OK all you gamers out there.  I am thinking of getting a toy for Christmas, for me that is, I already have stuff for the kiddies   I am thinking of getting some kind of hand held video game system, and I have it pretty much narrowed down to two options.  These options are the Nintendo DS (Lite) or the Sony PSP, are there any more nowadays?  Having said that, I guess the real question is what are your experiences with these two units, which one do you prefer?  I have read a lot about them, and it kind of seems like it’s a toss up, mostly decided by personal preference and gaming style/tastes.  I wanted to get your opinions though, so jump in the forums and share your thoughts, ideas and experiences with these cool toys.  Maybe you know of something other than one of these two that is better, I dunno.  Tell me what is on your mind, and what you think!

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Here we go!  After a couple weeks of effort, and some of the most dimwitted tech support I have ever experienced, I finally managed to get Fallout 3 up and running.  No thanks to Bethesda tech support by the way.  Now, support issues aside, the game is nice, nice, nice.  I don’t just mean the graphics, which are great, but the story and character interactions, the detail of the scenery and lots more.  The character creation process is quite unique.  The folk that made this game did a great job, lots of detail and extras and they give you a ton of freedom as to how to play the game.  All in all, my initial reaction is that it’s been worth the effort to get it going.  I have thoroughly enjoyed my first couple of hours with the game.  I suggest you check it out if you like first person type games.  This one is more than just an FPS, it has a grand story and lots more to do than just shooting.  Enjoy!

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Let me start this post by saying that I am a game addict, and not just video games either. Yep, years ago I was a pen and paper RPG nerd, and still am although I don’t really play much anymore. I love the books though, I love the stories, and therefore I have gravitated to computer games. What does this have to do with this site? Well, when I find something really cool, especially if it has to do with computers and/or related technology, I want to share it.

I played both Diablo and Diablo 2, including the expansions, and I don’t think anyone can argue that the Diablo series set the bar for many other games. How often have you seen games out there that were pretty much blatant Diablo rip-offs? From the GUI to the gameplay, they were trying to ride that same wave and catch some of the masters glory. Never seemed to work, did it? Just like World Of Warcraft is setting the bar for MMO’s with plenty of copy cats to follow, Diablo did the same thing years ago.

Well, now it’s doing it again. I got a chance to watch the HD gameplay trailer for Diablo 3 today and I was blown away. It looks like Blizzard is redefining this type of game all over again. The trailer was graphically awesome to be sure, but the gameplay and new features were insane. I wanted to play this game so bad I could taste it. Trust me, it will be a very long wait for this title to come out. Let me say too, I don’t see this is hype or vapor, this trailer is simply the game, and someone playing it narrating what is going on. Very cool.

Here, I have a link to the trailer that you can download in chunks. The whole trailer is almost 600MB and you can get it at FilePlanet [Link], but for those that don’t want to bite off all that at once, you can get it here in 12MB pieces. There are lots of places on the net to get bits and pieces of the trailer, but I can tell you that the entire HD trailer is an awesome thing, I highly recommend grabbing it. Then you can sit back, fire it up and just get lost in this magnificent game.  Grab the smaller chunks here.

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I have seen lots of folk out there trying to find ways to download the AoC client, even though it’s a hefty almost 13GB.  I was looking too and what I found was this:

• There is no (official) digital download/delivery method in place for the AoC client from Funcom.  Right now, if you want the game, you have to buy it retail.
• That being said, I found that the early access client that was available for download by the players that signed up for early access to the game, will work for playing live right now.  After the download, it will patch up to live (another ~800MB) and you can then play.
• There are two clients, one for the US and one for the EU.  If you are in the US, you need the US client, and the same for EU.

So, after much searching, I found links to the early access downloader.  This is a small file that will then download all of the game install files.  I don’t know how long this will work, but as of 5/23/2008 it was still working and allowed me to buy a key from an online retailer (Offgamers), download the game and start playing.  Make no mistake, I paid for the game, this is not a way to play for free and I don’t in any way condone stealing. However, for people like me who live in rural areas where you can’t buy it off the shelf without a long trip to another town, and didn’t want to wait for Amazon to ship to play the game it’s a great thing.

Here are the links that I found to the US and EU downloader tool:

• http://funcom.cachefly.net/AoC-US-EarlyAccess.exe
• http://funcom.cachefly.net/AoC-EU-EarlyAccess.exe

Good luck!

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Having trouble installing WoW (Word of Warcraft) on your Windows Vista box? Well, I was. Recently I wanted to go back and give WoW a try once again, and by now I have a new machine from Alienware running Windows Vista. I popped the original first CD in and low and behold … I got an error, it wouldn’t run the executable. I got an error number 132 and something about a bootstrap problem.

I thought this might just be a problem with the older installer and Vista, since I got these disks years ago, so I downloaded the latest installer from Blizzard’s website. So, 3.5 GB later I try to install from the download and it doesn’t work either. Different error, this time Vista just popped up a box saying that the installer wasn’t working. Support at Blizzard was no help, in their opinion I had bad memory but I didn’t think that was the case since every other game I have runs great. After some log searching and Google-ing, I hit upon something that clicked for me. It seems the installer was failing because of a problem with the LAME MP3 codec. Aha!

The answer was there in front of me. I took a shot, downloaded and installed the LAME MP3 codec and tried again. Lookout, now the installer worked! I didn’t go back and try the old CD’s, but the installer that I downloaded worked great.

So, if you are having trouble installing WoW on your Vista box, and especially if you get any kind of LAME MP3 errors, go and download the codecs here (http://www.freecodecs.net/files/lameACM-3.97-final.zip) and see if that helps.

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Valve Software, the folk that brought us the Half-Life family of games, has something new and (from my experience) pretty different out. It’s a game called Portal, and it’s unique in that it’s a first person shooter type of game, from the perspective of the player and the controls, but it’s purely a puzzle game. You don’t shoot anything (so far anyway, I haven’t finished it yet), but you do use “portals” to maneuver through test chambers and make things happen. So far, it’s been quite fun, rather addicting, and challenging too. Half-Life is great, Half-Life 2 is awesome and truly groundbreaking, portal is ingenious and fun, I recommend checking it out!

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