So as you may, or most likely didn't, notice, I haven't made a blog post in awhile. Well if you read the last one you might be able to guess why. I've been playing on my new rig quite a bit. Out of all the games at my disposal, COD4 has been getting the most attention. I'm liking it a bit more. It still has a mountain of problems, and too often collapses into an irritating mess of "noob tubing and 'nade spam" as it is referred to. But, at least I am having fun with it.

I'm starting to branch out a bit more and build very specific builds for specific tasks. I have a stealth build, a defense build, a "shotty boom boom" build and my "You got noobed" build. Last night I killed my pure sniping build, sniping kinda sucks in COD4, and replaced it with a "Sneaky Saw" build.

This new "Sneaky Saw" build consits of the UAV Jammer and the Saw light machine gun as the key features. The other stuff is optional. This weapon is ridiculous. It has a ton of bullets, shoots at great range, shoots FAST, and does a lot of damage. The only downside to it is the reload time takes forever. However, that is an easy trade off for the advantage. I've been regularly getting wins in 1 v 4 situations if I keep alert and take cover. Many a cap points have been saved/taken with this thing.

My "You got noobed" build consists of RPG's and Martyr along with the overkill perk to carry a sniper riffle. I routinely warn everyone in the game that I am packing noob gear so watch out. I usually then walk around trying kill people by hip-firing with the sniper riffle. It gets amusing sometimes. Normally I do this when a round is just going poorly and I want to have fun instead. Yes, this happens both when I am winning and loosing. Destroying an incompetent team is not fun. Niether is getting destroyed because the rest of your team is incompetent.

My scoring has been getting better, but not as consistent as I would like. I often land in the top 3 or so, I'm pretty much playing HQ exclusively, and occasionally I can take first. Every now and then I land near the bottom after going 0-8 or something. Those rounds are when I go Noob and just chock up the round.

I often will be playing and get into my old mode of play that works so well in TF2. RUN!!!! GUN!!!! That doesn't work here. I have to make a mental reminder to check corners etc and then things start getting better.

Anyways. That's what I've been up to. If you play COD4 then feel free to add me on Xfire. The more people I know the better. I warn you though, I don't hold back on cursing out crappy players that aren't even trying. "It's HQ you idiots, not DM. You have NO reason to be camping on the other end of the map behind that dumpster...."

Laters.

I put together my new PC last weekend, and have it almost finished up today. Hardware wise, it's all done. Now I just get to work on the case and lighting etc. Here are the important specs:

Xfx 790i Mobo

QX6850

2 x BFG 9800GTXs for SLI

Corsair XMS3 PC10600

Tagan 1100w BZ Series PSU - ESA certified

2 x WD 140gig 10,000RPM Raptors in Mirrored Raid1 (I think mirrored is Raid1 at least.. not 100% sure)

LiteOn BR/DVD reader

ZEROtherm Nirvana air cooler

X-Fi "fatality" branded (groan) Sound Card

New G15 keyboard (the orange one)

I went with a Danger Den Water Box, but quickly found out that was a mistake. There is no 5.25" bay, and the distance between mobo tray and lid is not high enough for my air cooler to fit. I realize it's a "Water Box" and all, so going with air cooling seems foolish, but my intent was to go with air cooling for awhile, then upgrade to water later on down the road. Oops. Now I have to sell it off and get a different case. Hopefuly Danger Den pulls through and does a custom Water Box Plus (5.25" on these) with an extra inch of clearance for the lid. That'd be just about perfect. Until that happens I am going to have PC guts all over the place "torture rack" s.t.y.l.e. in the current case.

Also, I started off with 2 BFG 8800GTS OC 512MB cards, but after having them in for 3 days I woke up on monday to find out the 9800GTX cards were released. I quickly put the GTS cards up on Ebay and ordered two GTX cards. I ended up turning a profit on the GTS cards, of about $15 each, which was nice. However, the GTX cards made my 3dMark06 score go from 16500 to 16595. A grand total of 95 points. I wish I had done some more in-game testing with the GTS cards to know for sure how much of a difference these GTX's are really going to give me. Synthetic benchmarks don't really tell you a whole lot. Especially at the end of their life-cycle when CPU becomes more important with them.

