Beat Grand Theft Auto 4. Goddamn is it good. One of the most compelling characters in anything I’ve ever seen. Niko Belic is a character that sticks with you. Good acting, good design, good game programming. It’s bigger than this blog is so I don’t need to go on about it.

I skipped the pigeon shooting in GTA4. It’s a mini game where you go around the city and shoot the “flying rats”. There are a crap-ton of them so I was marking them off in a digital map with a photoshop clone named Pixelmator. My little system was working great until I counted up how many I had left. My count was 57 and the game’s count was 58. That means I marked one down wrong. I spent some time backtracking but it was too much to deal with. Finding a missing bird is harder than finding a bird (and they are already hard to find). A bird that exists at least has a red glow on it and a missing bird is not as obvious. So I gave up on the whole goddamn thing.

The image above is from Beyond Good & Evil. Hmm, how to describe BG&E. I’ll keep this short. It’s an underrated and undersold adventure game from Ubisoft. It’s not as good as the fans say imo. I enjoyed parts of it (like the parts near the end) but it’s not the underdog that everyone says it is. I found it very frustrating and not that engaging. It had a very european developer feel to it (nothing wrong with that). It was just a little bit off most of the time. The controls were weird, the game engine didn’t keep up and the camera and level design was like playing blind pinball. I nearly sold it but then took it off the sell pile to put a nail in it. I’m just glad it’s done.

Back in 2004, when I was working at a small private company, I built a “God Box” gaming rig at work. I shipped all the parts to the office versus my apartment because that was easier for the shipper. Coworkers stopped by and oogled at the parts, we fired up some Nvidia demos. It was pretty stunning at the time running a single core AMD FX-57 and 7800gtx with DDR400. It cost about $3100. It was expensive and fast back then and now it’s not.

Fast forward to this past weekend when all my new parts came in for a brand new gaming rig. The parts were much less money and much faster. It’s a hilarious cycle. And even as shiny as my new toy is, I know it will return to dust when FPSTechDemo 2012 requires a house-glowing flux capacitor to run.

Here are some quick stats.
BOX: Antec P182 Case
CPU: E8600 3.33ghz dual core
MEM: 4gb DDR3-1600
VID: ATI 4870X2 2gb
MB: asus rampage extreme x48
evga 790i ultra

It was a dramatic build. I spent 16 hours straight (skipping dinner and lunch the next day) putting it together. At first, I cabled it all up. Then it would just turn on / turn off. It wouldn’t even stay on. So piece by piece, I dismantled it trying to figure out what was wrong. I thought it was a short, I thought it was the CPU, it could be anything.

So then I dismantled everything and put the motherboard on a towel. I had the power supply in the case powering the board with a single cpu fan hooked up to the motherboard. The board has a power button on the board itself so I didn’t even have to hook up the chassis jumpers. Nothing else (no cpu, no memory, no cards) were hooked up. Eventually I replaced the power supply and the motherboard with retail-bought replacements. This was annoying because ripping out a motherboard and power supply is like removing your skeletal system and then your circulatory system.

After making these swaps, everything seemed to run fine on an EVGA 790i Ultra motherboard. I lost the ability to do crossfire but I was fine with that for now. About 3 months later, I wasn’t quite done with this thing. I ordered another 4870×2 to do quad gpu. I put the asus crossfire board back in. It was a tight fit in the case and the heat coming out of the back really did warm the room. It was a bit louder too (the whole thing was loud by itself). It was marginal gain for the titles I play so I returned it.

Yes it plays Crysis. Although Very High still isn’t playable. High looks just fine. Even the developers said that they threw that setting in for future systems.

Confirmed on dual 4870X2s with full screen mode on and Catalyst AI turned to standard to enable Crossfire. Before WoW’s full shadow quality caused blinking shadows when using Crossfire modes (windowed mode forced single GPU mode).

I also saw the flickering shadows in L4D which is what I assume what the 8.12 drivers were released for.

With the gtx280, gtx280+, 4870×2 and other new hardware-craziness happening out there, my aging PC is starting to look like ‘Ol Yeller. At some point I need to forklift it. I don’t know if the Nehalem release this fall will be my trigger flinch point. Nehalem is Intel’s new arch. They called it i7 for some reason, is this the Septimum? I dunno, but 16 threads on 8 cores is crazy (maybe madness — as in useless — for gaming).

