TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Author: TallGuyCalif

  • LOTRO Tour Part 6: Stock to Bree

    Leaving the relative safety of the Shire, the road to Bree is dangerous to low-level adventurers. Wolves, bears, and boars wander along the road, while bandit camps are on either side. This area is for players of levels 13-20ish, with many quests that will allow players to explore the area.

    It turns out FRAPS is limited to 32-bit file size, so long captures are broken into several files. This tour leg resulted in 2 files, so I had to use VirtualDub to join them before uploading.

  • LOTRO Tour Part 5: Hobbiton to Stock

    Now I purchase a ride from Hobitton to Stock on the East side of the Shire. I pass by lots of places whose names are recognizable from the Lord of the Rings books. Next up: on to Bree.

     

  • LOTRO Tour Part 4: Tour of the Hill

    In this segment, my Hunter rides around “the Hill” suburb of Hobbiton. The Hill contains the Party Tree and Bag End where Bilbo and Frodo lived. As you can see in the video, the Sackville-Bagginses have moved in already.

    I’m disappointed by how much the compression by YouTube muddies the textures. The game is quite sharp and generally looks good, as do my source videos, but YouTube needs to save bandwidth, so re-compresses quite a bit. I don’t fault them, but it does blur things quite a bit.

  • LOTRO Tour Part 3: Michel Delving to Hobbiton

    This time, I am using my Hunter to take the tour because Hunters can easily zip between the major Middle Earth locations.

    This video shows the path from Michel Delving, where the last part of the tour left off, to Hobbiton, with a short detour to the Great Smials in Tuckborough. Again, no loading screens along this path, nor will there be any for quite a while.

    Based on the tour videos so far, you would think it is always night in Middle Earth, but it is just bad luck. The night views are good and I should show more of the stars and sky in them, but generally the daytime views are better.

    This video was captured with FRAPS at half resolution and 30FPS, so what you’re seeing is a quarter of the pixels and half the frame rate I see, but it gives you a pretty good idea of how large and well-done Middle Earth is in the Lord of the Rings Online.

  • Witcher 2 on sale at Amazon Downloads

    I just picked up Witcher 2 for $16 at Amazon for download. This is by far the lowest priced I’ve seen for a game that I am really looking forward to playing.

  • Finished Borderlands: Great game, but underwhelming ending

    I finished the main missions of Borderlands and thoroughly enjoyed the game, but the ending is quite a let down. I was quite high level before attempting the ending, having done all the other quests I could find, so I had some great weapons and gear. Therefore, I was able to power my way to the Vault, kill the boss monster, and finish the game without too much trouble. But once I killed that boss, there was lots of ammo and such (which is good since I used a whole lot trying to kill it), but there weren’t any amazing weapons or loot there. I would have expected the Vault would contain some killer stuff, but nothing? How odd…

    I thought I must have missed something, but upon consulting walkthroughs, it looks like I didn’t.

    So, in short, Borderlands is a great game, particularly if you can pick it up on sale, but the ending leaves a bit to be desired. I have the DLC since I bought the GOTY version, but can wait on that until I make some more progress in LOTRO and Uncharted 3.

  • Enjoying Borderlands

    I bought Borderlands on Steam when it was on sale for $7.50 for the Game of the Year edition (as I write this, the game is on similar sale) and have been enjoying it.

    Borderlands is a FPS (First Person Shooter) that instead of trying (and failing) to be photo-realistic, it has a detailed cartoony look, which it pulls off really well. Just because things don’t look realistic doesn’t mean they can’t be scary.

    In the game, you play one of 4 classes – I’m playing a soldier that likes his assault rifle, though other classes value stealth or brute force more. You can have several guns equipped at once, as well as a shield and a grenade mod. The amount of loot in the game is crazy – there is never enough inventory space to carry even the good stuff back to sell it.

    Many of the fights are tough and shooting one enemy often makes many more pop up and attack you. Each class gets a special skill, and mine is to drop a turret that automatically shoots enemies for a little while.

    Eventually, you get to drive armed buggies around and they are great fun. It’s great to run over enemies and hear them splat under your wheels!

    The number of missions is amazing – I’m just out of the first area and have activated the fast-travel system, and I’ve done tons of missions and there are many more that await.

    The only bummer about the game is the first person viewpoint – it is enough to nearly make me sick after playing for a while. The movement is smooth and fast on my new graphics card, so I need to take occasional breaks so I don’t lose my lunch.

    If you have a good PC, pick up Borderlands – It’s great fun!

  • Switched from NVIDIA to AMD graphics

    I have been a long time fan of NVIDIA graphics technology and have always bought NVIDIA cards whenever I bought or put together a PC. But after many failures of such cards, that has all changed…

    My new HP laptop has an AMD 6770 GPU in it, which is fast enough to play most modern games at reasonable frame rates on the 1920×1080 screen.

    And I replaced my NVIDIA GTX570 with an AMD 6970 in my main PC last night. The problem was that the card tended to fail during graphically intensive games. It wasn’t heat, as I monitored that and used utilities to crank the fan up. It wasn’t the power supply, as I had a good one with plenty of power on the 12V rail. I was having so many problems, I built a new machine, replacing everything but the video card. When the failures recurred, I knew that the video card was the problem.

    The new AMD card is larger and a bit louder, though it cost less than the 570. It seems to dramatically outperform it, too, so assuming things remain stable (so far, so good), it will be a big win!

    Sorry NVIDIA – quality control from your manufacturers has not been good lately and this latest card problem is the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’ve spent a lot of money on NVIDIA cards that have failed in the last 5 years and think it’s time for a change.

  • Enjoyed Ender’s Game

    I am probably the only self-identified nerd who hadn’t read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card long ago. I finally read it on Saturday and enjoyed it. It isn’t a trivial read – it deals with complex issues and is intentionally told from positions where the reader doesn’t have all the information. It is a fun challenge to figure things out as we go along. There are several intriguing and thought provoking elements to the story arc that made it impossible to put down once I started.

    I read the Kindle eBook version and it was the nicest eBook I’ve seen. It has good formatting and layout, unlike many eBooks I’ve read. I also didn’t catch any obvious typos or other problems, an issue that often detracts from many eBooks.

    Overall, Ender’s Game is a fun book to read and is joy to read, because it is a well implemented eBook.

    Note: I am not making any money from the above link to Amazon.com – it is for convenience only.

  • New eBooks category

    While my site was initially about games I like (or don’t like), I am going to broaden it a little and occasionally write about eBooks I enjoy and, perhaps, about the poor state of eBook publishing in general.

    My comments in this category will be about the eBook edition of various books, so my comments may or may not apply to the dead tree version of the books.

    I do most of my reading on a barely functioning Kindle DX (yes, Amazon’s quality isn’t as good as it should be) and an iPad. I tend to buy eBooks from Amazon because they will work on both Kindle and iPad, though I have bought some books for nook, reading them on the iPad, and of course Apple’s iBooks store.

    Most of the books I read are Science Fiction and Fantasy, though it kills me when bookstores, like Amazon, combine the two into one category. Since when did spaceships and black holes have anything to do with dragons or ring wraiths? They are not the same genre of books, and while some people are fans of both, I’m willing to bet that most readers do not want the two mixed together in the store.