Thursday, March 21, 2002

Pondering the Imponderable -- 9:44 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Indiana beats Duke and my bracket goes to heck. March Madness indeed . . .

Unreal Performance Test 20 Released -- 1:13 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Epic has released its Unreal Performance Test 20, which is designed to give an idea how graphics cards will handle next-generation games. Quake III Arena has been the standard up to this point, but with framerates in the 200s on even low end cards today, it's really not much of a test anymore. AnandTech has been using this benchmark for some time. Now we can verify their results. No word right now as to where it can be downloaded from. I'll keep you posted. Thanks Voodoo Extreme.

New NVIDIA Drivers -- 12:28 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

NVIDIA has released new 28.32 Detonator XP drivers for the various flavors of Windows. Unfortunately, I found out the hard way (and it was confirmed by HardOCP) that these drivers have a broken control panel that not only makes installation a PITA, they don't have the necessary control panel goodies when they are installed. NVIDIA is reportedly working on a fix. I wanted to see if they would fix some "issues" I'm having with X-Wing Alliance. We'll see.

By the way, broken drivers make Windows' "reboot whenever you do anything" cycle even more fun than usual. Blech.

UPDATE! 1:30 P.M. New versions of the drivers are available. I'll give them a spin.

UPDATE #2 2:20 P.M. Well, that probably wasn't worth the effort. The new drivers don't cause problems with Diablo II like the 23.11s did. Of course, they don't help with my X-Wing Alliance HUD text corruption. Oh well. I probably just should have stuck with the 21.83 WHQL drivers.

Just a minor rant too: ever since NVIDIA went to self-extracting drivers, there is always some problem with installation. Windows always complains that the files aren't there (with these new drivers, Win98 complained that every single file was missing) even though they are right where they should be. I don't know if the problem is NVIDIA's or Microsoft's. Whatever the case, it is as annoying as all get out.

Freedom Force Demo Released -- 12:01 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

Freedom Force Center reports that the Freedom Force demo has now been released. It's true: I downloaded it this morning. It's "only" 90 megs. You can get it at FilePlanet.

Nope, I hadn't heard about this game either, but it's pretty cool so far: a superhero game and done better than any I've seen. You can design your own superhero or play a pregenerated hero and fight the bad guys, just like a comic book. If the game is as good and fun as the demo, it's going to be tempting: it has attitude, it has atmosphere, it has superhero voices. This could be a nice change from the usual fare of FPS, RTS and RPGs we're going to see this year.

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

J.t. Claims Victory -- 10:14 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

When I got my new Athlon 800 system a few weeks ago, I installed Serious Sam to see how my snappy 64 MB video card worked. In the meantime I've gotten some far better games--Icewind Dale and Gothic to name two--but haven't been able to decide which to play first. So I decided first to finish up Sam and get it off my system.

I got burned out on shooters halfway through Quake and haven't been able to get into one since. I can't say that I've been able to get into Serious Sam either (you can't "get into" something which has no depth), but I've slogged my way through it and finally finished it a few minutes ago. I'll give Croteam points for the audacity of the thing (a 300' tall final boss; hundreds of enemies on the screen at once; some beautiful scenery and cool cinematics) but in the end it's just another twitcher and it has reminded me once again why I don't like shooters! And I hope I never see another Kleer Skeleton as long as I live.

You know, it's interesting to read the reviews of this game which praise it for its ability to let you fight hordes of enemies at once. Yet the Might & Magics are routinely criticized for the same thing. TANJ. Finally, bye bye shooters and on to something with depth and story!

HP Claims Victory -- 10:46 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is claiming that they have enough shareholder votes to approve the merger with Compaq. For the life of me, I still can't understand this merger, unless their goal is to destroy thousands of jobs. I cannot see either company benefitting from this and I have yet to hear a Wall Street analyst give any reasons why this is a Good Thing. I've a feeling this merger will become a case study in business schools on how not to do things.

J.t.Qbe comments: On the other hand, I've read that the Packard family is claiming that the merger hasn't been approved. It's been interesting to read about some of the tactics used to push for stockholder approval of this merger. You can be sure that SOMEONE will benefit from this (if it is approved), though they may not be saying so (or how much). . .

CrossOver 1.1 Review -- 9:22 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

MozillaNews posted a review of the CrossOver 1.1 plugin for Linux. This is the plugin that uses WINE to allow you to use Windows web browser plugins in Linux. I've been using it to use Quicktime, Windows Media (shudder), and Shockwave. It even lets me use the MS DOC reader for those idiots folks who insist on sending me DOC files. The article could use a thorough editing, but the point is good. Thanks Slashdot.

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