Category

Gaming

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Quakecon ‘09

I was very lucky to get the time off for Quakecon 09 this year, and it was a good thing because this was a good one.  Dan came down with the normal group of Tim, Adam, March, Matt and Steve.  Also there were Brian and Joe.  As usual, they drove down, which took about 19 hours.  They somehow get faster at it each year.  Unfortunately I wasn’t at home when this happened because I was working, but a few hours later I got home to find about 15 more computers in my apartment than normal.  It was pretty funny to see all the laptops everywhere and I wish I got a picture of it.  People slept on our sofa bed, on our air mattress, on heavy comforters, and even on our footrest thing.  By the time I woke up the next day, most everyone was gone already. 

I had a slightly different strategy for the line this year.  Instead of waiting all day to be at the front of the line, I wanted to wait until it started to move before heading down to the Gaylord.  With Tim and Adam and the group volunteering, they would get in first and let us know when to come down.  Typically we’d arrive at the line around 2pm and wait 9-10 hours for registration to start.  On top of that, I had a new motherboard/CPU/RAM combo in the mail from Newegg.  My desktop is intel based for the first time ever, a Core 2 Duo 2.93 Ghz, Asus motherboard, and 4GB of RAM.  Woot!  It arrived mid-afternoon and I spent about an hour or two rebuilding my computer right before quakecon.  It would give me some problems later, but nothing that ruined the experience.  After I finished rebuilding my computer, Dan and I decided to head down and get in line anyways.  I was pretty lucky to get a shirt right away as they were thrown to the crowd.  I don’t hoard shirts anymore, but I like to get one per year.  We waited for about 4 hours in total, which wasn’t too bad.  Had I waited another hour after Tim texted us we might have been able to cut that down to 3 hours, but there were plenty of people who showed up after we did, so I don’t think it’s possible to entirely skip the line.  That night you basically set your computer down on the table where you choose, and walk out.  We had a good spot near the tech desk and the NOC, but next year we need to sit on opposite sides of the aisle, instead of around the table.  If someone is on the other side of the table, you basically don’t see them the whole event.

This was the first year I woke up early enough to get down to the event when it actually started, 9am on Thursday.  After dropping Alison off at the airport to go home for the weekend, Dan and I went to iHop for breakfast and then to the Gaylord.  The layout was similar to the 2005 layout when it was at the Gaylord before.  The vendors were straight ahead through the door with the BYOC to the right.  I always like the sponsors that let you use their products while playing a game, like when Razer had the copperhead display.  There didn’t seem to be much of that this year.  There were some laptops like that, and some consoles and intel systems, but I could pretty much get the same experience at my own computer.  I’m looking for stuff that will make my computer better, not just the same experience somewhere else.  They did have cool stuff though, the new Wolfenstein game looks sweet, and playing Doom 2 was fun on the xboxes.  I think it really says something when your game is still fun to play like 15 years later.  These days a game leaves you bored after 4 hours.  Bawls was there selling cases and drinks and we got one.  Around the sponsors was a lounge area where you could watch the tourney matches with commentators describing the match.  That was pretty cool and fun to watch.  And there was the Quick Draw stage where they held the “how much of your humanity will you give up for something free” events and the Quick Draw Quake matches.  It would be fun to play a quick draw match, but you have to be present to win, and the odds of me getting called are so low that I don’t think it’s worth my time to hang around there.  I’ve also watched plenty of noobs play quake before, so the match itself isn’t appealing enough.  If you want to win a shirt, it’s the place to be though. 

We got to our computers and set them up.  The main game this year was Quake Live again, like last year.  They used Quakecon as an announcement for Linux and Mac support which is cool.  Quake Live is a great game, and it’s basically what Quake4 should have been.  And despite what people say, it’s NOT just Quake 3.  Should I go into it?  The weapon strengths are different which alters gameplay and it took a little while for me to get used to it.  The machinegun is weak as all hell now.  You can pump 100 rounds into someone and still not kill them, which means that getting your revenge frag is harder.  Instead of going for the quick MG frag after you die, its now a better strategy to give it up and look for a weapon.  Quake has always been a game about controlling items, and this makes it even more important.  The shotgun is stronger but spreads more, making it strong enough to kill almost anyone at really close range, but even more useless if someone is medium/far distance.  With a longer weapon switch time, it’s also harder to get the SG kill.  The Rocket Launcher is similar.  It does lots of damage when it actually hits you, and far less when you get hit by splash damage.  You can bounce around your enemy all day and hardly hurt him, while he’s probably pwning you with Lighting.  The LG seems to be the center of the QuakeLive experience, with it being found everywhere and ultra powerful, quick reload time (meaning you can switch from it quickly), and instant damage.  You can own at QL by having a LG and switching to the RL to finish the kill. It also seems easier to rail people in this game.  All in all, it’s close enough to be fun like Q3 and mastering the new skills can be fun.  QL’s web interface and stats will let you play against people with the same skill level as you so you’re not just always being pwned by one person, and that’s probably a good thing.  It’ll help people learn and like the game better so all in all QL is a win.

