The Gaming Grid

I just read an article today that says the CPU has pretty much hit a brick wall in terms of physicality. What the hell does that mean? CPUs really can’t offer more than they do right now except for speed and at a cost of power consumption. Enter the GPU. Everything under the sun can run through the GPU now. It really has no limits to its functions. Hell, the things are being used as physics processors for games and rendering. Ever think that would happen? Oh, there’s more…

Apparently, Microsoft has been doing some major R&D into using old computers to create “Personal Assistants”. Again, what the hell does THAT mean? Well, MS wants to create a somewhat watered down AI program that can sense things. It can help you schedule things and offer help on others and even book airline tickets. Okay, how scary is it that MS wants to do something as innovative as this? Well, until it becomes used and shows major usefulness in many areas, I’m not really gonna worry about it. If Cyberdyne happens to be created within the next 20 years, then we can sh!t our pants.

I never would have thought the CPU would have limitations. I know companies have some major ordeal making things smaller for whatever reason, but the more things you cram into a small space, the more its going to expand that space whether you like it or not. Oh well if a CPU has to be bigger than an inch and a half if it helps with making it more effective at what it does or needs to do. I honestly wouldn’t have an issue having 2 separate units doing separate things. If I could have my CPU going 8 GHz because other things can be done on another processor on the board at 1 GHz, then so be it!

In the future, the GPU will become more effective and almost more needed if things are progressing the way Microsoft thinks and is showing it can. We’ve only barely touched the tech pool with what things can do. I think it has to do with the fact that engineers and programmers have “tunnel-vision” and see only one component being the answer despite the multiple abilities of everything else. It’s actually a great thing to see unused processor power being used for something other than nothing. Too bad it didn’t happen sooner.

… wasn’t all that great, to be honest.

Anytime I see a movie or series dealing with Street Fighter, I usually cringe, especially if it’s made in America. I know a lot of backstories and how characters intertwine and who is what and everything else, but the people who should know it, the writers, just take character names and make up a story. A prime example is the first live-action Street Fighter movie with JCVD in it. Guile, who is solely American, is played by a Belgian actor. I have to give it to him on two aspects: 1) the Flash Kick he manages to pull off twice and 2) he’s the only one who pronounces Ryu’s name correctly. When I saw it at the theater, I knew stuff was all messed up. E. Honda is now from Hawaii and not Japan like he’s supposed to be. Balrog is a good guy. Dee Jay is working for Bison. Chun-Li is a news reporter. Cammy is helping Guile instead of being with Delta Red. T. Hawk is a moron. Blanka is made up from Guile’s friend Charlie. Charlie is called Carlos Blanka. Dhalsim is the guy from the Temple of Doom and never fights anyone and never uses the Yoga noogie. Fei Long doesn’t exist. Ken and Ryu are thieves or something. Vega wasn’t bad, but needed blonde hair. Raul Julia did a good job acting as Bison, but his voice was too high for the part. Zangief was well conceived, but again, he works for Bison for some reason.

So there’s the nitpicking on the first SF movie ever done. I had major issues with it and even with this new Chun-Li movie, I still have them. Watch out for spoilers if you don’t want to know anything and plan on wasting $10 to go see it. I know I did…

The story is this: Chun-Li’s father is some very important businessman and not a Hong Kong police officer as he really is from her actual back story. He apparently is very influential and Bison kidnaps him to identify other CEO’s families so he can get them to do what he wants. Chun-Li’s mother, who actually died when Chun-Li was born/very little, has some disease and dies when Chun-Li is a teenager or whatever age she’s supposed to be in the movie. (That never comes up.) After her mom dies, she receives some scroll at a piano recital (another thing that’s odd…) and goes ot the city to see what it means. Some lady tells her to go find Gen and off she goes to Bangkok for some reason.

Basically, the movie is about Chun-Li running around slums and stuff looking for Gen. Gen is played by Robin Shou (Liu Kang from Mortal Kombat). Why? I’m not really sure. Yes I know he’s Chinese and is a martial arts expert, but Gen is supposed to be an old man with white hair and a long beard. In this movie, Gen is buff and doesn’t really have an issue moving around since he’s not old. Once she finds him, he helps her train while Bison kills a bunch of guys to get his way.

The fights in the movie don’t last long at all. Vega and Chun-Li’s fight lasts about 2 minutes, if that. He dies from being hung by his feet. At least, that’s what it looks like. Balrog fights Gen and gets killed by a steam pipe being injected into him. And the final battle… Bison fights Gen and then fights Chun-Li. She supposedly kills him and everything is fine again.

