Dave's Place / Metamusing

I’m on a roll thanks to one of my New Year’s resolutions. I finished Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty earlier in the week. It’s a short coda to the previous game, Tools of Destruction, and explains how Ratchet figures out where Clank is after he…disappears at the end of Tools of Destruction. I scored the next game in the series, Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time on sale over Christmas and I wanted to finish this game so I could move on its sequel. This is the 8th (!!!) Ratchet and Clank game and it doesn’t bring much new to the table. There’s more of a focus on puzzle solving than in the previous games, and it’s really short, maybe 3-4 hours long, but it’s still got the trademark Ratchet and Clank humor and I enjoyed it well enough. The series features run and gun arcade adventure with some light puzzle solving, a lot of saturday morning cartoon humor, and generally great graphics. I’ve played all of them and solved several of them, including this one, but if you’re going to skip one, this is the one. Counterbalancing that is it’s cheap – I got it for $9.99 from the Playstation store as a download. Below is an ~8 minute video showing off some of the gameplay. Bottom line, if you’ve played the previous games and enjoyed them, you’re likely to enjoy this one as well.

I’m a bit behind, granted. I have a good excuse – came down with pneumonia and it really knocked the stuffing out of me. I’m just starting to feel myself again after fighting this off for three weeks, and I’m still fighting a cough and dealing with fatigue issues. Anyway, I made two resolutions this year: To get back on track with my diet and exercise regimen, and to follow an example I set myself several years ago with my buying habits.

The diet and exercise resolution has turned out to be easy thanks to the bout of pneumonia. My weight had been creeping up and by this fall I was over 180 for the first time in a number of years, something I had begun to worry about. Stomach issues and a generally slacker attitude to exercise had me off my regimen for almost all of the summer and fall, so I figured, time for a new years resolution to address it. Pressures off now though – I’m down under 170 for the first time in at least 4-5 years. I just need to keep it off. As soon as my stamina is back it’s back on the exercise regimen, possibly adding in running, which I haven’t done regularly since I left Maine.

The second resolution is inspired by a successful resolution from years ago. At that time I had gotten addicted to buying books off of Abe books, ebay, and Amazon, and my to-read pile was growing faster than my read pile was decreasing. I resolved to only buy a book after I had finished at least one, and to generally focus on bringing down the number of books in the to-read pile. It worked. I still have a huge to-read pile (>20 books) but it no longer grows and it’s no longer close to 100 books. This year I’m applying these principles to videogames, because my to-play pile is like 15 games at this point and maybe higher. I’ve resolved to not buy a new game unless I finish one, and to focus on finishing off games I’ve left partially completed. I have this terrible habit of starting whatever new game I acquire, playing it obsessively for a week or two until the next game comes, then moving on, rarely finishing anything. No more! I’m working my way through games at a rapid clip, and not opening anything still in the shrinkwrap until I knock games off the list. So far it’s working – I’ve finished 4-5 games since the year began, and this was with me unable to play games for two weeks thanks to the pneumonia.

I’m such a hopeless nerd.

I’ve also put myself on a budget. Mint.com rocks for helping you see where you spend your money. I spend too much of mine on games, and that’s stopping as well.

Anyway, to sum up a rambling post, figure on a lot of  ‘Game finished’ posts from me, especially over the next couple of months, as I focus on a game at a time instead of flitting from game to game.

A little friday fun of a different kind, we’ll call it the  ’scare the spouse with your gaming expenditures’ edition. Steam is the most successful of the PC gaming digital distribution platforms. I’m a big fan and have been using it for years. The folks at ddgamer have put together a little tool to calculate what your account’s worth. Remember when you look at this that the numbers are based on the current value of the software, not what you actually paid. For me this means my account looks like it’s worth a lot more than I actually paid because I so often take advantage of the weekly and holiday sales Steam offers. Caveats aside, here’s my account, which today is worth $1,603.26. Change the username to your own to calculate the value of your account. A side note – folks have actually been selling off their Steam accounts, so if the number makes you feel sheepish and you want to try and recoup some of that money, you can try selling it on Amazon zshops or ebay or whatever. Mind that Valve (owners of Steam) may not approve, it’s probably a violation of their TOS, etc etc.