The events there were pretty hit or miss, like usual.  It’s never quite been the same since HardOCP left, but I had high hopes for the Nvidia event and something called the hardware event.  I heard a rumor in the forum that Nvidia was supposed to do something big so when I got the day right, Dan and I and the group headed down to it and were excited to see a big pile’o'prizes, HardOCP style.  It became clear pretty quickly though that the prizes were for the few that they brought onstage.  Not only did Nvidia have nothing to talk about, but they couldn’t even give prizes away without embarrasing themselves.  They had a mod-a-PC contest between two groups that was okay, but then they wanted to wax a guy’s chest and when it came time to start eating live crickets and fish, I had had enough.  I’m not sure but I think I was one of the first people to walk out of the mainstage.  Like I told Adam and Dan, it’s not so much that I was grossed out, it was just boring.  I’ve never been excited by people eating things on fear factor and such, and I’d just rather be in the BYOC if Nvidia has nothing to talk about.  I was surprised when the rest of the group was behind me again in about 5 minutes and we decided to hit up Logan’s for steak.  Much better use of the time, indeed.

The Hardware Workshop by PC Perspective the next day saved Quakecon events.  This was basically a return of the HardOCP workshop, and those guys did a great job of putting it together and keeping it interesting.  AMD was there showing off their overclocking tool, and it was cool to see just how far their processors could be pushed, but it could have been even better if they talked about the basics of overclocking.  What steps to take first, where to start with, etc.  Would have been very cool to learn some real stuff at a workshop like that.  They did manage to overclock a 3GHz Phenom to 5.5GHz, something like that using liquid helium.  Pretty impressive, but not practical at all.  I don’t see a lot of 3dmark2007 tournaments anywhere.  They called tickets for prizes and threw a lot to the crowd, even processors.  Dan wants me to mention nvidia douche who somehow showed up again at this event.  He was giving away prizes, but would run around screaming trying to pump people up but would rarely actually give anything away, and when he did he just gave them to people seated on the aisle.  So we learned pretty quickly to not be impressed or excited from him.  Everytime we turned around nvidia douche was there it seemed. 

I didn’t feel like going to the closing ceremony or finals, and I don’t know who won the Shelby Mustang from Ventrillo.  I still think that money would be better spent on more video cards for more people.  A lot of people worked hard just to win a 99% chance of losing that mustang.  Other than QuakeLive I played a little Quakewars, Q3…and uhhh…ok I guess I played a lot of Quake Live.  Also got some more TV shows for my AppleTV setup like Seinfeld, House MD, XFiles, Stargate SG-1.  My plan to upgrade my computer right before QCon was mostly a success, although there were times when my computer threw an absolute fit.  I didnt reinstall Windows XP, just let it redetect my hardware when it rebooted and reactived windows, and I got pretty good speed out of it.  Quakewars looked great at 1920x1200, but then it would start to throw explorer crashes and firefox crashed a lot (which is not helpful when QL is launched from the web browser).  Reinstalling Firefox seriously helped it not crash all day Friday, but on Saturday it started again and early Sunday night I installed Windows 7 with Adam’s help.  It’s actually not too bad and has been completely stable, so maybe it was just WinXP and not bad hardware after all.  I should probably RMA the motherboard just to be safe, but laziness will probably prevail.

All in all, it was a great time, I’m glad everyone could come down again.  Glad Dan finally made it down after 6+ years of trying.  I tried to balance out sleeping and playing, tried to not get dragged into drama and all that that comes with less sleep.  I think this year was an overall really good year.  It was a record setting year for Quakecon in terms of attendance, it seemed well-organized this year with twitter and google calendar updates, and I hope we can do it again next year!  Thanks for coming everyone!

