Archive for category PC
How to bind the arrow keys in Battlefield 3
Bind the Up, Down, Left or Right keys, turn OFF Num Lock.
This one is simple so I will get straight to the point so you don’t have to trawl through the EA Battlefield 3 forums. If you want to bind the ARROW keys in BF3 you need to have Num Lock OFF. If you leave num lock ON you will get the error message ID_InvalidEnumValue. I hope this helps you get into the game with keys other than WASD. Not everyone plays WASD as we found in Mass Effect 2, some of us prefer the arrow keys.
As for the rest of the the Battlefied 3 beta, I’m pretty pissed off that the options menu can ONLY be accessed whilst in game. You need to find somewhere to hide, which is difficult and ends up with abuse from other players calling you a camper when they find and shoot you down. Why on earth would you only be allowed to access the options menu whilst in game, it is the worst time to be binding your keys, changing your graphic settings and adjusting your mouse sensitivity. Who tests this stuff? Who thought that was a good idea? It creates a server full of newbs doing nothing but testing binds and graphics settings, and free kills for other newbs. I know it is a beta, but how did this get past alpha with such a basic flaw?
Anyway moving on, the web based interface is ok as I got used to this with Quake Live, so not much to say on that. Generally it works although a few times I have had the A generic game error was reported, please try again. ( code: 1) message but this just seems to be random, keep trying and eventually you can get on a server. Otherwise try clicking the MULTIPLAYER text rather than the QUICK MATCH button, this will bring up a manual server browser and has prooved to throw up less errors than the match making of ‘QUICK MATCH’.
Keep retrying, or failing that, click Multiplayer for a manual server browser
This is really where you want to be to select a game anyway, the server browser. After all match making and quick match are for console gamers right? Here you can select a server of your choice, see the stats before you jump in. Well hidden EA!
Oh look, a server browser, well hidden EA!
So how is the beta? It’s ok, I wasn’t a fan of and still am not a fan of COD/BF style multiplayer but hey, its something to do other than StarCraft 2 right? GG
Dinner Date the game, is not really a game
Dinner Date?
I began to write this a while back but forgot to finish and publish it. So here goes. Dinner Date by Stout Games assumes you are the stereo typical gamer, male, single, young and desperate for a date with a mysterious oriental girl who (spoiler alert) lets face it, is not going to turn up, ever!
Now times have changed, that stereotype I thought had phazed out. Everyone I know who plays games does not fit that description. Infact I cannot think of anyone who reminds me of the role you play in Dinner Date. Furthermore you play this role from a first person perspective, which should make you even more immersed into this character. But still I could not connect with the character, yet something kept me thinking about this ‘game’ experience for weeks, there is something special in Dinner Date, but don’t expect it to be fun.
I hate the voice, everyone raved about the audio in Dinner Date but I found the voice annoying, heck I even found the gameplay annoying, and disappointing! At the end I was left feeling empty, Steam had sold me a game which left me feeling empty, thanks Steam. But for over a week I kept thinking about Dinner Date, it was stuck in my head.
The experience is what you are paying for. I’m starting to believe feeling empty and crappy at the end is the entire point of this ‘game’, after all, your single, drunk and alone in a shitty flat, your job sucks and your date is not going to arrive. If that doesn’t make you feel like crap then I don’t know what will, and the fact that this game makes you feel like that makes it a success, and worth the few pound just to try out this potential new genre, ‘Make you feel like crap ‘game’ experience’ genre.
The Death of Piracy…and online cheating?
Following Kotaku’s recent interview with an ex-pirate who chose Steam over BitTorrent, I figured it high time that the death of piracy should be upon us. In a world moving more and more into the cloud, services like Steam are providing a place to buy, collect and socialise as a gamer. With a friends list requiring a scroll even on a 1920×1200 display, a sale nearly every week and a constantly patched and updated game Steam offers a complete gaming solution. Why buy anywhere else? Where to buy is not the problem. Choosing to buy at all is the biggest issue on the PC as some simply choose to download for free via torrent, especially with games often appearing on torrent sites days before Steam/retail stores.
