Gaming hardware evolution dead-end.

So lately I’ve been planning for my next system upgrade, and it made me wonder if these days there’s any point to it.

It used to be you had to replace your system about every 3 years, or at least upgrade every 18 months.
This was in order to stay relevant and able to keep running all our various programs and games.

At what point did this become useless?

Hardware these days is god-like compared to what we used to have.

In my eyes the turning point came when gaming went mainstream.

Years back the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 were considered powerful.
Games started being created specifically with these in mind.
At the time PC’s had to work to keep up.

The problem is now many years later after many generations of hardware improvements, games are still being made based on old console specifications.

Basically these consoles are ancient in terms of capabilities.
Yet until we get their next generation there is no chance modern games will really make use current hardware.

This makes me a sad panda.

Some old some new.

Feb12

So sitting here in DV8 with my friend Kombatbunni after having a few drinks.

While there are familiar faces there are many I do not.
DJ Steve is of course playing tracks I enjoy.

I highly recommend it for people with spare time to waste on a Saturday.

That’s DV8 nightclub on McKillop street in Melbourne Australia from 10pm till 5am on saturdays.
New metal, alt rock, punk and so on.

I am not being payed for this post.

I have been infected.

Feb7

So anyone paying attention would have noticed I haven’t posted anything in quite awhile.

This is simply as I’ve been playing games such as Deus Ex Human Revolution and Skyrim.
More recently it’s been The Old Republic.

I have been playing quite a lot of TOR over the past month and a half and don’t think I’ll be stopping any time soon.

For anyone interested I play on the Vrook Lamar RP server on the Imperial side in a guild called Ghost Division.
If you like heavy roleplay with a great group of people do a Google search for us.

Anyway my train journey is about to end.
Until later.

Slaughter in the Emperor’s name.

Jul17

So last month I joined in a local game of Deathwatch.
I was curious since I like the 40k setting and had enjoyed Dark Heresy previously.

So I created a Flesh Tearer Assault Marine who was located during a kill mission.
Discovered quickly we were fighting something akin to the Borg.

Anyway after a successful first mission I chose to maximise attacks.
This of course meant that when selection for squad leader was chosen based on combat capability, that I got it.

First mission in command we ended up slaughtering countless women children with grenades, bolters and of course my brand spanking new eviscerator.

My squad is now a little more insane and corrupt.
The future is bright for the servants of the corpse god.

DC Universe Online – You will not be missed.

May4

So anyway, back at the beginning of things I bought a copy of DC Universe Online, since you know being able to be a superhero or villain and beat shit up is pretty cool.
It was fun to play, but then the problems began.

Like all MMOs, after the initial free month of included time (not really free if you think about it), the huge surge of players that lead to the need for server queues dropped off.
And with the plethora of servers available we ended up with veritable ghost towns.
This being a problem when on a PvP server wanting to pwn people.

Of course this doesn’t take in to account the number of people using exploits, which were driving people to PvE. Exploits which just weren’t being addressed.

Major issues and bugs kept cropping up, but none of them were getting fixed.
New content was promised, and what we’ve received has been fairly lackluster, as well as being very buggy.

Of course what’s really happened that will kill this game is major security breaches have happened, first with the PlayStationNetwork, and now with SOE.
Breach 1 happened, we got informed that everything was fine and there was no problem with SOE and our information was secure since it’s in a different location. This shook our confidence.
Breach 2 happened, and we’re informed around 24.6million user’s information may now be out in the wild, as well as over twelve thousand user’s direct debit and credit card information.

It may not be a lot in terms of things, but come on close to 25 million people?
And there’s a good chance I’m one of those people.

So naturally I do the obvious thing and try to cancel my subscription, but I can’t get in to do that.
I doubt anyone can.
The game’s also down for however long, and apparently we’re going to be granted 30 + 1(each day service is unavailable) days of free play time. Somehow to me, and no doubt many others, this isn’t enough.

So the short of it is this, when I can end my account I will. It’s too much of a security risk.
DC Universe Online is a low grade product, and can’t compare with much else out there.
It’s just not worth the time or money any more.

It’s not friday honest.

Mar20

Curses at Rebecca Black for telling us it’s Friday when it’s obviously now sunday.

I have enough trouble keeping track of the day as it is without some underage skank telling me lies. I am a gamer after all.

Fortunately I am at a metal club and thus am not being told it’s Friday.

Also by virtue of having a car I don’t have to decide what seat I’m in. Front FTW.

DC Universe Online, and how I fixed a small issue that Sony Online Entertainment caused with the Steam Release.

Jan16

So anyway I’ve been really peeved over the past couple of days.

I bought DCUO via Steam despite it not being released in Australia, and no matter what I tried, the Launchpad application was totally useless.

Tonight I finally solved the problem, which was outdated URLs in the Launchpad.ini file.

This is the file that’s meant to tell the Launchpad.exe where the latest app data is located as well as the interface code.

So below are the offending two lines that I replaced:

webapp=http://launch.soe.com/lp3/index.html
digestURL=http://manifest.patch.station.sony.com/patch/manifest/launchpad/launchpad-all/lp3-dcuo-live.soe

And I replaced them with the following lines:

webapp=http://launcher.station.sony.com/lp3/index.html
digestURL=http://soecontent.station.sony.com/patch/digest/launchpad/launchpad-release/live/launchpad.soe

Now if you’re observant you’ll notice that while there may be some similarities, the domains are totally different!
There was no way possible for the program to function when using entirely wrong URLs.
Thus it could not check for the latest release, could not login, could not do anything other than sit there looking useless.

