BioShock is one of those games I’ve been holding out on getting, mostly because I don’t own a Xbox 360 and I don’t have a powerful enough computer to run it well. I was planning on waiting until either of those situations changed, and the price dropped to around $10 or so. However, Steam are currently doing a huge Year End Sale with a lot of titles heavily discounted. BioShock, which originally arrived for $49.99 and dropped quickly to $19.99 was always on my list of games to buy, but this Year End Sale put the price at $4.99. There’s no way I can ever beat that price at retail, unless I get a used opened copy, so I bit the bullet and bought it. Even if I can’t play it right now, I’ll have it in my Steam account so that when I do get a better computer, I’ll be able to fully enjoy it. Of course, the wife’s laptop can run it just fine, so I might be commandeering that to play on.

Tags: Deals, PC Games, Play by Teh Bagder
764No Comments »http://iam.tehbagder.com/2008/12/27/steam-year-end-sale-bioshock/Steam+Year+End+Sale%3A+BioShock%212008-12-27+06%3A02%3A46Teh+Bagder

While I understand the need to add copy protection to games, I have a special hatred for SecuROM, which comes with a number of different games, including Prey. I received Prey as a Crimble gift, but didn’t realize it had SecuROM protection until I tried to install it on my laptop. I popped the first install disk into my drive, where it decided to spin rapidly and do little else. This happened multiple times, and I was concerned that I had a faulty disk. I decided to switch of the real-time AV check, and disabled a few other programs, but to no avail.

That’s when I checked online and found that Prey used SecuROM in its retail incarnation. Great! Then the strangest thing happened, and the games started to install. I have no idea why, but the game managed to install eventually. I popped online to the Prey support site and found that the latest set of patches REMOVED the SecuROM protection. So, quick as a fiddle, I downloaded Patch 1.4 and installed it, took the disk out of the drive and loaded the game. Lo, it worked, allowing for the following piece of justice about 3-5 minutes into gameplay, just before Tommy got sucked up into a giant spaceship, and after he went to town on them with a wrench for hitting on his girl. These guys obviously can’t quit each other.

Now that the game is installed, and I’ve got the settings optimized for a decent, albeit three year old, laptop, I can enjoy the game, and knock some aliens on the head. I’ve played into the third scene, and the game really does deserve the M for Mature rating that it’s got, and not just for language. This game has gore in it, and lots of it, and it’s got that whole Doom 3 creepy monster-in-the-closet vibe going on, but with portls. I have a feeling I’m really going to enjoy playing this game all the way through.

Tags: First Impressions, PC Games, Play by Teh Bagder
7591 Comment »http://iam.tehbagder.com/2008/12/26/preying-for-no-securom-pays-off/Preying+For+No+SecuROM+Pays+Off2008-12-26+06%3A01%3A34Teh+Bagder

As part of this years Wintersday festivities in Guild Wars, if you complete four quests, you get to unlock a special bonus, which turns out to be the Jingle Bear, a modified polar bear that has bells that jingle when it moves. I decided the best character to have this bear as a pet would be Gwen, seeing as the bear is lurking in her garden. I sold her eagle, and had her tame her own bear, which you can see from the screenshot below, taken in the little garden she has outside the Eye of the North citadel, and where she grows red iris flowers.

We’ll have to get the kids up to level 20 quickly so that they can complete the quests to unlock this pet before Wintersday ends, because I know my daughter would love to have a Jingle Bear for one of the new heroes she gets from the Nightfall campaign we bought her.

Tags: Guild Wars, Kids, MMO, PC Games by Teh Bagder
7542 Comments »http://iam.tehbagder.com/2008/12/22/guild-wars-jingle-bear/Guild+Wars+Jingle+Bear2008-12-22+05%3A52%3A32Teh+Bagder

Today, we picked up a The Ant Commandos Double Range wireless controller. Tomorrow, it goes back to the store, because it doesn’t play nicely with our wireless network, and is supposed to be interference free. If you leave the controller on, and don’t press any buttons, it randomly sends signals to the PS2. If I turn off the wireless router, it stops doing this. Our wireless router is a standard standalone Linksys Router, although I’m running DD-WRT on it so I can have better control of our wireless network. No matter what channel I change to (from 1 to 11) there’s still interference occurring. Seeing as a single wrong note in Guitar Hero or Rock Band can blast your score and progress to bits, this is unacceptable, and I shouldn’t have to turn of my wireless network to be able to use a wireless controller. So, back to the store the controller goes, and I’ll just have to get an additional wired controller. At least those don’t suffer from interference, just people tripping on them, or kids chewing on cables.

Tags: Borked, PS2 by Teh Bagder
749No Comments »http://iam.tehbagder.com/2008/12/21/guitar-hero-interference/Guitar+Hero%3A+Interference2008-12-21+23%3A56%3A43Teh+Bagder

One of the things I love about Guild Wars is the special events they put on throughout the year. Wintersday is one of those, and this year there’s a bunch of extra bonuses, including a special reward for completing four Eye of the North quests. Wintersday celebrations start tomorrow and run until January 5th, with a special Wintersday even occurring every three hours on New Years Day.

