the like.

[RandomCasualty2]

Space stage is a bitch. Make friends with EVERYONE, or else.

I hear the computer cheats like a bitch in the space stage.

[PhoneLobster]

I don't think it's so much that it cheats rather that it just follows a totally different set of rules to the human player.

I mean for one thing it has fleets. Lots of them. On all its planets, and some of yours. They aren't as good as yours but they are numerous as all hell and ultimately add up to out power you by a fairly significant margin.

You have ONE fleet.

And until you get about halfway with the badges you won't unlock weapons good enough to take a single computer planet, with your single fleet.

I got a feeling trade/allies/bribes/favors is superior to shoot first ask questions later due to some lame kiddy moral message thing. Making the career carnivore somewhat out of character when they hit the space stage and kiss up to every empire in their immediate neighbourhood just to avoid the endless waves of annoying "an alien fleet is destroying your home system" events.

But then being a carnivore was an inferior strategy in every stage bar the cell stage anyway. So clearly "violence is bad kids" is the overwhelming message Mr Sim is delivering with this game.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Update your graphics drivers.

Forgive the stupid question, but how do you do that on Vista?

[PhoneLobster]

I have no idea. I've avoided vista like the plague so far.

My experience at a few small lans has been that the vista machines though superior in hardware to my machine run everything at SIGNIFICANTLY slower speeds. My machine should be about half as fast and ends up being about double their speed.

I do know that vista DOES have graphics drivers and I suspect it still works mostly the same as it always did (though from what I understand driver publication is significantly harder and less frequent).

Anyway figure out the type of graphics card you have, pop by the manufacturers web site and download the latest appropriate vista driver package and run it.

Odds are you are running an NVidia card and want to pop by here

The tricky bit is confirming the make and model of your card/chipset, as I couldn't tell you how to do that from the operating system in Vista. But it shouldn't be TOO much different to XP, you should be able to see it from your hardware device manager or even display settings. I just don't know where to get at that in Vista.

[TarkisFlux]

Update your graphics drivers.

Forgive the stupid question, but how do you do that on Vista?

You need to do what PL said: figure out what make your video card is and then visit the manufacturer site for updated drivers.

You can determine video card make in vista by opening the Start/Whatever-it's-called-now menu, right-clicking on the Computer link, selecting Properties, clicking on the Device Manager link in the upper left of the new window, and then expanding the Display Adapters line to see what's in there.

...I think... That's all off memory, and I don't have a vista machine nearby to confirm, but it's probably close enough to get you there if I missed anything. It's similar to XP in that respect anyway, just not quite the same.

Once you know what you have installed and who made it, visit the manufacturer site and check their download section. Follow the prompts and you will soon be the owner of shiney new video drivers.

[Surgo]

It works the same way in Vista that it always has, and hasn't been made any harder. Visit the website of your video card manufacturer (it's either ATI or Nvidia) and download the latest from their website.

Start -> Control Panel -> Device Manager -> Display Adapter to figure out what sort of video card you're using.

Honestly though I wish people who have never used Vista wouldn't talk such shit about it. Not that I particularly care for Microsoft, but something like:

My experience at a few small lans has been that the vista machines though superior in hardware to my machine run everything at SIGNIFICANTLY slower speeds. My machine should be about half as fast and ends up being about double their speed.

is just bad science (and, nowadays, completely false).

[PhoneLobster]

Call it bad science if you like. I'm not just noting the fact that the vista machines with higher specs were labouring with slow frame rates on games I ran smoothly.

We actually timed how long it took to install shit. Vista = 2x.

I've read the articles I know the basics behind it Vista IS slower and there are hard grounded reasons for that mostly to do with DRM. I severely doubt that microsoft simply removed all the DRM features and even if they inexplicably did there are vast swathes of Vista machines that remain unaffected.

There are still just short of ZERO games that don't name XP as a compatible operating system. All games that differentiate state they have significantly lower required specs for XP machines. Even with directx 10 limited to Vista it offers almost no perceivable visual improvement compared to the very perceivable performance loss.

Real gaming machines are still running XP and real game publishers are still publishing for that and it is way late in the operating system cycle for that to still be the case.

Vista sucks. Live with it.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Yeah, I like XP better myself. However, I don't currently have a copy of XP, and I got this computer specifically because I wanted a windows system of some sort to run stuff that

I just checked the website for the driver I had, and it seems it has a new driver for my card specifically designed to fix the issues that the card has with Spore. So here's hoping I get to play this game, I really enjoyed the first part.