3 years ago, I spent $3k like I always do and got a 7800gtx and an AMD fx-57 with ddr400. I put a 8800gts 640mb (older process) about a year ago. It’s incapable of playing Mass Effect, Crysis, any CPU-bound RTS game and DX10 (because I don’t have Vista). It’s fine really. I play WoW most of the time and everything else is consoles (cept Portal and steam-stuff). Valve and Blizzard try to appeal to mass-market and don’t do “tech demos”. That’s fine. However since I got a 24″ LCD, things are running slower at 1080p. I’m getting spoiled on AA settings and image quality (especially in WoW). A new rig could be under $3k and last another 3 years.

I tried posting some questions around the intertubes but no one cares about WoW benchmarks. It’s such a simple game that people don’t even pay attention to it. This was my post in the WoW forums (no response).

If you have a massive new machine that was built for games outside of WoW (but you play WoW anyway), help me understand what life is like.

- What AA setting do you use? I encourage people to talk about 16-24x FSAA at 1080p or higher. :)
- Can you force AFR with SLI or Crossfire cards? Benefit?
- What can you run in the background if you have dual or quad core?
- What transparency modes can you run in? ATI calls this Adaptive AA, Nvidia transparency AA. What’s the nice balance for you?
- In Shatt (which is CPU bound), what FPS do you maintain and what CPU do you have?
- Do you run any hacks to enable larger distance drawing etc?

Since there are few recent WoW benchmarks, can you give me an idea of what FPS you get in CoD4 or Crysis etc (which have no limit on benchmark results)?

So now I’m taking it upon myself to do some testing.

The test

Orgrimmar to Azshara internal /timetest benchmark on WoW 2.4.3. V-sync disabled for timetest. Both

The Hardware

AMD FX-57 PC:
AMD fx-57 2.8ghz
8800gts 640mb
2gb of DDR400 timings at 2-2-2-5
AF 4x (nvidia control panel override)
AA 4x (nvidia control panel override)
AA Transparency off
177.83 driver version
XP 32-bit
1920×1200 (all settings max in WoW client)
Fullscreen

Mac Pro:
Octo-core 2.8ghz 45nm Xeon 2008 model
10gb ddr2 fb-dimms
8800gt video card
OSX 10.5.4
1680×1050 (all settings max in WoW client)
Maximized Windowed Mode
Full screen glow disabled (osx suffers greatly)
4x AA

The Results

What is wrong with OSX drivers? My slower PC looks better (more image quality, more resolution, more effects) and is 3 years old. XP on the Mac Pro is a completely different result! It’s not the hardware. The Mac Pro is a killer workstation for sound and video but that doesn’t mean that a fast nvidia driver is out of the question. There’s one little bit of software that needs to be optimized to open up the Mac Pro for a whole new market and use. I’m not trying to oversimplify the work involved but I’m trying to make a point.

Apple has no pull at Nvidia or ATI. They can no more get faster software than Microsoft can get simpler software. It’s just not in the cards until OSX market share is 50/50 with Windows.

Update: Friend of mine ran this on his G5 with a X1900. 52.812 avg.

I ran this again with a new rig. Forced transparecy AA, Forced 16AF. All other driver settings forced to high-quality. E8600@4ghz,ddr3,4870×2. I ran it once with forced quality (set to insane levels — which looks great) and one with normal settings compared to old PC and Mac.

Updated Results

The quality is so nice and LCDs can’t show more than 60. I think I’ll leave it on.

Final Fantasy XII. It’s a PS2 game that got amazing reviews from most review sites. I won’t bother covering the game itself. You care or you don’t already. In short, it’s a fantastic ride with some of the most convincing acting and modeling I’ve ever seen in any game not to even mention a previous gen platform. Unless you are an Atlus and JRPG elitist with too much time on your hands, this is RPG créme de la créme and cannot be avoided unless you don’t like cream at all.

True to how I beat X & VII, I was on a mission to beat the hardest “weapons” of the game. Then I could blaze through the ending like a warm bullet falling effortlessly through a warm ocean (knife / butter metaphor avoided). Such was FF12. It’s an adventure for about 50-80 hours and then you have a choice to make (as in past ones). Should you just end it or should you spend more time getting everything done? In FFVII, this choice was made when a friend of mine and I decided we’d take on the Ruby and Emerald weapon. This had some implied baggage, firstly that we had to get abilities and gear to make this happen (I can’t remember the exact things). The same decision point came and went and the very same friend and I decided that “yes we were going to uber”.