This year will be different for us, because the kids have their own Guild Wars accounts now. Not only that, but we just bought them the Nightfall campaign, which completes the campaign set for them, and for Christmas, they’re going to be unwrapping the Eye of the North expansions which plug into all three campaigns. My daughter has a character at level 19, and my son has a character at level 8 or so. To allow them to do the quests, they need to be level 20, so there’s going to be a lot of Guild Wars-ing going on over the next couple of weeks. Now that they’ve got all the campaigns, we’ll be able to play together a lot more, although we only have three computers that can run the game, so only one adult will be able to play and help them level up and complete the quests. That will most likely be my wife, as I’m still working through the winter break, even although college is out of session for a couple of weeks.  Screenshots will be forthcoming.

Tags: Guild Wars, Kids, MMO, PC Games by Teh Bagder
7401 Comment »http://iam.tehbagder.com/2008/12/18/guild-wars-wintersday-2008/Guild+Wars%3A+Wintersday+20082008-12-18+15%3A20%3A17Teh+Bagder

While browsing Half Price Books last night, I found a used copy of Warhammer 40K Dawn of War Gold, which includes the Dawn of War game, plus the expansion Winter Assault for $10. I was sorely tempted to pick it up, even although GameTap has signed a deal with THQ and has released the game today as part of the GameTap service. When games come to GameTap they typically stay around for around a year or so at minimum, so I’ll have plenty of time to play the game through GameTap before having to find myself an offline copy. The only drawback to playing via GameTap is that I need an Internet connection to initially connect to GameTap and verify I can run each game.  This isn’t usually a problem, as I usually have my laptop at home, the in-laws or at the college.

I was first introduced to Space Marines when I got heavily into tabletop roleplaying games at the tender age of 14 or so. The Ultra Marines were my first unit, and I religiously bought White Dwarf magazine every issue so that I could get the updates. Eventually the Mentor Legion became my favorite chapter of Space Marines, so I’m hoping I can get some action in as those. I’ll be playing some WH40K over the next week or so to get a feel for it (although Guild Wars may interfere with that.

Anyone up for some Ork-bashing?

Tags: GameTapping, PC Games by Teh Bagder
736No Comments »http://iam.tehbagder.com/2008/12/18/ultra-marines-were-supermegaultraawesome-marines/Ultra+Marines%3F+We%26rsquo%3Bre+SuperMegaUltraAwesome+Marines%212008-12-18+14%3A28%3A57Teh+Bagder

In addition to offering the original Command & Conquer, updated to run on current machines, EA is also offering free downloads of the first game in the Red Alert series for C&C. If you missed this game first time round, you really need to play, even if it’s just to watch FMV of Kari Wuhrer playing Tanya. As usual with all the C&C games, scenery is chew and there’s lot of ham acting, but that’s half the charm of the game. The site also includes updated instructions on how to install and run it on both Windows XP and Vista.

Tags: Free Games, PC Games, Retro by Teh Bagder
7282 Comments »http://iam.tehbagder.com/2008/12/17/free-red-alert/Free%3A+Red+Alert2008-12-17+19%3A05%3A00Teh+Bagder

Steam are offering Weighted Companion Cube Plushes for $29.95 each. They’re awesome, but too rich in price for me to order one. You can bet these will sell out quickly though.

Tags: Geekery, PC Games, Web by Teh Bagder
731No Comments »http://iam.tehbagder.com/2008/12/16/companion-cube-goodness/Companion+Cube+Goodness2008-12-17+02%3A47%3A56Teh+Bagder

Not quite sure how this passed me by, but Rockstar are offering some updated and free versions of classic games for download from their website, namely the first two GTA games and Wild Metal. You need to supply some personal information first, but then you get to download the games and play them to your heart’s content. I remember playing GTA when it was first out, and the franchise has come a long way since then. Windows only.

Tags: Free Games, PC Games, Retro, Retro Tuesday by Teh Bagder
724No Comments »http://iam.tehbagder.com/2008/12/16/freebie-gta-1-2-and-wild-metal/Free%3A+GTA+1%2C+2+And+Wild+Metal2008-12-16+21%3A57%3A00Teh+Bagder

A few years back we had a subscription to RealArcade. This was before we discovered GameTap, and we thought the value of a subscription was worth it. The gist of the sales pitch that RealArcade made was that any games you bought would be yours to keep and you’d be able to play them in the future. They basically put a wrapper around the main executable that tied it to the RealArcade player, which was a standalone executable that ran as a program launcher on your computer. Due to finances we eventually decided to stop the subscription last year, knowing that at any time we could reinstall the RealArcade player and still play the,

Except that’s not what happened.

Real has upgraded RealArcade to a browser-centric application that won’t recognize the old file format of the games that we bought and archived. As RealArcade gets rid of purchase history beyond a current year’s time, we archived all of our games so we could play them again. The problem is that there’s no way to load the new games into the new executable, because the new executable launches a web-browser and operates completely differently.

My laptop got wiped a few weeks back, so of course, I didn’t have the old version of the RealArcade software installed. It took me a couple of hours research to find a way to get the old executable back (which is no longer supported by Real). This mad me quiet mad, but I’ve archived a copy of the installer so that we can continue to install the games we bought and expect to be able to play.

Other games services such as Steam and Impulse keep track of all your previous purchases, so why doesn’t Real? From now on, we’re buying games through Steam, Impulse and GameTap, because these service providers get that you don’t piss off your player base.

Tags: Borked, Opine, PC Games, Play by Teh Bagder
717No Comments »http://iam.tehbagder.com/2008/12/15/borked-realarcade-retrofitting/Borked%3A+RealArcade+Retrofitting2008-12-15+17%3A17%3A00Teh+Bagder