Thirtyfootscrew’s Blog

Actually, this post would be better titled “Things I Hate about people in First Person Shooters” because in multiplayer FPS games it’s people that cause all of the problems. I can break this down into three broad categories:

1. Campers & Snipers.
2. Cowards.
3. People who are crap at objective games.

I really don’t understand campers, I mean how much fun can it be sitting in the same few spots for the entire round just waiting for people to walk past? It shows a complete lack of skill and a pathetic desire to win at all costs, disregarding the enjoyment of all others – especially those on the same team. Snipers are even worse, these guys hole themselves up miles away from the action in hard to reach places and just picking people off, they’re both a subset of campers and subset of my next group – cowards.

As an example, I’ve been playing team deathmatches and domination (a.k.a. king of the hill) all night and have spend so much time stuck behind idiots that are cowering in doors or taking pathetic little pot-shots at the opposition. So many times have I been running towards a doorway only to have one of my teammates stop dead and completely block my exit, in about 6 or 7 times this evening such behaviour was directly responsible for my death. As I happen to be playing COD4 there’s no friendly fire but if there were I promise that I’d be a very unpopular guy by now as I instinctively go to melee anyone in my way.

But depspite the bitterness caused by the above two irritants, nothing comes close to how annoyed I get with the fact that 95% of people are crap at objective games. This is a problem I first noticed in Halo 2 where almost every capture the flag game was full of people who were aiming purely for high kill counts and nothing else. This sort of behaviour completely screws over any serious players as nobody will provide any decent support when you end up being the flag carrier. Tonight’s COD4 session was also typical of this pattern (as is every other session I’ve played), you’ll find that out of a team of 8 you’re lucky if you’ve got two other players who actively seek out objectives and/or will provide cover/supressing fire whilst you’re capturing objectives. I’m not sure why these people are the way they are, some are just simple – they clearly don’t understand the game as you’ll see them run with you to an objective and just keep on running (even when it’s easy points). Other people though probably fall into my first two categories and the rest must not be team players – I can only hope that natural selection catches up with them at some point.

Well, that concludes my little rant – time for bed now to meditate on the evening’s deathmatching, sweet dreams people, sweet dreams.

This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: COD4, first person shooter, FPS, Halo, multiplayer

I told myself for months that I wasn’t going to upgrade to Leopard right away, instead I thought I’d wait to see what bugs came out of the woodwork and if there were any other annoyances. Even on release day I was still working to plan, none of the confirmed features were killer-apps for me until I heard the Macbreak Weekly panel saying that Leopard’s networking is so much faster and slicker.

I own two Macs, a 13″ 2GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook that’s my main machine and an old 500MHz G4 PowerMac with 512Mb of RAM that I rescued from a skip last year sometime. Obviously the Macbook would be fine but I wasn’t so sure about the G4 so when I finally went down to the Apple Store on Regent’s Street in London I asked one of the clerks in the store who assured me it would be fine (having asked how much RAM I have in it). So based on the clerk’s recommendation I bought a family pack (allows up to 5 machines) only to find out when I got home that Leopard has an artificial floor of 867MHz for the processor.  My emotions ran through a journey of being pissed at Apple to pissed at the clerk from the Apple Store to determined to make the damned thing work.

I did some checking on my own but couldn’t find the file responsible for the limits, thankfully I found a collection of sites with some helpful info:

Forums on Macrumours.com
Installing Leopard on an Unsupported G4
Installing Leopard to an external firewire drive

Unfortunately neither method exactly fit my situation so using info from there and some general knowledge I did the following…

1. Rip an Image of the Leopard Install Disk, make sure you pick Read/Write.
2. Mount the Image.
3. Make a folder on the Desktop called OSInstall.
4. Open Terminal (make sure you have full permissions, might be worth elevating to root temporarily).
5. Type: “cd Desktop”, then press enter.
6. Type: “cd OSInstall”, then press enter.
7. Type: “xar -x -v -f /Volumes/”Mac OS X Install DVD”/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg”, then press enter (this empties the contents of the package to the current folder).
8. Use TextEdit to open the “Distribution” file (don’t quit Terminal yet).
9. On line 15 change the “var minRm = 512;”  to whatever value of RAM you need (e.g. “var minRm = 256;”).
10. On line 39 change the beginning of “866000000″ to match your processor (e.g. ”400000000″ for 400MHz).
11. Save the file and quit TextEdit.
12. Back in Terminal type: “xar -c ./ -v -f /Volumes/”Mac OS X Install DVD”/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg” (this rebuilds the package including the file you just edited), you can quit Terminal now.
13. If you have dual-layer DVDs you can skip the next part and just burn a disk directly form that and skip the next steps, otherwise secure yourself an external firewire or USB drive.
14. Use Disk Utility to create a partition of 10GB on the external drive, make sure you use the Apple Partition Map if the disk is to be used with a PowerPC Mac.
15. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to restore your image to the 10GB partition (Disk Utility might work but for me it gave me loads of errors).
16. Boot from the drive (hold Option / Alt during boot to select the boot disk).
17. Install Leopard!

