Today marks another milestone in gaming history with the release of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV. The impact this series has had (not counting GTA 1-2) has certaintly caught alot of attention with its immoral values, graphic violence, "adult" entertainment, and just in general looked down upon outside of the gaming community as a harmful game that should be marked with a surgeon general's warning label along with the M rating. After hearing some commotion about the game the instant I turned on my radio this morning, I started to think about games that I loved as a kid and how they impacted on my life. Super Mario Bros. was my first ever game that I played when I was about 4 or 5 and all I can really remember was that terrifying first big hole where you had to run THEN jump. I remember being frustrated but I kept trying until I eventually somehow found out what I had to do to pass that part of the first stage. Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers was my first co-op game for the NES and I learned how much fun it was to cooperatively work together to finish the stage (and how funny it was to also pick up and throw your friend across the screen).

As I grew older, I played even more games and it's all been a blur of good memories had by myself and/or with others. I'm a generally good and considerate person (or I'd at least like to think I am) and I definitely do not want to bring about harm to anyone or anything, although I do love the FPS genre and I have played my fair share of GTA and other similar games. I feel that since I play many games that involve some kind of puzzle solving or precise movements with analog sticks or the mouse and keyboard, that I have an easier time solving problems (especially with my hands, like building or taking apart something), decent eye-to-hand coordination, and can learn fairly quickly (especially anything electronic related). As far as morals and values, I mostly learned those from my parents (who did not monitor my gaming in the least and let me played as long as I wanted, generally) but I think that since most of the games had me trying to save someone or thwart some kind of evil force, I can't deny the fact that I generally want to be looked upon as a good person (or hero lol) and always want to try to do the right thing. I'm no saint, but I definitely live an optimistic life where I hope I can help contribute to the world in a positive way.

Not wanting to turn this into another story about proper upbringing vs. adult interactive entertainment, I was just wondering if any others had similar past gaming moments where they felt like they accomplished something as complexed and difficult as a math problem or learned how to play well with others, etc. Have games impacted your life in a positive way, and if so, would you expose those games to your own children and use games in general to be a tool to help instill morals, values, etc.

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This is just not my week for gaming. After downloading an update on Thursday (or Friday, can't remember really...) my 360 started freezing on me while playing the Battlefield: Bad Company beta. I didn't think much of it at first and thought it was the beta that was causing the problems but I started to notice that my 360 would begin to freeze right on start-up at the logo screen. Finally, I tried watching a movie on it yesterday and it played about 2 minutes of it before it froze again. I switched it off and hoped it would be better today but it looks like the inevitable happened, I got the red rings of death.

I've run into some trouble lately with one of my games that I purchased off of the well known online game distributor, Direct2Drive. Before I get into the issue, I will say that I've never had any issues with D2D's support and ordering games from them had been an easy and painless process. Purchase through secure Paypal, download as fast as my connection allows me to (which is a few hours), simple installation and activation and play. It was a good way for me to find and download games that I wanted to play....that is until I ran into trouble activating my game that I paid as much as a regular hard copy that could be found in-stores and with no need to activate through SecureRom or stuff like that.

ArmA is a unique Military SIM that I've been dieing to play lately.

Over the past year that I owned this digital download version of ArmA (as it's called, weird acronym for Armed Assault: Combat Operations, but whatever) I've made a few changes/upgrades to my PC. Some were minor like re-formatting to a different OS while others were major like upgrading to an SLi setup and finally, my latest CPU upgrade. Now, I can understand the need of an anti-piracy process like activating your game, tieing it with your hardware to make sure that your copy isn't spread around to all your buds, but there should be a quick and easy way to deal with activating your copy of the game that you purchased, after all this is supposed to be an equivelant to purchasing the game from the shelf right? Anyway, upon re-installing my copy of ArmA, it brought me to the Activation screen which follows the installation of the game. I click on Activate Online (the normal and easiest method of activating your game) and it proceeds to tell me "Activation Failed: Limit of Activations Exceeded: Contact Customer Support". Great, I tell myself, I forgot that I had used up the 3 different activations on 3 different systems, oh well, I'll just contact D2D's support and hopefully I can play tomorrow night. So I log-in to D2D's support page and open a ticket, explaining my situation and requesting a new activation code. I recieve an automated response within seconds telling me to look at some FAQ's concerning my issue and that a Support Agent would not get in contact with me unless I replied back with the Unlock Request Code (pulled from the Product Activation prompt). "Wow, I won't even receive actual support until after I go through all this? Oh well I guess they get tons of support tickets every day, I can understand" I thought, and filled out the Unlock Request Code before I went to bed.

This sort of frustration brings this scene from Office Space to mind.

