As much as I would like to have a full gaming experience with Call of Duty: World at War, I don’t think it’s possible.  I’ve encountered so many errors and issues that I don’t think I can remember all of them.

It initially started on the beta.  I had a few days of fun with the beta and suddenly one day it started crashing after getting partially through the map load screen…the screen would flash and then crash.  There was an error message but the brilliant minds at Treyarch didn’t think to allow the error to show over the game executable dialog so I have no idea what the message was, just showed an error dialog that couldn’t be viewed.  I played with settings and found that if I disabled Crossfire on my dual ATI Radeon 3870’s, and clicked on restore factory defaults (I didn’t change anything but did it anyway) it worked.

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I’ve been playing Left 4 Dead for a few days and the demo last week and I have to say that this is the freakin’ best FPS of the year.  While there are a few short comings, like the length overall it’s just incredible!  I’ll try to put more up this week but in the mean time, I’ve updated the screenshots for the first time in a looong while! :)  I’m going to try to start uploading in all their glory (1920×1200 or 1680×1050) but for now, here they are in 1024×640.  Enjoy…

Check out the entire gallery.

This week I found out that running Virus protection on everything Microsoft seems to be essential.  My main system was rebuilt a few months ago and I decided that I’d not install AV right away or any kind of protection.  I found out this past week that it’s not a wise move.  While I wasn’t infected with a virus or worm (typically choosing to open a document from an unknown source) I did find I had a trojan that was wreaking havoc on gaming.  I typically have issues with Unreal Tournament 3 and crashes since they can’t seem to fix the OpenAL issue that plagues the game on SoundBlaster X-Fi cards or it bounces back and forth between them and Creative.  Regardless I started having frequent crashes in Call of Duty 4 which has never happened.  I did some reading and found that people were reporting issues and the answer was a trojan.

I initially thought that I hadn’t done anything to warrant the concern but downloaded and installed a few spyware apps and Spywarefigher found an executable residing in my Program Files that looked like an MS patch that it reported as a trojan as well as a few tracking cookies.  I did the clean up and viola the crashes went away.  While it wasn’t a hard lesson learned, it was a lesson learned that running Virus protection is vital for the integrety of even gaming.

Thought I’d post that even if you think you’re privy to something like this, you may want to think again.  I’m still not sure what I did that allowed this to happen but I went ahead and installed AV even with the hit it takes on resources.

Why can’t we have a perfect game filter?  So many games create filters and leave so much to be desired.

Most of the first person shooters have filters but it seems a mismash of what we would like to see.

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I’ve not posted about DRM but after reading some items the past few days I decided to make a few comments.  I was looking at an article at Ars and what I’d like to hear someone ask these executives is how is this incredible protection allowing someone to break it and upload copies of  Mass Effect, Spore and now Crysis: Warhead to filesharing/torrent searches and sites with “patches” around DRM.  Why is this never a question to these executives?  I want to know if their intention is to prevent Bob and Cathy Gamer from being able to use the same copy because it certainly can’t be them attempting to stop massive torrent/filesharing piracy.

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Metallica was announced as one of the finalists for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the 2009 class.  It’s only fitting that the band that has influenced Metal and hard rock the past 26 years be put in their 2nd year of eligibility.  The only thing that pisses me off is lars’ attitude about it and his comment about Dave Mustaine inducting them.  It’s not like Dave told them to piss off and went off on his own, they dumped him.  I’m not saying they didn’t have their reasons but why be a complete piece of shit about it?  I honestly don’t see a reason why Megadeth shouldn’t be inducted at some point as well.  It’s not like Dave didn’t help Metallica get established and get their contract.

Anyway, here’s the Lars comments…

There should be a nice YouTube video here but apparently the person that uploaded it decided to not allow external embedding so….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWqJgKz2KVA

I know that Xbox Live is going to be down this week for a day or so for updates so I assume it’s for the late fall update that they’re calling the New Xbox Experience.  They have a video at Xbox.com talking about it but they really don’t focus too long on what it’s going to look like but I did’t see the familar blades as part of the interface.  I guess we’ll see….

If you haven’t seen, Metallica released the entire CD for Guitar Hero 3 and Guitar Hero World Tour.  I paid $30 (marked down the first week allegedly from $40) for their CD with the GH3 unlock while the standard CD was $10 but what pisses me off is that there is absolutely nothing special about the packaging outside of a piece of paper that has the key on it.  So I bought this “Special Edition” from Best Buy that’s a piece of paper?  What’s worse is that you can download it for about $18, so that would work out to a few dollars less.  If it had some kind of additional value like an extra CD or enhance CD or ANYTHING it would have been more than a freakin’ piece of paper with a redeem code on it.

Anyway, if you see it at Best Buy, AVOID IT.  It’s not worth it, especially if they mark it up to $40.  As for adding the tracks, it’s great to get to play through some of my favorites from the CD and I’m sure that with Guitar Hero World Tour it will be even nicer having the drums and full band going.

As for the CD, I love Death Magnetic!  As for the complaints about it hitting the wall, I don’t completely agree.  When ripped to MP3 I notice it but on the CD itself I don’t hear it even in my car which has a fairly high end system in it.  I think it covers a lot of the Metallica discography in terms of influence from previous discs.  I can hear Justice, The Black Album and a little of the Load/Reload mixed with the classic sound.  I’ll go into a more indepth review later (I always say that and never get back but I’ll try this time. ).  It’s been in my car since Sunday and about all I’ve listened to show what I think of it.  I’ve not listened to a disc like that in a long time.

I happen to notice the “This Time Last Year” post mentioning Bioshock and I realized that we’ve not been hit with very little exciting news on the FPS gaming front this fall.  At this point last year we had a few titles already hit (ET: Quake Wars, Medal of Honor: Airborne and, as mentioned, Bioshock) with quite a few on the horizon for late fall (UT3, Crysis, Call of Duty 4, Timeshift, Hellgate: London, F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate, Painkiller: Overdose and an initial Frontlines: Fuel of War demo).  So that was 3 titles already out and 8 demos available by mid October.

So far this year we have Far Cry 2 scheduled for October and Crysis Warhead coming next Tuesday.  Call of Duty: World at War is coming complete with Kiefer Sutherland lending his voice with a November release but I’m not sure where this game really treads new ground.  I guess I’m happy to see another WWII installment but the Pacific theater doesn’t ever seem to be that popular in gaming.  The addition of bushido rules and the reinsertion of vehicles may work out.  Throw in Jack Bauer barking out orders and maybe it’s a more exciting release than I’m expecting.  Battlefield Heroes is suppose to hit as a free Read the rest of this entry »

I decided to update to SP3 finally on my main system and received “Access Denied” when installing.

After some looking around, I found this article at Microsoft.com:

Method 3 is what I used to correct the issue. Read the rest of this entry »