GAMING: Deus Ex Human Revolution

Due to the previous Deus Ex Invisible War I played I was very keen to hear that there was a new release in the series of Deus Ex called Human Revolution and got a hold of a copy.

From initial demos I saw it looked absolutely stunning and oddly it was seeing this that made me want to build a new RIG. I do not have a rig by the way and it has been 6 years since I last built one.

This was something I spotted that made me want to get back into building, which I wanted to do as a business many times, that had my sweating and hating my situation caused by my unknown health problems, although almost there STILL UNKNOWN!! (see Corruption Blog for more details on that)

But then despite its lavish looks I then heard PC users complaining about it, possibly being a ported game, which really is a rip off way of doing things and the graphics, or details, in the games end up being worse than there XBox and PS3 equivalents  This is for me bad practice and is a rip off as the PC is always capable of much more eye candy than any gaming console and even true on the LAUNCH DAY of them too, along with the NEXT ONES...

Basically if the XBox and PlayStation versions LOOK BETTER you have been ripped off, more or less and that is how everyone feels and I do not blame them.

However for me this is hard to tell as I have been absent from all this for so very long now. This will become obvious over the next few posts I make but I have been playing Deus Ex Human Revolution and I bloody love it!!

GAMING: THE WITCHER ENHANCED EDITION

THE WITCHER ENHANCE EDITION

My God! What a love, hate relationship I have with this title?! On first installing it I assumed I was doing something wrong and the first battle with the Salamandra, yes to my repitle people I did type SALAMNDRA as that is what they are called I kid you not, I could not win nor die.

This was infuriating and in the end I put it down to the game and was going to return it to the Game Store, depite a suspicion that they do not accept Windows Games returns!

It seemed when looking around on the internet I was not the only one to suffer from this peculiarity which was that deaspite how long I battled I neither died, nor would die and did not seem to be able to control anything at all.

On the second running of this title suddenly the problem righted itself and I noticed Salamandra bandits falling in battle and that I had much more control of the main character...

...fast forward a fair section and I have been running around a village battling rabid dogs that glow in the dark ... a spooky green, killed swathes of drowners and other ilk. However now my love for this game had increased beyond that what I was expecting until I find the Salamandra's secret cottage... not big enough to swing a mouse and yet their are, contained within, four Salamandra with one a boss. No group boss as opposed to a level boss, kids, eh?! LOL.

I am supposed to kill them and yet every time I enter they are upon me as if possess Superman's X-Ray vision and i am struck several times before I can even draw my sword and yet again I find myself dying repeatedly?! Oh for the love o'...

Oddly no matter how much I battle I only ever kill two of them repeatedly and this includes constantly head-butting the door in the hope of opening it and luring them outside, which does not work either?! Oh for the love o'...

I do hope the second one has more control and more sense although this is yet another title that I had read could no way be run smoothly on a laptop with my CPU and my Graphics Card!

Despite admitting I do have to have the extra graphics bits turned down somewhat I am well aware that with my GAMING RIG I crave using an AMD FX 8350 and a Radeon HD 8970 or GEFORCE 680 I am at odds to understand the webpage after webpage I come across that has no end of those fanboys types stating that the FX's are NOT gaming CPUs. This insinuates that you cannot run any of the latest games on it when I have YET to actually by anything that FAILS COMPLETELY to be playable on my humble laptop!

Though the closest I came to a crawl until again turning a few things off would be the one up next...

LMAO!

GAMING: DCS: BLACK SHARK

Good one this one! Are you ready?

Right wanted to play this title for ages, I do actually have Comanche 4 by Novalogic around here somewhere. Only when I ordered DCS: Black Shark 2 it arrives as one and I figured I must have made a mistake...

Only when I eventually install this I have that flickering menu pointer issue, and no switching off aero in Windows 7 does not resolve it, you also get in Lock On Modern Air Combat?!

Then it asks me for a serial code I do NOT have as it was purchased used from Amazon. So I contact Eagle Dynamics and explain the issue and guess what? Yes ... NOTHING!! 

I have had this sitting in my pile for three months now I think and one day I will actually get to fly one of these things!