Piracy statistics from torrentfreak.com
Looking at the piracy statistics for 2010 (above) at first glance piracy seems to be up over 2009 for this years Call of Duty (see stats below). 4.27 million illegal copies of Black Ops were downloaded this year vs 4.1 million copies of Modern Warfare 2 last year. So in 2010 there were 170 thousand more illegal downloads of Call of Duty over 2009 through the first two months of release. However, if we look at sales a massive 5.6 million copies were sold in 2010 within 24 hours of release (across all platforms) vs 4.7 million in 2009. I’m no accountant (ed. lol?) but that’s almost a 20% increase in legitimate paying customer demand over last year, yet pirated figures show only a 4% increase. So is this a sign of a slow down in piracy? I think it is. Piracy as a whole does appear to be getting bigger, but so too is the industry and at a faster rate. The number of gamers willing to pay, at least if not only for Call of Duty are increasing.
2009 piracy statistics from torrentfreak.com
The question is why would piracy slow down as we all become more digitally download aware? If digital downloads are slowly taking more and more of the market especially on PC, why are people choosing to pay for digital downloads over torrenting them for free like they have been for the last near decade. Steam is why!
Retail purchasing on PC died along time ago for me, first the high street and then even online ordering became a chore. Leaving the house to purchase a physical disc, having an optical drive hooked up to your computer, getting the disk out of the box to install it, manually finding the latest patch…very 1990′s. Steam offers one central ‘app’ for the gaming community, you know what your friends are buying, what and when they are playing, what they have played for precisely how long, what they have achieved and now even what they want to play if they had the money a.k.a Steam wishlist.
Gifting on Steam is a joy. I often buy gifts for relatives and friends, with a few clicks Christmas and birthdays are sorted without having to leave my seat, delivered direct to their email/Steam account. And don’t even get me started on Steam sales, games for a few pounds, why even waste time torrenting and searching for key gens and nocd.exe’s? Steam have perfected the process so well, I would rather pay for a game on Steam than to get it for free not on Steam, that’s capitalism at its finest.
Another reason for piracy decline and the eventual death of piracy is the big brother account integration of these services like Steam as well as Xbox Live and PlayStation network. If you are caught using pirated games or even cheating, the risk is you lose your entire account, either a ban or complete account deletion. All those achievements, digital downloads and the ability to play with all your friends, gone in an instant! All to save a few pounds by pirating? It’s just no longer worth it.
This year has seen a huge clamp down by the powers that be, with the most extreme example when Blizzard banned over 5,000 Starcraft 2 players for cheating. Back in 2009 Valve even gave everyone a gift for not cheating, a free hat which I wore with pride, obviously the cheaters didn’t get anything. With more recent and a touch more serious tone Sony is attempting to sue the hackers who opened up the PS3 for all manor of piracy, which this year has been a constant battle by Sony releasing countless patches to stay one step ahead of the pirates. Will I patch my PS3 to play Gran Turismo 5? Of course I will, I did straight away even though GT5 sucked! Do I want to lose any of my online accounts to save a few pounds and spend hours illegally obtaining pirated software? The answer is no, my time and my avatar is worth more than that and most importantly I want to support the games industry, and so should you.
I’m not anti-pirate although I may sound it. Piracy has changed the world often for the better and I highly recommend a favourite book of mine The Pirates Dilemma which covers this subject in far more depth. When there is a solution out there that is better than piracy, I’m all for it. After all that’s usually why we pirate in the first place, a rubbish system. Now if only the movie industry would take their fingers out of there ass…
Fallout New Vegas performance issues
Fallout New Vegas (PC) has a serious issue with performance. Dropping below a playable frame rate every time NPC’s are around, and generally performing jerky and sluggish. A quick fix which worked for me was to download d3d9.dll from here, paste it into your Program Files/Steam/Steamapps/Common/Fallout New Vegas folder. Load up Fallout NV and away you go, perfectly smooth frame rate!
I was a tad reluctant to install this .dll, as reading around various forums some comments suggested it wasn’t legit. But desperate to enjoy the wasteland and the New Vegas strip, as I’m sure you are, I gave it a chance and it works great. If only I had this .dll whilst playing Fallout 3 Point Look Out DLC, which for me had the same crappy performance.
