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 not done anything for the longest time probably since I started BREWTALITY.NET through all of it’s incarnations.  I’m still alive.   I’m playing Left 4 Dead 2 and Modern Warfare 2 at the moment.  Held back on MW2 because of the non-dedicated servers but after playing it I have to say it’s a LOT of fun and may end up superseding L4D2 (gasp!!).  L4D2 is a lot of fun as well so I’m hoping that mixing the two will give a longer time for it but time away from MW2 means you fall behind and get worse than you already are, and in my case that’s bad! lol  I’m not the best at it and tonight I didn’t especially like the guy (cheesy shooter movie?) wielding 2 sub machine guns but it’s still fun.  Spec Ops was especially fun after a few hours tonight, hope to do some more of that soon!

As for the dedicated servers on MW2, I’m not noticing much issue so far, although I’m not a daily player or spend all my free time gaming.  The fact that there are people already with prestige makes me wonder, can someone really do that in a few weeks unless they’re playing constantly?  I guess I know some that do it in WoW so anything is possible.  It is nice that people are “supposedly” earning their achievements unlike the debacle that World at War was.  I admit I played on some of the servers that had an ungodly amount of points for a kill, etc. but it grows old but so does having games like MW that casual gamers got the hell beat out of them because they didn’t play daily.  The nice thing with MW2 is they have perks for casual gamers who aren’t great (AKA me! heh).

Anyway, I need to do something with screenshots since I have 100’s that I’ve not uploaded including stuff from these two great games.  I have a crap load on my xFire profile which I’m finding is more and more useful as a gaming social site even though a lot of gamers don’t use it.  It keeps all my shots in their 1920×1200 glory so that’s a bonus and does the uploads in game rather than having to do anything with them here and spending precious space.  Still using FRAPS tho and have that subscription.   If you’re not into xFire, you should at least check it out.  Cheap product for a lot of usefulness… Videos, Frame Rates  & Screenshots.

Check out the xFire Screenshot page.

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.

You can view this at Steam as well.

The Left 4 Dead Survival Pack is now available for the PC and Xbox 360, free of charge to all owners of the game. The full change list for the PC release is below. In addition, both the retail and Steam versions of the game (PC and 360) are now available for a special price. Check Steam and local retailers for pricing details. For more information about L4D, please visit www.l4d.com

Survival Mode

• New gameplay Mode
• 16 maps including Last Stand
• Leaderboards
• 7 new achievements

Versus Changes

• 2 new versus campaigns
• Fixed a case where versus team score would continue to be recalculated after the score panel was displayed
• Fixed an issue with recalculating the versus score health bonus for a player when they are rescued from being incapacitated
• Fixed being able to start a swing as an infected, then teleport to the survivors and have the claw swing hit a survivor
• Fixed a case where teleporting to the survivors would not reset the ability timer
• Fixed an exploit where you could load the chamber of a weapon with bullets by holding down the melee key
• Fixed a case where it was not possible to join a game while it was in a finale
• Fixed a rare case where listen servers would speed up the game over time
• Removed convars related to melee fatigue
• Fixed a case where infected players would get a respawn time on their initial spawn into a map

Server Changes

• Made ms_force_dedicated_server not require cheats
• Add a message when queuing a heartbeat
• Simplified setting of game mode
• Removed convars director_no_human_zombies and director_holdout_mode
• Added mp_gamemode [coop,versus,survival]

General
Added lobby join and leave messages

Coming Soon!  Love the first commercial spot I saw with Old Time Rock’n'Roll where they tie the guys up to the tree.   Unfortunately I can’t find the damn thing but… here’s a few others…

So here’s another…

The Official Trailer(?):

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):