Battlefield 2142 – Player Profiles. Too much information?

EA just launched a portal for viewing your and other players’ Battlefield 2142 stats (including unlocks and rank). Stats for my soldier, BadWolfOne, can be seen at this link. Currently, BadWolfOne is a Master Seargent Gold. I unlocked both recon trees, most of general and I have 2 unused unlocks.

The progress section is a little over the top, though. There, graphs will show you that my ‘kills per minute’ and ‘deaths per minute’ are both climbing at the same rate. Navigating the 20+ pages of the details section will show you that my preferred weapon is the Lambert Carbine.

All this information is great for learning from your competition, but where is the website badge made popular by XBoxLive so I can have my stats in a little box on my blog?

Update: On a side note, the Total Battlefield 2142 forums are full of tons of useful information. This ‘little secrets’ thread, for instance.

October 18, 2006

in ComputerMice, Games, Microsoft
4 Comments

My New Computer

Update: I forgot to mention that I’m running XP, not Windows Vista. I installed Vista RC2 first, but found that all the motherboard software and speedfan didn’t work correctly (for tracking the cpu and motherboard temperatures). Also, my attempt at installing World of Warcraft on Vista RC2 failed. I realize that these problems could have been overcome, probably, but I wasn’t in the mood to compromise with my brand new hardware.

On Friday, I built a new PC with parts I ordered from NewEgg.com. The components are listed at the bottom of this post. The total was well under $1500, including tax and shipping. The build procedure took more than 5 hours including the OS install – it was well worth it. My new pc is very fast and can handle all the games I tested at excellent speed with lots of beautiful graphics. Here are some thoughts:

Second Life character animations are still choppy even with a fast CPU and Graphics card. Am I doing something wrong? I tried Second Life earlier this year and was turned off by the clunky look. I assumed it was my computer, but now that I know that’s normal, I guess I won’t be going back.
Installing the heat sink/fan is much less stressful now than it was a few years ago. You don’t have to apply as much pressure. That’s a welcome change. When I built my AMD 2500+ based machine back then, I was afraid I was going to snap the motherboard because I had to press really hard, with a screwdriver, to get the heat sink set up.
Battlefield 2142 is amazing.
I haven’t tried Oblivion on this PC, yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
World of Warcraft runs at 60 FPS with all settings on high in windowed and full screen mode.
The case is very quiet. I installed a second 120mm fan and it’s still very quiet. The CPU and motherboard temps stay around 35-39 degrees celsius. The graphics card gets as high as 45 degrees under load.
I bought a Logitech MX Revolution wireless mouse last night. More on that later. I love mice.
Haven’t overclocked anything, yet.

Components:

October 9, 2006

in Games

PS3, XBox 360, Mac, PC or Wii?

Scoble wants to know what consoles we’re interested in. This is a very relevant question for me as I dropped $1100 on NewEgg about an hour ago for parts for a new PC – not a console.

I’ve been contemplating this decision for months. I sold my XBox 360 earlier this year to make room in my wallet for a UMPC. So, as I’ve been deciding on what my primary gaming machine will be for the next year or so, I had the following options:

Wii – Hard to see this as a PRIMARY gaming machine, but I’m very excited about the technology and creativity at Nintendo. AND this thing is cheap enough that I might buy one in a few months as a SECONDARY gaming machine.
PS3 – Expensive. I can’t see myself buying one until the game library is really solid.
XBox 360 – Not a big enough game library, yet. XBox live is awesome, but when I did own one there weren’t enough players online in the arcade titles like Joust and Marble Blast. Geometry Wars is one of the best games ever. NOTE: I don’t have an HDTV – I played my 360 on a PC Monitor using the VGA cable.
A new, home-built PC – Spore will be out next year. Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142 look great. The new Half Life 2 episode with Portal is going to rock. I would really like to see what Second Life looks like on good hardware. The other HUGE advantage to a PC is the flexibility you get.
MAC – A home-built pc seems to beat the pants off (price/performance) a low end MAC.

So, I chose the PC. Here’s a link to the parts I ordered.

September 27, 2006

in Games, Nintendo

Nintendo DS Homebrew

This question comes up from time to time – How do you get started writing Nintendo DS Homebrew. Here’s a very brief intro:

Daily news:

Dev Platforms

DevKitPro or PALib (which is based on DevKitPro).
The DSDev / GBADev forum is a good place to start learning about the two.
PALib has a lot of great documentation and has a very active community, but it insulates you from the hardware more than DevKitPro does.
You’ll want to test with one or more emulators. I like Dualis, but I hear that no$gba is rapidly becoming the compatibility frontrunner.

Dev Hardware

First, read about FlashMe.
For the DS or DS Lite, I think the new DS-X card is the most interesting for Homebrew Developers. It fits in the DS slot, not the GBA slot and you don’t need to buy a micro SD card. DS-X requires that you use FlashMe and not a PassCard. Frankly, I’m glad, because I prefer having a flashed DS – it’s safer, because it reduces the risk that your DS will get bricked by malicious code.
If you can’t wait for the DS-X to ship, you should consider the SuperCard Lite. It fits in the GBA slot, so you can use FlashMe or a PassCard.
You can buy both of those cards at http://www.divineo.com or http://www.winsunx.com.