Archive for June, 2007
Punkbuster Sucks
Posted by Wanderlust in First Person Shooters, PC Gaming Tuesday, 26 June 2007 04:33 No Comments
No longer do you have to wait for issues to arise with EA/DiCE games like BF2 or BF2142 after so long of playing and crashing, now you have to deal with Punkbuster and their memory resident GARBAGE. Multiple times now while playing BF2142 it gets minimized to see a PunkBuster error. They did a decent job in the early days but now it’s just garbage and shows up in games. I didn’t mind it when it loaded for a specific game but apparently they’re attempting to do something with memory resident programs that crash randomly and in the case of BF2142 kill the game you’re in since it doesn’t minimize well after playing for a while.
Another company that I hope goes down in flames and someone else starts working on hack/cheat software.
The other pleasant problem with BF2142 is the blank random PunkBuster messages. You have no idea if you were kicked for some reason or if it was PB just sucking ass and I tend to think it was the latter. Some days it never happens, others it happens on multiple servers for no apparent reason… Is it ping? Is it a vote? Is it something else? You don’t find out because the message is BLANK!
USB Missle Launcher
Posted by Wanderlust in Hardware Sunday, 24 June 2007 05:44 No Comments
I picked one of these up on woot last week and it’s kind of a fun toy but I did come across an issue with this after upgrading to the latest drivers. It killed DirectX directinput. I didn’t notice until I fired up Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and it kept crashing or hanging on initializing input. Not sure if it does it with other games but that was the first thing I had attempted after installing the Missile Launcher. No need to uninstall it if you’re having this issue, just unplug it before playing games if you’re getting this error.
This is a good link for additional software to control it with a camera (http://www.antmason.com/wiki/index.php/SharpLauncher). Not tried it yet but plan on getting a camera to play with. I’d like to see a web interface to do the same thing… be fun to have someone take over your launcher while you’re sitting at your PC and fire off missiles to get your attention! 
woot had them for $18 but you can get it at Amazon for $29! With a handy link below. 
Enemy Teritory: Quake Wars Beta
Posted by Wanderlust in Betas/Demos, First Person Shooters, PC Gaming Saturday, 23 June 2007 00:21 No Comments
Started playing the demo tonight and it’s fun but will take some getting use to. The action is more along the lines of Quake or UnrealTournament and less like the Battlefield series. The conquest demo map, sewer, reminds me of the way Return to Castle Wolfenstein played. There are objectives based on your class such and you chose a mission while playing such as blowing things up as an engineer or defense.
FilePlanet, as far as I know, still has keys. So if you can’t wait until August you can subscribe to them for a month, get the key and be on your way to dominating as humans or the Strogg in an epic battle through earth’s sewers!
Quake Wars Demo Shots:
Desert Combat Fan? BF2 Fan? BF2142 Fan? Read Up!
Posted by Wanderlust in First Person Shooters, PC Gaming Friday, 22 June 2007 19:45 2 Comments
Kaos studios, who use to be Trauma Studios and brought us Desert Combat and the game play in Battlefield 2 (before EA/Dice bent them over) is working on Frontlines: Fuel of War. In this video it’s fairly clear where the cool shit came from that was in BF2 over the previous versions such as Commander. Sounds like this game is going to be kick ass and will be out after the first of the year. Would have liked to have seen it sooner but from what it sounded like they are trying to miss the rush on the big games and established series (UT, Quake, MoH, Crysis, HL2 Episode 2/Team Fortress 2).
For all of you who dig it, post it on your blogs and spread the word about this game!! I am looking forward to this as much as anything at this point.
I am compiling a list of my fall FPS games (coming soon to the site) and this is near the top… I can never drop UT3 from #1 tho. Check out the PCGamer podcast here.
Toms Hardware Videos
Posted by Wanderlust in First Person Shooters, Hardware, PC Gaming Friday, 8 June 2007 23:13 No Comments
So while I was waiting for the Black Rain tickets I decided to do some video watching but on a tech site rather than rotting my brain on YouTube or the various other video sites that pop up daily. At least I thought I wasn’t rotting my brain. I started off because of what showed up on my Google home page about Quake Wars vs. Team Fortress 2. These guys “Ben & Rob” don’t do badly hosting and speaking but the information is just lame. They discussed Quake Wars without once bringing up BF2 or BF2142 which are kind of what it is essentially is like. They’ve taken Wolfy ET and combined it with the proven successful BF model. I could be completely wrong but I thought CWET was developed for ID and meant to be sold but they decided to offer it as a free game? They said it was created by modders. There may be content by modders but the beginnings I’m fairly certain was ID.
I watched a few more of their driveling commentaries and then checked out the HIS HD 2900XT review by Rodney Reynolds. Good information overall but he describes the card as if it’s revolutionary in design, discussing how large the heatsink/fan housing is, etc. without mentioning that ATI x19xx’s and nVidia’s 8800′s look similar in build as this and occupy two slots. He also needs to work on o-v-e-r e-m-p-h-a-s-i-z-i-n-g in movements and when he speaks. Good overview tho, didn’t realize a few things. I think I’m happy that I went with the nVidia 8800GTS for now. I can’t imagine Crossfire with the 2900XT considering a single card requires a 6pin and 8pin power connector.
That’s it for now… just boring post of my viewings on Toms Hardware.