The log of the gamer

Strange thing just happened. I have installed Win XP over Win 7, which caused boot menu to corrupt - I could boot only XP’s, so after a moment of googling I’ve found EasyBCD - great and simple boot manager. Using it I restored Vista bootloader on the primary partition of first HDD, rebooted and the screen went black.

WTF, I thought for a moment BIOS had died again (remember my problems two months ago?) but then the computer boots, the HDD LED blinks vividly, so it’s running with no video. Then I thought ‘VGA dead’ with a smile - I would replace the crappy GF8500GE with something newer (HD4770/4830/4850 or GF9600GT/9800GT/GTS250), even started looking for warranty card. I even digged out some old S3 Virge PCI VGA which proved some of my theories - using it I saw the computer booting (bootloader was installed correctly), but then came the idea ‘what if I switch PCI-Express slots’.

Damn I hate those moments of truth.

Anyway, I put the 8500 in second PCI-Express slots, and it worked! Seems like the first (PCIEx16) slot went down to hell, so I quickly changed the configuration of PCIE slots from 16/2 to 8/8 (damn you DFI for those jumpers), reseated the VGA in the second slot and off we go.

Good thing is that I realized this could be the cause - I would spend money but the problem will be there still.

Bad thing is that I don’t know why and how this could be reverted.

The idea of web-based MMO is really old. All you need is to set up a site with database, store all user’s actions inside and probably do some interaction. Easy, huh? No wonder that people keep playing those for last 10 years or so.

For me first of those was Outwar back in 2003 - I played for about half a year, which was long time considering how simple (and stupid) the game. You had to post your link around the net and wait for someone to click in order to gain strength.
Then came Hattrick in which I spent about three years. Hattrick wasn’t so occupying - you could log on twice a week for 10 minutes to set up your team, pick up new player and probably arrange sparring in the middle of the week. At first, the game was funny - yet another football manager, but different, with lots of people around. Then the economy changed and I simply dropped - no fun anymore.

In the meantime there were few others - Travian (civilization-alike), The Crims or Monstersgame, to which I devoted maybe a month each.

Most time I spent at oGame, of course. I built two empires, one at universe 3 of ogame.org and second at universe 37 of ogame.pl. I had a friend who kept sitting with me all days and nights doing crazy actions. This stuff was really addictive, no kidding. Every time I see ogame now, I turn around, I don’t want to make the same mistakes anymore. Lost two years for it I guess.

Now I don’t want to indulge myself in such pleasures. I do have one account in erepublik (login phobosq, of course), but (at least that’s what I say to myself) it’s really innocent.

Be warned. Web MMO’s can take your life away if you’re not careful. That’s why I want to create one. if you come up with any ideas, contact me - maybe we’ll figure something out.

After three years of service and five or six removals it’s high time to change the house for my computer. I have chosen Sunbeam Freezing Storm for Core Fan technology and a window.

The case is very stylish, of course it’s black. It comes with all the accessories needed to mount your equipment inside. There are five 5,25″ bays, two (or maybe three - can’t really tell right now) 3,5″ ones, and three slots for mounting hard drives. There are also three 120mm fans included - one for the back of the case and two for Core Fan stuff (it’s just a bar in the middle of the case which allows you to have good air flow directed at your mobo).

I have disassembled my water cooling set and rebuilt it using new case. It’s superb, however, I still need little fixing - the hose coming into the case through PCI slot is squeezed - the temps are a little high due to blocked flow. I should have some time now - I get up before six every day, which gives me two hours before going to work.
BTW the case is a great birthday gift

In the previous post I have mentioned installing Prince of Persia, so now it’s time to go deeper into the story.

The game installed OK but then I had trouble finetuning video details. In the end, I chose 1024×768 medium details. The game looks okay, but I’m not the fan of hand-drawn characters. Besides, the difference between medium and high details is enormous - I switched to high for a moment and even if it was unplayable (low framerate) it really looks much better. Time for new VGA, I guess (should have known it while trying out World in Coflict lol).

About gameplay itself - it’s real arcade, which hasn’t changed much since Sands of Time six years ago. You have to run, jump, do some fighting, climb the walls etc… You can’t die - your partner in journey, Elika, has got some magical protection over you, so every time you fall from a distance or are about to die in combat, she saves you from trouble - you’re back in the moment before death would occur. This can be annoying during fights, but who cares?

I’ve played about an hour - passed the tutorial, completed the introduction in the temple and saw how the map works. While I have some more time, I’ll probably proceed further. For now - it’s worth the try. 7 out of 10, I guess.

I guess it was early December when I got Red Alert 3 and promised to have some fun with it. Well, it had to wait for a long time, my fault, but finally I’ve done it.

I’ve got a terrible cold, so I’m at home now, have some time off (work is exhausting, believe it or not - I don’t have time for playing then) so I’m having a bit of fun. I started Prince of Persia (later about it) and Red Alert 3.

I was wondering why some sites keep calling RA3 “sexiest strategy ever” until I launched it. I started, of course, with Soviet campaign and was really amazed by debriefing chick… the game sucks, I thought, that’s why the EA decided to make it interesting this way. Then it gets better, when you start Allied campaign, the chick’s even hotter. Unfortunately, the Japanese isn’t showing off at all.

