Grimblast.com

Well, posting to make sure my very small crowd of readers knows I’m alive!  I did manage to make it to Blizzcon and it was a blast.  Figured I’d share some pictures for those that might be interested in what all I managed to get shots of.  There was a lot to take in and 2 days just isn’t enough time to check everything out there.  I plan on going again next year assuming I can secure tickets again.    Click the below gallery to get a gander at some of the pics I took. For those familiar with me, you may even know which dude I am in a certain picture there.

Blizzcon 2010

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.

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.

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

After a little bit of fiddling around and what not, I now have my Team Fortress 2 server(Grim Ends) setup most of the way I want it.  I’m still working on a good map rotation and I was considering a day of the week based map type rotation.  For instance, say Mondays could be arena map night, Tuesday ctf, Wednesday capture point, etc.  I think it would be fun.  Currently I’m working with Sourcemod to add some additional admin/reserved player slots to the server because I think my friends should have priority on my server.  Sourcemod has a few nice features and in concept, it reminds me of the old Tribes 1 and 2 admin frontends except without the nice GUI.

I hope to have all these goodies fully operational sometime next week.  This weekend I only have 1 off day so I will actually be working on this site and another project or 2 for myself.

Well after playing through all that the Orange Box had to offer, I honestly can’t wait for another episode for Half Life 2.  They have a way of story telling and yet making the game remain very fun and making you want to play more.  The graphics are awesome as always and more is revealed with each episode.  I hope they don’t take too long on making that 3rd episode if they are even making one.  They so leave you hanging at the end of episode 2.

For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, these episodes are extensions to the game.  They occur after you get to the end of the normal Half Life 2 campaign.  They are sort of like expansions and boy do they have a bit of content.  If you do look into trying any of these, the link I provided shows you what is in the Orange Box.  All of the games in it are awesome and worth getting bundled.  I had mentioned it in a previous post but seriously get that box.  It is well worth it!