Charlie is in the movie, but doesn’t look at all like his character and is played by Chris Kline. He could actually be eliminated from the movie completely and it wouldn’t affect anything. At the end, Liu Kang, I mean, Gen, tells Chun-Li there’s a tournament posting (in the newspaper) and he’s going to look for Ryu (but says it like RYE-YOO and not REE-YOO). She doesn’t want to go along as she’s back home at her house with no parents… Although she’s not through with fighting.

I didn’t gain anything from the movie except that no one seems to grab the concept of the Street Fighter characters (or ANY video game, characters or not) at all. I think all they see is that these characters fight each other and some die. If there’s ever a video game movie that gets the characters AND their stories straight, I’d be amazed. Mortal Kombat ALMOST did that except they combined MK1 and MK2 characters together in the first movie.

You have been warned about the content of the Street Fighter: Legend of Chun-Li movie, so go see it at your own risk to your wallet. Man, I wish I was a director…

This is going to be a multi-part subject and hopefully the information here will help those of you who are curious as to what type of hardware you need and why it matters for gaming. I’ll touch the basic concepts really quick and go more in depth in later posts.

Todays computer games are becoming huge in size. Not just in scale, but in hard drive occupancy. Getting a bigger HDD isn’t too complicated really, but other hardware isn’t as easy as you might think.

The hardware basics:
-  CPU and Motherboard
-  HDD (hard drive disk)
-  Video Card
-  Sound Card
-  RAM (Memory)
-  Optical Drives (CD- and DVD-ROM)
-  Computer Case

So that’s the general list of what makes up a computer. We aren’t going to care about add-ons such as card readers or fan controllers or anything like that. I’ll go into the specifics of each category and also make some sample builds of parts you can buy now as well as make performance tiers.

Questions are welcomed throughout this write up and I’ll answer everything I can. I’ll put a Q&A at the bottom of each post with the questions pertaining to that category.

Okay, so this isn’t really about games or anything, especially since I’m talking about Macs in the first place, but I wanted to point out another difference in Macs and PCs.

One thing first: All computers are PCs. I don’t get why people keep calling Macs something different. “PC” stands for “Personal Computer”. Using this, Macs must not be personal computers. Those stupid commercials about Mac and PC are just that: stupid. What they’re really saying is OSX and Windows. Stupid crap happens on both OSes, so one’s not really better than the other. Before people start flaming me, I use both extensively.

Getting back to the point… We have a couple G5’s here. A couple weeks ago, one just decided not to work. Could’ve been a power surge that took it out or some other oddity. In any case, the video wasn’t working. The computer came on though as if nothing was wrong. After changing the video card, it still didn’t work. Since I know nothing about Mac hardware, as all 3 of the G5’s we have look totally different from one another inside, I had to schedule an appointment at the Apple store.

The tech looks at it and does everything that I already did to try and fix it. He then says that it’s probably the motherboard. In my head, I’m think that shouldn’t be all that much since it’s a desktop and a Windows equivalent at the most expensive is a little over $300. Well, he says that they’d also change one of the CPUs. Uh… There’s 2 CPUs in there and you’d only change 1? Don’t really know why they would do that in the first place. The next thing he tells me is crazy.

It was going to to cost $1875 to replace just those 2 things. He then said that a whole new computer was $2400, which had everything in it. So now that my mind is blown by the astronomically high repair prices, I decide then and there, I will never own one of these computers. You can’t buy replacement parts for the things ANYWHERE because Apple has to do it. Since it’s exclusive to Apple themselves, they can charge you out the ass for fixing their own crap.

Well, another case happened while I was there. A girl and her boyfriend and his friend were waiting to see if her laptop could get fixed. Mind you, this thing probably cost her $1200-1300. Don’t really know what the problem was, but the tech told them that it’d cost $875 to fix it. Her boyfriend was just as blown away as I was when I heard it. I could buy 2-3 Windows machines for that price.

Another thing I witnessed was a girl with a 1st gen iPhone. Apparently, the thing can’t hook itself up to a computer, or if it can, the tech sure as hell wasn’t going to let her do it just to save her phone numbers. The tech told the girl that if her numbers weren’t backed up, they’d be lost when they fixed it. She had to write them all down on a piece of paper. Awesome hospitality!

