Video Games

MMORPG sweatshops

Samat Jain — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 05:10:00 +0000

Sweatshops in third-world countries earn gold in massively-multiplayer online role player games. I’m glad I don’t play these games.

Topic:

Video Games

My take on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Samat Jain — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:32:00 +0000

I finished Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PC this past week. Overall, I liked it–better than the previous games Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto 3.

Rockstar really added some pointless crap, probably to appeal to a larger audience. I almost felt like I was playing The Sims (why is this game still on the top 10? I mean, really, they have to run out of idiots to buy it?) when I had to work-out CJ (your character), muscle-up CJ, feed CJ, go out on dates with CJ’s multiple girlfriends, and worst of all, DANCE DANCE CJ.

The game starts off sort of slow at first, with a lot of emphasis on story. Not a particularly wonderful story either, I didn’t really get into it, and almost stopped playing because of how boring it was getting (one of the missions is to drive your homies to the equivalent of the Taco Bell drive-thru).

The girlfriends suck (not in that way). Probably alluding to the fact that I don’t have a girlfriend myself (ehhh… after the last one), I took great glee in shooting all the girlfriends (who weren’t crucial to the story) in the head with my AK-47.

One of things that bothered me about the Vice City game in the series was how much smaller it was than Grand Theft Auto 3–San Andreas rectified this completely, the game world is HUGE, with the performance much better than GTA3. Part of the story, your character wakes up and asks “Where am I?” to which you’re given the response “In the middle of fucking nowhere.” And, you are! It took me 10 minutes of driving in-game (though, I later found out faster ways) to get back to the part of the map I was previously.

You can tell they didn’t give too much thought into the PC port with respect to game control. Controlling airplanes is next to impossible to do with the keyboard. Not until I took out my gamepad could I even get the airplane to stay level in the air. What I thought was the absolutely most difficult mission in the game (and all 3 of the 3D ones, and actually was pretty difficult in the original 2D Grand theft Auto) was the RC missions, particularly the RC plane. Luckily, apparently you don’t have to win this mission to complete the game. The camera movement when driving is not too great either (different than from previous games), but you get used it after a while.

So, yeah, I liked it. Best single-player game I’ve played in a long while. Too bad there is no multiplayer.

Topic:

Video Games

NVIDIA 6800 Ultra power usage

Samat Jain — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 05:33:00 +0000

For some odd reason, NVIDIA gives the power requirements for their video cards in watts. Watts aren’t a very good quantitative measurement for this–there are both “good” and “bad” power supplies that have the same wattage rating, however they usually measure differently.

An article over at Spode’s Abode measures the power requirements of the 6800 Ultra. His consensus is that a 6800 Ultra requires a current of 5 amps at load, and can use a max of 124 watts power.

My 6800 GT is probably not far off. Along with the consideration that a modern high-end CPU will need 8 amps, and hard disks require ~2 amps each, I can plan my power requirements for a new system I’m building. More on that later.

Topic:

Video Games

Computer Hardware

Fixing Unreal Tournament 2004 for Linux permissions

Samat Jain — Thu, 26 May 2005 17:45:00 +0000

If you’re using the dedicated Unreal Tournament 2004 dedicated server, you may have noticed that the zip file does not preserve UNIX permissions. Things begin to get messy when you start to update things, as updates are normally distributed as UNIX tar files which do preserve permissions.

Topic:

Linux

Video Games

Unreal