Cygon’s Blog

This weekend, I started playing Assassin’s Creed. It’s really a fantastic game and you can see all the experience from the Prince of Persia titles. For example, whilst running, you just have to control your character’s direction. He’ll intelligently navigate the environment like a free-runner, jump over obstacles, launch himself off of obstacles or jump from beam to beam.

The fighting system is also great. No as dedicated as that in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but you won’t get very far with button mashing. For example, you can deal light strokes and hard strokes with your blade, the hard strokes of course take longer to execute. You can break a move at any time and block, if you’re quick enough you can pull a last-second defense if your enemy tried to strike you while you tried to gain momentum.

Now once you’re used to this, you can learn new tricks. For example, when an enemy raises his sword to attack, you can press the left and right mouse buttons (in the default controls) to intercept his move and execute a counter-attack. Or when you see that the enemy is about to parry your own attack, you can left-click again to punch or kick the enemy. And if that worked, if you click again, you can deal a fatal blow.

It’s a really well done progressive system where you learn better and better tricks, one step at a time!

Frying?

Now what about the post title? Well, I’m playing this on an Asus GeForce 8800 GTS 512 TOP, a factory-overclocked card. So far, it has worked great in numerous games. Assassin’s Creed, however, manages to overheat the card rather quickly.

I had to crashes yesterday, once with strange blocky artifacts on the screen (a telltale sign that your graphics card is either overclocked too hard or overheating) and once the system just froze. Looks like the default fan control settings aren’t adequate. The card idles at 70° C (158° F) and there was only a slight increase in fan noise at the time of the crashes (I don’t know which temperature it was at since I didn’t monitor it at this time).

Using NVidia’s nTune utility, I set the fan speed to 60% (that’s about the point from where onwards the fan’s noise level starts to exponentially increase), which kept the temperature at 60° C (140° F) during the game. No crashes anymore.

I just bought myself the Logitech G9 Laser Gaming Mouse:

This mouse has all the features I could ever wish for:

• 3200 DPI (For gaming, I usually turn the DPI setting all the way up and reduce the mouse sensitivity in the game itself. This results in superior aiming because even the tiniest movements don’t get filtered out by the mouse but reach the game and are just scaled down.)
• Adjustable Weights
• Tiltable scroll wheel for horizontal scrolling
• Big teflon feet that cover the whole width of the mouse (my MX-518 has already lost 3 of its 5 tiny teflon cushions)
• Scroll wheel can be toggled between smooth or stepped scrolling

All in all, this mouse unites everything I ever wanted from a mouse.

But it utterly fails in the ergonomics department:

• The cord is rough and feels like it is made out of nylon. I don’t like it one bit. This gives me a really ugly feeling, especially when the cord runs over the edge of my table.
• The thumb pit is too small for my thumb
  • I can’t easily reposition the mouse because I don’t get a good grip on it.
  • My thumb is permanently pressed against the edges of the forward/backward buttons, up to the point that it hurts.
  • The alternate cover allows me to grip the mouse, but it’s rough and its thumb pit has the same problem.

This could truly have been the holy grail of mice. Everything about the functionality of the G9 is totally over the top. And that just makes it all the more painful to admit that its ergonomics utterly destroy the G9.

I’ve tried several mice over the last two years, but each time, I quickly returned to my good old Logitech MX-518. Among the candidates were a Razer Diamondback and the Microsoft Habu. Now the Logitech G9 has to line up in this list of expensive mistakes. *sob*

Last weekend, it was finally time for an upgrade to my 1 1/2 years old gaming rig. Amongst other things, I switched from an Asus A8N-E (NForce 4 Ultra) board to an Asus Crosshair (NForce 590 SLI).

This alone solved a lot of issues I was having with my PC. It appears that the NForce 4 chipset has serious problems with heavy bus traffic. If, for example, you’re copying a large file, NForce 4 may fail to deliver the next chunk of audio data to your sound card in time and you’ll hear skips or ugly scratches whilst listening to music.