Also, I started out with a Q6600 that my fiance was going to sell me for $150. She won a QX6850 at PDXLAN (I blogged a bit about it) and had installed it in her PC. She was getting a very minimal performance gain from it since her mobo is stuck at 1066 FSB vs. the Qx6850's 1333 FSB rating. With the Q6600 and 2 GTS cards I got a 12169 on 3dMark06. After swapping CPU's it jumped over 4k to the 16500 score. I was pretty stunned. She was too, so she told me to keep it. Yay me! (love that woman) If I ever sell it though, she gets the dough. I'll just have to burn a hole in it before it comes to that. ;)

The PC itself was actually the most difficult build I have ever had. I've built a LOT of PC's over the years, and this one easily had the most problems. I'll make a post about it this weekend probably. But to leave you with a hint of how things went... the last problem I had was solved by renaming a file from idecio.dll to Idecio.dll. Yes, just one capital letter fixed it. Don't ask, cause I don't know.

EDIT: I foolishly went through my Photobucket and "cleaned" out pics. One of the pics I deleted was the one I had linked above showing the rig in the first case I bought from DangerDen. Ooops. I have it now linked to a top down shot of the 9800GTX on the board with an 8800GTS that I took to show the comparison length of the cards. Here is a link to what it looks like now in the new case. Wires are still a mess, but I have a sleaving kit ready to go. I've never done sleaving before so this should be a learning experience.

I've been playing a lot of Overlord the last week or so. I had this game on my radar from the day it first released, checking the box each time I saw it at a store. I didn't end up buying it until recently. So far I have to say I wish I had got it sooner. It is definitely coming across as a "sleeper favorite" for me.

The game is basically a mix of Fable and Pikmin if you can imagine that. Both of those games are well worth a purchase and play-through if you haven't seen them yet. Yes, even Pikmin 2. The games look and feel just screams Fable, but the actual gameplay is very similar to Pikmin. Throw in a handful of RPG elements, item upgrading and health bar raising etc, and you got quite a unique package.

One of my favorite parts of the game is the sense of humor. The way characters talk and animate is this kind of campy ****that makes fun of a lot of the conventions in RPG's. The way the elves talk is especially humorous. Killing them is definitely enjoyable.

I'm just past the point where I have gained access to all the different types of minions, and based on what the reviews have suggested, this is where the game starts to get a bit difficult. Apparently the controls aren't quite up to snuff for what the game demands of the player. I can already see how this might end up being the case because I have already spent a bit of time wrestling with the controls. They are good, but could have used some tweaking. It just feels like you can't do exactly what you want to do nearly as fast as you want to.

I upgraded my graphics card a few days ago. I was previously rockin' an XFX 7950GT 512MB card. I upgraded to a Powercolor HD3850 512MB card. When I bought the card on Newegg I wasn't entirely sure how much faster it would be over the 7950GT, but after I installed it, it became clear it was a pretty big upgrade. It kind of makes me wonder why the 8xAGP interface was phased out so fast because it can clearly still handle quite a bit.

My best 3DMark06 score with the 7950GT was 5012. This was after OC'ing the crud out of both my CPU and the cards GPU/Ram. The 3850 snagged a 6449 out of the box at stock settings. Not too shabby!

I never ended up playing any games at the same settings the 7950GT was running at when I got it's best score because the card was getting super hot with the stock heatsink. I even tried finding a good 3rd party cooling solution for it but since it is not a reference design, almost nothing works for it. I found out about the HD3850 before finding a good solution. The "stock" cooling on the 3850 is actually a pretty massive copper heatpipe setup. It's basically a 3rd party solution out of the box. I realize these two cards are quite different, but the fact the new card runs 18 degrees celsius lower then the 7950GT says a lot. I've got quite a bit of headroom for heat if I decided to OC this new card.

