Ever play six-degrees to Kevin Bacon? Fun concept. Anyhow, try this one out for size.
Me...
My (now retired) friend Jimmy...
His (now grown up) daughter...
Warren Spector.
O_O
She works directly for Warren Spector at Disney. Warren-freakin'-Spector. One of gaming's royalty.
When I found out I texted her telling her how jealous I was!
Well, right now the blog plans are on hold. I'm talking with one other person, debating doing it tag-team style. Fair bit needs to be worked out first.
I've got one project that I'm researching right now. I'm hoping it could bring in a little money every month - we'll see. I find that expectation management is an odd thing. I don't want to be negative, yet I don't want to get my hopes up too high. Fortunately the project won't require any capital on my part. Lower risk is nice! The tradeoff being, of course, that the payout is lower as well and I still would have to do all my own footwork promoting it. For the time being I find that acceptable.
Big news: Reworked my budget and other things into a highly aggressive plan to eliminate my remaining debt. If everything goes as planned (no setbacks, I don't cheat on my budget, etc) I will be out of debt come April next year. Let me just say - YAY! Thank you Dave Ramsey :D
I just paid off my credit cards ahead of schedule because of this movie. I was, well, disgusted. Pure and simple.
What I hate is I found out later that some property managers run credit checks on prospective tenants, and even some jobs do so as well. I know that the insurance industry wants to do so also, and if you've got poor credit? Up go your premiums.
Yeah, talk about rigged, you know?
Anyhow, back to the plan. If there's a Financial Peace Universitygroup going on near you? I can highly recommend it. Thanks to Dave Ramsey I'm getting control of my money. Not always perfect - I screw up still - but I'm worlds ahead of where I was before. Definitely worth the money I paid (almost $100).
If I can keep on goal and budget, I can pay off ALL my remaining debt in 18 months.
This concludes my "old man" rant. Now, if you'll excuse me, there are some kids on my lawn.
1. See how much it would cost to get a blog started. A hosted one, not a free-one.
2. See how many of my hobbies could be written about in a regular manner.
3. See how many of my hobbies are serviced by online stores with affiliate programs.
At worst? Its an experience. Hopefully? It'll be a self-sustaining hobby (ie, commissions cover costs). If I'm lucky? I'll make some decent pocket change.
Why do this? Because, well, I do like to write. But also, its attempting to get some of the online purchases out there to benefit my local economy. Makes sense to me. Since our only locally-owned comic shop, game store and kitchen shop went out of business in the past few years, folks are either going to large stores like Borders, Gamestop and Macy's, or shopping online. I don't mind folks shopping locally, even if its a big store because some of that money stays here. But when they shop online? Nothing stays here.
So, I might as well try and get some of that money redirected my way.
At the moment I'm downloading Prototype, newly bought from Stardock's Impulse service. On another forum I go to, I basically asked, "Hey, sell me on this game. Should I get it?" When I began listing things I wanted, I noticed a few things...
1. Game length is not really important to me anymore. Super-long? Super-short? Average? Didn't come up. That's something I used to knock games about, but now it doesn't seem to matter so much for me.
2. Play sessions, on the otherhand, are important. I played, beat and enjoyed a number of games in the past year - Gears of War 2, Fable, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Devil May Cry 4, etc. But unlike even a few years ago, I didn't do it through long marathon sessions, where its just me, a bunch of Mountain Dew, and playing sun-down to sun-up. Instead, I've been playing an hour or two one weekend, then getting back to it another weekend, and then another weekend, repeating until I've actually completed the game. So I asked, "is Prototype friendly towards this way of playing?"
3. Linearity. Will I get lost playing this? I used to think that sandbox style games, the "go anywhere, do anything" style of play was the peak of gaming. Until, well, I tried playing one (Morrowind) and finding myself lost as hell. That's something I liked with Batman, Fable, etc., is that I had clear goals to go to. Now, yes, I could goof around getting to them and such, but there was still that drive in a certain direction. Sorry - I don' have the time or inclination to play a game where I need to take tons of notes anymore!
4. I didn't ask about system requirements. Now, this I have to thank the industry for - Games for Windows (among others) have really improved the honesty of minimum system requirements for games. When I bought Devil May Cry 4 I just made the requirements. What did I get? A game that performed excellently on my computer! Not "turn down all the details, resolution, and how its playable" like computer games of old. It was very good looking, very playable, and only got better as I upgraded hardware. So when I see Prototype wanting at least an X-cpu, Y-much RAM and a Z-video card? I bought with confidence - my computer should handle this game quite well.
Also worth noting is I'm wishing I had more and more of my PC games available in a digital format. I can't find my Gears of War key anywhere, for instance. Bummer. Devil May Cry 4 needs to be in the drive. Blah. When upgraded my computer to Windows 7 recently (was on the release candidate) all my NCSoft, Steam and Impulse games just got re-downloaded with almost no fuss on my end. Do I like physical media? Yes, I do. But at the same time, digital distribution seems to be a lot more friendly for me... no more losing discs (where is my copy of the Witcher again?), no more losing keys (Gears, likely Witcher), etc. No, I can't trade them in, but honestly, I'm not so worried about that anymore. The fact I can better support publishers/developers I like by buying new honestly has more appeal to me now than it did before.
Anyhow - its an hour and a half after I started my download, and I'm at 60% of it having come down already (7.34g for the whole game). Hopefully I'll get around to a nice play session today between laundry, housework and the like. But, I have to say its very interesting to see how I've changed a bit over the years.
Anyhow - happy gaming, folks!
Noting the lack of any sort of performance benchmarking using City of Heroes, I began to wonder if there was any sort of benchmarking aids out there. Most tech sites have their choice games along with specific content they run through so they can have repeatable, predictable results. Nothing like that existed for COH to the best of my knowledge.I went looking on the official boards to see if there was anything. Nope! I then searched the mission architect. Not there either.