You can find several references to this bus priorization issue of you google for NForce 4 bus issues. For example:

NForce4 on Wikipedia
Issues With nForce4 Mobo and X-FI Cards
X-FI + Nforce4 = Pops/Hicks/Hisses

The important parts:

We have observed through direct observation of the PCI bus on the nVidia nForce 4 motherboards that when the crackle symptoms are occuring, the Soundblaster X-Fi card PCI bus master memory requests for audio data are being held off (not serviced) for very long intervals.

We have observed peak holdoffs of up to 2 milliseconds in some cases. This is unusual chipset behavior that is beyond the ability of a hardware audio accelerator to compensate for in its internal buffering. The SoundBlaster X-Fi tolerance for these PCI holdoffs is approximately 120 microseconds peak holdoff, with a 1 microsecond average holdoff.

and

Further to the reported cases of crackling issues reported by owners of Sound Blaster X-Fi cards, we have extensively tested both Creative and non-Creative audio cards on motherboards where the issues were reported in an effort to isolate the root cause.

The findings indicate that circumstances causing these audio glitches only arise on Nvidias nForce 4 range of motherboards, with the exception of the newest n590 board which does not exhibit this issue.

The Sound Blaster X-Fi card was designed to meet PCI bus standards and tolerances and this is the only range of motherboards that operate in this manner.

Here’s a list of issues I attribute to the NForce 4 chipset:

• Games that load data in the background momentarily skip a frame or two. As an up to date example, NForce 4 owners playing Need for Speed: Pro Street will experience the game making tiny little pauses while they drive around the track. Enough to completely destroy every sense of speed and to skip past the exact moment you need to turn into a bend.

• You can either watch a movie or defragment your hard drive, but not both. If you try to listen to music or watch a movie during hard drive defragmentation, the sound will hang, skip or scratch every few seconds.

• Your mouse cursor becomes jumpy or temporarily unmovable when you copy large files. As in all the other points, whenever heavy disk activity hogs the system bus, something goes wrong. In this case, the USB devices seem to not be polled in a timely manner anymore.

• Cutscenes played by games while at the same time loading data will hang, jump and have sound distortions. NForce 4 owners playing Call of Duty 4, for example, will have serious trouble understanding the mission briefings played while a level loads. Slower drives might merely destroy the game’s atmosphere.

Now I’ve got the NForce 590 SLI chipset. All of my issues went away with the upgrade:

• The loading screen in Supreme Commander rotates slick and fluid.
• The cutscenes in Call of Duty 4 are intelligible.
• Need for Speed: Pro Street gives me a sense of speed.
• I can watch a movie when I defragment my drive.
• I can use my mouse while I copy large files.

I’ve never been so happy about an upgrade. All of the little issues I was having — gone in an instant.

There are users reporting the issue with the NForce 590 SLI, but all of them have two graphics cards installed and are only experiencing this during heavy usage (eg. 3DMark). I don’t plan on using SLI anyway (I just wanted to get the Asus “Crosshair” :p), so even if the issue is only gone because bus throughput has been dramatically increased, I’m happy

Quality doesn’t seem to be what quality once was…

Installed the game, launched it and did the obligatory video settings adjustment. When I jumped from page to page, one part of my settings was kept, the other discarded. At least until I found the little ‘apply’ button in the lower right, which was only there on some pages, but not all.

I launched the campaign, was about to finish the training course when the game crashed back to the desktop. Wow…

Installing the latest ATI drivers seemed to help, at least I now was able to finish the training course.

This training course needs to be done as quickly as possible and starts with you having to climb down a rope. Wanting to improve on my time, I did the clever thing: I jumped, not climbed down the rope. But someone yelled “you missed the rope!” and the screen faded out. Interestingly, the game had autosaved just then. Fade in, I’m falling, “you missed the rope!”, fade out. Fade in, I’m falling, “you missed the rope!”, fade out. Fade in, I’m falling, “you missed the rope!”, fade out. Fade in…

Starting the campaign all over once more, I did the training course in about 20 seconds which seemed to please the instructor, so I continued without repeating the darn thing. Next, I’m greeted by a BSOD showing ATI-something.dll as the source. Great, reboot, launch game again, Campaign, Resume, play on.

Went through the ship mission, lots of scripted action, feels even more like a movie than Call of Duty 2, but the gameplay looks rather poor. Finished the mission, jumped into the helicopter, BSOD, reboot.