Check out more pics in the Quakecon ‘09 Gallery

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock

don’t say I never try anything

Okay, I will never pick up on WoW no matter how often everyone else posts about it. But everyone has such a good time playing and talking about Guitar Hero / Rock Band, I figured it was worth a look. After all, I did enjoy DDR a lot, and I was good at it without taking too long to get good at it. With the recent release of Guitar Hero 4, I was able to pick up the game and two Les Paul Controllers for about $75. GH3 is a welcome addition to my PS3 game collection which is growing very slowly on account of available moneys and lack of games.

God what a hopeless idiot I am for not knowing GH3 and Rock Band are not the same companies anymore, right? I guess there is a lot of drama between red octane and harmonix and activision, but oh well. This game was cheap, I have two guitars for it so I can play with Alison, and I'm enjoying the game. A recent update to the PS3 will allow my controllers to work with rock band should I decide to get it anyways. After about a week I am around the hard-medium-to-easy-hard stage. I can beat the normal tracks in medium with about 95% notes hit, and I can play one or two hard songs, but difficult songs mess me up on medium and I'm trying to play the harder songs to get my note recognition faster before really moving on. Overall I like the game and how it is similar to DDR, but what annoyed me is the career mode. I don't really care to battle guitars. I don't care about winning money or custom characters. I don't want to fight to unlock songs. And I want to play co-op with Alison which forced us through another career mode but oh well. I just want to play a guitar, play any of the songs I want to, and be a rock hero wooo! Pretty much immediately I was putting in the cheat code to unlock all songs, and much prefer it this way. I don't know a lot of the songs but they are fun to play. Has anyone played the new one? What tips are there for stepping up from medium to hard?

Doh! Forgot to mention my favorite song: Paint It, Black by The Rolling Stones in 1966. I can't believe it's that old of a song.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Once more in the Saab, dear friend

better title than “LAXitive” I guess…

It feels good to be home now! I've actually been busy since my last update. I went to Ohio from the 13-15th to see people since I haven't been working a lot. I got in later than I wanted on Monday but no one could give me a ride earlier. Had dinner with my mom that night and later went to Jo's. I spent Tuesday out at the KSU airport. It was Kent's turn to host the regional flight competition. I hoped to help judge but they had enough already so I mostly just talked to people I hadn't seen in a while. It was great to see the planes and everyone since I spent just about every day from 2004 to 2007 at that airport it's kind of weird to be away from it now. Had dinner with Tim and my dad and then went to Tim's apartment to play some Quakewars.

Tim (Alkali) and I are pretty good at Quakewars together, and it would be awesome if more people would play with us. We stick together, usually with me as an Engineer and Tim a medic. I sometimes change my class depending on the objective, but typically it's my job to complete the mission and tim's job to revive me when I get shot. I prefer offense and Tim likes defense, but we usually just play on the Strogg (Alien) side. We played for about 2 hours. In one mission we were on the human team and it was our job to construct a generator underground. It's a good map that requires teamwork by the GDF (humans) to get into the highly defended area. If people just rush in randomly you will get mowed down or set off a mine. The strogg side was putting up a strong fight and we were getting pissed off so I came up with a strategy. I waited for some teammates to run in before me to take the fire, then I jumped in onto the generator, setting off the mines and dying. Then tim jumps in behind me to revive me and we got the generator built. After that we were able to rush the map before they could get a solid defense up. I had a good airstrike at a critical time to finish the map too, but it was our classic revive strategy that won the map. I always wish more people would get the game before like Wolf:ET, some people are just too good.

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Wednesday, October 08, 2008

LAN Weekend and Days Off

These days it's getting hard to tell the days that I work from the days I don't. I'm enjoying being on reserve, or "On Call" for an airplane Eagle doesn't fly anymore. I've gotten called into the airport once out of 6 or 7 days and it doesn't look probable for many more days. The way to tell my days off from my days on are that I can travel on my days off. I did just that on Saturday, traveling back to Cleveland for a LAN Party hosted by one of Jo's coworkers, Caleb (Not sure exactly what his handle is, ma shtie or something).

