Jack Thompson sinks to new low, still accomplishes nothing

Having failed in both courts of law and the court of public opinion, Jack Thompson has chosen a new tactic. He's telling your mommy.

Thompson wrote a finger-shaking letter to the mother of Rockstar games exec Strauss Zelnick shaming her, among other things, for raising her boy to sell murder simulators to teen boys. No doubt these instructional sessions took the place of Sunday school classes and summer bible camp. This would make Zelnick a victim of his own upbringing, right? Jack, I thought you were a victims' advocate! Well, so long as you are now after the one who's REALLY responsible.

My Current Problems with World of Warcraft

My first MMO was Everquest. It was a pretty hardcore environment in the endgame; character death resulted in experience losses making it possible to lose entire levels, and every raid boss in the game was a timed spawn shared by the entire server. When the Avatar of War was up, it was a race between the top guilds to get to him. You always had to be ready to grab your gear and get to the spawn if you wanted your guild to get the kill.

When World of Warcraft started up, their answer to raid targets sounded like a dream - all encounters would be instanced, there would be no competition for big bosses, every guild/raid group would get it's own shot at it on their own time, when they wanted. The only catch being that once you killed it, you had to wait a set amount of time before going after it again. Sounded PERFECT. No more competition with people who had less of a life than me. And for a time, it was.

Now I'm experiencing the flip side. I've started playing again, and back in a guild consisting of old RL friends, and people from my old guild on Alleria (Aftermath/Tolerance). The guild's time, as it turns out, isn't really my time. The main raids are started at 8pm eastern, and typically last until midnight... on Tuesday and Thursday. I go to bed at 10pm. Gruul/Mag are done on Sunday night, starting at 10pm so those are right out. So needless to say, I'm missing out on most of the good stuff. Tuesday I got in on two boss kills, Thursday I got in on one. Out of 7 killed between the two nights.

I'm not angry at the people in the guild, this was their schedule long before I started playing again. I wish I could be there for more, but I understand that's the schedule that works for them. In Everquest, I played whenever I could, and whatever bosses came up while I was playing I made the most of it. Those that spawned while I wasn't around, I didn't worry about much, because you just can't be around for everything all the time. In WoW... I could be around for everything, but the ability to schedule your raids are actually making me miss a lot.

So this is what I did.

I ended up ganking a 2 GB stick from Anna's computer till my RMA goes through.

So after a few days of grappling with faulty hardware and a screwy Windows install, I've finally gone from this...


to this...


So for now I'm satisfied. Yaaaaaaay.

Computer Build Fail

Not completely though. One of the memory modules is bad, so it has to be RMAd. Unfortunately both were in a kit together so all the memory has to go back, so I'm SOL for probably a week. BAH!

New Computer Incoming!

So I started playing World of Warcraft again recently. And for some reason my computer starts hating life at the worst possible moments. When I was playing last year it was still ok, but now, not so much. At seemingly random times frame rates will drop, graphics will completely disappear... and worse case is that the graphics card completely stops feeding a signal to my monitor. I could probably fix it with a new graphcis card, but the machine is already three years old. It's time to move on. Plus I was already craving a new machine after building Anna's last month. The components I ordered for mine are mostly the same as hers just with a better processor. I got the one I originally wanted for Anna, but which was OOS everywhere at the time; demand was much higher than initial supply on the recently released CPU but it's fairly easy to come by now.

So here's what we have coming.

Ultra Black Aluminus tower case - I love this case. It's not as accessible as my old one which featured latches and a hinged side panel. But this one has a lot more space inside, and has a double hinged front door allowing easy access to drive bays or control panels. One of my biggest frustrations in building a new machine is usually working the front panel off without breaking anything. No longer an issue!

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3l - A no frills Intel P35 motherboard. Don't need SLI or anything fancy. I'll be sticking with the onboard sound as well, as long as it isn't complete crap.

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Processor (3.0 Ghz) - It's really the current sweet spot for gaming PCs. Quad cores are overrated for gaming, and the new E8000 line of Duos features 45nm chips (uses less power and runs cooler than earlier lines) and a cache bumped up to 16MB. Supposed to be fantastic for overclocking, with many users breaking 4 Ghz. I'll be leaving it at stock speed for the forseeable future though. On a sort of sidenote I'm a little uneasy on this purchase just because I ordered through a new (for me) company. But Newegg was OOS again, and TigerDirect was overpriced by about $26. Hopefully FuturePowerPC comes through and gets it to me soon - both the Dell (monitor) and Newegg (everything else) orders have already shipped. FuturePowerPC lists the order as "To be shipped." Here's hoping it ships soon. From the looks of things everything will arrive on Wednesday but the proc is up in the air. And now that I look up a link for the item on Newegg... it's back in stock. *sigh*

EVGA GeForce 8800GT, 512MB of DDR3 RAM - Another sweet spot, at least to me.