Fast Forward 4 days. I still haven't received a single word or even another automated response concerning my issue. I've updated my support ticket with several pleas on receiving support over the past days, no word from D2D's Support at all. I look over the automated response... "We have received your request for a new key or activation and a support agent will respond within 24 hours to your request." is placed in the message as a reassurance that someone will get to me very soon, but I'm still waiting for some word about anything other than the first automated response. If Direct2Drive is going to offer digital copies of games that require Activation, then they should definitely make sure that their customers go through that process as easily as possible. I mean, people could very well go get a hard copy of the game (which I'm sure many still do to avoid these kind of problems) which would hurt their sales. Activating your game is necessary, I'm not complaining about that, but if there is a case in which you can't activate your legit copy of the game that you paid for, and the instructions that pop up say to go contact D2D customer support, then by all means D2D has the responsibility of taking care of the issue, and in the timely manner that they said they would. 24 hours is understandable. Heck, 2 days of waiting would be ok with me, but not updating the ticket or getting back to me after 4 days just brings the impression of "Screw you unless you're going to give us more money".

Yeah, yeah, I understand that issues like this never happen if you buy a hard copy of a game, but there is a market for downloadable content out there and the need for support on what you purchase and download should be at the same standards as purchasing a physical copy. Money is the same, no matter how you spend it, and if you're going to give your customers lousy support on products that are broke, faulty, or just have issues, people will stop putting up with you and go somewhere else, it's just the way it is. I'm not trying to tell people how to spend their money, this is just another warning from an unhappy customer of Direct2Drive's support service for their games. As far as me, I don't plan on purchasing anything else from these guys and will try and stick to games that don't require this kind of activation, and if they do at least I can have a telephone number to call and not rely on online-only support. Anyways, sorry about the rant, just needed to vent off some steam. I'll be sure to update you guys if and when I recieve support.

Back to retail stores for now, and no I've never played Fight Club for Xbox.

** 6 Days and counting, still waiting for support on my issue :(

** Finally received support 6 days after submitting my ticket, unfortunately now I can't even activate the game even though I have a new license for activation. The prompt just hangs after I click Activate. I re-submitted my ticket and I'm re-downloading the 2.8 GB setup file. Hopefully this mess will be cleared up by today...

** Resolved! The activation finally went through when I re-downloaded the game. If D2D support would have just responded sooner saying they needed more time, I would have happily waited. Unfortunately, I can't overlook how long it took just for them to respond and I don't plan on putting myself in the same situation again.

Hey folks, looks like I haven't updated this space in awhile. It seems like I might have made a misjudgement on how frequent I could make those video reviews like I would like to, so I'm shooting for at least one per month from now on (just goes to show my time management skills). Anyway, I recently ordered one of those new Wolfdale CPU's from Newegg (if you haven't heard of Newegg check them out, they've got some really great prices on everything Computer related and then some) and the performance is amazing. Out of the box, it can run at 3GHz and has a new instruction set, smaller core, and requires less voltage than the 65nm. The secret sauce of this CPU though is it's ability to OC like a beast. I've been able to push it to 3.8GHz, stable on air! Coming from a water-cooled e6600 that could barely push 3GHz and around 1.4V, this is a major improvement. The price of the CPU is around $200USD which is definitely an affordable option for anyone who is looking for a decent dual-core.

On the gaming side of things, I'm slowly progressing through WoW. I started a new character with some friends on a PvP server and it's been good so far, I think I definitely like the danger atmosphere of a contested zone rather than feeling safe 100% of the time on a PvE server. I also signed up for that Age of Conan PvP Beta that's going to be running next weekend, I signed up for the original beta a good while ago but never heard from them, hopefully I can get into this one, I've been keeping an eye on that MMO and it seems to have some fairly interesting new ideas for interactivity with the world and PvP clan battles. Anyway, until next time!

For those who were expecting another video review, I've got some disappointing news, no video review as of yet. Sorry folks, been kinda busy (or lazy) with nonsense and playing some games (I know, shame on me). It'll probably get posted on Friday, I'll probably try and do 2 quick reviews to make up for the lost time. In the mean time, I've been drawn back to World of Warcraft after about a 1 1/2 year hiatus. I picked up Burning Crusade but I haven't tried out the 2 new races yet, I mainly got it so I could be up to date in the WoW universe and also to open up those new zones where I can find superior gear (or so I hear) as opposed to the regular WoW zones. It's amazing how much the game has been changed and patched, I really gotta hand it to Blizz (or ActiBlizz now) for their top notch support for all of their games, it truly has paid off.

