Bad Company 2 is in beta for pre-orders and I’m in Nirvana.  Finally an FPS has been released that makes me jump for joy.  I wasn’t sure how badly they’d implement the game in this day and age of console porting but they’ve done an excellent job on the game.  I’m missing the command button to call out enemies, thank yous but I’m hoping that will be there at some point.  It seems they took some of the good things from the Call of Duty series and made them better such as melee.  No quick, 1 random knife shot, I’ve had a few but I’ve also seen where it takes a few swings of the blade to take down the enemy and I know I hit them on the first because of the “ugh” sound.  It’s refreshing rather than the, what sometimes seems like, the 10 feet long knifes from MW2 and even BF2/BF2142.

The familiar accumulative stats, as previous BF games, are there as well.  The current mod they’re demoing is also fun but quite tough as the attacking team if you have no one that can get in to the base.  It’s an attack/defense mod where the attacking team parachutes in and attempts to destroy key objects.  It already seems a bit more polished than BF2/BF2142 in terms of the interface, outside of the EXTREMELY slow server browser and lack of sorting servers by latency or players and the filters resetting after every restart but again, hopefully that will be added as well.  It allows you to immediately join a squad, the ability to spawn on players and as I said, most of the “goodies” from the BF series.

So far I’m loving this game.  It’s the type of FPS game I’ve been waiting for since BF2 began to grow long in the tooth and I’m looking forward to the March release!  I have some video’s and screenshots I’ll get up soon but in the mean time, check out the official trailer at Battlefield.com or watch below!

Cheers!

So I made this game my gaming life for the moment.  I am still far from doing what I did 10, 5 and even 2 years ago in terms of play time but this has become my defacto game of the moment.  It beat out L4D2 mostly b/c of the repetition of L4D but I no doubt think it’s still a good game, I’ve just decided to put it behind MW2 on the hierarchy of games.  I’ve already equaled my time from MW in MW2 and will probably supplant it as the CoD series goes.  My biggest problem is the air crap.  I default back to games like Domination (from my UT99 and BFxxx days) as my favorite.  What I get tired of is the airstrikes, AKA air crap.  Typically you can run a match and easily win while getting the shit kicked out of you by airstrikes.  Why? Because of dipshit morons that like to just camp, snipe and then call them in while doing nothing to progress their team.  I get especially irritated when these morons are on my team and we have a good team with the exception of 1-2 players that are out for personal scores.

What to do? Well I wish that they’d offer ground games without this crap.  Oh wait, you probably could specify this if they had dedicated servers but alas they decided to be cheap assholes and not put any time into the development of the PC version while charging $10 more.  Sorry, I forgot for a second that Activision and Bobby Kotick (who cares nothing about gaming) cared about quality over money.   Bobby Kotick should be the person at the end of single player that gets the knife to the head, hell he probably doesn’t even know that’s how it ends.  I personally would love to see the game move to someone else but unfortunately with the sales of MW2 he’ll remain in control until a fan does toss a fatal knife into his skull.  I look forward to (and God I never thought I’d say this) EA taking back the reins of a game with the Battlefield series.  Unfortunately I’m not sure how BF1943 is going to play out since we’re still 6 months on the PC without it, so I can only hope that Bad Company 2 compares to BF2 or even BF2142.

Edit:  My continued rant on 1/3/2010….

A few more things that pisses me off about the game I love at the moment.

1. The lack of control of hacking and kicking.  WTH were they thinking? People rape people in this game and you can’t kick them. I had a game tonight with a guy who went 85-5 and I left 1/2 through the game.  Sure they did something a while back by kicking 2500 people they said were hacking but we’re at 2 months now and it runs rampant.  Granted some are just campers that rack up scores but not 85 kills to 5 in less than 10 minutes?
2. When you can’t connect there’s no way to exit.  So it attempts to connect and can’t, it sits there forever.
3. It throws you into a map that you can’t change during the load screen, so it forces you to accept the map. Exit after it loads and you lose the match.  A lot could care less but I’m a stats freak which is what does keep me playing, I love the unlocks by WORKING for them.  The Quarry map in particular, who the hell likes that map???
4. I already said this but … People who play Domination like it’s TD. Played a map tonight where the guy just sat around knifing people outside our base.  Didn’t attempt to take the point, just knifed.
5. I already said this too but … Again, air combat in domination from people out for personal score who could care less about points.
6. Inability to play maps you want to play.
7. The party system… It’s a double edged sword.  Unfortunately it stacks players and more than that clans.  Even in most dedicated servers this isn’t a problem or at least you can find another server. Not in glorious MW2.
8. Join delays.  L4D offers that when you’re kicked or exit a map it won’t put you back into that game.  Not in MW2, you pop right back into the server with the assholes hacking or the clan stacked server you just left and get another loss.

