I got a chance to try the Starcraft 2 beta (multiplayer only), and on my first match, I was able to win in about 5 minutes, using a tactic from the original Starcraft. That’s not to say that it’s just Starcraft with a face lift – there were a lot of units I didn’t recognize at all – but it looks like a good deal of Starcraft skill will port easily to Starcraft 2.

I can’t really comment much on Civilization 5, as they seem to have not released a whole lot – a few screenshots, and a worthless trailer – but I figure, based on the series track record, that it will be excellent.

The thing is, though, part of me wonders: are these games a little disrespectful? Is it disrespectful to take something as serious as World War II, in which millions died, and to turn it into a game? While they’re quickly disappearing, there are still World War II veterans alive; what do they think about a bunch of 20-somethings playing soldier in games that are becoming increasingly realistic?² Do they take offense? Do they think the war should be seen for what it really was, something terrible and something that should be avoided if at all possible, and that making a game out of it is crossing a line that shouldn’t be crossed?

These questions could be posed to veterans of other wars, as well; the Vietnam War is serving as the base for more and more games (although I’ve not played any). It’s obviously even closer to us than World War II; how do ‘Nam vets feel about games being based on their experiences?

While it’s hard (or perhaps impossible) to find where the line is exactly, there seems to be a line between what we’re allowed to base entertainment on, and what we aren’t allowed to touch – yet. If Russia were to declare war on America tomorrow and land two million troops on the west coast, would I expect a game based on the event to be released 6 months later? No. The event would still be too close to Americans, too real. But 30 years down the road? 50? Sure, why not. It’d just be another war to make a game out of. Strange.

1. Admittedly, Return to Castle Wolfenstein has a lot of fiction in it – zombies, monster-like robots, etc. – but the base setting is World War 2.
2. As realistic as games can be, anyway. I’m well aware that playing a game will not teach me what it’s like to be cold in a bunker or to see my friends blown up. By “realistic”, I suppose I mostly mean visually realistic.

A couple weeks ago, I bought a new video card for my aging computer, in order to give it enough juice to run some newer games I’d like to check out. (I will also openly admit that I wanted to be able to run some of my older games at max settings and still get a good framerate. Yes, I’m a geek.) I’d been running an nVidia Quadro4 750XGL for a long while, a piece of hardware I bought when I thought I was going to get into 3D modeling – a hobby that never really developed. The card had done well in running games, something it wasn’t even really built for, but some Source games were a bit clunky, even if I used low settings, and Company of Heroes was even worse. To replace it, I bought a Sapphire X1650 512MB card after poking around on newegg.com. It seemed to have, on average, very good reviews, and it’s AGP, which is all my motherboard supports. Reviewers said that it ran all sorts of newish games very well at high settings, including Half-Life 2, which is a Source engine game. The card sounded right for me.

I got it in short order, due to newegg.com’s wonderful lightning-fast service. After physically installing it into my computer*, I moved on to the next thing: drivers. Thinking I was oh-so-techy, I figured I wouldn’t even bother with the outdated drivers on the CD that came with the video card. Instead, I would get online and get the latest and greatest set, or maybe even some optimized drivers! I went to guru3d.com and surveyed the landscape; aha! I found Omega drivers, which are optimized for performance. I nabbed them. I installed them, rebooted as requested, and then fired up Day of Defeat: Source to see if the new video card made a difference. And wow, what… the hell? Why was Day of Defeat running the same, or perhaps even worse, than it did with the Quadro4?

I tried out other various games I’d played before – Company of Heroes, Counter Strike: Source, Half Life 2. While they were vaguely prettier due to the new card supporting some shading stuff that the Quadro4 didn’t, overall, the difference was nonexistent. Framerates in all of them were awful, sometimes dropping so low that the games were essentially unplayable. Certainly, they weren’t flying, which is what I had expected from all of the rave reviews at newegg.com.

For a week or so I kept trying to play the games, tweaking settings on the video card using the ATI Tray Tools application, which came with my so-very-optimized Omega drivers. Nothing made much of a difference. Day of Defeat: Source, even using all low settings, ran about like it did before. I was quite bummed overall. I felt like I’d spent $75 and ended up with the exact same thing I’d had before.