Reading around this is probably a Windows 7/Vista specific problem, as everyone with Windows XP seems to have no trouble. This in my eyes also validates the authenticity of this .dll fix, as it is supposed to force DirectX 9 and ignore any DX10/11 issues. It sucks having to force DirectX 9 on such modern hardware, but Fallout still looks great on this ageing engine. Happy questing.
UPDATE : A new patch has arrived as of 9th Nov 2010 which seems to have fixed the performance issues mentioned above. I have removed d3d9.dll from my Fallout New Vegas directory, Steam auto applied the patch and I can confirm the frame rate is perfectly smooth now. I’ve also noticed since removing this d3d9.dll image quality is much better, most noticeably on the weapons in your FOV, anyone else feel the same?
Q.U.B.E – What happens when Portal and TAG make a baby?
TAG : The Power of Paint by DigiPen is one of my favourite games, ever. It’s a first person shooter, but with a paint gun and puzzle based gameplay rather than killing people, a fun puzzle, not a tear your hair out puzzle. You’ve probably not heard of TAG, it was just a small student project, an ‘indie’ title. I say small, but was clearly big enough to come first in the Independent Games Festival, and then big enough to get noticed by Valve, who decided to hire the makers DigiPen and incorporate the ideas into the yet to be release Portal 2.
I’m babbling a bit, after all this post is supposed to be about Q.U.B.E, which is the evil child spawned from the depths of TAG and Portal’s loins (ed. that sounds gross). Q.U.B.E, which stands for ‘quick understanding of block extrusion’ (not a very catchy line but the acronym is cool) is a first person platformer/puzzler similar to TAG and more well known Portal.
It’s another student project, which according to their website is turning into a fully-fledged single player game. Personally, I can’t wait. This game is totally fresh, taking the first person platformer another step forward. The scientific white wash walls may resemble Portal and TAG, but that is a good thing. The brightly coloured controllable objects stand out and with nothing else to distract you, you’ll quickly make progress through the increasingly more difficult challenges. With nothing but WASD, left and right click, anyone familiar with FPS will find their way instantly, and anyone with half a brain will progressively work through the puzzles only to discover time (in the real word) has disappeared.
Currently in beta (v1.3), Q.U.B.E can be downloaded for free here, the two important words to remember here are ‘beta’ and ‘free’. Other than choosing a resolution, there are no other options at present (it is beta after all). No changing controls or adjusting sound, infact once ingame there is no save either, so don’t do what I do by quitting to write this article only to go back in and realise your hour or two of progress is gone and you need to start again.
So team Q.U.B.E, please add a save progress option in the next release, and maybe a VSYNC option as I found tearing a bit of a problem, obviously not your fault but a known issue with any Unreal Engine 3 game. Speaking of which this game was made using the Unreal Development Kit, which is free to everyone and anyone who wishes to try and make their own game. Unreal Engine powers nearly everything out there, from Gears of Wars to the latest Medal of Honour, XBLA hit Shadow Complex to next gen iPhone games, so it’s great to see such cool titles being produced by people who wouldn’t have the funds or time to create there own engine. So hats off to Toxic Games for Q.U.B.E and also a big cheer to UDK for enabling titles like this to be produced. Long live PC, and long live indie.
Deus Ex Human Revolution at Eurogamer Expo 2010
Some more videos from day 1 at Eurogamer Expo, this time the Eidos Montreal team showing Deus Ex Human Revolution on PS3. I must admit I was seriously impressed with this presentation. The world seems so alive, the city feels like a real hustle and bustle metropolis, with NCP’s a plenty going about doing their own thing, each one with a different look (not repeats ala GTAIV). I think this game will be the one to look out for in 2011, the atmosphere is so deep just watching this demo felt like watching a big budget movie. Enjoy
Fable 3 at Eurogamer Expo 2010 with Peter Molyneux
Yesterday was a busy day at Eurogamer Expo. I managed to capture the Fable 3 presentation by Peter Molyneux but only now am I getting the videos online.
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