4GB (2x 2GB) Corsair XMS2 RAM - RAM is so inexpensive right now (only about $85 after rebate), I was tempted to get 2, and go up to 8GB. Reined myself in a little as that would be overkill.

Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 250 GB SATA3 drive - No need for a billion drives and terabytes of storage. Cool and quiet, all I need.

Samsung SATA DVD+/-RW drive - was going to use the old one, but why hang on to an IDE device when the new drive is only $27?

Corsair 450W PSU - Not filling up the box with a lot of power consuming extras. 1 drive, 1 low power consumption processor, 1 graphic card. 450W is plenty. It's quiet and runs cool.

Dell 2208WFP - 22" widescreen monitor. It's a TN panel which makes many people cry ("Oh noez lightbleed!") but my current Samsung is a TN and the bleed doesn't bother me much. Same monitor we got for Anna and I couldn't be more pleased.

Hardware is rounded out by a couple of quiet 120mm fans, and that's that. I'll be installing Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit edition - so far I've not had the issues with Vista that I'd feared. It runs smoothly, and hasn't caused any problems with any older games we've played on it so far, and WoW runs beautifully.

Looking forward to all the parts coming in. We've been very happy with Anna's computer in both power and noise level. Her old PC often sounded like a jet airplane under load. Next to her new one, my current machine now has taken on the jet airplane role. My new one is basically the same with a little more oomph in the processor, so the computer room should soon taken on a peaceful atmosphere.

Hers was also far easier of a build than my last machine was, so I'm hoping this one goes as smoothly. The only problem I experienced with Anna's was that on the first boot the CPU fan didn't want to spin up, but that problem magically disappeared. I freaked out, but I expect it this time. Hopefully no other bizarre problems will present themselves.

Ikaruga is totally awesome...

... and I totally turned my wife on playing it this evening. Not kidding.

God I love my wife.

(image stolen from Kotaku, who probably stole it from somewhere else, but they at least deserve the link back)

KOTOR II: Oh what could have been....

I've put off playing Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords for several years now. I finally purchased a copy about a month ago, almost exactly three years to the day after the game was released. This was no normal lazy delay. No, from the minute the game was released, it's been the target of complaints ranging from rampant bugs to incomplete content. And so I decided to bide my time and wait. I still hold the first Knights of the Old Republic to be one of the best RPGs I've ever played, and one of the most significant pieces of work in the entire Expanded Universe canon. At the time I was confident that bugs would be fixed, and content patches would eventually appear to correct the mistakes made by an overly-eager publisher (LucasArts) wanting to get their product on the store shelves in time for Christmas. I was willing to wait for a perfected experience in the follow-up to the game that renewed my love for Star Wars which had largely been killed by the Phantom Menace four years earlier.

Some bugs were fixed, many were not. LucasArts outright denied a request by the developer, Obsidian Entertainment, to reintroduce the deleted content. There was much crying and gnashing of teeth. However, there was some hope given in the form of a fan effort to restore the missing content. Unfortunately that project is still underway to this day and has yet to release anything (but I'm still cheering for them).

Why now? Mass Effect. BioWare's (BioWare developed the first KOTOR) latest epic lovingly caressed many of the KOTOR buttons in my brain, without ever pressing them - after Anna played Mass Effect and listening to my endless litany of comparisons between the two she decided it was time for her to play KOTOR for the first time as well. She played it first (and agreed that as good as Mass Effect is, KOTOR is far superior), then I replayed... for the tenth time.

I decided it was finally time to stop waiting on KOTORII. Fresh off the original, I ordered the sequel and dove right in. And it was buggy, oh yes it was buggy. Pathing errors, problematic scene changes, equipped items disappearing in the middle of cut scenes (only once, but that was enough), poorly implemented transparencies, buggy cameras in cut scenes... and I stopped counting the number of times it locked up - both in the game, and while loading an old save.

Even with all that though the game was playable. And it was an entirely serviceable sequel to the original. What hurts so much is how obvious it is that the game was gutted. Plotlines removed, endings excised, a whole planet no longer playable, and on and on. The worst part of it all is that after reading about exactly what was removed... I think KOTORII could have been a much deeper experience than what was offered in the original which, as I said, I hold in very high regard.

I can also say that it leaves me wanting a KOTORIII more than I would have thought possible, and that's a real accomplishment. Perhaps we'll get one eventually. Maybe even developed by BioWare. I can only hope, it would be a shame to leave it where it stands.