Well, the install launches and it’s taken ages so far and still says there’s 30 minutes to go but once it’s done and I’ve got some use out of the system I’ll let you know how it runs.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: Apple, Carbon Copy Cloner, g4, Hack, Leopard, osx, PowerPC

Last night I went to the theatre in London to see Macbeth, I’ll admit that the whole idea of going to see a Shakespeare play was based primarily on the fact that the title role was being played by Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame. Now, I’m not the world’s biggest Star Trek geek and although I have seen about 99% of the Next Generation series, I did also read Macbeth at school and I’ve always thought that Patrick Stewart was a great actor anyway.

The seats I had were about as far back as you could get (Row J, Grand Circle) but the view was unobstructed even though I had a rather tall gentleman sat in front of me. The acoustics were ok, but some of the more softly spoken lines didn’t make it into my ears intact (note that I am a bit deaf anyway), the majority of the dialog was clearly audible though.

The play itself keeps true to the original dialog but the production is set in a pseudo-Stalinist Russia with images of goose-stepping soldiers and tanks being projected onto the backdrop of the stage, along with the projection some great lighting and additional sound effects (gunfire, screams) create a magnificent atmosphere of fear and madness. The set is effectively a bleak and dull kitchen but various props (tables, gurneys, fridge, television) are whisked on and off the stage and lighting is used to delimit areas of the stage so that you very quickly forget about the kitchen aspect and just enjoy the play.

The performances of both Stewart and the leading lady Kate Fleetwood were brilliant and I really felt the emotion they were trying to convey, something I think is difficult to do with Shakespearean English amongst the modern slang-fueled dialect. Whether through mild hearing difficulties or poor understanding of the old-English I did fail to follow-along in some areas but in all I think this should be an accesible experience for the majority – it might help to re-read the book (or a plot synopsis) before going to see the play as a quick refresher should you become lost.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: Kate Fleetwood, Macbeth, Patrick Stewart, Shakespeare, Theatre

I was just posting in the Call of Duty 4 thread over on Red Rant and mentioned that I think COD4 deserves a spot in my Top 5 First Person Shooter games, that lead me to start wondering - what are my Top 5 FPS games?  It’s a tough call as it’s my favourite genre of video games so it’s like choosing between children, to make life easier I’ve limited this to the multiplayer (deathmatching) aspects of the genre.  Here goes…

1. Red Faction 1 (PS2) – the geomodding was great and the game had a wicked pace.
2. Unreal Tournament (PS2) – the first uber-fast run & gun FPS that I played on a console (loved the PC version too), foe a while it was in class of it’s own.
3. Halo 1 (Xbox) – I know the sequel had Xbox Live but nothing ever beats the System Link games I used to play with a bunch of friends at the regular mini LAN Party events we use to have.
4. Call of Duty 4 (Xbox 360) – a recent release but one that feels instantly familiar yet adds all sorts of cool features to the genre (the Perks are brilliant).
5. Ghost Recon Series (Xbox, PS2 Xbox 360, PS3) – much more tactical than all of the above but these games gave an immense scope for teamwork in the co-op modes.

One game many would expect to see on this list (and many would feel is conspicuous by it’s absence) is Perfect Dark, I didn’t own an N64 until a couple of years ago and so never played Perfect Dark back in it’s glory days.  Consequently when I tried to play it I found the stubby single-analog control method to be extremely odd and impossibly frustrating so I couldn’t be bothered to play any more.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: COD4, FPS, Halo, PS2, Top 5, xbox

Yet another relaunch?  Yes, but this time I’ve done what I should have done in the beginning and started hosting my own blog on my own domain  - writing on a shared blog just feels like signing a guest book at a B&B.  One of my plans for the new blog is to broaden the topics about which I post, previously I’d limited myself (more-or-less) to gaming and techie stuff but now I’ll talk about absolutely anything.

So, hopefully you’ll find something here you enjoy, if not let’s just hope I enjoy writing it otherwise we’re both screwed.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: blog, relaunch, thirtyfootscrew