It was a fun time, a great minilan. Caleb provided bawls, hamburgers, and good amish sweet bread or something. It was pretty much pure sugar. The network had some small hiccups, but I got to play some good Quake 3, and UT2k4. I have to say I am not a UT fan when playing with all those mods. I think it was an RTS mod where you get experience points which can be traded in for powerups. The whole reason I play FPS instead of RTS is to avoid that. It's no fun to jump in a game and be pummeled by someone with a ton of points. Most FPS set everyone pretty much the same so it's a game of skill. The highlight of the day though was definitely ET:Quakewars. Finally! This game has been out for a while but no one wanted to play it with me, due to WoW and xboxes. It really doesn't take too much to run, I was playing decently on my macbook pro. Being the only person who really knew the maps and gameplay, I took the role of the leader as a medic. I didn't think it would be fun for everyone else if I just ran through the levels completing the objectives myself. I shouted out what needed to be done, what classes were needed and where, revived teammates, and showed how all the different classes worked. I think everyone enjoyed that. We ended up playing pretty late into the night. I want to keep it up, but no one else has actually bought the game, so we can't play online. It was good to see Jo and Tim, and wish Dan would have stopped by. The party broke up about 1am eastern.

Crashed for about 4 hours on Jo's couch, before waking back up to jumpseat back to Dallas. Big thanks to Jo for picking me up, dropping me off, and letting me stay at his place even with work in the morning. The flight out of CLE was delayed by a flap issue or something. The captain boarded and we sat on the plane for 90 minutes before finally departing. I don't think there's been a cloud in the sky since Ike rolled through, but it was raining monday. I had planned to go to the "Big Tex" Texas State Fair with Alison, but it was looking like we couldn't go. By the time I got home though, the rain was clearing up, and although there were some short showers, we did go to the fair and had a pretty good time. The fair was pretty much a game of "how much $ can we take from you before you start to notice". After paying $14 for admission and $10 for parking, you had to buy a bunch of tickets to do anything. We walked around the free stuff, shops, and the auto show was pretty nice (one of few free things there). The food is always really popular there, even though it's not good for you at all! I got a turkey leg and a fried snickers bar. We walked everywhere to find that one place with the fried snickers bar, and it was something else, that's for sure! Very hard to describe, and it was good..but not really $4 good.. Alison and I both agreed just a normal snickers would have been better and cheaper. But by all means you should try one if you get the chance. It's not bad. We didn't want to ride a lot of the spinny fair rides since that's where you hear about people getting killed on in the news, but we rode on the big ferris wheel and the carousel. The wheel was $6 each and the carousel was $3, and most of the rides were 2-4 bucks. I didn't really like that approach, although I guess we saved money compared to an amusement park. I don't want it so seem like I didn't have fun either because I had a lot of fun and it's great to hang out with Alison. We have our routines and stuff we do together a lot, but this was special :D

Tuesday I spent working on my website again on the friends page. From 1.4.2 to 1.5, this is a very big change, although it doesn't look like anything changed from the initial look. It's largely a backend change where instead of copying the code several times and editing it for each person, I created a multidimensional array of friends and their website data, and I run a loop of the same code until it runs out of people. This means one day I should be able to sort by post date instead of person if I choose, and it's far easier to edit overall. Also, and this is a big one: You can now control the image on the friends page yourself! RSS feeds can contain a link to an image if you set one, and my page will use whatever you select. If none is set in the feed, it defaults to an image saved on my site. LJ uses your default pic I believe.. Anyways if you're not sure if the image is yours or mine, click "History" and see if it displays a pic in the title. If it does, that's the pic I'm also using on the friends page. So now if you don't like the pic there you have nothing to complain about. The last thing is that "Tweets for Today" doesn't light up, you actually have to write something constructive.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Computer Issues, TV and PS3

Hmm well I guess it's been a year so time for a PC post.

My desktop computer is being more picky than an old car these days...Before Quakecon 08 it needed a speed boost. Hmmm Athlon 64 3500+, 2gb ram, 256mb geforce 6800gts, aah probably need a new video card. It's great living close to both a micro center and fry's electronics. Micro Center is having a deal on Geforce 8800GT 512's so I pick one up and when I get home it looks like everything is great. Quakewars and Flight Sim X look great! Lots of detail in flight sim and...what's that sound? My airplane's propeller sound should be constant but it's stuttering like it's going to quit... But it's not the game. My entire computer seems to come to a halt for just an instant, but it's constant. Every single second, exactly once a second there is a little stutter. It's most noticeable in games where smoothness is key, but it's happening in windows too. The mouse stutters, music is interrupted, and by a few days I'm paralyzed with rage at this little tick my computer has developed. It's unusable! In safe mode without drivers it works fine, so I'm thinking it must be a software problem i.e. driver or resource conflict. I would remove everything but the barebones components of a computer (Proc, 1gb ram, vid card, mobo, 1 hard drive w/windows) and it would work! The stuttering was gone! I would begin to add things back into the computer to see where the conflict was and the stuttering would come back randomly.
      