So we (in parallel game save universes) sought out to get the materials to make The Tournesol (The Sunflower). The best sword in the game. It’s a real beauty and it took forever to get it. It’s just like grinding in an MMO. Kill stuff, sell stuff and get goal done. The mechanics in XII are actually pretty entertaining. You have to sell a number of items and then an item is unlocked to buy. Once you buy it, the item count resets and you could start all over again. Of course, if you read online you can figure out the minimum path to unlocking an item. The Tournesol is such an item that you’d want to follow this path because it could save you 20 hours of gametime. I don’t know what my time was but it took about a week (after work) to get this damn thing. In the end, it’s funny because just like other FF games, you don’t really have the cool stuff until the end and then the game is over. Feh.

So then I’m approaching 150 hours in game and I leveled to about 90ish. Vaan is 90 and most others are low 80s. Time to take on a “weapon”. In XII, there’s a corelation that the Internet hasn’t summarized, Yiazmat is the Ruby Weapon and Omega Mark XII is the Emerald Weapon. There was an Omega Weapon in X, I believe that would be the equivalent of the Ruby Weapon or Yiazmat. They’re not exactly all the same but whatever, those details I don’t care too much about (join a ff forum and argue until you’re a hermit). I’m just trying to set the stage here.

I downed Omega Mark XII, no problem. Tom had beaten him before me and I got all the strategy from watching him. Youtube (as always) has some monkey-see-monkey-do tips that make him a non-issue. I really wish I had the same resources during FFVII for the Ruby Weapon fight. Looking back, I didn’t have gamefaqs or net sharing, just AOL on a 386. Perhaps this is the “walking uphill to school both ways” geezer talk of the modern era. *pause for effect*

So now the game is approaching the singularity point. I’m not maxed out and there’s only one thing left. Yiazmat. Oh noes. I had read about this one. See, in the game it’s described as a fight that NPC’s in the game had heard about from their fathers. Yeah, this boss fight has been passed down from generation to generation. One NPC said his father died after fighting him for a week. Ha! Ok, so this guy is some kind of HP-sink-hole of doom, how bad can he be after I level to 99? Hmm. Reading the Brady game guide, my eyes tear up in horror … “Yiazmat has 50 million hit points”. I then proceded to run around the room like Christopher Lloyd shouting “1.21 gigawatts?! 1.21 gigawatts?!” I put it away for about a week and did other things while muttering “50 million hp … feh”.

Eventually, I started back up again and I piled all my party peoples into the Henne Mines. I set up my gambits to kill the undead bats that drop in on you. It’s a great place to grind out XP. You just mass sleep everything and mass-Curaja “Target: Undead”. I was able to practice drumpad and recording while I slowly leveled everyone to 99. Then when I had a block of time on a weekend, it was time to start on Yiazmat. It wasn’t actually too bad. It took me a little while to learn the best gambit setup and I had to babysit it most of the fight. I only saved once and I was mostly holding the controller for the entire 4.5 hour boss fight. Yes. Longest boss fight ev-ar. 4.5 hours. I ate dinner, I vacuumed the room, I recorded some stuff and I left the room for breaks while my guys pounded away on 50 million hp (6999dmg hits at a time). Eventually he fell and things were done.

After the hardest fights are done, everything else is easy (makes sense). The ending is really, really good. I won’t say anything about it. The ending fights at level 99 is a lot like being 99 and fighting Sepiroth in VII. It’s a non-issue.

Fantastic game. Best game on the PS2 if you ask me.

Birthday was a week+ ago. Wife got a full-on NES bundle as a sweet-ass birthday present. The thing came in the original box, even the original cords and styrofoam. It works like a champ. Funny thing is, I pulled it out and turned it on and there was all this garbage on the screen. So I blew the dust off the cart (you know, the NES trick) and it freaking fixed it! Having something that cliche work was quite a shock, like an airplane meter actually responding after you tap the instrument dial. Cliche.