[Surgo]

I'm not sure why you're going all fanboy on me when I merely called you out on a little misinformation and bad science.

SP1 fixed most, if not virtually all, of the speed issues that Vista had in comparison to Windows XP. From a gaming standpoint, they're pretty much even.

From a non-gaming standpoint, Vista (SP1) seems like a far better OS to me. I think Microsoft really hit the nail on the head pretty well with a lot of features. The automatic search that essentially works like the Linux "locate" is grand. A special shout-out goes to whoever decided that Vista should use your RAM as a cache instead of letting it go idle, something that's significantly awesome for a machine that's not gaming 24/7 (though if I had less than 4 gigabytes of RAM, I'd want to be able to turn it off when playing some really memory-hungry games) -- and a feature that Linux has had for ages, but improvement is improvement.

Funny note on backwards compatibility that I learned in my operating systems class: Vista's break of backwards compatibility with some apps is actually Microsoft's closing of long-standing security holes. Turns out that some old applications actually depended on one or more of these holes. Oops!

[Koumei]

My dad uses Vista and he thinks it's excellent. That being said, his job sort of involves him having a very high-end PC, always getting whatever new upgrade he reads about and thinks he'd like, so his hardware can support the software completely.

Even when I upgrade my PC, I'll probably stick with XP just because I'm used to it and it does everything I need it to do.

[CatharzGodfoot]

SP1 fixed most, if not virtually all, of the speed issues that Vista had in comparison to Windows XP. From a gaming standpoint, they're pretty much even.

What about startup times and hibernation? I downgraded to XP on my laptop because it was taking forever to go to sleep or wake back up.

[Surgo]

No idea besides anecdotal evidence. I can tell you that my computer starts up (from bootup and hibernation) faster than any previous version of Windows I've ever used. I'm using an Intel E8400 (clocked at 3 GHZ) with a standard 7200 RPM hard drive. Seriously, the thing starts up and is usable in about 15 seconds (hurray for multi-core processors), faster than Linux (which I also have installed)! The BIOS itself takes like 20 seconds to even load the boot loader.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Alright, so you have a super-fast computer; I'm using a dual core throttled for battery life. This could be the difference.

On the other hand, my slowdown could have come purely from Thinkpad bloat.

[PhoneLobster]

I downgraded to XP on my laptop

You aren't alone

Mind you getting it in the first place makes you somewhat unusual.

Did you know vista is slowing us ALL down?

A lot of people (well actually not very many people) "haven't had problems" with vista. But generally they haven't seen it running side by side with XP machines, which is why my lan anecdote is notable.

Also notable is at least the first and best machine I've seen labouring under Vista, a quad core no less (for which the only multi core application we ran on it at the lan only detected 2 cores compared to the full four detected and exploited on its only quad core XP rival) certainly DID have the supposed speed "fix".

But then considering the speed "fix" does almost nothing that isn't much of a surprise.

Apparently my eyeballed estimates of XP performance, were pretty much dead on right.

According to the Office performance benchmarks, Windows XP SP3 is also considerably faster than Vista SP1. "None of this bodes well for Vista, which is now more than two times slower than the most current builds of its older sibling," said Barth

Try a search for vista pretty much anywhere. The public hates it, the business community refuses to adopt it, even micrsoft has changed its mind and is permitting continued XP sales until 2010 and is struggling to push the NEXT windows already, it remains slow, developers of software and hardware hate it and are losing money and time over it.

Vista did NOT get fixed by service pack one. Vista is already a resounding failure. So incredibly bad that it has opened the market to potential attacks on microsofts monopolies. Or did you think the new google "browser" is just an innocent web application?

And if you don't believe me and my pile of easily found articles just ask wikipedia.

Great now Vista has eaten my whole lunch break.

[Surgo]

Vista has hardly slowed the SSD industry, considering how Intel just beat the pants off of everyone with their new SSD technology.

More recent benchmarks:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1395&page=6

(Linked page is the conclusion)

Unfortunately with synthetic benchmarks, the amazingly neat caching mechanism that Vista implements is never taken into account. I highly suspect that somewhat-used non-gaming applications will kick the crap out of XP in terms of at least startup speed after using Vista for about a week.

Also unfortunately is how rarely benchmarks tell you whether 32- or 64- bit versions of things are used, because 64-bit versions will usually have better performance.

It's weird that Microsoft actually did the right thing for once (with SP1 and later at least) imo in terms of making a better OS, and they get bashed for it.