MW2 breaks pre-order record

Update: Ops! I failed reading a comprehension roll.... they didn't release actual numbers. So really there is no point to this posting aside to say MW2 is selling well...

But I still resist pre-ordering! With my dieing breath!

Dragon Age crash issues and game thoughts

Well after a day of headaches, worst issues I've had with any game in many many years... I finally got to sit down to play the game. Which its pretty good but what amuses me is it plays nearly identical to Drakensang. Less European strangeness in the stats but otherwise the two play much alike. So when you finish DA and want more or feel like saving some money now, Drakensang is your hook up. You could play a pirate (Arggg) class in Drakensang (among other strange and varied classes).

As to the Dragon Age issues... the game would blue screen of death (BSOD) frequently but if I turned down settings it would happen less often, if I turned them all the way down it never happened. Took a long time to figure that out. Situations like that generally indicate a heat issue.

So I took all fans off automatic control and when the game fires up I set them all to 100%. This took care of the problem and I was able to return to max settings. What ever video card you have, you can get tools from ATI or Nvidia that allow you to change settings like fan speeds (I don't recommend changing anything else as your just likely to make your problems worse).

There's something strange that BioWare is doing with this engine that I think taxes video differently then most games. I didn't run monitoring with auto fan controls on so I really don't know for sure that that was really the cause of the problem... I changed a bunch of settings in mass so it could have been a number of other things but my gut tells me its likely the fan issue.

MW2 Countdown

Just thought I would provide a helpful update as to how much longer we all must wait.

Dead Space victory thoughts

A long standing item on my TODO list has been completed. Run through Dead Space has been checked off. Halloween time seemed like a great time to make this happen as it is a game firmly grounded in horror. I didn't get it completed before Halloween because it was a lot longer then I expected it to be.

The game is a satisfying cross between Bioshock and Resident Evil with a lot of awesome visuals...and creepiness. Loved the puzzles, amazingly they are quite simple but I guess that's the beauty of it, they never seemed simple at first. A couple of times I about quit because they seemed so impossible but they weren't in the end (chapter 5 I really struggled with). I found myself chuckling at how much I tended to complicate things that weren't complicated at all.

Last year, when this game came out (ancient times in Internet years), I played it a bit on the 360 but never really got into it. This time I tired it on the PC. In retrospect I should have just stuck to the 360 version, not only was a mouse useless, the PC visuals really weren't anything better. Certainly on the list of total console port games as ended up just using a controller.

Dead Space 2 is definitely on my must play list. Maybe I can dare to dream for co-op next time around.....come'on if Resident Evil 5 could do it so can you!

FAGS video

A guy over at Infinity Ward put out this Modern Warfare 2 video called "Fight Against Grenade Spam PSA" which comes out to read "FAGS". I have a feeling its was intentional but as we all know, that caused outrage because you can't be funny about anything these days.

I don't know how long this video is going to be valid, so watch it while you can. It was pulled by the original poster and many of the mirrors are getting pulled for content violations.

X-Com confirmed

Fraxis is doing it which is almost as good as if all the original Microprose team got back together to do it. Aside from it looking like its going to be 360/PC targeted, we don't actually know that its still going to be turn based. But I'm thinking its likely to return to its roots, even with the console in the mix.

NSA Cybersecurity center

• $1.5 billion dollars
• located in Utah
• 30-megawatt data center

That's some serious Internet monitoring.

Jones limited edition drinks

$19 for a 12-pack is pretty crazy....

Illithid Brain Juice

Potion of Healing

Sneak Attack

Dwarven Draught

Bigby's Crushing Thirst Destroyer

Eldritch Blast

Big Red soda

Here we are at helloBK.com asking all of life's important questions.

Inquiring minds wanted to know, what is Big Red supposed to taste like?

I thought it was supposed to be bubble gum flavored, aka that pink hard gum but apparently it is supposed to be cream soda. According to Wikipedia:

Its unique taste, though often thought to be bubble gum, is created by mixing orange and lemon oils with the traditional vanilla used in other cream sodas

I also learned:

• It was created in the original land of crazy, Waco, Texas.
• There are all sorts of "Big" flavors that I have never seen before: Vanilla Float, Big Blue, Big Peach, Big Pineapple, Fruit Punch, Red Jack energy drink, and some diet variants of many of these.
• It has caffeine in it...it just seemed to scream caffeine free to me but its not.