When will the morons that produce games realise they will make MORE money when they stop crippling their own software as well as make it run faultlessly with a several year old operating system like Windows 7. If you are unfortunate enough to be running Windows 8 then I would strongly urge you, before splashing out the 30 to 50 asking prices, to email said company and request compatibility!

GAMING: LOCK ON AIR COMBAT

I got this cheap because annoyingly, despite being a bloody old title now, I will have to have this installed if I am to play the soon to be released...

Lock On Flaming Cliffs 3

Though why I would have to do this I do not know...

Also despite what they say about these titles they are extremely frustraing to install and work for a whole bloody list of reasons and Eagle Dynamics are pretty shit for customer service and support really as you will note from this and the following post...

In MENUS in full screen the pointer disappears and only appears in flickers meaning you GUESS what you are clicking on?!

Installation is BAD and registration was coded by brain dead monkeys, normal monkeys would have done a far better job!

Still it does eventually RUN!!! LOL..

I asked Eagle Dynamics about the menu issue and no answer, other than 'oh we lost your email could you go on our site and re-submit it?!'

A game programming team that loses email? Oh dear! lol.

GAMING & COMPUTING: I HOPE WILL BE MY NEW RIG

What I hope my new RIG will be, and I DO NEED to do a post on an up to date of what I have worked out. Or as I like to call it ... THE WHEAT I FOUND AMONGST THE CHAFF!!

AMD FX-8350                                                    [HOPING: STEAMROLLER RELEASE or 8550]
Vertex 4 240GB SSD Drive                                 [LONGEVITY ISSUES OF SSD?!]
Western Digital Raptors 2TB x 2 in RAID 1 ARRAY
Gigabyte UD 3 or 5 Motherboard
Gigabyte or Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 Graphics Card [HOPING: 8970]
8GB CRUCIAL OC RAM                                   [16 GB]
Viewsonic 27 INCH LED MONITOR                   [TIMES THREE]
Logitech Laser Mouse
Logitech Keyboard Top End for Typing!!

The things in aquare brackets [] are what I am HOPING I will get eventually.

Oh and for the idiot fanboys out there, I WILL ONLY SEE THE ABOVE SETUP BEING FASTER IN 90% of things from me USING IT. Everything Intel is faster in you only know because a piece of software tells you!

In other words I will NOT see anything running more slowly but I WILL see things running a lot faster!!

Possibly others I will add BELOW this point in time...

GAMING: FARCRY AND MY LAST GAMING RIG BUILD

An old title and one that I played when I built my last GAMING RIG... oh which was...

Athlon 64 3200 (I think it was) plan was to go X2
Gigabyte Geforce 6800GT x 2 in SLI (before the now biased Custom PC Magazine did it)
[STILL HAVE THE TWO COPIES EACH OF THIEF DEADLY SHADOWS AND OTHER ONE]
Asus Motherboard
Western Digital Raptor HDD 64GB x 2 in RAID 0
Seagate 750GB HDD
Logitech Dinovo Kayboard
Logitech MX1000 Laser Mouse
Acoustic Energy Aego 2.1 Speakers x 2 (i.e. 4 satellites and 2 subwoofers)
Viewsonic 20" LCD Monitor

Saitek X-51 PRO Joystick and Thrust Set

Err if there are other bits I later recall I will add them here...

Man did I get a shock when the first game I played on the above rig was FarCry?!

Oh and with what I have read about Skyrim, FarCry 3, Metro 2033 and any future Bethesda games and Crysis and X REBIRTH along with any possible Deus ....

... ooh what happened?! I think I passed out?!?! LMFAO!!

GAMING: X3 REUNION

A little old now and I got it very cheap, couple of pounds I think, but love it and have since the very first one, called X Beyond the Frontier (CLEVER!)

Absolutely massive game this and even the Fallouts and Elder Scrolls cannot come close, well yet anyway, when it comes to longevity, played previous one for months and months and still had plenty to do! This makes this title the only game whereby the previous version came closest to still being played before the next version comes out!! Build, Trade, Dogfights, Several Friendly Alien races and a few evil ones too. Finding your self in the corner of a star sector and the way out cut off by pirates intent on killing you and after thinking there is no way out then spotting and asteroid field. Then navigating through it before making a full speed run to a jump gate?! Exhilarating!! LOL.