Now that I have sufficiently pimped out old-ass PC, I'm finding myself really wanting to buy a whole new rig and turn this one into an HTPC.

I finished the entire campaign for Warcraft III today and decided to throw up a review immediately.

It's an awesome game. Just awesome. If you haven't played it yet, and you own a PC with a graphics card that cost you more then $20 in the last 4 years, then you should give it a try. Especially if you've played WoW at all. This game does a LOT to setup the events that are occuring in WoW. So many familiar names and cool moments.

I'm probably going to jump straight into the Frozen Throne expansion. From what I have read it's just as long or longer then the campaign I just finished. It took me about 22 hours to get through this one, so I am looking forward to another lengthy experience to wrap up a lot of the loose ends that were setup during this game.

I haven't even played the multiplayer! Not sure if I ever will. Not a whole lot of time for it. Maybe I'll take the woman into getting it and letting me steam roll her with my minions. Roar!

I've been playing a lot of Warcraft III lately. I've had the game for a long time, and have played through the human and undead campaigns several times, but never managed to get much further before getting distracted. I am almost done through the Orc campaign now and have to say that I find this particular play-through to be a lot more enjoyable then previously. I actually have a much stronger interest in the story this time through now that I recognize many of the characters from WoW. I freakin' killed Cenarius! That's was pretty cool. The graphics are pretty dated, but the art style goes a long way to cover that up.

I'm super excited about the elf campaign. They seem like the most interesting faction. I'll probably find myself firing up the Frozen Throne expansion immediately after finishing the original game.

I've had a pet project going in the Legacy Platforms forum for creating an icon that I mentioned it in a previous blog post.

Since that post there have been a few more submissions, and over the weekend I did a first round of voting. Today I removed the first poll results and started up the Round 2 voting. Since this thread has managed to get admin attention, it would seem that the winner will actually end up getting used, which is kind of cool. So if you feel so inclined, please drop on into the thread and drop a vote. I've made several updates to the original post, and all of the icons submitted are within that post.

Here is a link to the thread in the Legacy forums.

If you don't vote, and end up not liking the icon that is selected, it's your own darn fault!

I didn't think I would end up playing anything that could have been worse then the Superman game. Oh, how wrong I was.

The only even remotely good aspect about this game is the cover art, which can be seen online for free, and the transformations that you can do with the main characters. Beyond that, everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, about this game is just trash.

Infact earlier today after I took a dump in the bathroom I had to do a double take before flushing. I thought for a second that I had dropped my copy of this game in the toilet. But, sadly, it was really just an actual turd. Had it been the game I might have had a bit more enjoyment from flushing that time.

Well, I got knocked out of the Forza 2 tournament on tuesday, so I am feeling a little down on driving games. Instead, I felt like playing something completely mindless. The Transformers game finally gets some attention!

So far, it's pretty mediocre. The best thing about it is the highly detailed robot models, and the fact that you can hit one button to transform. Transforming is ALWAYS entertaining. Too bad the game is chock full of glitches and boredom. I may put up a video of some of the crazy glitches and weirdness that happen while playing, although that seems like a collosal waste of time.

You would think that after playing through the Superman game I would have learned my lesson. Sadly, that seems to have not worked and I still feel compelled to play through this entire game. At least I am getting achievements left and right!

I made a video of what happened during the first few minutes of my race today in round 2 of the Gamespot Forza 2 tournament. One of the guys that gets taken out early on ends up winning the race. I had practiced with him a bit before the actually tournament round, and he is a really good driver. He hits the lines perfectly almost all the time. The other guy gets too damaged to remain competitive. The guy that I took out masterfully, and when I say masterfully I really mean totally by accident, ends up getting too damaged to even really drive. The video makes it look like I did it with intentional precision, but I am just not that good at the game. I was trying to avoid him at the last second, but I just went straight into him. It all happened very fast.

I came in second thanks to some odd luck. I'd rather have a competitive race though. :(

[video=InxmxTer5bwEujHf]