So I created arc#385083:Psyte's Benchmarking Arc v0.1.
You will receive no tickets or XP for doing this arc.
All missions will be on the same map: the burning Arachnos base.
#1 - no enemies. This will provide a baseline.
#2 - 8 patrols of Longbow.
#3 - 4 patrols of Longbow, 4 patrols of a custom enemy.
#4 - 8 patrols of a custom enemy.
The custom enemy is very special-effects heavy. It has Hurricane, Steaming Mist, a loud aura, the magic bolero (cape-like elements plus see-through in parts), and a shiney helmet.
I recommend turning your difficulty up so the game spawns mobs for an 8-player team.
For reference, I'm getting used to playing at 1920x1200 @ Recommended settings. Usually I'm 45+ FPS, many times staying closer to 60fps. The very last test can get me under 10 fps.
Hopefully folks will find this to be a useful tool and point of comparison when making upgrades and such! :)
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/3/4/nvidia-retracts-whql-certified-gpu-killing-drivers.aspx
Recently, nVidia posted a WHQL driver "Release 196.75". The driver brought WHQL-certified support for nVidia ION, recently renamed 300-series cards, Optimus-enabled GPUs and many more. However, the driver was quickly found to prevent the fan from spinning and caused a death of multiple graphics cards around the world.
Yes, you've read that correctly - the drivers had an extreme version of issue nVidia already experienced last year with one of past WHQL-certified drives, when the drivers broke fan control on custom-built GeForce cards. Unfortunately for a lot of customers, Release 196.75 brought nothing else but tears, as Internet Forums started filling with complaints about graphics cards that started to die out, most notably during Blizzard's StarCraft II beta test. Activision Blizzard was also first to react and made an official comment on the state of the drivers, advising its customers and testers to immediately go back to previous driver revision, i.e. Release 196.21.
We contacted Bryan Del Rizzo, nVidia's PR Manager for GeForce for comment:
"We are aware that some customers have reported fan speed issues with the latest 196.75 WHQL drivers on NVIDIA.com. Until we can verify and root cause this issue, we recommend that customers stay with, or return to 196.21 WHQL drivers. Release 196.75 drivers have been temporarily removed from our Web site in the meantime."
Given that the most users that reported their graphics cards have died were using a custom-built boards featuring nVidia's favorite renaming chip of all times, G92 GPU [8800GT, 8800GTS, 9800GT, 9800GTX and the subsequent 55nm die-shrink: 9800GTX+, GTS 250]: GeForce 9800GT, 9800GTX and GTS 250 were particular victims of this issue.
The biggest question that now remains is how fast nVidia will handle this situation with the physically damaged users, as it is clear that board vendors will have to accept RMAs for the cards, and if there's one thing that we heard from nVidia partners here at CeBIT, that was a collective opinion that they've lost faith in the company. This driver situation certainly didn't help the situation and we see no other but to address those concerns in a separate article.
How to roll them back.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/driver_rollback.html
Hopefully noone here has had this issue.
And NO gloating. This affects your fellow gamers through no fault of their own.
An interesting question, certainly.
I know for myself that right now I'm playing most all my games at default settings or better. My CPU's level of performance is pretty much entry level these days, my video card being more low-end.
Holy hell you should see how nice Batman and Mirror's Edge look. I haven't tried Mass Effect again yet since the CPU upgrade, but I'm sure I'll be a noticeable improvement. I'm really wanting to try Assassin's Creed and Prototype while I'm at it (are there demos?).
I think its safe to say that anyone claiming you need a $2,000 computer to play games decently is out of step with what's actually out there. Right now I'm pondering NOT upgrading my video card, an $80 Radeon 4670 running at stock speeds. Why bother? I'm running everything at nice resolutions with good details and steady framerates...
Holy crap, Batman! That's 75% off!
Tell you what... between Steam, Impulse and now Games for Windows? I don't think I'll ever miss a good deal again on PC gaming. Especially since the local retailers barely pay any attention to PC games anyhow.
Buying it tomorrow after I get paid :)
edit: Got it.
Had to buy it from the Games for Windows client, which is okay but I wish I could've bought it from the Games for Windows website too. That aside, it was quick and easy (they have my credit card on record from my dealings with Xbox Live), very painless.
Games For Windows has the potential to be a nice platform, but its got a long way to go. What it dos it does pretty well, which is good. I think its a good, competent foundation for the future. Sadly, there's a LOT of stuff its missing, especially compared to Xbox Live. The client is a marketplace pretty much, and that's it. No friends, no chatting, messaging, etc. Otherwise the interface is nice and clean, albeit uninspiring.
Right now I'm going to have to say that its behind Impulse (my favorite) and Steam (the best platform right now), and notably so. The selection is the smallest of all of them, it lacks the features/functionality of the others, and more than that has far more potential than its reaching for.
Its not BAD, don't get me wrong. Its just... it could be so much more. So much better. Especially when you look at Xbox Live or Zune/Zune Marketplace. Microsoft is capable of better. Microsoft has delivered better.
Anyhow, downloading :)
I'm happy :)
SFIV's benchmarking put me at an A.
I went from playing City of Heroes at 1280x1024 @ performance (30-60fps) to 1920x1200 @ recommended (50-60fps).
My Windows Experience thingie went from 4.9 to 7.1 for the CPU subsection.
Still doing more "testing," but man... its awesome.
Nicely spent $100 upgrade :D
update:
Mirror's Edge is still at low-res (can't remember what I have it at) but is running MUCH smoother now.
Demigod is went from low-res and low detail to 1920x1200 with most things at medium detail.
I'm dying to put Devil May Cry 4 back on my PC right now! :D
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