Watched in 1st person as the president of some small country being driven through a town by terrorists, lots of unarmed people being shot on the way through, then I’m shot in the face, BSOD, reboot.

Second mission, helped some rebels, stormed a town, rescued some informant, BSOD, reboot.

Third mission, stormed another town in search for terrorist leader who was broadcasting propaganda speeches, stormed his building, he wasn’t there, stormed some more town, some TV station, turns out the speech was recorded, mission end, BSOD, reboot.

Launched COD4, Campaign, Resume… wait, where’s the Resume button? Uh-oh. My savegame was gone with the last BSOD. So now I can enjoy starting right at the *beep* training course again.

Oh, well, come to think about it, that Timeshift icon on my desktop suddenly looks so much more appealing. Maybe I’ll play it through once more instead… and if I wanted to, I could play it from the beginning to the end in one big session without any hangs, crashes-to-desktops or BSODs

I’ve got a pretty elaborate scheme for keeping my PC clean: I’ve got a disk image of my C: partition with a clean Windows XP install including recent drivers, firefox, winamp, VLC and so on. Whenever I’ve got the feeling that my PC is clogged up (usually right after taking part in a LAN party), I just restore my disk image (a work of 5 minutes) and everything is fine again.

This week, I almost went and logged into my old Steam account again to order BioShock. Luckily, while looking for reviews, I stumbled upon some fine lads reporting about the copy protection system in BioShock.

Apparently, when you install the game, it phones home (to SecuROM). Somewhere on the SecuROM servers, a counter is incremented. This counter is used to restrict you to only install the game 2 (in words: two) times. Then it’s game over and you can buy another copy of the game.

Other sources suggest that if you uninstall the game, that counter will be decremented again (so upon uninstalling the game, it will phone home as well). Also word is out that this counter has been extended to allow for 5 installs.

Bugger. I was really waiting to play this game, but with that, I’ll just leave it be.

For some time in the past, SecuROM was the sane alternative to StarForce. But apparently, that wasn’t because they were less crazed out than the StarForce maniacs, but because they just weren’t technically capable of what StarForce did. Now the beast shows its ugly face.

I’ve always been a fan of the “buy it and its your’s” mindset. When I paid for the game, I should be allowed to do whatever I please with it. Just attempting to run it in a Linux/WINE environment would be futile because of the copy protection. Forgetting to uninstall the game before I restore my disk image means one install is gone - forever. If I wanted to install the game on both my Vista and my XP partition, I’m already nigh on using up my allowed install count.

Being a software developer myself, I tried not to use illegally copied software. But at this rate, I’m actively considering to look for a pirated version just for the sake of it. You can almost feel the mistrust in the air. Think of entering a store and immediately, two guys with “Security - Anti-Theft Department” on their shirts start walking behind you until you exit the store again. SecuROM my ass, you’re soo close to making me become a software pirate on purpose.

I finished!!

What? Test Drive: Unlimited, of course. “The Millionaire’s Challenge” is a 60 minute time trial with about 200 km to cover in heavy traffic. You’ve got to speed like a maniac and keep your concentration for the whole 58 minutes. For the last 3 evenings, I tried to beat this mad race. Just did it in 58 minutes and with barely 2 minutes to spare in a Koenigsegg CC8S.

I made it to about checkpoint 12 (ca. 15-20 mins into the game) several times, but repeatedly hit two other cars in succession (triggers the police) or scored a direct collision with a police car. If the police car that eventually appears in front of you manages to clip your line, you’re promoted to a two-star-criminal and unlike Need for Speed, you’re basically wasted at that point.

When I reached the 16th checkpoint of 32 (half the race), I was ecstatic. At 24 checkpoints I had the urge to hum a victory hymn. Just then, the course lead through a dense city on a 2 laned one-way street — in the wrong direction. Of course I rammed right into a police car and while silently trying to sped away on the side of the road, another police vehicle watched as I ran over a sign, which I thought was harmless but nevertheless raised the criminal level to two stars. With the onslaught of police vehicles trying to run into me, commited my third offense by letting myself be rammed and had a full three-stars chase going.