On the Tech side of things, nVidia released their 9800 GX2 which is essentially 2 9800 GPU's on one card. In theory, this card is smoking with 256 stream processors split between the 2 GPU's, 1GB of GDDR3 512-bit interface @ 2GHz and 600 Mhz core's. After reading up on some benchmarks, the card edges out over an 8800 Ultra and 3870 X2 but not as much as I would think or expect from a dual-GPU card, although it's probably too early to tell since the drivers were just released and need to be optomized/tweaked. This card is definitely a smoking piece of hardware and having a pair to SLi would grant you 4 GPU's which would blow any PC enthusiast's mind. The card is, of course, freaking expensive at around $600, although not much more than what the 8800 GTX was available for 2 years ago. Intel also made available their new 45nm Core 2 Duo Wolfdale processors and I'm hearing amazing results from this new line of CPU's being able to easily O'C past 4.0GHZ on air alone. Lots of good tech coming out this year, too bad we're in a recession (although it doesn't feel like it yet, maybe I've been gaming too much).

Well I finally got around to posting my first video review on Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It definitely could have been alot better but I got my point across. I plan to release at least one video review every week, so keep an eye out for those if you're interested.

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In other off-topic news, my PC recently just took a nose dive due to some serious overheating that I was unaware of. Apparantly, my water-pump for my water-cooling kit died on me earlier today, causing my CPU to reach a temp of 100 C before shutting off. I frantically pulled out all the tubes, cpu block, reservoir, etc. and popped in the old stock heatsink+fan and was glad to see my system boot up without a hitch. I'm kinda disappointed though, that pump didn't even last a year and I poured over $100 into it. I think I'll just stick with a high-quality heatsink+fan for now, I'm just glad my CPU didn't fry in the process. I'm just glad that my rig didn't die on me while I was capturing/editing the video. Anyway, until next time...

Although I can't say I'm a die hard fan of Smash Bros., I also can't deny it's greatness in gaming history. So I found myself with a last minute pre-order on Friday night and picking up the game on Sunday at 12:01AM at my local GameStop. The line wasn't really too long and I was in and out within 15 minutes or so, although it probably helps that there are three GameStop's within 5 minutes of eachother to help thin out the lines. I got home and was lucky enough to have a working copy (read the horror stories in the forums about the game not working and having to send both the console and game to Nintendo, yikes!) and promptly played through the game's new adventure mode, The Subspace Emissary, which was pretty fun although I have to say the storyline was pretty transparent, but hey, you punch dudes in the face and knock them off the screen with your awesome Nintendo characters, do you really need a storyline? Everyone knows the versus mode is where this game truly shines anyway, so I'm not really disappointed with the game. I'll probably try and post a proper review later on this week, but if you miss the old days where you and your buds had a proper party game like Melee or GoldenEye, go ahead and do yourself a favor and pick this one up.

Since I had a few people ask me how I recorded my footage from the Forza tourney, I decided to put together a brief walk-through on how to do so. Sorry about the low volume on the first part, I don't really have a good mic setup and the built in mic on the webcam picks up alot of white noise so I had to use my headset mic. This is just a simple setup on how to record footage from your 360, albeit only standard def, the footage comes out pretty nicely on your PC. So, if you're interested in how to record some live gameplay footage from your 360, I've posted the video below.

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Well, I finally met my match tonight. Actually, these guys were really good. After sliding off the track a few times, I finished in 4th by a long shot. Gatz, who placed 1st, pulled off some impressive lap times and set a best of 2:02 on Sebring Long. I have to say that the tournament finals will be very fun to watch as these guys are some seriously skilled drivers, so I'm definitely going to tune in and watch. In the mean time, I'll probably get back to playing Lost Oddessey and pump out some reviews or whatever.

I'm also going to post the race footage for my final match, but instead of watching me struggle for fourth place I'll spotlight Gatz who dominated in 1st place. Good luck to whoever is left tomorrow!

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Last night's race displayed some serious skills and some dirty racing. Luckily, I was able to duck underneath everyone after the 2nd turn and keep my place for the entire 10 laps. Someone did tap my rear bumper and I was slightly damaged but I hardly noticed a difference. The guy behind me however looked like he had some trouble with his engine because he didn't seem like he was going at full speed. The battle for third place was where all the action was since the guy in 1st place and I had a considerable lead on the rest of the pack. I guess since we're entering the final elimination phases of the tournament people are going to fight a little harder to stay in, and I guess that's what the rest of the pack was thinking since they were slamming into eachother, knocking eachother out of the way, and scraping sides throughout the race. Laguna Seca does make for some close racing, especially at that wicked evil S turn.

Tonight's race is at Sebring Long, a little more forgiving than Laguna IMO, but definitely longer. If we can all get through the first couple of turns without taking eachother out, I think this can turn out to be a clean, fun, race since there's more room to pass here. I have to admit, I haven't had this much excitement from Forza 2 in forever, but this Tournament just shows how much fun a sim racer can be. I'll continue to record my match tonight and hopefully I'll report back with some good news, if you want to see yesterdays match, I've posted it below. The first few minutes are pretty entertaining.

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