Quake Wars goodness

Here is a fantastic interview with the developer of Quake Wars so give it a read.

C&C 3 Demo

Now while I would not call myself the hardest of the hardcore fans from the early Command and Conquer days, I do recall greatly enjoying the game when I finally did get the time to play it. The storyline and cut scenes, while silly, helped to make the game enjoyable and give it an almost pulp/camp feeling.

Command & Conquer 3 really needs to do something about this camera work in the game. Even at a higher resolution (1280x1024) you don't get to see enough of the ground and I'll be damned if I can find a way to zoom out further. I also don't see any INI files or other config files to edit so I can manipulate it in some way. I understand with Supreme Commander that you can zoom out to an almost planetary scale. Somewhere between these two extremes would be ideal for how I like to play these games.

Quakecon sign-ups

Quakecon is coming August second through the fifth to the Dallas area and with Quake Wars hopefully out by then I am definitely planning on being there if only to LAN it up for a few hours. It appears Quakecon will be at the Anatole again this year which wasn't my favorite venue to have this. The actual convention area was smaller, parking was kind of expensive unless you parked across the street at another hotel (which didn't charge $15/day) and the convention area where the speeches were given was like a meat locker.

But, with a new PC and a game I very much want to play, how can I resist not going again this year?

Vista and its relation to Doom 3

As mentioned in countless blurbs about Vista, there exists a new component called the UAC (User Account Control)* which attempts to provide some extra security in Windows by ensuring that no one, not even people with administrator rights, can access a lot of the core Window files without setting off some sort of alarm or trigger. A nuisance to be sure but one I am personally willing to put up with considering this is Windows we are talking about after all.

It just so happens that the UAC is also the acronym for Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC), the megacorporation from Doom 3 the unleashes the portal to Hell. While such a connection is tenuous at best and down right ludicrous at its face value, I don't think such threats can be ignored and can only lead to one conclusion: Microsoft will one day attempt to colonize Mars and subsequently open the gateway to Hell in an attempt to become even more sinister. Some might say this is a bunch of F.U.D., but when that imp is one day chewing on your arm and uses your fingers to clean his teeth, you'll be thinking to yourself right before you black out from blood loss, "Should've listened to Sphinx, man. Should've listened to him." But hey what are you going to do, use a Mac? I know that's crazy talk, too and it doesn't really help since a Mac can now run XP. No one is safe except for those hardcore VAX and AS/400 users I suppose and they're so weak and decrepit they pretty much are already dead and unable to put up a fight.

It is probably posts like this which make you blogaholics actually consider going back outdoors, or communicating with real people, or posting to alt.suidice USENET groups, doesn't it?

* I mistyped that the first time around. My bad.

So let's talk about my new PC

You want some specs for it? Of course you do! First question to ask is, "What do I want to do with this PC?" The answer is this. I need that game more than air.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965p-S3. Some might point and laugh because I didn't get the DS3 but it just had things I didn't need so I'll keep the cash for myself.

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E600 chip. I'm told you can overclock the hell out of these things but I'm too much of a chicken to try.

Memory: DDR2-800 dual channel. This was my big splurge item. I could've stuck with the 667 or something lower but to hell with it, I wanted it some scorching memory this time. My last upgrade I splurged on the hard drives, this time the memory and I think that is probably the better investment anyway.

Video card: Leadtek 7950GT, 512Megs of RAM. I know the 8800s are just out and only cost $35-50 more but I figured when EQ2 (my uber secret game of shame) looks like this then I think it was a pretty good investment.

Hard Drives: Nothing fancy, just some SATA 7200RPM drives

OS: Windows Vista. Despite the UAC being a complete pain in the backside I truly don't mind having to click confirmations that yes indeed I do want to open up that program for the 100th time. I may have been an early adopter but I'm not completely stupid. This is Windows and it is NEW which separate are bad enough when it comes to computers but when put together it morphs into something much worse than the sum of its parts.

Gotta give props though about the user interface still being pretty simple, and the fact that during an install you can now use CDs or USB keychains to load 3rd party drives (thus removing the need for floppy disks forever) brings small little tinge of warmth to my bad empty heart.

Quick benchmarks:

Doom 3 on my old system (an Athlon64 3000+ with a Radeon 9800 Pro) gave me about 32 frames per second at 1024x768 and 2xAA.

The new system gives me 97 frames per second at those same settings. When I cranked the details to ultra high maximum the frames still maintained about 32 frames per second.

Well hello, Mr. Fancypants

Oh now aren't I just now completely and totally "with it" and "hip" now with my blog. Actually I'm still not cool but have accomplished what about a billion losers have done over at Myspace.com. I feel so meidocre and now realize that I might have indeed wasted four years of college learning things that now any 12 year old can accomplish provided they are tall enough to reach the keyboard

If you want to see the old shit from my site go here.

If you have never met me, I'm Sphinx and I play games. I write about games, I review games, and I sure as hell get angry at games. In other words I am another pothole on the information superhighway of some angsty thirty-something with more time than common sense. However, I think this is okay as I have until forty to wean myself off of the games lest I be given the title "man-boy" which is probably not the best thing to have affixed to your persona.

Let's get down to business folks. I lost my HTML editor when I upgraded to Vista and didn't want to mess with finding another HTML editor. The free ones I tried were often free for a reason (for those slow witted that means they sucked)

I like Vista actually and I'm sure that makes some of you cringe even though I bet a lot of you don't even know why except that it's new and it's from Microsoft. Fair enough, those are two pretty good reason. My response would normally be the same but dammit I'm actually enjoying this damn thing. Figuring out the gadgets was painless and now some real websites and companies are catching on and putting out gadgets. So far Weatherbug, some computer monitoring tools, and a clock adorn my little gadget toolbar.

The only problem with gaming so far is that when I tried to startup the Command Conquer 3 demo the demo balked about needing DirectX 9 files. I read online that installing the DirectX 9.0c install files would make it work without compromisig DX10 and sure enough it worked. Thank you Internet. Despite your bizarre ability to cater to the worst furry porn and goatsecs sick crap out there you can still every once in a while be useful. Hopefully the bloggers won't continuet to erode that ability. Wait a sec.. dammit, now I'm part of the problem! Let's all shake our angry old man fist at my buddy Maulf who suggested this to me.