TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Tag: PC

  • My Latest LOTRO News

    It has been a while since I posted any LOTRO news, and my video upload project is stalled because I’ve been busy.

    Most of my characters have left Thirst for Power, which couldn’t seem to gain critical mass in terms of having enough active members online at any time. Most of the kin members jumped to Exiles, which is an active kinship with many high-level members and a pretty fun group.

    My main character, Tallborn, is now level 59 and has done some missions in Moria and lots of instances, like the Grand Staircase (in order to get Moria Medallions to get awesome armor). I’m working through the Epic story missions, but they are a bit tedious and have lots of FedEx quests. I should not have waited so long to do them, because I don’t get much experience from them at my level.

    Several of my characters got fancy new Spring Festival horses, which are not faster than normal horses, nor cheaper, but have better decorations (saddles and gear). To get them, we had to win races and earn tokens, in addition to paying for the horse. While in Moria, you need to ride a goat, but outside, I like my festival horse.

    I can’t emphasize enough what a compelling game Lord of the Rings Online is. It supports solo and fellowship play, excellent crafting, skirmishes, and more. If you have any interest in role playing games, swords and sorcery, or the Lord of the Rings, give it a shot. You’ll have fun!

  • LOTRO Middle Earth Tour Part 2: Needlehole to Michel Delving

    This video continues my Middle Earth tour in LOTRO. I start at the entrance to the Shire from Ered Luin (see the first video) and the ride to Waymeet and Michel Delving, ending at the Mathom House.

    This video was captured using the Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle using an HDMI connection. While the sound was set to the HDMI connection, it apparently was not recorded, so this video is also without sound.

  • LOTRO Middle Earth Tour Part 1: Ered Luin

    This is the start of my tour of Middle Earth as envisioned by The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). LOTRO is such a huge game that I thought it would be worthwhile to show people how amazing it is. I decided I would ride from end to end and post the video, but I will do it in segments, because it may become boring and I don’t have access to all areas yet (at least not without being killed quickly).

    I’m also experimenting with capture approaches. My GTX280 video card failed, and in the process of diagnosing that, I built myself a new Sandy Bridge Core-i7 rig with 8GB of RAM and a GTX570, all in a nice red mini-ATX case. Unfortunately, the new GTX570 doesn’t have component video out, so I can’t use the Hauppauge HDPVR to capture anymore, at least not directly. The video below was captured using the HDPVR, but after the HDMI signal fr0m the computer was converted to component by a Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle. Why not use the Shuttle to capture directly? Well, the software is a little unforgiving (ok, horrible) and when I did this video, I didn’t have it figured out. I did use the Shuttle to capture the second part of the tour, but have so far been unable to get it to finish uploading to YouTube (it’s failing for the 3rd time as I write this).

    Unfortunately, just as I was experimenting with video capture, I was experimenting with audio capture. While the audio capture approach I used here worked in tests, it failed in real life, so this video doesn’t have sound. This is a shame, because LOTRO music is great. The soundtrack is varied and generally excellent – one of the best game soundtracks out there.

    This video shows me leaving Thorin’s Hall on my goat (you need a goat to ride in Moria, but you can ride it elsewhere and it is as fast as a normal horse) and riding past Gondamon, through Duillond, then into the Shire gate. Sadly, it’s at night, so the colors are muted, but LOTRO has a great night sky, which I show off a bit during the ride.

  • Enjoying Dragon Age II

    I posted before that Dragon Age II is pretty good, but I am enjoying it more and more each time I play it. I still haven’t found a powerful over-arching plot, but the side quests and personal quests for your companions are very good and compelling.

    As I said before, the combat is quicker and flashier, which is a nice improvement. I thought the combat in Dragon Age Origins was quite good, but this is more fun in my opinion. I haven’t had to do much handholding for my companions in battle, like I did in DA:O. They seem to pick reasonable targets and the default rules are pretty good. In DA:O, I had to adjust the behavior rules a lot. Perhaps as my characters level, I’ll need to do the same in DA II.

    The family Mabari war hound is an interesting addition to the game. The first time I played DA:O, I didn’t get the dog, and I assume the same is true for many players. Here, they give the main character (Hawke) the ability to summon the hound, almost as a spell. The dog does not count as a party member and does not seem to be controllable, but attacks targets and acts like a tank autonomously. For some reason, I was sure the dog would stay with the party once summoned, but as I was playing yesterday, I noticed that the dog stayed in the same area and didn’t follow along. This means dismissing the dog and resummoning it during battle, which is a bit of a pain.

    I still highly recommend Dragon Age II to RPG fans. It’s been a great game so far.