Most of these are, gasp, easily avoided in dedicated servers… You kick hacks and you chose the map/server you want to play, admins could turn off air attacks and most of this crap is gone.

Game play is great, the hierarchy, bonuses and unlocks are great but the administration of the game sucks worse than any game I’ve played.  Even BF2 had some restraint by having a single “commander” that did the air support piece. Granted there were hacks in BF2/2142 but they were a lot less frequent, and you could kick people.  I get that things in WaW and MW were out of control in terms of just point hacking but trading that for a gaming experience ISN’T the answer.  It’s backwards thinking…rather than specifying rules like EA did with BF2/2142 “official servers” you just say screw everyone and STILL have no control over hacking.  It reminds me of the RIAA mentality.

Let’s throw in the extremely engaging and riveting but extremely short single player mode (7-8 hours) and the $10 more for a PC game.

So I’ve tried Chrome where I found that I consistently got DNS errors when loading pages. I refresh and it loads fine and I don’t mind the browser but it’s not Firefox.  This week I’ve been giving Safari a try, again it’s OK but not Firefox and I’ve noticed a few issues with it like accepting gifts in Facebook.  It doesn’t return you to the request page properly and when you browse back, it’s f’d up…shows incorrect tags on buttons, lists the wrong apps for buttons, etc.

Firefox never had these issues, even IE, while having more than FF, doesn’t have these little issue. So I rebuilt this past week with Windows 7, installed Firefox 3.5.1 and viola, Firefox has started having the EXACT same issues. Could it be my AT&T Uverse? Maybe, but not in the past have I noticed these issues but with Chrome. It almost seems that Firefox has made their changes for private browsing and whatever else they changed under the hood and added this annoying bug. I ended up logging into Facebook earlier using IE because it allowed me to rather than telling me there was a DNS error with Firefox for about 5 minutes straight. Oddly enough after I logged in with IE, it worked on Firefox with some delay.  Could it be Windows 7? Maybe but my laptop running FF 3.0.x has yet to show this behavior.

The newest problem seems to be with 3.5.2 and EXTREMELY slow page browsing. I load a video on YouTube and it keeps stammering as it tries to keep up. So I reset my router thinking maybe my connection was to blame (although speedtest.net didn’t seem to show it but could be lost packets somewhere) and the same thing. I tried to load the same page in IE and it works flawlessly. I’m not sure exactly what they’re doing with Firefox but it almost seems like Coke changing the formula while on top of the world. Firefox has slowly, and more recently, quickly started to make huge grounds on Internet Explorer but now at the height they seem to have stopped testing released code? I’m not sure, I’m just reporting what I’m seeing… Maybe others are seeing different results but when Facebook, Youtube and other popular sites are loading slow, it’s not good when the desktop browser is chugging along fine.

Again I’m a huge Firefox user and supporter but not if they’re trying to keep up with a fledgling browser and in the process have started to disregard the user experience. As for the testing, it’s already been published the security flaws in 3.5 so I’m wondering if this is the beginning of them being in the spotlight? What is that, now famous, quote? With great power comes great responsibility.

I finally uploaded a few pictures of my Goliath project that I upgraded last month.   My network naming standard is based on UnrealTournament vehicles.  My main system is Leviathan (the powerhouse, although not accurate with the 2×300GB Velociraptors), the 5+ TB server is Goliath, laptop is Raptor and the iPhone is Manta.   Scorpion was my media PC but I’ve combined that with Goliath and use the Xbox for streaming media but will probably be back up online once I am able to reduce it down to an extremely small case for my Ubuntu box.

Anyway… I put up 4 images of the hardware and what it looks like finished.  It’s a lot of storage but not a lot of power, it actually runs quite efficient on an Antec 300w PSU that I’ve tested output on.  It has ran rock solid since I brought it up and since I’m using as a media server as well as storage, it’s running Windows Vista x64 w/8GB of RAM.   Still not much of a fan of Vista but XP didn’t do what I wanted for this project, so I had to move to it.

Here’s the images… The installed components are slightly blurry (first image) but it’s the gist that matters.   As you can see from the side view it took some, ummm, pliers to get the SuperMicro enclosure in since it had 5 1/4 rails.  This didn’t turn out to be too bad since it kind of hugs the enclosure and secures it better.  I also did some wire management after I verified things were working.  The case is a simple Thermaltake M9 which is realatively cheap.  I had no intentions of doing the enclosure when I bought it or I would have probably went with another Antec 900.  I may eventually upgrade my main rig to a 1200 and move it into service, but honestly this little Thermaltake is great for $50.  I also have a 650w PSU waiting in the wings but if I can keep things running without peaking out the 300w, it’s going to stay for efficiency.  If I decide to throw in my ATI 3870 I’ll add the 650w but for the moment there’s really no need.