Look at all the great things you learn from reading this blog! Tune in next time!

DirectX 11 released for Vista

This is part of a platform update that includes some other things as well. You have to tell Windows Update to install it, it is not automatic. It is listed as Platform Update for Windows Vista x64 (if your 64 bit) based systems (KB971644).

Borderlands, post victory thoughts

As I had previously posted, Borderlands is a game that touches on greatness but ultimately falls short of achieving that level. I do not believe that modding the game for the PC will ultimately launch it into legendary status. Assuming they even fix all of the half-assed issues in the PC version in the first place. It suffers a number of console-ish set backs that it shouldn't have had. Granted its not nearly as consolized as most ports have been lately but still its clearly a console port.

Make no mistake, I liked this game. Its clearly as good of a co-op game as any other co-op games I have played. I enjoyed it tremendously. If I had to break it down into a dollar spent vs. game hours played, it would rank very close to the top of the list (at least for console games). Though I don't really tend to think that way.

My point here today is how disappointed I am that it wasn't more. As a game that (like Diablo) is designed to be played through a few times as one pass will not get you to the max level. Which is one disappointing aspect of it... a level 50 cap seemed unneeded. They could have procedurally generated that content, as it was, forever, just keep having you play through it like Diablo.

Other problems: Death is such a non-factor, 4 classes limits replayability, mindless MMO FedEx quest were overused, mystery ghost lady leading you around to create a story has been used to many times, later bosses weren't nearly as much fun as the earlier ones, the final stages of the game were a slog with little creativeness, some of the class abilities were unbalanced (soldier ammo ability for example) that made the game utterly simple, second play through should be noticeably different (harder?), quests should have at least had the XP scale up on the 2nd play through (level 1 rewards at level 35, how'd you miss that?). I'm sure I can find more problems if I tried.

I'm just venting because it wouldn't have taken a great deal to really push this game to the next level. Its a shame when people come so close yet fall short. I think mainly them making it for the consoles is what caused it to shine less brightly then it should have. Though taking PC out of this, considering console gaming as a whole, it is one of the better console games.

I hate to beat this game up so hard because it was fun. It did earn my money. 4 player co-op is a blast. If you have some friends, go to town on it, its not a great solo game though.... skip the PC or PS3 as both have some serious issues but the 360 version was trouble free.

Ultimately it was not good enough for me to continue to play through again, not that that's a bad thing... lots of games I've played through once and loved them. This is one of them.

Intel adds TRIM support to SSDs

UPDATE: Intel pull this update due to some crash issues experienced by some people.

A much anticipated firmware update was released by Intel to support the TRIM function for their current generation of solid state disk (SSD) drives. TRIM is the ability for the operating system to clear used disk space to make it ready to be written to again. Which is a big Windows 7 selling point, TRIM support.

Super fast SSD drives slow down after a while because they have to stop to clear a previously used disk sector before they can write to it again. TRIM support means it goes in and clears those before you need them in order to maintain the super speeds.

Other manufactures of SSDs have already added this support in various ways. But everyone was waiting on Intel because they are considered the SSD leader having basically the fastest drives to market. They aren't the best price point but they are quality. Except they didn't support TRIM, till now.

There's some good news and some bad news here. The good news: They also provided at tool to use for XP and Vista. The bad news: Win7 was supposed to be a transparent background process but it ends up that you do have to configure a process much like a disk defrag.

Then there is some really really good news: This firmware update also greatly improved the already amazing drive performance even further.

Course these bad boys are still $500-$600 for 160gb each. I'm also not sure they support RAID yet but they are fast, faster then any spinning disks.

GeoCities to be closed

10 years ago Yahoo! spent $3.57 billion on the web site hosting company and appears to have ran it into the ground. How's that for mis-management?

Three and a half billion dollars and you can't find SOMETHING to do with it?

Companys still plan to use dedicated servers in PC games

I find it amusing that company's are now coming out to assure people that they will be allowing for people to have dedicated servers in their various games. Apparently Infinity Wards move to be rid of dedicated servers, in Modern Warfare 2, has caused other company's to rush out to assure everyone that that will not be the general trend.

Until I started reading this I hadn't considered that others might be so foolish.

The title link article also talks about a game called Brink, which I don't know what Brink is exactly. A role playing shooter (RPS) I think. What ever it is it appears it needs an eye kept on it because I think it may turn into something.