After toying with settings and staring at bad framerates, I decided that something was not right, and that I should perhaps check out the newegg.com reviews again. 10 minutes of skimming and I found a recurring issue – people loved the cards, but drivers could be problematic. More importantly, many people who had grabbed the latest drivers from ATI – the drivers that the Omega drivers are built on top of – persistently ran into problems. However, if they went back to the old drivers that came on the disk, things were great.

So, going against my usual habits – so long ingrained that they’re more like instincts – I uninstalled the latest and greatest Omega drivers, rebooted my computer, and installed the (rather old and outdated) drivers that came with the video card. I rebooted again, fired up Day of Defeat: Source, and proceeded to oooh and ahhh like I was watching Fourth of July fireworks. Everything was running on high, and it was running fast. I tried Half Life 2, and oooh’d and ahhh’d some more. Company of Heroes had me bouncing up and down in my chair, pointing at stuff and saying things like “check out the texture quality!” I even downloaded the demo of Bioshock, and was very pleasantly surprised to find that it not only ran, but it ran well enough to be quite playable, even on my aging system.

My ATI video card taught me that newer isn’t always better – even when it comes to drivers. I guess I’ll have to amend my “how to fix a computer problem” bible now.

I may end up checking out the official updated drivers, but if things go boom, at least I know the old drivers will work well.

Post Script – Read The Frakking Manual

* The physical installation did not go smoothly. I got the card and rushed to my computer like the overgrown little boy I can be. I’m sure I looked silly, with a big grin across my face.

I yanked the old card out, then pulled the new one out of the anti-static bag it was in. I put it in the computer, hooked the monitor up to it, and pressed the power button on my computer. The monitor clicked on and… nothing. Well, it was something – green, yellow, and red, slashing across my screen in nasty, jagged lines. Not quite what I wanted to see. I tried rebooting the computer (always step #1 if you’re having computer problems), and got the same thing. I then decided that I should perhaps look at the quick start guide. It told me what I already knew: take out the old card, put in the new one, and turn the computer on.

I examined the card closely, and thought that perhaps it wasn’t seated well in the AGP slot. I took it out, and put it in again; that time, I thought I saw it go into the slot a bit deeper. Aha! I thought. This shall yield success. Alas, hitting the power button told a different story. Same jagged lines; same nastiness.

At this point I was in a bit of a panic. Had I gotten a bad card? Would I have to go to the trouble of getting an RMA, sending it back to newegg, and then having another go with a different card? I decided to inspect the box more closely, to see if I’d missed anything important. By that, of course, I mean I really looked in the box for the first time, because upon opening it, all I’d grabbed was the card. That’s all I needed, right?

I found a little power cord. Before I found that, however, I moved the anti-static bag out of the way; when I did that, I noticed that, on the underside of it, there was a sticker. I flipped the bag over. On the sticker, in big red letters:

STOP!!! You MUST plug this graphics board into the power supply of your computer. Please see the Quick Start guide for details.

Oops. I used the power cord the card came with to hook it into my power supply, hit the power button on my system, and – well, imagine that! It worked.

A long time ago, when I first started messing about with computers, I often read in tech forums this simple response (usually not directed at me, to be fair): RTFM. Read the… well, let’s say frakking manual, but that’s not what it stood for.

The site is very clean, and quite easy on the eyes. The board is simplistic but functional, and is slightly customizable: when you create a game, you’re able to select the color o the dark squares. You’re not required to finish a game once it’s started; in fact, it’s expected that you won’t. Most of my games are spanning a few days at least.

The site uses AJAX to update the games when you’re on a game screen, so you don’t have to keep refreshing the site – at least in theory. I’ve personally been running into some issues with this feature, namely, my connection to the server just dies. The AJAX updates will work for a while, and then the game will get rather quiet. When I manually refresh the page, I’ll discover that my opponent has indeed moved. I’m not quite sure if they’re having server problems right now, or if it’s something to do with my router. Whatever the problem is, hopefully it’ll be sorted out soon.