  • Dragon Age II is great (plus PC failure)

    I got Dragon Age II on release day and it is great. It isn’t quite as compelling as the original, which I simply couldn’t stop playing, but it is still very fun.

    DA II is clearly much more aimed at console users than PC users, so the top-down view is gone – instead, the camera is closer to a 3rd person perspective. In addition, inventory management and skills are way dumbed down. This is a shame for those of us that love digging into RPGs, but probably makes it more accessible to casual gamers, which is likely where the money is.

    The graphics look quite good on my 2560×1440 monitor driven by a GTX280 graphics card. The bummer is that the automatic configuration decided I could use 4x antialiasing, which made the game stutter quite a bit. I turned AA off and the game runs quite well. The game looks better than DA:O, but there are still a few issues. As usual, the face textures look great, as we’ve seen in Mass Effect II, but the clothing and some other textures were apparently done in crayon and look pretty lousy. There is a high-resolution texture pack linked in this forum post, but I didn’t install it yet for the reasons I discuss below.

    Loading new areas is slow in DA II, but perhaps a bit better than in DA:O (and remember the horrible memory leak in DA:O that made loads really slow after a while). The fighting is a little faster and more action-oriented, again dumbing it down a bit and making it less strategic, but shinier and perhaps more fun. The spells and effects look better and most spells are quicker to cast than before.

    The game has different paths to choose in both conversations and actions, all of which affect how much people like you and may change future game events. So far, I’ve been playing a goody-goody mage and choosing all the nice answers. I may play again sometime as a rogue and choose the smart-ass answers. I don’t really like playing evil characters, so I probably won’t bother with that.

    Overall, DA II is great fun so far and seems stable enough that I’d recommend people with even a passing interest in RPGs should try it!

    I’ve been having very strange PC troubles lately that seem to be hardware related, particularly my graphics card, but it is unclear exactly what is happening. It seems that right upon login, my screen either goes black or fills with a color or pattern and the system stops responding. I think it is as Windows Aero is starting. It happens on my normal account and a virgin account I have for troubleshooting. The crazy thing is that powering off and back on sometimes fixes it. I’ve updated drivers and everything else, to no avail. It is getting worse, however, sometimes taking 5 or more power cycles to get working. And once it is working, it stays working until the next power-down (not reboot – that’s okay).

    So to solve this puzzling problem, I’ve ordered parts to make a nice Sandy Bridge i7 system with a GTX570, so it should be a significant upgrade in both CPU and GPU performance. Then I will install the hi-res texture pack for Dragon Age II.

  • Dragon Age II Demo is Fun!

    I played the Dragon Age II demo today and it was pretty awesome. In the demo, I chose to play a rogue, which meant either dual-wielding blades or bow and arrow. I chose the blades.

    There are essentially 3 parts to the demo. In the first, you and a mage are fighting lots or darkspawn. This is a memory of one of your soon-to-be compatriots. Then you are with your family and escaping the burning of Lothering by the darkspawn. This leads to the formation of your party of 4 (soon to be 3), where you end up at the earlier scene, though with a bit more help. A surprise shows up to save your butt, and then there is a jump to a later scene where you have an indoor fight.

    The demo is sometimes difficult, and I had to do the troll battles a couple of times, because the entire party kept getting wiped out. The graphics were good and the effects excellent. The backstab ability of the rogue is especially cool!

    The demo portends good things for the not-soon-enough release of the game. Looking forward to it!

  • Enjoying the story quests in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO)

    I’ve really been enjoying the story missions in LOTRO recently. I had neglected them for a while, because I was having so much fun in skirmishes and generally exploring Middle Earth. I had completed the missions in Lone Lands and North Downs (Esteldin), so was sent to Rivendell for more.

    Elrond had me running all over the place talking to his sons and such, but that led to some really cool fellowship missions that could be done solo because I got a buff that gave me thousands to HP (Morale in LOTRO). Killed a bunch of trolls! All of this was to look for a Nazgul that escaped the flood at the Ford of Bruinen.

    Two days a go, I got to take a long, boring walk with Frodo, at Gandalf’s urging. Not very exciting, but nifty nonetheless.

    Yesterday, however, I got some fun missions! In one, I chased Gollum and nearly caught him (and killed an orc escort). In another, I went with Legolas to hunt forest trolls and their minions. In the end, we ran into the Nazgul commanding a boss troll, which we quickly dispatched. The Nazgul escaped, however, so I’m sure he will be back to cause us trouble.

