Here at the very end of all things (on this blog)
Blogger are disabling FTP publishing. I use FTP publishing, this blog is hosted at the fantastic Server101 and I've no wish to move it. Appears I have not really much wish to publish to it either, reviewing the woeful stats for the last months. I blame Twitter, Facebook and Left 4 Dead for taking up my valuable time. And when I say blame, I mean thank. I love Left 4 Dead!
So here I am writing a final post that is not so final, for publishing shall continue, somewhere else. I am downloading WordPress which I have long wished to tinker with. Though tinkering is bad for the spare time too …
My last post about cold bytes leads nicely into this. I have rejoined the Communities web team, though it is much different to when I left it, with over double the staff it had then and impressively named Business Innovation & Web Services — within which I job share a team lead role for a Strategic Improvement group. 3 days a week and it is going to be awesome. I still code two days a week for Smart Service Queensland. A good balance.
There is much to celebrate this year. A change in the workplace is refreshing — and even the development team is moving out of the darkness into some natural light — and this year marks the 10th year anniversary of my marriage and moving to Caboolture. A decade! Such were the naughties. Let's leave blogging back there. It’s time I got back into publishing and content/media creation. More creativity, I must have more! We’ll see what the year brings …
http://inspire.server101.com/ben/2010/02/here-at-very-end-of-all-things-on-this.html
GTA IV on PC: first impressions
The good
Independence FM. Having your own music just makes the GTA experience that much more what you want it to be. We all have our own favourite driving/party/cranky music, it's nice to finally be able to play it. And commentary that relates to the audio track metadata, nice touch!
Mouse. Nothing beats the mouse. Nice camera control. Nice easy yes/no buttons. Useful for target and attack in combat. Love the mouse.
The bad
Driving with a keyboard — augh! OK, this one is all my fault for not configuring my gamepad — yet. Keyboard control for driving is awful, truly, terribly awful. In any game, this is not a GTA issue.
Antialiasing. Needs to be turned on! Even 2× AA would be nice. I guess this is related to …
The ugly
Graphics performance. I look forward to a patch or new nvidia driver (or both) that brings the framerate up. FPS is hovering in the 16–22 mark and that’s noticably poor. Strangely, dropping the resolution and graphics settings down as low as they go doesn’t improve the situation. I mean, it is good I don’t need to run it on low quality. It’s bad I can’t get the framerate up. So, bring on a patch. It seems to be a hot topic on the GTA forums. Glad it’s not just me.
- The chance for comments is gone. Shame, 0 is never enough.
http://inspire.server101.com/ben/2008/12/gta-iv-on-pc-first-impressions.html
Our consoles days are numbered
Big fans of gaming that we are in this house, we have 2 PCs for gaming, a Wii, PS3 and gamecube. There are more: N64, SNES and even an Atari, but they’re all packed away. Oh, and a handful of DS Lites and Gameboys are floating about. But I wonder about the consoles …
The PS3 exists here for one purpose only: GTA IV. With the announcement that GTA IV will be available for PC in November, will there be any reason to hang on to it? Sure it’s a blueray player, and a fine one at that, but DVD beats it hands down for price and availability and I’m not convinced the quality difference is noticeable (although I did enjoy Die Hard 4.0 — excellent quality. I’ll need to watch the DVD to compare). The games? Nothing has really struck me as “must have” yet. Other than GTA of course. The dualshock 3 controllers are great, and the USB charging is a great idea (that the Wii should borrow asap). They work great on the PC too, and xpadder is awesome at mapping the buttons. It’s a shame their isn’t better native driver support, or they’d be one of the best gamepads available for PC! So I might hang onto my dualshock, but I think the PS3 will be for sale soon. Just as soon as I complete GTA. Have I mentioned how awesome this game is?
What’s wrong with the Wii? Gotta admit I haven’t been playing it much, enjoying BHD on the PC more. But we love our Wii and it will stay. Very irritated at the long delay and inflated price of Super Smash Brothers Brawl here in Australia (and all PAL regions) and that Nintendo have used the Wii system update to block the freeloader that allows NTSC games to be played. Forcing consumers towards the slow and expensive local market for games is very, very disappointing. Of course, faster releases of games at better (internationally comparable) pricing is the real solution to this! For now, we're faced with buying another (local) copy of Brawl, or never updating the Wii system again … Please note I’m talking about purchased games, from overseas stores yes, not pirated copies.
Now when GTA IV is released for PC, in the USA first (followed by Europe), nothing will stop me buying the US version cheap from playasia the day it becomes available. And it will install and run on my PC without an issue. That’s how gaming should be. Go the mighty PC!
Props to Sony for keeping the PS3 game releases region free though. Learn this lesson Nintendo, and learn it fast. Your future revenue (from this household) depends on it.
Despite all this, I still love my games :)
Ben said:
After trying the PS3 more for DVDs, very happy with its quality as a multimedia player. Upscales grainy 4:3 DVD to pretty darn good looking presentation 16:9 via 1080p HDMI. Keeping it for that.
Shame it's slightly noisier than the macmini we usually use. Maybe the Queensland climate again.- The chance for comments is gone. Shame, 1 is never enough.
http://inspire.server101.com/ben/2008/08/our-consoles-days-are-numbered.html
