Archive for the ‘planet’ Category
Friday, November 13th, 2009
In case you somehow missed it, this week saw the release of Modern Warfare 2, a game that has comprehensively smashed every existing release day sales record, and looks set to become one of the best selling titles of all time.
Leaving aside certain issues that came to light in the days and weeks preceding the game’s release, the game’s PC release was marked by a frustrating and peculiar disparity between the release date of the retail and digitally distributed editions of the game. For its retail release, MW2 has been fully integrated with Steamworks, meaning that in order to install and play the game, it is first necessary to install Steam and associate your copy of MW2 with your Steam account, something that worked well on the game’s release date of Nov. 10.
However, copies of MW2 which were purchased directly through Steam (i.e. weren’t ordered from a retail store either in the highstreet or online) failed to unlock on this date, and indeed did not do so until very late on the night of the 11th. The reason for this remains somewhat unclear, but is suspected to be a concession to a retail channel which is greatly afeared that digital distribution will steal all their business.
This hugely frustrated many who ordered the game through Steam unaware of this delay, but it does allow an interesting insight into the strength of digital distribution on PC today.
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Posted in blog, gaming, planet | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
This review is a reposting of the review that I wrote for the Warwick Boar – complete with intended italics.
Only a month ago, the landscape of PC adventure gaming seemed a desolate and barren place, Telltale’s episodic offerings being the only visible remains of one of the bastions of traditional PC gaming. Since then Lucasarts had confirmed that they were returning to work on Monkey Island, one of the most infamous of adventure gaming franchises. Indeed, it was soon confirmed that not only were they working in collaboration with ex-Lucasarts staffers on development of a quintet of new Monkey Island episodes, titled the Tales of Monkey Island, but also on a special edition rerelease of the first Monkey Island title, the Secret of Monkey Island, resplendent with both a graphical overhaul and new voice acting. Only hours before this writer put fingers to keyboard, Lucasarts further announced that they would start releasing their back catalogue of titles on the digital delivery system Steam, starting on Wednesday with a selection of ten titles ranging from LOOM to Battlefront II. Perhaps adventure gaming could be stirring from its long forgotten ashes?
The first of these Monkey themed releases is the Tales of Monkey Island, whose five monthly episodes begins today with The Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, which I’ll be looking at here.
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Tags: games, lucasarts, review, telltale
Posted in blog, gaming, planet | No Comments »
Monday, July 6th, 2009
That game developers insist on filling my Documents folder up with hundreds of folders bearing their company name, with the sole reason of storing their save files in those respective folders. There’s a reason that there’s a “Saved Games” folder, guys. The ability to use this folder seems to be a skill learnt only by Darwinia, Red Alert 3 and C&C3 (even then, the latter two create a folder in /Documents to store Replays – DO NOT WANT).
Tags: games, stupid, tech
Posted in blog, gaming, planet | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
Probably not the best choice of photo possible, but here’s an interesting one that the camera threw up:
Answers on a postcard… or in the comments section.
Posted in blog, compsoc, planet | 4 Comments »
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
In a desperate effort to procrastinate today, I’ve been tinkering on the Linux ITS machines seeing if I can supplement their provided software. To this end I’ve attempted to build some decent multimedia apps (vlc and mplayer), update Firefox from 2.0 which was being used, and install Chrome; all in a non-root environment.
Firefox was at least successful (eventually), after sorting out a mountain of dependencies and ensuring that they were all compiled against updated libraries (in particular, various libraries were compiling against old versions of fontconfig which later threw undefined symbol errors for FT_SYMBOL_SIZE). Unfortunately, until/unless I compile KDE for these computers (it’s presently on 3.5), it isn’t possible to compile gtk-qt, so Firefox looks somewhat horrendous on the default theme. KDE4 though… there’s an idea. Instead, I’m using the rather lovely Chromify theme, which hides most of the defects for now.
It’s taken years to get Chrome to start compiling, not least because of the dependency tree that needed sorting. A more trying problem was that Chrome uses SCONS via gyp to set up the development environment. Cruelly, scons uses its own $PATH variable which it determines of its own accord. This meant that all of the dependencies that I’d built into /local/usr weren’t being referenced in the SCONS path. Additionally, editing the scons files themselves with the PATH setting didn’t work because they were regenerated by gyp at each reinitialising of the environment. Eventually after much trial and error I found a workaround in editing the src/build/common.gypi file to include the line:
'ENV': {'PATH': '/custom/path/variable/here'},
Within the scons_variable_settings block for linux.
Tags: chrome, code, firefox, programming, tech
Posted in planet, tech, warwick | 2 Comments »
Friday, April 17th, 2009
There seems to be a problem on ITS windows machines at the moment where trying to do nearly anything in Word (even pasting content into the page, or attempting to print it), results in Word complaining that “The Macros in this project are disabled”. Until ITS presumably release a fix soon, you can fix this now by:
- Enabling the “Developer” tab in the ribbon – Open Word Options from the menu which is opened by clicking on the circular thing in the top left. Under “Popular” options should be “Show developer tab on the ribbon”. Enable it.
- Open the Document Tempalates dialogue – it’s under the developer tab.
- Disable the addins – On the templates tab, uncheck both the “MathType Commands 6 for Word” and “MathPage” Global Templates and Add-ins.
And you should be done! Yay!
Tags: hotfix, tech, university, warwick
Posted in blog, planet, warwick | 3 Comments »
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
Reposting from Dave McCormick.
President:
- Andrew Bradley
- Mitchell Fung
- Andy Glyde
- Sam Shirley
- Asen Geshakov
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Tags: union, university, warwick, warwick university
Posted in blog, planet | No Comments »
Monday, December 8th, 2008
Returning my University float of games to my shelf at home made me very sad about my ability to complete them.
These are the games currently sitting on my shelf
Without counting the games purchased on Steam, of these, I have completed only… erm… COD2, COD4, COD5, Half Life 2 and… uhhh.. that’s it.
Christmas is a good excuse to play more, right?
Tags: games, gaming, I_suck
Posted in blog, gaming, planet | 1 Comment »
Sunday, December 7th, 2008
Here’s the week 10 Boar article which once again I left writing until the very last second; and then some. Will thoroughly dealt with the first three platforms, whilst I wrote most of the latter three consoles’ recommendations; though I must admit to the need to entirely retract the recommendation for Guitar Hero: World Tour. It was made in lieu of any other decent DS releases in Europe for this holiday period.
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Tags: 360, christmas, ds, games, gaming, pc, ps3, psp, wii
Posted in blog, gaming, planet | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
Fine. Now that it seems to have made it to Facebook statuses everywhere, I’ll give in and follow the crowd.
The amount of money in our pocket will not change as we walk down the street, jostling it up and down; the number of books that we have will not change if we pack them up in a box, load them into a car, drive one hundred miles, unload the box, unpack it, and place the book in a new shelf.
Does anyone fancy trying to guess which book this is? Answers on a postcard…
Suffice to say, it’s a book which I’ve now had for well over a year and am yet to even read the preface of. Seems to be a gripping read though…
Posted in blog, planet | 1 Comment »