That’s real pressure. You’ve invested 45 minutes of your precious evening into this stupid race and now you’re that with 99% probability, you can start right over again. With some crazy luck and insane driving I managed to get away until the chase was given up. And finished the race.

What a miserable way to spend an entire evening. Yet so satisfying…

I’ve been playing Supreme Commander a lot these days, including a LAN party where we basically didn’t play anything else because everyone just kept wanting to “try something new in the next round”

While a typical round takes at least an hour due to the slow build-up phase and highly effective defenses, the game’s strategical depth is easily underestimated. Unlike other strategy games, Supreme Commander gives you time to react to an offense, and to think about what your reaction will be.

There were some really cool moments. Especially when we were playing coop against a computer enemy, like once, we were playing a two-on-two, two humans versus two computers on the ‘hard’ difficulty setting. We managed to rush one of the computers, but the commander literally ran away before the base blew up, only to reapper a short time later at one of our bases, running straight for our own commander. When we realized what this really was, it was too late — the defenses had blown up the enemy commander and one of our bases, including the respective player’s commander, with it!

Another time, we tried turtling in against the computers, building a perimeter of base defenses and shields. The computer actually ran his attacking army around the entire defense perimeter until he found an undefended spot allowing him entry in the otherwise undefended base. So, in Supreme Commander, event against computer enemies, turtling doesn’t really work out.

I’d also really like to see an addon to Supreme Commander, maybe continuing at one of the three endings of the single player campaign. How about the Cybran ending, when after 5 years, the interstellar gates start working again?

Just in case you have never heard of this game, Sexy Beach 3 is an adult title sold exclusively in Japan. In the game, you take the role of some random guy who gets invited for a holiday on “Sexy Island”, a small vacation island populated with a handful of other guests, which, by mere chance, are all good-looking women. You can probably see where this is heading to now…

Right, Sexy Beach 3 is basically just another sex simulation game, only that the Japanese are miles and miles ahead of the stuff churned out by western development studios. The game features beautiful anime girls, deforming clothing, real-time skin tanning and realistic boob physics. Yes, really.
Getting this game to install in Windows Vista is quite a headache, so I took the liberty to write down exactly what I did to make it work in an western Windows Vista system.

1. Install Sexy Beach 3. Do not use the Autorun feature or Setup.exe, instead, manually select the .msi file in Windows Explorer.

2. I’d recommend installing Sexy Beach 3 in a folder without Japanese letters in its name. 3. Install Sexy Beach 3 Plus if you have it (otherwise skip to step 5). As before, you need to manually select the .msi file in Windows Explorer. 4. Choose a different folder from the original Sexy Beach 3 folder. The addon is not supposed to be installed into the original game folder. Again, I’d recommend not to use Japanese letters in the folder name. 5. Install Microsoft AppLocale (download from here). At the time of this writing, AppLocale does not install cleanly on Windows Vista unless run from an Administrator Command Prompt. Windows XP users can skip to step 6. 5.1. Open an Administrator Command Prompt. Locate the Command Prompt entry in your start menu, right click and select “Run as Administrator”. 5.2. Execute apploc.msi in this command prompt by typing the full path and file name of the msi file. If you saved the file to your desktop, for example, the path would be C:\Users\\Desktop\apploc.msi. If in doubt, move it into the C:\ root directory and type C:\apploc.msi. 6. Run Microsoft AppLocale 6.1. Select the Sexy Beach 3 Plus executable. If you don’t have the addon, select the normal Sexy Beach 3 executable. 6.2. Choose Japanese as the language to use (the lastmost entry in the language drop list). 6.3. Make sure the ‘Create Shortcut’ option is checked. 7. AppLocale will save the shortcut in your start menu. For your convenience, you can drag it onto your desktop if you wish. The game will now run and display proper Japanese letters. One more note to german users: If your system country is set to German / Germany (which is quite likely :P), the game’s characters will be tanned so much they look like afro-americans. You can fix this by specifying that you’re located in the USA or Japan.

I have played the Need for Speed Series since Need for Speed 2 came out. I was able to drive “El Nino” very close to the lap times the Mercedes CLK achieved in the hands of a good driver in Need for Speed 3. I could beat Empire City on highest difficulty and navigate through the dangerous shortcuts in Need for Speed 4. I finished the test driver challenges in Need for Speed 5. I could outrun the McLaren F1 using a Lamborghini Murcielago (I love this car!) in LAN play in Need for Speed 6.

