Miscellaneous comments pertaining to computer games that interest me.
I’ve spent another fun day banging my head against a brick wall. The light I’m starting to see is from the cracks in my skull…
I downloaded Battlefield 2142 via EA Link yesterday. Being a good little user, I also downloaded and installed the v1.20 patch before even trying the game. I figured that one of the main reasons for a patch on a game that was released late in 2006 would be to improve Vista compatibility, so why bother even trying the unpatched game.
| Title | Tomb Raider: Legend |
| Developer | Eidos Interactive |
| Type | Third person Action |
| Platform(s) | XBox 360, Windows, Playstation 2, Gamecube… |
| Kelly Score ™ | 80 / 100 |
I’ve been playing with my XBox 360 quite a bit lately. One of the features I enjoy is it’s online match up, content, and “game tracking” service, XBox Live.
I originally signed up with XBox Live when I bought my original XBox (I.E.: before I bought the 360). It was really a poor investment- I played the old-style XBox for about three weeks, and bought (and renewed!) a full year subscription to XBox Live. That’s two years of XBox Live, and I’m really only starting to use it now. You might be asking…what is XBox Live? And why would I care unless I have an Xbox?
Continue reading XBox 360, XBox Live, Gamer tags, and the future…
I decided to play a little bit of Lego Star Wars II tonight. It’s a cute game, essentially a “platformer” with very prettily rendered 2.5d graphics. That one sentence summary is doing the game a disservice- it’s quite large and reasonably faithfully reproduces the stories from the original three Star Wars movies, albeit with a humourous/comical twist.
| Title | Gears of War |
| Developer | Epic Games |
| Type | First Person Sneaker |
| Platform(s) | XBox 360, Windows |
| Kelly Score ™ | 87 / 100 |
I’ve posted before before about the fact that I can’t play Second Life since I upgraded to Vista. I was pretty certain that the problem related to the ATI video drivers. ATI added OpenGL support in the 7.1 release of the drivers and updated that support in the 7.2 release, but Second Life still doesn’t work. I haven’t been logging into SL recently: I decided to cut back and focus more on other things, but I would like to be able to log in once in a while…and the lack of support for Vista and ATI has been a major inhibitor.
I have a somewhat mixed history with regards to console games. Looking back in history, I believe the first console I had was some kind of pong-type thing…back in the days before console games had cartridges, so about 1977…30 years ago. Yowsa, I’m old! The first console I had that I have a clear memory of was a Colecovision: I had Donkey Kong, plus some kind of adventure game where your “character” was a little ball with a bow going through a 2D maze. After that I went through a succession of Sega systems, culminating in a Sega Genesis “portable”. That was about when online PC games started showing up (1996), which somewhat coincidentally was the last time I played a console game for about a decade.
I played a great game of “Make the Game work with Vista” earlier this week. It was fun! I give it an 8 out of 10. How is the game itself? I’ll tell you in a few days…
The game in question here is Gothic 3 by Aspyr. I collected answers to most of the problems I encountered in the game publisher’s community technical forums (see link below). In an effort to help out folks who might be wanting to install and play this game on Windows Vista (64 bit version in my case), I’ve collected here the things I found necessary/important to make it work: Continue reading Gothic 3 and Vista: getting it to work
| Title | Vanguard |
| Developer | SoE (Sigil) |
| Type | MMORPG |
| Platform(s) | Windows |
| Kelly Score ™ | 70 / 100 |
I’m not a big fan of Southpark. I find its “humour” to generally be too crude for my tastes. But every once in a while I catch an episode, and now and then it’s funny without diving too deeply into toilet humour.