So, to sum up; Windows XP Service Pack 3, wont install unless you hack your into your registry.   That’s the short of it.

Microsoft’s official stance is to say that “some programs change the system access control lists (SACL) in the Registry so that administrator accounts cannot alter them. The service pack installer runs under the user (admin) account and not under the SYSTEM account. Failure to update a registry key causes the Setup program to fail.”

Wait..  You mean Administrator isn’t root?  Why does the root login for my box not have root access?!  Who’s the jackass that thought that was a good idea?! 

And Microsofts official stance is that you must edit your registry.. something that if you don’t do 100% correctly, you’re boned.  I swear they developers at Microsoft are the biggest bunch of asshats..  I’d love to hear why this is acceptable and how this got through QA.. Someone MUST know — Please chime in..

What’s jacked up is on their website it actually says that this is for advanced users only and if you’re not comfortable then here is our support link where you can pay us to help you.. (I’m paraphrasing.)

They give instructions on how to fix it, then below the instructions they say that they aren’t responsible if these instructions don’t work.  Awesome..  Gotta love good customer support on top of a huge snafu.

To save you the trouble, here are the steps to fix it;

1. Backup your registry.
2. Download Microsofts Subinacl.
3. Download this file and double click it.
4. Install Service Pack 3 from the FULL install.

It works.  Step 1 is vital just in case, 2 is a microsoft tool that enables the script that is step three.  Step three is just what passes for a shell script, feel free to read it via notepad.  Also, step three takes about 10 minutes to run so go have a coke and a smile.

 I had actually been considering installing Vista just to test out DX10 on a different partition, now screw that.  Install Vista? Accept/Deny… Denied.

Game developers please.. start releasing your games for Linux..  Let’s make Microsoft shape up or get the hell out of the market..

My main character is a ranger — and as with all games that have a ranger class, he’s broken.  Primarily when it comes to damage output. 

I understand that a range, being a subset of the rogue class, can’t tank.  I’m there.  In EQ1 rangers were made of paper.. I’m cool with that.. But the ranger should be able to put out some damage, and since they can’t tank, they should be able to put out damage at range.  If they can’t for any reason do ranged damage, what’s the point of a ranger?   

In AoC the ranger can melee, use a bow, or use a crossbow.   Melee with an AoC ranger is a joke — don’t waste your time.  Crossbow has some nice damage, but its slow damage — and the majority of the skills are for bow not crossbow.  You’re really best using a bow.

Okay fine. I’ll use a bow — which is what I wanted in the first place.  The issue is with the various attack abilities with a bow, most of them are broken.

Salvo
The number one issue, and the number one skill used by a bow ranger is “Salvo”.  Salvo pisses me off to no end.

Salvo is a 3 key combo  – Meaning you poke the “Salvo” hot key, then you have to do two directional attacks in order to get the full combo (and thus the full damage) to fire off.  The problem is that salvo, as the name implies, fires more shots than you press keys for.

The first salvo hot key fires one shot usually straight initiating the combo.  The second key fires one shot either left or lower left, to try to get them to refocus their shields. And the third key fires 3 shots straight — but it does 3 individual attacks, its not like you knock up 3 arrows and fire them all at once.

It’s this third key that is the problem in that if anything interrupts your third key and those 3 attacks, the mob gets all the health back that he lost due to the combo.   This could be over a thousand points of health he just suddenly gets back.. *pop*  Insta-heal.

Further more, if you kill him on the first shot of the salvo, he still does damage to you until the entire combo finishes.  It takes about 8 seconds for the entire combo to resolve itself and I have died many times during that 8 seconds to a mob that was DEAD but still swinging.. 

And of course if they kill you this way, they are suddenly full health and back standing there!!

If the mob dodges or you “miss” with the first shot of the salvo, ALL shots of the salvo miss. Time well spent.

Salvo needs to be fixed.. But so far they wont even acknowledge that it’s a bug.

Some shots don’t register at all
Sometimes you will go through the combo keys and nothing happens on the final key.  No “Miss” text, no “Mob is too far away” text, nothing.. just.. nothing.  You’re left standing there wondering why the hell the mob didn’t just take damage.  Time well spent.  

No Range
The ranger also has ZERO RANGE!  It kills me how short ranged the bow is.. A bow in AoC has about a 50 foot range.  (Hard to say how many “feet” it actually is, but it aint far.)  I’m not saying the bow should have a 300 yard range, but it should have a longer range than it does.  It’s down right silly how short it is, and makes a rangers life suck as you basically have to get into melee range to shoot.

Give us some room to shoot folks!