    I also completed a Legendary Trait that allows me to use a sword as well as my Lore Master staff. This trait, based on Gandalf’s sword usage, makes me slightly tougher up close, though I can still die too easily. I’m also discovering that my Lynx pet seems to show more threat that the Bear that I had been using as a tank. The Bear (BigGrowly) is slightly tougher than the Lynx (Slynxy), but the Lynx keeps the enemies at a distance for longer. Plus the Lynx has the awesome sneak attack that can take down some enemies in one shot!

  • Logitech G15 Keyboard Spill and Cleaning

    I managed to spill less than a mouthful of Coke on my fabulous Logitech G15 gaming keyboard yesterday. I immediately unplugged it to avoid electrical damage, but then I did exactly the wrong thing: I turned it over to try to drain the Coke out.

    It turns out my beloved keyboard has raised mounts on which each keycap sits, and while the initial spill couldn’t penetrate them, by turning it over, Coke went into the keycaps, then down the mounts when I turned it upright again.

    After the initial drying, all the keys worked fine, so I thought I had dodged the bullet. But later, as I was playing LOTRO, I noticed that the “I” key was hard to press and slow to come back up. Of course, “I” is inventory, so it is used all the time. Then I noticed, as I was chatting with my kinship members, the period key was even worse than the I key!

    This morning, I looked at all sorts of resources that involved taking the keyboard apart and removing the circuits and LEDs and such and putting some pieces in the dishwasher. While that sounded awful, I was resigning myself that I should at least take the darn thing apart and take a look.

    Then I saw a post that said the keycaps are easy to take off and quite robust and hard to damage. This is a change from the old days when my wife would spill her soup into her Apple Extended Keyboard and I really did have to take it apart to clean bits of carrot out of there.

    So I took a picture of it to make sure I put all the symbol keys back in the right places:

    and started prying a wedge of keys off between the Alt below the period up to the I key. I used a small flat screwdriver and it was pretty easy, though I was very careful.

    The area between the key posts was disgusting so I used slightly damp Q-Tips to clean the area. I also cleaned the inside of the key wells for the I and period keys using very little water. Once I was done, I put it back together and checked that all the keys popped up well again.

    I plugged it back in and it lit up and works:

    I am now using the keyboard to type this. The I key is back to about 95% of its old feel, but the period has been getting stickier as I type. Maybe it needs to come off yet again…………………….

  • Why I like LOTRO so much

    Note: as I write this, LOTRO is down. There is big activity on Twitter where everyone is telling which server they’re on. Look for the #Servername hashtag. I posted mine.

    I have been enjoying Lord of the Rings Online a lot recently. I have 4 characters (the natives call them “toons”) on the Gladden server, one a mid-level Lore Master, a lower-level Hunter, a similarly low-level Minstrel, and a very low-level Rune Keeper. There are several more classes that I have yet to try. Each class is so different that it really makes the game very interesting and not boring to replay the missions (mostly). For example, the Hunter is quite the badass at low level, and has only died about twice, and then only when mobbed. The Lore Master can reach out and touch the enemy and has a pet to help, but dies pretty easily when approached. The Minstrel can play music that does damage and heals, but can also use weapons. I haven’t played the Rune Keeper long enough to be able to comment on him.

    The crafting system in LOTRO is very good (and much better than in Star Trek Online, though that has improved a lot). To craft, you need materials and recipes, which you either need to gather or otherwise get. Being in a Kinship is great help here, because your kin will send materials and recipes to you (as well as give you other goodies). Then, when you make something nice, you can send it to appropriate kin. Essentially, you don’t need to be self reliant. One of my characters is a jeweler and a cook, while another is a farmer and woodworker, and a third is a scholar (potions and scrolls) and weaponcrafter. With crafting, you can often make better stuff than what drops from your kills.

    If you this sounds like fun to you, check out LOTRO, create characters on the Gladden server, and, when you decide you want to stay, look for members of the “Thirst for Power” kinship and join up!

  • Just bought X Superbox on Steam!

    One of Steam’s daily deals is the X Superbox, which contains 5 X Universe (space adventure) games and some bonus goodies. I have already bought X2:The Threat, X3:Reunion, and X3:Terran Conflict on disk and re-bought X3:TC on Steam, but the opportunity to play the earlier games was too good to pass up. Plus I wanted the Superbox goodies. The only bummer is that because I already have X3:TC on Steam, they wouldn’t give me another one. For Half-Life, buyers of the Orange Box that already had some of the games got the extra copies that they could give to a friend, so I am disappointed that Steam didn’t repeat that good business practice here.

    I am looking forward to X gaming sometime soon, in my infinite spare time…