The gameplay is fairly standard, so if you’ve ever played any C&C-like RTS, you’ll be familiar with it very quick. I think the only new stuff is extra bonus weapon, which is unlockable based on your achievement during mission. Soviets have magnetic satellite and a kind of orbital drop, I don’t know about the others - haven’t played that far.

By the way, the game has rather big requirements - I could play only 1024×768 with medium detail. The visual experience is rather poor then, so I guess that 8800GT or HD3850 is reasonable minimum for the game. If you wanna play in HD-resolution you’ll probably need HD4870 or something similar. Hope that Starcraft 2 doesn’t follow this trend.

Final judgement - nothing new, big requirements, poor graphics. I would recommend it only to C&C series fan. The score would be about 6 out of 10.

Just a quick post - I’m not going further into Fallout 3 as I have started over with King’s Bounty. New character class will be Mage - I’m level 3 now with difficulty level Hard (Normal ’s OK for beginning). More to come, as always.

After more than three months of struggle, I’ve complete my journey through Capital Wasteland. The time spent with Fallout 3 was so fun, that I decided to start over just to check what other possibilities are. I will report my progress from second approach, of course.

Speaking of game itself, it’s quite of a gem. At first, I was wondering a bit whether Bethesda ruins Fallout experience (I am die-hard fan of first two Fallouts) - there were lots of response on blogs and forums that F3 is nothing but Oblivion with guns. Yes and no. Indeed, you can sense Oblivion’s spirit, but the engine is tuned to post-nuclear reality just fine. Oblivion was astonishing with it’s candy-ethereal graphics, grass, leaves etc, but in F3 almost everything is dusty, wasted or rotting. This gives amazing sense while walking through ruins of something, what once used to be a great city, but now there are only winds of death blowing slowly.The leveling is dealt with also OK, but could be better.
The developers, sadly, didn’t avoid few bugs.

First of all, the enemies are morons, so to speak. They run purposeless all around, trip on mines, set off their own traps or just run all over the place. The game in 2008 should incoroporate a bit more sophisticated AI than just “run and shoot”, IMHO. Moreover, the enemies sometimes get some weird “speed” - Mutants or Raiders run several times faster than usual.

Second, it occured to me a few times to get stuck between bushes or trees. No further comments required.

Third, I stumbled upon some creatures in places they were not supposed to be at. There is an example of floating Centaur I made some time ago (there were more of those):

At the end, it took me about 68 hours of playing, so it is a lot. I haven’t explored a lot and, to be fair, have cheated with level cap - at the end I was level 22. I join those who say that the players gains XP too quick - that’s the fact. At least set the cap higher - around level 30 or 40.

Overall score - 8,5 out of 10.

In my previous post, I described an unlucky situation when BIOS in my computer got corrupted. I’ve been waiting to fix it for two days, when I finally hooked up with a friend of mine, who still happens to have computer with working floppy drive. Fine, I thought, I will do it quick and come clean out of this mess.

Not so fast. First it turned out that his computer is stored somewhere in the basement, so we had to go and pull out of the storage room. Then it appeared that the computer was dead, so we grabbed another one from the storage. This one booted fine, but after entering Windows it became clear that default account has only guest privileges and is unable to detect and install my flash drive I brought with. Damn the machine, we said, and went looking for a nice student in nearby dormitory who owns working computer and floppy drive.

Then this dude happened. First year postgraduate in chemistry, so I thought, it’d be real quick now. So I sat in front of monitor, pull the flash drive out of the pocket, but still something seems strange. Yeah, that’s fucking ubuntu at the desktop. Fortunately, he appeared to use Windows virtual machine due to his fondness of Office 2007, so after 10 minutes of installing floppy drive module and mounting disks I got it working. It took me an hour to make three bootable floppies with three versions of DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D BIOS.

Then I’m back home, put the floppy into the drive and damn! It won’t flash! It just hangs after reading BIOS image from the floppy. I thought floppy was corrupt, but no, two others acted the same. What the hell, I thought, and started to work with some strange runtime parameters for awdflash. Finally I’ve found the combination of awdflash /py/sn/cc/cd/qi/f to be working (actually /qi was the one to do miracles), but the nightmare’s not over. It’s time to assemble to machine again, what is the most annoying of all. Got still a leak in water cooling to catch, anyway.

The outcome is easy - never flash with overclocked/untested/unstable settings.

I came to an idead - DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D with 510-1 BIOS now is not the best of ideas, especially while using X2 processor. So I tried to flash to newer one, 3/29/06.

I used WinFlash as usual. While flashing the progress indicator stopped at 27% during programming flash memory and bang! computer rebooted. What’s left was:

Award BootBlock 1.0

Checking drive A:

INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

I don’t have a damn floppy with system and BIOS to flash!

I just got a pair of TCCD-based G.Skill 4400LE sticks. The set contains two 512 MB sticks built upon 437 TCCD chips on Brainpower PCB. The purpose was simple - get another 1 GB of RAM, and have total of 2 gigs running in my rig.

Didn’t have time to test it thoroughly yet. Right now they’re running @255 6-3-3-2,5 with command rate of 2T, together with mentioned earlier 4800LA’s. I may find some time the other day to see what maximum they can reach.

I almost forgot - they were dirt-cheap, paid 98 PLN (just over 20 euros) for it. Quality memory for a superb price.