Windows sucks, sucks so profoundly that words cannot express my loathing for it, yet it’s the standard OS for gaming and I love my gaming action, so I’m stuck with it. I took Friday off last week because windows registry cruft had finally gotten to the point where the machine was taking ~5 minutes to finish booting and no amount of registry scouring could cleanse it of the problem, plus the boot volume was writing a disturbing amount of error messages to the logs, making me fear for its life. It was time for the ‘once every couple of years’ clean install of windows.

Since I was having to go through this, I took the opportunity to buy a new motherboard and videocard. The motherboard only supported 1066 bus speed, leaving me unable to upgrade to newer faster cpu’s including the new wolfsdale 45nm cpus. The videocard has had overheating problems since the day I bought it – it’s an ATI 1900xt and I basically dislike the thing. Performance wise it was ok, but it’s been loud and flaky due to the heating problems the whole time I’ve owned it.

I went cheap but effective on the motherboard side of things, with a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L. It’s lean on the features but the right price and with a solid review and reliability record. The one thing it lacks is firewire, which my last board also lacked and I survived without (though not without the occasional annoyance). It doesn’t support DDR3 RAM either, but I figure I am at least one machine away from moving to DDR3 anyway.

On the videocard end of things, I switched to Nvidia after at least 4-5 ATI cards in a row. ATI still produces decent cards but the 8800GT I bought is basically the value performance leader these days and ATI cards continue to run hot and loud. I didn’t want a repeat of my last ATI card is what it boiled down to. It also helped that I found a deal on an ASUS for around $150 after a rebate.

The build went pretty uneventfully. The only problems I had were initially getting it to boot, which turned out to be because the cooler on my CPU has a broken peg which was causing it to not stay seated against the cpu. Boot, overheat, shutdown immediately. I figured it out pretty quickly and brute-forced a solution. Next time I upgrade the CPU I’ll toss the cooler. The other problem was me being a dummy coupled with bad labeling on my RAM. For some reason I had it in my head that I had 4GB of Patriot RAM, the the labels on the RAM are misleading, so I spent a ton of time fiddling with ram slots and BIOS memory timing settings before I had a V8 moment and realized all was already working well – I had 2GB and the machine was seeing it correctly.

On the OS side of things, I did a couple of things differently. For the first time I used a slipstreamed installer disc, in this case one with service pak 3. I had an initial blue screen with it but the second install went smoothly, and it was a beautiful thing to go to windows update and see only a small handful of patches instead of the usual hours worth of patches to apply. I also installed Ubuntu 8.04. I’m going to try and force myself to only use windows when I’m gaming and linux the rest of the time. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway I just figured I’d write up how the build went, as I’ve done a number of times in the past. The whole thing took me a full day and then some, though portions of it were spent watching progress bars creep by, fiddling with my DS or PS3 while I waited. The current build’s name is ’suckeggridesaga,’ which is short for ‘Suck Egg Rides Again.’ Every one of my machines has been named some version of suck egg, cause, well, you know – Windows really does suck eggs.

Oh – one other thing to mention. Steam, as in the software service from Valve, is just awesome. I have at least a dozen games installed in Steam, and to get everything up and running again all I had to do was install a new copy of the steam client, log in once, then log out, copy 70 some gigs of data into the steampowered folder, and re-login to the client, and all my games just worked. Compare that to installing a dozen games using the physical media, then installing all the patches and adding in all the mods and addon content. There’s no contest – digital distribution is totally the way to go. The same was basically true of my gametap stuff as well – I copied over the client and binaries and all my games were good to go. Physical media for PC games can bite me. Given the choice, I will go digital distribution every time.

Mix a japanese pop soundtrack with the art style and humor of Katamari Damacy and drop dead simple controls and you get Doeo, a lovely little flash game on my favorite gaming portal, Kongregate.com. Doeo’s appear, and you roll your mouse over them to make them disappear, scoring points for doing so and for chaining together sequences of them. It couldn’t be similar and it’s charming and fun, a perfect friday fun link.