Different Range First Person to Third Person
What?!  I want to know who the smacktard was that thought it was a good idea to give the bow and crossbow a different range based on first person or third person shooting.  What bone head thought this was a good idea?

Why does my bow have a range half again as long when in first person?  Why does my bow’s combo’s have a very short range, yet I can key up an arrow to fire at any range? etc..  This is just stupid.. 

Shooting from a ledge
One of the missions early on tells you that you need to go stop the mobs from shooting their bows from a ledge high up, because it’s killing the good guys.  SO you rush up there, kill them, only to realize that .. hey, this is a good spot to snipe back at the bad guys too!

So, you target up a mob and let fly.. Only to see them constantly evade..  You have line of sight, you have range.. you are above them though and they “can’t get to you” so instead of letting you murder them fair and square, they just evade,evade,evade like a broken mob.  

This is fucked up.. The whole point of the mission was to stop them from doing this, only to find out that YOU can’t do this.   WHY?!  If I can get up on this ledge, so can they — as proven by the fact that THEY WERE UP HERE FIRST!  This is just down right stupid and breaks the game to me.  You say you want players to be clever and try new things, then break the new things we try.  What bullshit.   If mobs are getting shot from someone they can’t get to, RUN OUT OF RANGE.  It’s short enough… 

I can go on, but you get the point by now..  This game is very beautiful.. More over, the 1 to 20 game is awe inspiring, and should be a lesson to other games as to how a game should be made.  

At 21 though (or when you get off the island) the polish comes crashing down.  It’s sad really.  I know for a fact it’s driving players away.  Several of my friends have already left due to these annoying bugs.. Above are just the ones that the ranger suffers.. each class has their own set just like this.. 

I do like the new combat system, but it isn’t enough to support a game.  You need to get the rest of this crap working.. 

In six or eight months this game will likely be awesome.. but for now it’s annoying and upsets me.  Time will tell, but I dunno if I will stick it out.

Simply put, this is a very impressive game — Not perfect, but worth the purchase.  To be honest I’m not sure why I waited as long as I did.  The game itself is quite beautiful and has a very nice story line.  It’s the first game in a while that I would classify as “smart” and clever at every stage — taking quite a step away from your usual brute force or shoot’em up games.  Stealth in this game is everything.

The player must use all manner of stealthy game mechanics like eavesdropping,  pickpocketing, and assassination in order to complete the missions.  Running in swinging your sword to just kill everything simply wont work, and while you’re not nurfed like you were in Thief, you still can’t take the overwhelming odds that you’ll encounter if you try to hack your way through.

The game mechanics are excellent as anything you walk at, run at or into, jump at/on/over will cause your character to behave exactly as you’d expect him to.  The “oh wow” moment for me was early on when I jumped and landed on a short platform and went a little too far.  The character hit the edge and flailed trying to regain his balance.  It looked very convincing.  The climbing mechanic is extremely well done, and you’ll use it pretty much constantly.

Your character is extremely athletic, probably unreasonably so heh.  I wish I could hang by my finger tips for an hour while my player went to the store for a coke..  And while jumping off the tower into the cart looks keen and all,  that’d kill the hell out of you!

I did find some issues with the game;

Jumping into water .. KILLS YOU!  heh, harsh.  But then I guess this is a desert memory and he can’t swim.

I’m not sure how slowing down and ducking your head makes you less conspicuous.. but.. it does.  This really is the only mechanic I don’t understand, but then how else would you provide a button that allows you to “fly casual”.

Controls are extremely unintuitive and border on confusing.  Especially for a PC gamer who doesn’t play console games.  You can really tell that this is a console game that was ported to PC where the controls are concerned.. The main issue is there is a LOT of things you can do and they try to do all of them with some combination of 4 buttons.

While the controls for the game are unintuitive and confusing, they give you quite a lot of options both in and out of combat.  And I don’t care who you are, sneaking up to an archer on the top of a building and pushing him off to watch him fall to his death is good wholesome fun.  You will eventually realize that you can be extremely “loose” with controlling your character and he’ll usually behave the way you wanted.

This is something that most PC players will have a hard time with simply because they are used to micro-managing their characters, as opposed to console games which will partly play themselves.

The graphics engine seems a tad unoptimized as I get a solid 60fps (with vsync) but there is video lag and jumpiness.. Also the game is beautiful, yet it has no ingame option for anti-aliasing.  This is a common trend of game makers lately and it boggles the mind.  Games with AA look so much better than without, but most of them don’t use AA.  It saddens me.  Forcing AA through the control panel has odd and unplayable results.

That’s really it.    Most of my complaints are pretty minor.  The game is a lot of fun and most likely will be one that I finish.  (For me that’s a sign of a good game.)