Sometimes I would start it up, it would work and when I rebooted it stuttered again! And removing whatever it was wouldn't stop it until I took away everything. Other people online had reported similar problems with driver fixes. I tried new drivers, beta drivers, 3rd party drivers... And I was so sure it was a software problem since it worked in a barebone config and safe mode. Not having another desktop system (Alison has an iMac) I was finally to the point of shelling out another 200 bucks for a new video card to see if it was really a hardware problem. So I got a new one and it worked perfectly... I had a bad card all along. I returned the old one disguised as the new one and got my money back. Woohoo.

But that's not all! Just about a week ago my windows hard drive, the 200gb maxtor PATA drive (same drive) started clicking itself to death after a power outage so I went and bought a 350gb Western Digital SATA drive on the cheap to replace it. My computer wouldn't auto detect it and after a few hours of painful testing I decided that drive was bad too. A quick exchange at Fry's got me a Seagate 500gb for about 15 dollars more. Quality control is not up to par these days. Chinese products, gotta get rid of them. Anyways new drive works fine but reinstalling everything is a pain and there's some stuff on my old c: that I need to figure out how to access without it booting off that drive. I'll probably bring it to CLE in Oct and have Jo extract it to a flashdrive or something.
Also my Razer Copperhead laser mouse seems to be quitting on me. It will suddenly stop for a few moments. You'll hear windows drop it and redetect it. Sometimes it'll drop and that's all you get until a reboot. Why can't I just play my games? :( :(

On a more upbeat note, 50 bucks bought me a row of LEDs from ikea with some neat features and different colors. I laid them out behind my desk and they complement the blue light inside my computer pretty nicely. I can change the color depending on my desktop background or have them rotate colors automatically. Some pics and the one on the right is a 20mb video of it auto changing colors:
              vid:


Changing topics away from my desktop, Alison and I were recently trying to get a nice flatscreen HDTV. And well...sorry schultz don't mean to steal your thunder but I know you know your stuff. So we ended up getting the same one, the Samsung LN40A550. It looks great, and well..you can't just get an HDTV and not get an HD player. Enter....the PS3

That's right, I have a console.

I got a Ps3 because it has blu ray. I guess I would have preferred the xbox360 since I could pay money to play online with friends despite being able to play with them for free on the computer. The fact that it plays games and acts as a decent media client is extra. I got gran turismo 5 and alison got harry potter. GT5 looks pretty good with the high res. There really aren't many good games for ps3. About half of them are sports games and the other half are GTA IV and Guitar Hero. Might get GH3 later though. Don't really have the money to grab a few games yet after the tv and ps3... I also don't want any games I'd rather play on the computer like FPS.

The unit itself is pretty nice. I got it used on craigslist with 2 wireless controllers, a bluetooth remote and hdmi cable. It's a 60gb model so it plays most ps2 games also, a big plus. I like the black and silver and it complements the TV nicely. It sits inside the TV stand we have and when it has been on for a while it will get hot and the fans turn on and it's pretty loud. We had to rearrange the living room to put the couch a lttle further away from the screen cause it would give us headaches, so the wireless is nice.

To get the media client stuff working, BobOmega pointed me to a program called tversity which is a streaming and transcoding service that runs on your PC and will stream video, music and photos over a LAN and even the internet. It also can connect my ps3 to steaming video such as Skynews and NASA TV. The best part is that it will reencode your divx, xvid etc files into a DLNA compatible format on the fly. So I don't have to reencode everything to get it to work. There are some downsides to it, such as the service can't run as an admin, only a local user. That means I have to log into my computer for tversity to start. I want to just be able to hit the power button, walk away and have the service run like file sharing. This way I could keep a password on my computer but people could still access media. The other downside is that tversity takes an itunes approach to content and builds a database of all videos and music. Now you can have a folder view only - and no streaming content, or you can use metadata to arrange everything and frankly who has the time for a beta program such as this. That's what you get for free I suppose. Ok some pics and then this post is finally over..