As I said, this has ran quite well other than some of the things I took for granted in Windows XP for speed like simple items of searching for a file and doing a sort after searching, folders remaining after moving the contents to another location with the same folder name (after confirming to move and replace), the speed that folder deletion occurs and a few other things that I find annoying as hell with Vista.  At least Raptor is running well with Windows 7 x64 beta other than the damn start menu and lack of classic, but that’s for another day.

Specs:

Thermaltake M9 Case  |  Antec 300w PSU  |  Asus P5W Deluxe Motherboard  |  Intel E6600 Processor  |  8GB Corsair RAM
3Ware 9650SE-4LPML RAID Controller (4 Port)  |  4 x 1.5TB Seagate Barracudas in RAID5  |  1 x 750GB Seagate Barracuda
ATI 2600XT  |  2xCD/DVD Recorders (no BD yet)  |  SuperMicro Hot-Swappable Mobile Rack 5×3.5 | 5-in-1 Card Reader
Logitech MX5000 Bluetooth Mouse/Keyboard  |  Gateway 2400 24″ LCD  |  Perelian X2040 LCD  |  Antec Veris Remote/IR

Upgrades will be moving to maybe a Q6600 if I find a used one cheap, the 650w PSU and maybe the ATI HD3870 which would make this a decent gaming box as well.

Click an image below for individual images (or click here for the full gallery):

I’m about to rebuild my secondary box (see previous post) and was thinking of finally using my Vista Ultimate x64 disc (that I still really am hesitant to install on my main PC) but with the Windows 7 beta available and how I use the system I thought that I’d just download the beta and install it.  When the time comes, I’ll either go to Vista x64 or pick up Windows 7 x64.

Anyway, I went out to get my key today, did a quick search on Google and got the following results:





Note the interesting “This site may harm your computer.” below the Download the Windows 7 Beta header.  I clicked on the link and it gave me the malware screen warning me about proceeding and I had to copy and paste the URL into the address bar.  I checked before posting but it appears they’ve “fixed” it already but thought it was interesting enough to post.  I didn’t take a lot of time to learn how sites get this designation but I’d assume that it’s possibly some Microsoft haters reporting the site or Google…er um… having fun?

A while back I must have wandered into a bad, bad site. I was browsing on FireFox, checking some old bookmarks when I noticed a graphics tips site acted odd and locked up (it was also no longer what the title in my bookmarks suggested). FireFox appeared to lock up, I killed it and had to take care of something else. While I know the story is always “I didn’t install anything”, I can honestly say that all I did was go to the site which was almost immediately followed by the lockup.

Regardless, a bit later I heard talking coming from my office.  I at first thought I’d lost my mind and my dogs were having a conversation.  Luckily (or maybe not) I found there were multiple Internet Explorer 7 windows opened and I saw tasks in the system tray running and realized I got hit with something while, I assume, on that page.   I did a clean up with several adware apps, Windows Defender and did a full virus scan which gave me multiple references in my registry and files on my drive (most residing in Windows, System32 or my temp folder). I deleted the files, allowed the programs to do the cleaning process of the registry in addition to me removing a few items listed in both the local user and local machine run keys and rebooted. On reboot, my Anti-Virus reported additional files. I rebooted into safe mode (which I should have done to begin with) and did additional cleaning which rendered little additional finds.   I rebooted again and things seemed to be OK until I attempted to launch IE7 for something (which I don’t use that much). I received the message Windows cannot find ‘C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe’.   When I right clicked on the icon, it took me to the path and selected the file, so it was still intact.

A few things I tried: Restoring IE default settings, copying the Internet Explorer folder from a working XP system (thinking iexplore.exe or a dll may have been corrupted or compromised), updating to IE8, uninstalling IE7 from Add/Remove programs and reinstalling, downloading IE7 again and allowed automatic update (which still worked) to install patches and when none of this rendered results, I cursed and screamed loudly at my PC but for some reason this too didn’t resolve the issue.

I had quit worrying about it, for the most part, since it’s the system I use as a media player, storage and a utility PC for backups, etc. and don’t really browse on it.  But it was always there laughing at me, pointing at me and making fun of me!!   So tonight I painted my face, stared the monitor down and said “Prepare for war”….

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