As per the title – I’ve been playing Far Cry 3 – not a new game I know, but instead of buying new games (such as elite dangerous) I’m trying to actually play some of the games I have already purchased – generally in steam summer sales.

I know I am not alone in this endeavour, I have a few mates that are the same and I imagine there’s quite a few people out there with large steam libraries – of which they have not played a great deal of.

Anyhoo – I just finished Far Cry 3… and, well, that was impressive and fun… best game I have played in a while.
Some aspects of the story were a bit bizarre, but graphically it was great, the weapon variety and available upgrades were fantastic, the missions and stealth aspects were done quite well, in that you could go in guns blazing, or stealth, or a mix of both… I was a big fan of disabling the alarms via stealth then using the shredder to run around an finish the bad guys off.

In short – for those of you that also have a steam backlog (you know who you are) – I recommend putting Far Cry 3 near the top of your “play it at some stage” list.

I, like many nerds around the world, awaited the release of Starcraft 2: Heart of the swarm – had pre-purchased it and was pretty excited to play it.

Just finished the campaign – and geez, that was was disappointing.

To put this in context, Wings of Liberty is, in my opinion, the best RTS ever made…..  the single player campagin was awesome, with (mostly) fun missions (and a few pearlers), an adequate storyline, great look and feel… and fantastic multiplayer.

Heart of the swarm was just dull…… unengaging missions, terrible story (which just doesn’t flow from the previous games), new multiplayer units are pretty unexciting…. it is pretty ofcourse, and the cinematics are awesomely detailed…. but hard to watch if you are bored shitless by the story.

I have no doubt is that part of the issue is that expectations were so high after WoL – especially considering the wait time between games…. but either way, HotS, while definitely not a bad game, is a bit disappointing.

http://www.shacknews.com/article/75104/rise-of-the-triad-revival-announced-at-quakecon

cool!

old-school shooter with lots of boomies….. thats what us old-timers want! 🙂

a few days ago, i saw over at shacknews that Doom3 BFG edition has been announced….
Updated gfx, new maps etc….
I think this is a great thing….  along with the re-mastered versions of monkey island, upcoming baulders gate 1 & 2 etc… updating solid games with new engines etc is a great thing in general – as it allows you to relive the old game without constantly thinking about how dated it is.

What surprised me… (or maybe disappointed is the right word) si some of the comments flying around about it.

1) Doom3 was a good game… the expansion was a little average, but still playable and fun

2) “It’s a cash grab”…. ummm… people that want to buy it will… those that dont, wont. Last time i checked, companies are in business to make money – and if they provide a product that their target market wants… why bag them for it?

3) “RAGE was so bad that they needed to fall back on something decent” – RAGE was good…. not great… (and metacritic with an average of 79 would seem to support hat) – but fun to play and good enough that i would definitiely buy RAGE 2 if it was to happen.

Anyhoo – point is, im all for the re-makes….. updating classics is generally a good thing…. now if who-ever the descent and freespace series these days (parralax disapopeared a while ago) would do HD versions of them, that would be awesome… oh – and freespace 3 while your at it!

http://www.shacknews.com/article/73886/dice-64-bit-only-frostbite-games-coming-in-2013

considering its been impossible to buy a 32 bit processor for a number of years….

im also of the opinion that win8 should be 64 bit only……. as places that still have 32-bit only apps will still have the supported OS, Win7 to use for a number of years yet…. but meh – thats just my take on it.

So i grabbed an Xbox wireless receiever last week – so i can play PC games with a 1/2 reasonable wireless controller… for those that are better with controller.

Plugged it in, no PNP recognition (and its an MS devce – thats kinda odd…) – so select the device driver manually as is documented about 1 million times around the web – but officially here…http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933710

ok, no worries…. sets up correctly, but any controllers you try to sync with it just continually try to sync and never make it…

Apparently there are no updates found via windows update for this either…  but if you want it to ever sync, you need to grab the drivers from here – http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/d/xbox-360-wireless-controller-for-windows…

not difficult – but kinda annoying that not only is there no PNP for the device, but even once you manually force the correct driver, that updates are not found.

It’s been many many years since i played games online…. i used to play a lot of Quake 2 online, many years ago.

I also got into Starcraft 2 when released – great game… and very addictive multiplayer. I stopped playing it for a few months, as i found i was addicted! Re-installed it and had a few games this week – and was quickly reminded why i stopped playing it. It seems the most popular comments in game are “fag”, “gay” and “noob”… sure every now and again there is someone that can actually string a sentence together, but mostly it seems to be random strings of text such as “uz is gayz” and “u sux noob”… and these seem to increase in frequency should you actually be winning.

Sometimes i query the comments and find out that “gayz” and “fagz” are apparently bad…. “Noob” apparently cannot be explained and queries are met with a further comment “u is noob” or other illiterate rubbish.

It worries me a bit that we have a generation (most of them are in their teens – or so they say) that seems to hate gays so much (well done christian organisations, you seem to have achieved one of your objectives) and have such difficulty forming sentences – and when giving them crap back – they cant seem to do anything other than say the same things over and over…. geez, if your going to talk smack – at least be good at it!

A few weeks a go, a mate of mine mentioned that he was looking a getting a network TV tuner…. “they’re readily available these days?” i asked…. as i just hadnt thought about it for many years…. sure enough he pointed me to

http://www.jbhifi.com.au/computers/accessories/kaiser-baas/network-tv-tuner-sku-67777/

http://www.kaiserbaas.com/kaiser-baas-product-page/tv-tuners/network-tv-tuner

picked one up, installed it today (was waiting on some other cabling to get finished) – and it works well… quite well. I dont have any wireless G devices anymore to test on…but is all good on wireless N and (no surprise) gig wired connections. Setup was as easy as plug, plug, plug (power, antenna, ethernet) run the supplied DVD…. auto downloads the latest firmware, a simple wizard for config, then config Windows media centre to use it…. very easy….

Handy for when the missus is watching some crappy soppy movie and the cricket or footy is on!