It came with SMB1 and Duck Hunt. Classics but I wanted to expand my horizons to maybe a humble stack of 10 gray carts. I don’t want to go overboard (see the rest of my life) but the NES carts can really be cheap. I picked up Baseball Simulator 1.000 for $2+$3 shipping and some ones too:

• Baseball Stars
• Baseball Simulator 1.000
• Zelda (yes gold cart)
• Kirby’s Adventure – I used to borrow this one from a friend
• Legacy of the Wizard – was like $3, classic!
• SMB3
• Tecmo Super Bowl (ut! ut! ut!)

The modern TV is kind of puking at the signal but it’s working fine. I really have to chuckle at the size of the carts and no fans anywhere on the box. It’s extremely light compared to the PS3/360. Also, remembering that there’s no save games (outside a code on a napkin) was something I completely forgot about after all these years.

Wife gets a cookie for birthday present from heaven.

Upgraded wordpress, upgraded plugins and snagged this new plugin (which made me fix my theme). Had to add < ?php wp_head(); ?> to my theme. Apparently I wasn’t following the rules.

[Tenacious Defender]

Neat. It’s pretty easy to link to an item. The plugin then caches the info in MySQL, it’s pretty slick (as long as wowhead pays the bandwidth bills). There’s one item that I found funny, the one ring. Read the little note at the bottom of the tooltip. Mild funny, not spicy funny.

[The 1 Ring]

“Not quite as good as the two ring.”

… not even a mouse.

The xmas tree is lit, the wife is making cookies and Santa is killing people. Ho ho hell.

This year, Kristin got her first real-live xmas tree. She’s always had a fake one. We decorated it to the tunes of Xmas music, it was lovely (once the tree stopped falling down — hey it’s my first tree too). After a bit of decorating, Kristin pulled out her baby ornament. It says “Baby’s first Xmas 1977″. She laughed, “we have the same ones!” Sure enough, we held mine next to hers and mine said “Baby’s first Xmas 1977″. And odd coincidence that made for some laughs.

This year we’re heading to NC after the holidays. I can’t wait for some more time off from work. I promise to upload the pictures from Amsterdam soon, there are some key ones worth yawning over.

I’m a moment of weakness, I started playing WoW again. A new patch, a new expansion and voip features drew me in like a swirling vortex of infinite monthly expenses. I resisted for 3 months, a whole quarter year (in boozehound terms). All of my things were still there, frozen in time and restored instantly from some mega-SAN storage unit once a card verification engine gave me a “1″.

My rows in a massive character database probably did something like this:

update player_table set account_status=”active” where player_id=”chris”;

Of course, “Chris” would be a login name or whatever. And I’m sure Blizzard has a crazy SAN/cluster setup that does 100x the work and complexity that I think of. Their job board is very appealing for someone as me who likes to think about how this monstrosity operates. Of course, heading to the West Coast on a whim would upheave habits and ruts. But that doesn’t kill the job posting at Blizzard for a SAN Administrator.

It’s extremely overwhelming to be in the throws again, not knowing what has changed and having a flood of aggravation & memory instantly jogged. I feel like rip-van-winkle and everyone is riding on hoverboards. As far as content, I am a newbie again with so little free-time compared to the people running around in front of me. I think I never want to be resurrected if such technology is devised, I would be constantly be lagging.

Company of Heroes is crashing on my non-stop. I haven’t found a fix. Synergy is also giving me problems. You can read about that on my other neglected tech-only blog (sigh, no … wait… no apologies).

I sent my Xbox 360 packing in a box today. The repair process has started. I feel comforted by the few tens of blogs that actually documented the shipping process. I don’t know if I’ll be surprised if someone has a site about how to throw up poisoned food properly.

The nostromo has an update coming in November. It’s plenty shiny and the “quick keys” is a welcomed improvement. I only used mine for CS and WoW and even then I found it an equal to the standard keyboard. It helps with stress, comfort and has “hover car future svelt” but I put it away. Just as my recall to the MMO, I’ll give it another shot.

The keys on the N52 were a bit slow and changing something familiar is always hard. It took me weeks and weeks to get my system down and the software did a good enough job of making this intrusion easy to manage.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Someone tell Alex Albreicht “hey I knew you and I listen to you podcast”, I’m sick of trying to contact him. Kthx.

Awesome.

So I got my ref number for repair, stripped it down and now I’m just waiting for the UPS box to show up. At least they throw in a month of Xbox gold in (I guess). How many of you have had the red rings?