One feature seems to be missing, even though the front page says it exists: email notifications when it’s your turn. I’ve not received any emails, nor do I see an option for it under my profile. I guess that’ll be coming out in the next release.

If you’re interested in playing me (or just watching me blunder my way through games), here’s my profile.

Update: Okay, I’m sorry. Clearly, the veritable flood of traffic that I’ve sent to the site (yeah, sure) is causing 64squar.es some problems – at least for me. I keep getting error messages, saying I’ve been disconnected from the “push server”. I’m told to logout, then log back in to rectify the problem. Unfortunately, logging out just gives me another error. Oops.

Hrm. Unless things get less clunkier connection wise, I may be hopping to Red Hot Pawn. In fact, here’s my profile for that chess site. I don’t like it nearly as much as 64squar.es, but at least I’m not getting errors / disconnects constantly at Red Hot Pawn.

Update #2: 64squar.es is now back up and running, and from a preliminary test run, it seems to be working much better. I’m not getting popup errors now, and my connection to the Ajax-iness seems to be working well. Jonah, the fellow working on it, also told me that there was a bug with the email updates, causing them to not work. That’s fixed now. In other words, 64squar.es is now back in the race for being my favorite chess site.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been treated to some great gaming news, and some not so great gaming news.

The good news is that the next expansion pack to Civilization IV, Beyond the Sword, is coming along very nicely. It’s supposed to be released in July. The PC section of IGN has a nice write up about the additions here. There are a lot of new things in Beyond the Sword that I’m really looking forward to playing with. The Apostolic Palace looks quite interesting, letting you win a diplomatic victory way before you can build the United Nations. It also opens up a variety of other diplomacy “things” you can toy with. The corporations and colony stuff also sounds interesting. The colony feature, though, while it’s a bit more realistic, sounds like a huge trade off: basically say goodbye to your cities on other continents, while keeping access to the resources, so you can stop paying out the arse to maintain overseas cities. While having more income’s nice, I don’t know how I’m going to feel about basically “letting go” of my overseas holdings and letting an AI leader take over them.

I have to chuckle about one feature they’ve added, the espionage slider. This espionage slider thing is blatantly ripped off from Galactic Civilizations 2 and its expansion pack, Dark Avatar. The exact same espionage system is in GalCiv2. You can even sabotage buildings in GalCiv2, just like they’ve added in Beyond the Sword. Having said that, though, I’m glad they’ve put it in; while GalCiv2 is an alright game, Civilization IV is (in my opinion) leaps and bounds above its bound-in-space brethren. The espionage will be a great new layer of gameplay.

The bit of bad news is that Spore has been delayed again – sort of, anyway. While the information being passed around is a bit confusing, the fact of the matter is this: we aren’t going to see Spore anytime soon. It being a game that involves evolution, civilization building, space exploration, terraforming, war, and a ton of other open-ended goodies, this is a game that I really want to play. I don’t want to wait until 2008 or 2009 to play it. We wants it now, precious! If you’ve not watched a demonstration video of Spore in action, watch this one. It’s a good one.

There’s one other important note about this: the game is large. The Steam cache file for Red Orchestra comes in right at 1400MB. Due to the game being distributed over Steam, you’ll need a broadband connection to get any value out of the guest pass. If you’re on dialup, the pass will have expired by the time you’ve downloaded the game.

By the way, if you hadn’t guessed, the game is set during World War 2 on the Eastern Front. It aims to be a “realistic” first person shooter, in that there are no crosshairs – to aim, you have to use ironsights (i.e., the gun sights on the gun itself). The barrels on the MG42s will overheat and make the weapon useless until you’ve changed barrels. Shots have to be lead – if you’re shooting at a fellow 300 feet away, it won’t do you any good to point the gun directly at him. By the time the bullet reaches where he was, he’ll already be gone. Bullet drop is also factored in – bullets will not continue on for infinity on the plane they were initially fired on.

So, if that sounds interesting to you, let me know and I’ll toss you a guest pass. One other thing (and this is important): the guest passes must be sent within 1 month of them being issued. After that, they expire. If you want one, don’t dilly dally.

