Grimblast.com

Well, looks like blizzard has started the cataclysm beta testing for WOW.  MMO-champion.com has been posting some nice information now that the NDA has been lifted on the expansion.  I look forward to possibly getting into the beta myself so I can get some face time with the stat and talent changes.

Well, after some guys at the office mentioned about going to Blizzcon this year, I figured I’d go as well since we could all car pool there.  As of 11:01am this morning, I got my tickets for Blizzcon so looks like I’ll need to make plans for the trip in October since that’s when they are having the convention.  It’s pretty exciting to think about since I’ve always wanted to go.  I’ll have to gear up my camera for pictures and what not so I can possibly share them here.

My friend Zancarius(alias Ben to those that know him) has found something online that might help break up some nights of boredom.  He found a fix for the old Tribes 2 game that allows us to finally play that game again online.  The game used a crappy concept of requiring some auth server to be able to play it online.  When that auth server went offline, it made the game totally useless.  They didn’t patch out that auth server check for the cd key so the game had no way of being played online.  Enter TribesNext.  Seems a guy came up with a ruby based fix to allow us to play Tribes 2 again.  And if you didn’t have it before, now you can download it and play it for free with his fix.

I haven’t had the opportunity to try all of this yet since I’m work but this all sounds promising since I always liked Tribes in the past.  Had some great multiplayer matches in that game but their company went down the wrong road and tanked the series and themselves.  I can’t run a linux server with this fix but I can run a server under wine since the windows server should work just fine.  I might post back later about what progress I/Ben have with this.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the game Pacman.  The only way I found out was from a coworker that went to search something up on google.com.  They had changed their logo to a pacman ish logo.  I found that it had a mouseover which mentioned the anniversary and if you click it, you can actually play pacman in the logo with your arrow keys.  Now that is cool!

Looks like my new FPS love is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  It’s very well done.  I like the realism the game has as well as the competitiveness in the multiplayer side of it.  The queuing system in it reminds me of halo’s multiplayer lobbies.  I pretty much suck at it but hey, the only way to learn how to do it is play against those greater than you.  Gotta eventually catch on!  Or just get beat down a lot.  Either way, the game is pretty fun.  Worth trying out at least once if you’ve not played any call of duty games.

PS: PC version for the win.  That’s right, I stab at thee console jockeys!

I forgot how useful Fraps was.  I just recently reinstalled it and took some awesome, no frame rate loss screen shots of a game of that lacked a screen shot feature.  Quite the nice solution.  I used fraps sometime back when I was making boss fight videos for my World of Warcraft guild.  I did a lot of recording then.  I might pick up on that with these other games I’ve been screwing around on.  Need to spice up the website with some visual stuff!

Well, only after playing a few hours of the game it has a lot of replay value.  The graphics are amazing and I love the turn/time based combat system they are using.  The paradigm option is different and I’m used to controlling each person individually but currently you control the party leader and the others follow suit based on the paradigms you setup.

I’m not much for in depth reviews at the moment but I’ll look into doing more for the games I comment on since I am a gaming enthusiast.

With my reinstallation of Windows 7 and Steam I started to encounter a silly problem.  When I would try to run Steam it was trying to say that:

Running Steam in Windows compatibility mode is not recommended. Please remove any Windows compatibility settings for all users under file properties for Steam.exe and restart Steam. Press ‘Cancel’ to premanently ignore this warning and continue.

I checked my properties and found out that I wasn’t running in compatibility mode and yet Windows believed I was.  I did some searching on the internet and one of the first few hits I got had the answer to this little dilemma.  The site was slow to come up for me but it had what I was looking for.  Apparently, there is a registry entry involved which causes this to happen.  I’ll quote that site in the event they disappear or just don’t load up in a timely fashion.

To fix the issue:

1. Hit start->run->regedit
2. Go to key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers
3. Look for a entry with your path to steam.exe
4. Delete that entry
5. If you dont find it there try HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers

Hope this helps out any that encounter this particular  issue.  As always, if you poke around in your registry and don’t know what you’re doing, I take no responsibility for your breaking of things.

Looks like games are for the mice!

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/mouse-virtual-reality/

What a crazy concept but yet another odd and geeky read!

Here’s another wacky comic by gamespy.  I think it covers the basics of what it takes to be a video game villain.  Some of them are pretty accurate as to how you take out some bosses in games now days but still funny!  I wonder if this could be used to determine how Rambo takes out the villains in all of his movies, hmm.

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/102/1029366p1.html