The Gaming Grid

Well, with my latest episode over my latest 360, I got Kung Fu Panda for free. Now it has been a long time since I have played a full blo0d platformer. I was really excited about the games. Now I know that this is for kids since the movie was for kids, so I did not figure a very difficult game. What I got was a free fun game.

Now I really don’t feel like I need to talk much about the game, its your standard platfomers. There isn’t much missing, but also not added. It is a platformer there is not much to make this game work. So while I did like this game, I wondered if any of the people making the game had actually watched this game. Now I love watching movies, and since my 3 year old daughter has made me watch Kung Fu Panda 3 times a week. I know that game back to front.

So when the game comes out and there are these extra stuff that completely changes the whole meaning of the game, you wonder where they got this stuff from. It still wasn’t bad, but if the development team was working on this about the same time, if not a little bit before the movie, could then directly pull info from the movie production company?

This is a just the weird side of movies being translated to games for reasons. Usually when they go far off the actual story usually they already announced their death knell. The second is that the only character that is the same in the game as in the movie, is the master that trains Poe. All of the other characters do not have the same mentality as in the movies. But my thinking is that they did a decent job, is that they picked a simple enough game type.

Now, I know that most of the development companies that work are rushed because of the time line. They have to work on a shorter time line, and sometime cant get a good product out. I think this is now more prevalent in this console generation than ever. I would atleast say put this on your gamefly, but not worth it unless its under 10$.

So there I was, in a best buy store long time ago. I figured I had enough money to pick up my very first 360 with gears of war. I picked up a wireless controller and warranty on the console itself. Boy would I found out that, the warranty was the best purchase of my life. Now since I had been working for Best buy at that time, I knew what all the warranty meant.

When a console first comes out, they will not exchange them in store. They will have you call a number and they will next day ship one out. They just want as many people to buy the consoles from the store. Now if you pick up a console later in its life. you will find out that they will just swap them out at the store. Same day is very nice. I never though that I would be on my 3rd 360. Who knew?

Now I know I have said this before. If the games were not so good. I would have ditched the bitch a long time ago. There are a lot of games that I really enjoy on this console, and the online match making is amazing. Well, I should say the majority of online match making is very good. Some games mess it up, but overall I have a good community to play with. If I had this community for any online game, I would never quite.

Now most people wonder, Phil did you get the RRoD (Red Ring of Death)? No unfortunately I didn’t. Here is the run down of how my 360’s bought the farm.

1.) Pro. Video failure - Green lines would show up on the screen, and cause the console to lock up. This was on any game. At first it was temperamental, and did not do it all the time. So I did go awhile just wondering if it would come out and play. exchanged for Halo 3 edition.

2.) Was told that the Halo 3 edition had a new processor in it. This processor would help prevent RRoD. Now since my first one was not a RRoD. I figured that one of them would be. So I go home, plug this one up. I instantly notice I can connect to the internet. I go through all the troubleshooting, checking the router, the modem, nothing on that end seemed out of place. Great I just got this one, and its network card is shot.

3.) Take back the Halo 3, and upgrade to an elite. Now your thinking, those are not supposed to get RRoD, and they are super awesome. Well I would agree with you. I have it plugged up to a new 60″ TV and it is awesome. Well I should say I had that one plugged up to a nice TV.  I was playing and we lost power only for a few seconds. When the power came on, I had a RRoD. What the hell, this cannot be happening. I called support and told them what happened. I was told to exchange it out. So I did.

Now im on the new 360 elite. Now here is the funny thing I did not know, and soon found out. apparently there are 2 RRoD. The brick itself has some trip mechanism in it. When it detects some bad power coming on the line, it will trip. The light on the brick will go from yellow to red. Your 360 will show you the RRoD. You will get upset. Now when I went to the store. I just took the 360 itself in. They can do an even exchange, this is where you bring in just the console and you will leave with just the console.

Now, I left the HDD and everything else at home, I did not want to lose all my saved games again. When I exchanged out the console they had me grab one off the shelf. I noticed they now come with Lego Indian Jones, and Kung Fu Panda. WOW, I might get two free games with this. I point to the guy doing the exchange that my elite did not have these games, can I have them, or will I need to pay for them.  He told me I would have to pay for them.

When he was taking all the extra stuff that I did not bring, he packed the rest into the box, including the games. Now I did point that out, He said go ahead, they will just pitch them anyways. Sweet two free games. Now I’m walking out the store and go home. When I take the new 360 out I notice, they left the 120Gb HDD in place. Free hard drive. I plug in the 360, and I get the RRoD. Now how did this happen, its brand new.

Well, if you remember how I said there were 2 types of RRoD, the real one is when the processor over heats and frys. the second is the power short. All you really have to do, is unplug the brick for about 10sec, and then plug it back in. All was right as rain after that. So because I did not know any better, I just got 2 free games, and a 120Gb HDD. Now because im not a total tool, and I did not need another 120Gb HDD. I decided to give that to a friend who could use it.

Well, lets see how long this one lasts.

I’m a fan of first person shooters.  I’m not to sure what draws me to some and pushes me from others, perhaps quality of the game, maybe an engaging story line or two.

When the original Halo game came out for the Xbox, I was left out due to my owning of the far superior PS2.  Some may disagree with this sentiment, but those are obviously people that play Halo on a regular basis and continue to tell themselves that it’s a good game to be taken serious.  I played over at a friend’s house on occasion while I was either stoned or drunk enough to imagine I was having a good time killing annoying little dudes with annoying little voices and annoying little catch phrases.

That last paragraph means it should come as no surprise to you that I don’t like Halo 3.  I played for about an hour or so and realized I owned Fallout 3, which, when it comes to the third part of a game series, far out strips the Halo franchise.  There are a few reasons for this:

Fallout 3 had good games in the past.  The first two, while not in my preferred style of gaming, were brilliant and immersive.  There were choices to be made, people to befriend and enemies to destroy.  The third installment went a step further, turning it into an FPS and injecting a high dose of awesome into it.

The Halo franchise does nothing like this.  There is no interaction you have with others beyond putting bullets into them.  There aren’t any side quests and it takes absolutely no creative abilities necessary to make the plot line.  Go here, shoot some shit because of a thing, repeat.  You would think that the biggest gaming franchise Microsoft has among the 18-35 year old male douchebags of the would merit some sort of upgrade as the games went along, but there aren’t any.  You still shoot with the same guns and act in the same way.  Master Chief continues to be the same guy fighting the same war over and over without an end in sight, mostly because if there were and end, Microsoft would collapse in on it’s self and their design department of drunk frat boys would reabsorb into the collective douche.

The only thing Halo has ever had going for it was an extensive online player database, but wading into those waters will get you called all manner of horrific things if you’re bad at it, and eve worse if you are good.  Online multiplayer games have always suffered from this problem, and the way of solving it, playing with friends only, is hampered by the fact that I don’t have any friends that are retarded enough to play this crapfest.

Perhaps I was a little too judgmental on this game, but it had it coming. The release of this game was heralded on G4 as if it were the second coming of Christ as they held tournaments, countdowns and all manner of parties for a second rate game that wouldn’t have been given the time of day if it wasn’t championed by the idiot gamers of the world. It’s a travesty that these guys have been giving Halo 3 all of the laurels, yet Psychonauts hardly registers on their radar. If I hadn’t borrowed this game, I would have traded it in and then firebombed the store by now.

Your 360 can do better. You can do better. Pick up something with a bit of depth to it, a bit of story and a bit of fun. Pick up Fallout 3 or Mass Effect and play a real game that has replay value, and if you really feel a need to get yelled at online, you can always play End War.

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.