Update: As I no longer have any guest passes and don’t foresee Tripwire Interactive releasing any more anytime soon, I’m closing the comments on this post. For some reason, spam bots are hammering it, and every day, at least 1 or 2 get through, which I have to moderate. If more passes become available I’ll write a new post.

All of your decisions affect up to three different spheres in your nation: Civil Rights, Economy, and Political Freedoms. Furthermore, all of the decisions you make bring about extremely exaggerated results. For example, I recently decided that my nation, Russkiya, would not force TV executives to represent various minorities on every television show that aired. At the time it seemed like an okay idea; the producer of one of the shows commented that it was “just a soap opera, not an attack on minorities.” However, a bit about my nation now reads:

…and the alarmingly racist TV show ‘Bigtopians Say the Darndest Things’ is a hit.

Another example of the exaggeration is this, which resulted after I deemed it inappropriate for everyone to go throughout their day totally nude:

…nudity is frowned upon.

It’s a fun little game, and playing it helps one see that politicians can have one hell of a time pleasing everyone. If you’re interested but hesitant to make a nation due to time constraints, don’t worry: at most, you can choose to get two “issues” per day, and each issue takes, at most, a minute or two to deal with.

I’m looking forward to getting back into it. When I was younger, I wasn’t much at good building decks, because building decks takes a bit of.. well, critical thinking. When I started playing, I had my nephew build my decks, and I went about smacking people with big creatures and then toasting them with Fireballs. Fun, to be sure, but not nearly as enjoyable as playing with your own well thought out deck. I’m also looking forward to getting into the game again from a social standpoint. It being a physical card game*, I have to get my hermet ass out of the house and to a place where other people are playing. Once I’m at such a place and playing the game with other people, hopefully that thing called “socializing” will take place. Since I took the last quarter off from school, I’ve been mostly doing the stay at home dad thing, and the instances of socializing which I’ve taken part in have been few and far between. Suffice to say, I need some socializing time, even if I do have to resort to a game where I pretend to be a wizard, hurling fireballs and commanding legions of dragons and vampires.

Whatever it takes, right?

* There’s actually an online version of the game now, titled aptly enough Magic the Gathering Online. However, I’m keeping myself away from this, because part of the whole appeal of magic is getting out with other people, instead of sitting in front of the computer. I’m also not fond of the idea of buying “digitized” cards. If I pay for a card, I’d like the type that I can actually hold in my hand, thanks…

In the evening we all sat down to a rousing game of Pirates of the Barbary Coast. Each player gets a ship (or more); the ships are 3D, constructed out of thick cardstock. Each ship has different attributes: move speed, number of guns, the ranges on the guns, etc. Furthermore, every player gets a home island, which serves a few different purposes:

1. It’s where you return treasure your pirates (arrrrr) have found.
2. It’s where you repair your ship(s) after they’ve lost one or more masts to enemy fire.

In the play area, there are one or more islands that have treasure on them. Each coin has a number value on it (from 1 to 5, if I remember correctly), which none of the players can see until they actually get the gold back to their island. The goal of the game is simple: when all the treasure is gone, have the most. Or, if you’re a warmongerer, I suppose you could take out all of the other players and win, too. There being four of us, I was often tempted to get a shady deal going with one of them to take out the other players (and then, of course, embrace my piratitude and backstab my partner).

I was honestly surprised at how enjoyable the game was. We ended up playing two games, each lasting an hour and a half, roughly. Computer games have truthfully spoiled my mind a bit; after playing complex video games for so long, I’d often look at tabletop games with a bit of disdain. “Lame,” I’d think. “That couldn’t be any fun. It looks far too simple.” After my experience this past weekend, it is clear what is needed to make tabletop games amazingly fun: great friends (and a bit of mead doesn’t hurt, either). While the game would’ve been alright with strangers, playing with people I know well was a blast, particularly when the jokes and jabs started rolling.

The game would be even more enjoyable if we had a larger set of ships and crew cards to play with, not to mention more terrain for the ships to maneuver around. We only had a base set and a booster pack or two (I think), so the pickings were a bit slim. If I knew folks who lived close to me who’d play (the people I played with live a few hours away), I’d seriously consider taking it up as a hobby.

Do you play any tabletop games that you really enjoy? If so, what are they?