I know there are a lot of people out there that swear Macs (or I should just say, OSX) are the greatest things since sliced bread, but they never mention how much they cost to repair. Their retort to such a statement would probably be something along the lines of them never crashing as much as Windows. I see Windows as being more versatile and compatible with a boatload more apps and hardware than OSX. I damaged a thumb drive because I didn’t “eject” the damn thing. It’s called “plug-n-play”, not “plug-n-play-then eject before you corrupt all your data removing it from the USB port like you normally would”.

I’m not saying that Windows doesn’t have it’s share of problems, but at least when 1 piece of hardware fails, I can spend $100 and replace it without a hitch. Sorry, Apple. I’m never going to buy one of your computers as I can make a better machine with the same amount of money and with better components. If something goes out, I’ll replace that piece. It’ll be a helluva lot easier to get to it in my case than yours because you have everything so packed in there with aluminum and heatsinks the size of Godzilla wedged in there. Trying to go with “silent” operation, so you make the case weigh about 50 lbs. to do so.

Also, watch out for the unintelligent “Geniuses” they have there. One girl was explaining how to use the photo program in OSX and totally blew this old couple away. I found it funny that she told them to save a photo as a PDF then open that up and THEN save it as a TIFF because it would be a picture file then. That’s just too moronic in my book. Also, how do you save it as a PDF without Acrobat Pro? Did Apple take something from Adobe that I’m not aware of? Regardless of that, the girl is still a moron for telling these people to save it out as 2 different files. Very sad…

Those who like OSX, that’s great. Just hope nothing hardware-wise breaks as it’ll cost you an assload to fix it. I’ll stick with Windows and the lower cost of hardware.

I’ve been playing Left4Dead for the past couple weeks online. I’ve done the campaign in Single Player and loved having the AI teammates helping me. The same can’t be said for most of the real people counterparts. I’ll get into that a little later.

I thought that zombies were supposed to be dumb and slow. I thought they could only really lunge at you if you were within 5 feet of them. Apparently Valve wanted to make them completely opposite of the long standing, generic regular zombie and create something like a “super” zombie. The zombies can run VERY fast and can climb just about anything to get to you and never get hurt if they fall 20 feet. Also, when they “hear” some foreboding music, they come rushing at you from everywhere despite the fact they haven’t seen you. They just happen to know where you are. Yes, I know the music is just alerting the player the horde is coming.

Okay, so I’m totally picking the game apart and the whole aspect is to fight hordes of zombies that just happen to act like they all train for the Olympics by kicking your ass. I don’t think it’d be terrible to just replace the zombies with some kind of geneticly altered people that are sick and are now cannibals or something. With the way these things act, they really don’t seem like zombies to me. Just a science experiment gone bad.

The game itself is awesome and I love playing it, so don’t get me wrong there. The “story” and actions just don’t mesh with classic zombie behavior that I’m used to seeing in other games and movies. After playing the demo a few times, I just started noticing all of this. I ignored it because I was having fun, but I thought I’d rant on it. They piss me off a lot because the zombies can run faster than me at full health and when they hit me once, I slow to a crawl as I try to get away.

I guess the reason I’m picking it apart is because I played Dead Rising so much and just got really used to how those zombies acted. They were just all over the place and none of them ran toward you. They just shambled and acted like zombies. They’d pick up arms and start chewing on them and whatnot and you could distract them that way. Zombies aren’t supposed to be smart and cunning. They’re dumb and slow.

As far as your team goes on the other hand… The AI is far better most of the time helping you than real people counterparts. See… the AI is programmed to help you, not sit there and shoot you because they think its funny or not help because they don’t really care about your sorry ass getting mauled by a Tank or Smoker or Hunter. I can’t count the number of times where guys just started shooting me for no reason and started laughing about it. I then turn around and blow them away when I’m rescued and they start yelling at me about what I did. Hello? Are you a total moron with a REALLY short memory about you killing me for fun?

Sometimes when I’m playing, I’ll actually get kicked for not keeping up with some guys as I won’t be in their close-quarters, 1-foot trail that I’m apparently not supposed to leave while killing zombies and fending off Smokers and Hunters. Geez guys, its a game. It’s more fun trying to fight off a horde while running toward your buddy to see if you can save them. I’ve laughed my ass off many times because of that scenario.

I love Left4Dead, but am getting annoyed at the exploits and stupid people playing the game nowadays. I guess that happens to all games you play online. I find it funny then why developers keep making games where people can dump on your fun just because it’s possible. Give me the original Super Mario Bros. online and that would be great fun to play against someone.