Now I want to see this X REBIRTH title released and I hear it is a ground up recreation... oops I my keyboard os fizzing and popping from that dribbling I failed to notice?! LMAO!

Had it awhile and was shocked it runs as smooth with everything on MAX on my...

Radeon HD 5470 M!!

Of course no surprise as I have been playing Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas and cannot help but wonder if I will be able to play SKYRIM?! But I will resist the temptation for when I build a new RIG as I want ALL that EYE CANDY TURNED ON!! LMAO!!

GAMING: OK ONLY FOR INFORMATION PURPOSES

CONFLICT DESERT STORM

Right well for those that remember this game and the others by the software house called Pivotal Games. Based in Somerset in an old converted Barnhouse, or at least they was...

...when I had my interview with them for a job as a games programmer back around the end of 2000!

In fact there are a few people on my Facebook list who were kind of hoping I would become their UNCLE when I was living near these people and attending this interview. About two months before GCHQ, or Government Communication Headquarters asked me to go and see them for an interview, LMFAO.

EDIT: I purchased this off Amazon for a single penny and it has been sitting around for about ten weeks waiting for me to take pictures of it and put it on this post, as have many other games lying around, lol.

GAMING: FALLOUT NEW VEGAS

Yes you better believe it I can also run the latest in the series I posted about in the last post and now running Fallout New Vegas...

...only it is a bit odd this time around as I seem to be able to have more of the eye candy turned up than in Fallout 3 and it looks better, is even MORE open ended that Fallout 3 and there are no underground sections thus far. That was one niggle in Fallout 3 was that you HAD to traverse underground to get from one part of the city to another.

Also it seems like I do not seem to die easily and some of the things, like food, seem to work somewhat differently in this game to the previous one.

Now for me the greatest programming team for games was Id, as I am sure it was with many a few years back. But where as they have stuttered, the pitfalls when creative types earn too much cash too quickly, Bethesda Softworks have launched themselves into ORBIT!!!

I cannot help but winder what their game titled Dishonoured is like?!?! LMAO!!!

GAMING: Fallout 3 by Bethesda

Yes would you believe it ... I managed to play this on my laptop and I bought it despite the Game Store laughing when I told him I would run it on a laptop?!

Glad to see my wagers normally pan out .... now WHER IS LADBROKES?!?! LMAO!

What can I say about this game that has not already been said?! Despite niggles you can never really totally be without this is a huge game with massive amounts of freedom and looks fantastic.

Indeed both my brother and his son, my nephew, gasped at seeing it running and said they could not get anything looking this good on their PS3?! LOL. That actually surprised me and just goes to show what I said about porting games from consoles to Windows!

 ... my god did I get a massive shock on running this one and I did not realise it was the same team behind the Elder Scrolls series either! That would be Bethesda.

Oddly enough after I bought this I then went in and bought the game in the following post I was also told would not run on  my laptop at all!

I love this ... almost as much as I love ... wait for it...

GAMING: Deus Ex Series & My Graphics

Now I must remind readers that my 17 inch laptop as a Phenom X3 1.8GHZ CPU and a MOBILE Radeon 5470, which switches to another 4200 Radeon when unplugged to save battery power, thought this is not needed much in my case!

Yes I do play these in 1900x1600 along with a few others and I do mange to mostly have Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on 2x, sometimes 4x?! Object and Grass fade set to far and textures on maximum and I have yet to see a slow down within the game. Bumping up the graphics too far would very much slow it down that IS for sure.

In the meantime I have loved the latest Deus Ex Human Revolution game and I only bought it as you could get it and another game for £15?! Marvellous!!

Yes there are some elements of the game that could be better but it matters not as for that money its excellent value and I am so happy that I managed to get it to run on my laptop, something that a great many people out there on forums stated was NOT POSSIBLE and NOT EVEN CLOSE!!

TUT!! Armchair experts!!

GAMING: Deus Ex Invisible War

I loved this game when I it came out and I never quite completed it...

Due to other games I now have I have wondered whether or not to put in on my laptop, if it works with Windows 7 at all that is.

I reckon I probably got near the end of the game and oddly do not remember much about but but did like it a great deal!!