Oh and Chad, my computer gets a solid 60fps in most places though in a couple of the way up high views were you see everything, it dips into the 50s.  =)   Max graphics baby!   *sniff* I love my computer..

This game looked awesome! Everyone that played it said it was awesome and that I should rush out and get a console to play it — so needless to say I was really annoyed that it wasn’t a PC game and even more annoyed at folks telling me to buy a console.. But I was very excited when I heard it was eventually coming to the PC!

When it hit the shelves for the PC back in May I pretty much went and got it as soon as I could. (I was a couple days late, but a funeral will do that.. )

What an absolutely fantastic game! I maintain that Bioware is an awesome company and that they do good work. I have liked just about all of their games; Baldur’s gate was fun, BG2 of course was a good game, Neverwinter nights was well done, but had issues. And of course KotOR was fantastic. So I knew when I heard that Mass Effect was being put out by these guys, it was going to be a rockin game. Oh how right I was..

The game is so polished! I mean from character creation all the way through the end of the game, it just feels right, and works. Everything works! It is the closest thing to “playing a movie” that I have ever experienced.

What I love about it is that you can play the game differently multiple times through, choosing a different class, past, powers, weapons, armors, friends, missions, assignments, personality..etc.. and play the same game in a completely different way!

And whats awesome is, the game will play right along. The voice over actors will actually do different dialogs depending on your past history, your past actions, your current actions, and will correctly label you if you’re male or female! I really hope they got their money back on the sheer volume of voice acting they had to supply this sucker!

I can’t say enough good things about this game.. I want to salute Bioware! And to think they are currently working on Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3!! *GLEE* (though probably for the consoles first.. *grumble*)

I read quite a few posts about the game too and the biggest complaint is that it was short. Which boggles my mind. The first play through took me 25+ hours, and I didn’t do everything. There was still quite a lot of content that I didn’t do.. (I initiated the final end game mission without really realizing that was what I was doing.. but then.. I’m st00pid..)

25+ hours of game play, especially for a game you can play again in so many different ways, seems very reasonable. I mean other games of this nature didn’t have that much content.. Plus they are talking about releasing future downloadable content? Seriously..

This game very much rules.. In all likelihood you should get it…

Firstly let me say, funcom has done a wonderful job capturing and portraying the world of Conan.. I’m having a lot of fun.

However, I was initially worried.   I beta tested and played Anarchy Online and by all accounts it’s initial release was a nightmare. It was truly, truly bad.  Funcom, and all other game companies for that matter, learned that day that to release a broken game dooms the game forever.  I had assumed that funcom learned its lesson and would release a stable game, in fact I had visions of board meetings in which the members all chanted, “please not like AO”… So you can imagine my shock when at 12pm my time, when the doors were to open.. Nothing happened.

I refreshed the game a couple times and found out that it got pushed back to 3pm.  Fine fine.. understandable.. these things are complex..  So I played some Call of Duty 4 for a couple hours and dreamed of headchopping..   3pm came along and…   Nothing.  Plus, now the funcom forums have crashed due to a database error..

“Oh god..” I cried, “funcom is doing it again! Its Anarchy Online all over.. ”

Now before you get disappointed, at 3:30pm the servers came online and I played for 12 hours straight.. but I get ahead of myself..

At this point the forums are coming up and down and having all manner of issues.  People are yammering away about lawsuits and making immature pointless complains.. (Seriously folks.. build a bridge and get over it.. )  Constant cries about how funcom has screwed the pooch!  About how players are going to sue, and about boycotting them, how this is the worse release ever (I WAY disagree)..etc.  (it was really lame.. I hope funcom knows that the vocal and annoying minority are just a bunch of douche bags that don’t represent the rest of us.)

The game isn’t actually to be released until the 20th.. so at this point the game isn’t much more than a paid beta..  I’m not sure what people were/are complaining about.

Once the game did finally go live for those of us in the Early Access program at around 3:30 I jumped in and made 4 characters to get my commonly used names.  I then played the game as my ranger for the next 12 hours!

Seriously.. 12 hours.. straight..   I got my character to level 17, and at around 4 am I went to bed..

I had my graphics set to max and played without a hiccup or a glitch until around 6 hours in when my frame rate went into the toilet.   I relogged, and went right back at it. So they have a very minor memory leak most likely.. but hell if thats the worst of it.. YAY US!

Seriously, what a fantastic game.  Funcom has done a marvelous job here folks.  Those who are saying this release was a bad one.. A) You’re retarded — the game isn’t out yet.  That happens on the 20th in the US and the 23rd in Europe (Sucks.. sorry about that guys)..  B) this has been the cleanest deployment I’ve ever seen and I have played a lot of games of this nature.