So if you have that small problem I had with it doing absolutely nothing but showing the SOE logo, go in to your game directory and fix that one small file.
And feel free to thank me 😀

AmK.
Looking forward to finally playing the game.

MMOs, and the state of them these days.

Jan14

So anyway I’ve been a long time player of MMOs and such over the past decade and then some, back in the beginning with such things as The 4th Coming, and Dark-Ages (no, not of Camelot) so some people could say I’ve had some experience and have played a decent number over the years.

So I figured time to talk about how they’re going, or at least the ones that catch my interest.

Guildwars, was there from the beginning and it’s been going strong over the years, but I lost touch with all the friends who were playing it, and there’s not been much new since Eye of the North that I’m aware of.
So I haven’t been playing it much over the past year or so.
Guildwars 2, on the other hand is looking spectacular. Even checked out some of the gameplay footage and it looks amazing and I cannot wait to get my hands on it. I’m expecting Arena.net to pull off a masterpiece with it.

World Of Darkness Online. Well other than knowing it’s set in the old world of darkness setting like masquerade and such, I really can’t make much in the way of statements as White-Wolf/CCP haven’t really shown off anything other than some animated artwork. Curious to see what they do with it, and if it’ll all be night based and vampires, or if there will be other stuff.

Star-Trek Online, kinda got side-lined with that, and I imagine when I finally get back to it the content will have built up enough with all these new episodes. I’m just hoping the player base is still there when I do.
I do want more detailed ship interaction though, such as arranging the location of hardpoints and such, and being able to spend time tweaking values and settings to get the most out of it.
I still intend to go back and get my carrier for my klingon borg 😀

Global Agenda. Was there also at the beginning. Problem is that it stopped being able to run on my machine, and the updates are huge, in the manner of gigs. So I haven’t been able to play.
Nice concept and execution and all, but it’s not a good sign that they shifted to a free to continue playing model.

City of Heroes/Villains.
Well I started in this franchise years back with the release of Villains with the collectors box set and spent some time playing it and enjoying it, problem was too many games to focus on like guildwars and so on.
It was so much fun. Then a friend of mine convinced me to get Heroes to upgrade my account so we could play together. So I did and all was fine. Fine that is until a couple of months later when they made Villains available to owners of Heroes, and vice-versa. They basically cost me money there which I didn’t have to spend, so I guess they cheesed me off resulting in me walking away.
Come now to the very end of last year and the Steam sale, Going Rogue was on sale for $10, figured I’d pick it up and see how things had improved. Suffice to say over the past week I’ve been having lots of fun.
I probably will subscribe again. My challenge now being to find people to play it with as well as an active supergroup.
Any Arachnos Epics out there on Victory?

Dungeons and Dragons Online.
I guess I decided back in September or so that since I’d heard it had gone free to play that I might as well check it out. So I went to ddo.com, created an account and downloaded the client.
And the fact I keep pumping fundage in to keep buying quest packs and things, shows it’s a winning model for me.
Come on, it’s worth a shot, is essentially free to play, and you can buy what you want. Or if you so choose you can pay each month and get access to all the account unlocks up front.
I play on the Argonessen, Khyber and Sarlona servers.

DC Universe Online.
So yesterday I decided what the hell and purchased the game through Steam and set it downloading all 13gig last night.
Tonight I went to try it out, and the account creation progress Sony have got, while it may be good if you play things like Everquest and so on, is not really up front and clear.
I could tell you what it’s like, but the furthest I get is the Launchpad application showing SOE, and that’s all. Apparently according to the Steam forums the servers are down.
Not good for them this lack of communication. Even Hellgate: London (RIP) had more of that. We could at least see in the launcher that the servers were down.

So this is more or less it all for now.
And before you ask, no I do not play WOW, it’s not worth my time or money. I just don’t enjoy it, I’ll not play it, Sam I Am.

Get game trials where possible, and if you want to get in contact with me in these games, let me know and we can set something up.

AmK.

Dungeons and Dragons, an adventure.

Sep20

So anyway, growing up I was never really got in to D&D, but this year seems to have changed all that.

First I got involved in a 3.5 edition game of Planescape using the various different f20 games. Been fun using stuff from Monte Cook’s World of Darkness.

And now I’m playing in a 3.5 forgotten realms expedition to ravenloft campaign.

And of course for the past weeks I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons Online.
Free to play more or less.
Though been spending a bit of real world money on it.

I’be come a long way from the CRPGs of old like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale.
But I’m enjoying it.

And tonight i play Call of Cthulhu with some friends.

Wildfire, I can has yes?

Sep15

So anyway I have been totally slack with posting, usually as I forget to log in, but now I have no excuse.
This is because on Thursday I went out and purchased a shiny new HTC Wildfire from Telstra. Epic phone for only $349 prepaid.

Sure it’s no Desire but it is half the price and it natively supports Ogg Vorbis.

It also has the huge library of Android apps available so I consider it win for the price.

I will be sure to post more now that I have it.

Ciao for now.