I stopped playing Need for Speed Underground and never saw the ending movie. Instead of impersonating a rich guy challenging other supercar owners, I was meant to be some brainless teenager pushing his rolling prisma-colored junkyard over the finish line. Not my cup of tea. Plus it was frustrating. You often lost just because of bad luck when traffic appeared on your lane directly behind a corner.

I liked Need for Speed Underground 2 good enough again to play it through. There weren’t any supercars and you still had to play some teenage dumbass (supposedly the same jerk that somehow survived Underground 1, how, nobody knows), but at least you weren’t forced to plaster your car with ugly “vinyls” and other crap. The series still had this goddamn rap jabbering everywhere, but this time, I had discovered some mp3 converter which allowed my to put my metal collection in the game

Need for Speed Most Wanted was a turn to the better for me. Finally, daylight returned to the series and I could drive my beloved Lamborghini Murcielago again. Driving physics were arcade style but still allowed you to to some cool moves, the random traffic seemed more ‘fair’ (eg. less cars at higher speeds and I almost believe that special care was taken not to place traffic on my lane behind corners). In overall, a great game.

Now we’ve got Need for Speed Carbon. It feels like a console backport. If you ask me, the graphics have gotten worse since Most Wanted, but still it runs slower. This game is also permanently crashing me back to the desktop. I finished one third of the city on Windows Vista, then the game crashed in any race I chose just before I reached the finish line.

I deleted the game, sometime later did a fresh install of Windows XP, installed the game again, played through about one third of the city, and… it almost always crashes, no matter which race I choose, just before I can cross the finish line. So there we are, daylight has gone again, you’re supposed to team up with some ego-less jerks (at least in the beginning), rap gibberish follows your every step an everything looks less detailed.

If this opinion on the Need for Speed Series sounds rather negative, it’s only because I am so frustrated about the direction the developers took after they finished Need for Speed 6. Probably the next generation of players is happy with the changes. Time for me to go search another racing game series. Any recommendations?

This game sounded promising. Granted, it was a console port, but so was Final Fantasy VII and that has made it into my eternal hall of fame. FF7 had two key setups, one inside the game and one as an external windows application, the movies had been scaled up using point filtering and many more things, but the game was still playable and fun.

Now here comes Devil May Cry 3. The first bad sign is the setup assistant. It is launched whenever you put the DVD in your drive. Even if the game is installed already. Can live with that, no problem.

When you start the game, the first thing that greets you is a low resolution, flickering Eidos logo with a jaggy mouse cursor on it. Then, having arrived at the game’s main menu, you’re on your own. The mouse cursor is just there, it doesn’t do anything (besides being in the way). Pressing keys is of no use — until you find out that the zero key on the numpad is the start button. And 8, 4, 5, 6 represent the cursor keys.

Of course you want to change that. So welcome to the key configuration screen. You’ll notice the key bindings have been spread out over the whole keyboard allowing you to continue your game of find-the-key inmidst of the action when you’re playing. Having put all the keys in places you think you might just remember them, pressing the ‘exit’ button yields a message you that you cannot leave the key configuration because there are unassigned keys.

Well, the keys are all configured and everything’s alright. Through trial and error you notice that there are some “trap keys”. That is, once you change them, you can forget about your new key configuration, the game will keep telling you that there are unassigned keys until you choose ‘defaults’, resetting all your key bindings. So forget about keyboard control.

Thank goodness I’ve got my gamepad. There is a seperate joystick configuration page. Buttons can be reassigned here without the stupid message, however, there’s another trap. One of your gamepad’s buttons will spontaneously reset all keys to their defaults. Try to find out which one!

All that could be accepted because you do it once and never touch it again. Well, did you notice that you couldn’t reassign your directions? You’re asking why you should want to do that? Simple. Because the default controls are like this: left: move down, up: move right, right: move up, down: move left. So no matter how you hold your gamepad, one axis will always be inverted. Unless your are so clever to hold the stick away from you.

What in all world has ported this game?