I think funcom has done a very good job.  Now I’ll admit there is still ample time for them to screw it up between now and release, but so far so good.

Major game issues:

• In the 14 or so hours total that I have played the game at this point, I have only had one blue screen of death.  The game was running smoothly then the sound locks up, BSoD and auto-reboot.  No idea why it happened.  *shrug*  Could have been anything, so I am not even sure if it was the game.  It could have just as easily been the Microsoft auto updater which has caused me issues before and was demanding I install something upon reboot.

Minor game issues:

• After 8 hours of game play my frame rate tanked — which of course just required me to re-log and all was well.  I class this as a minor issue because there was an easy fix.  Most likely it was a memory leak issue somewhere..
• Climbing interface needs work — you just kind of pop onto a ladder and then pop off of it.  Plus if you have multiple climbable surfaces near one another the game often gets confused as to which one you actually want to climb.
• Mob AI is kinda weak — when sneaking through the keep to steal the phoenix medallion often you must dispatch some troublesome guards.  Typically I wait for one to be alone, then kill him.  Wait for the next one to path along, then kill him.  Etc..  It amuses me that often one mob will path over the body of his fallen comrade without a care in the world.  I expect this behavour out of unintelligent mobs.. but not guards..
• Grouping Colors — by default player names are turned off..  To include those in your group!  I want to be able to see my group mates easily and can’t do that in a pack of mobs.  Give us an option to show just our group mate names and make the icons for group members bigger on the mini map please.
• First Person Shooting — why does it take me from first person shooting to an over the shoulder view then back after combat?  this confuses me.. and frankly I hate it.
• Range First/Third Person difference — why does my bow have a different range depending on my view?  that’s retarded.

Requests:

• I want a way to set a view preset for each of my weapon sets.  You have two weapon sets that you can swap between, I want my view to be able to swap too!  First person for bows, third person for swords.  Should be simple.
• My bows range should be the same no matter what view I’m in.  Its really lame that they are different.  Both third person and first person should work as first person currently does.  If I miss, then I miss.  Don’t tell me I’m out of range though.. thats really dumb.

more as I think of them…

I have been using linux quite a lot at work, and really like where Ubuntu is going. Pretty much everything about it leads me to think that Microsoft should be worried. (Apple has nothing to fear, simply because they are a hardware company..)

Anyway, after having XP tell me for the umpteenth time that I had “unused icons on my desktop”.. (Yes I know.. I PUT THEM THERE..) I decided to install Ubuntu on my game machine and try to get WoW working. I figured I’d be in a long and protracted fight, an impossible up hill battle with a colossal fight at the end! I couldn’t have been more wrong — but I get ahead of myself.

Getting Ubuntu installed on my game machine was cake. I installed a new hard drive, partitioned it to have a /, a /home and a swap.. Installed Envy to get the nvidia drivers running.. and fiddled with the xorg.conf file for hours on end trying to get my dual monitors to work correctly. That was the only part that was hard to be honest, I screwed it up a couple times.. heh. That and I had to correct some oddity with the alsamixer being muted.. not sure what that was about.

So with that, my game machine is now dual bootable into XP and Ubuntu. Synergy works nicely on both installs which gets me to my email goofing off box (also ubuntu) and all the peripherals work nicely.. (er.. I haven’t gotten the G15 keyboard stuff working in Ubuntu yet.. but haven’t tried either)

So next, I installed WINE. I really didn’t know what to expect here, but was pleasantly surprised.. It’s very simple, clean and works nicely.

Next I dragged the World of Warcraft install off my XP C: partition into the .wine directory.. and typed “wine Wow.exe” via command line..

And holy shit if World of Warcraft didn’t launch first try!! I was shocked and stunned beyond describing.. I mean I didn’t expect it to work at all.. little alone the first damn try.

Now the truth is, it didn’t work fully the first try. It got to the loading in screen, got to 100% and locked up. But a couple of config file changes later (I had to enter 3 lines into the WTF config file) it worked and I played on it for several hours.

What amuses me the most about this is that the game actually played in Linux at roughly the same frame rates as my windows XP box or HIGHER frame rates depending on what I was doing.

I have no idea how they do it, but the WINE folks are awesome..Awesome I tell ya. Wine you’re the bomb!

I don’t know how it would handle a much more intense game.. Lets face it, World of Warcraft doesn’t exactly push the envelope here.. So if I tried the same trick with say, Crysis… I doubt it would work. But still I’m damn impressed.