Flashgamer

When I got a Mac one and a half year ago, I never thought I'd become an Apple fan-boy. I still have my gaming PC that I keep upgrading and it's caused my a lot of griefs lately. The power supply on my uber-fancy gaming case broke down. The machine had to be restarted 10-15 times until XP booted. All this restarting while booting screwed up the harddrive. So, now I've spent a bunch of $$$ on a new case, PSU and harddrive but I still can't get it up and running - because of sloppy programming.

After installing XP, I started installing the required drivers, but I have just one problem:
You need a mouse to install the mouse!

No, I'm not kidding. You have to click the device found, but it is not possible to navigate to it using the keyboard. I order to install Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer for Bluetooth, you need to have a wired mouse! I don't have one since my kids played with the old wired one I had and now it's broken. Not only are the batteries this mouse requires expensive, now I'll have to buy a mouse to use my mouse? Seriously - the reason why I think Microsoft is going down the drain faster than you can say "OSX" is that their coders simply does not care about the end user. They just don't care if they make crappy software.

Being a gamer and a mac-lover is kind of problematic, so I guess I'll keep the gaming PC for now. Here's a fun reminder to myself why I have a gaming PC:

Apple is improving somewhat in this area though, but it's far away from a gaming platform. Too bad Microsoft snapped Bungie/Halo back on 2000....

Posted by Jensa at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

This eve, I was going to install the C&C3 Map Manager on my WinXP gaming PC to play some community created maps. Every time there's a new Blizzard game, I'm wasting way too many hours on them and C&C3 Tiberium Wars is no exception... Anyway - I try to install the app, the install crashes and suggests I click the Details button. I once installed a beta .NET framework 2.0 and this is supposedly the cause. I try to uninstall it but get an error message with a long un-clickable link and then the uninstall fails.

Odd. I then try to uninstall the beta version of Microsoft Max that I once installed with the framework. When I try to uninstall this photo viewer, i get one of the wackiest popups I've ever seen. It says "If Microsoft Max is removed, these programs might not work properly. Do you want to continue?" and then displays a list of every single software installed on my computer. Supposedly, even the Flash Player Plugin could be affected by removing beta software from Microsoft.

Next, I run the uninstall again and type that long unclickable link from the error message into my browser to find that it's really .NET 3.0 that is the problem? You gotta be kidding me. I have to uninstall .NET 3.0 to uninstall the 2.0 Beta? Well, that will certainly break an application or five? So - I'll have to reinstall 3.0 afterwards. Did I mention that these installs require reboots? I bet this whole thing took me about an hour, just in figuring out the error and resolving it. Great way to spend your evening - you and WinXP in perfect disharmony...

On my Mac, some programs come with custom uninstaller software. These are the really complex ones such as Photoshop and Flash that put files into multiple locations. For all other programs, you just drag the App-icon into the trashcan and the app is gone. Isn't that just beautiful? It just works...

BTW: I've recently read a few blog entries that indicate that there is a new generation of Mac users/switchers - the ones that have tried using Windows Vista ;-)

Ohh! While I was typing this entry, DrWatson (the MS debug software) crashed while debugging the former attempts at uninstalling .NET 2.0 and it took the whole Windows GUI with it. Yet another reboot... Brilliant!

Posted by Jensa at 09:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This friday I joined Paulo to pick up a WII controller at a gaming store. He asked the guy at the counter for a demo disk of Supreme Commander, an RTS that I've been eagerly awaiting. Back at the office he had a look at the specs required and then gave me the disk as his gaming PC wasn't up to it and he mostly plays WII these days anyway. Back home I found that my own gaming PC also struggeled a bit but then I remembered that Apple released an update to BootCamp the other day.

The MacBook Pro is quite a piece of hardware and it has a better GPU than my gaming PC so I thought I'd try BootCamp again to see what kind of performance I'd get. Easier said than done as my 120Gb harddrive was almost full and Bootcamp would need about 12Gb of space to install the game and XP. After a lot of cleaning and backing up old stuff, I had more than 30gb free, but BootCamp still wouldn't install since there wasn't enough contiguous free space on the drive. OSX has this funky Unix filesystem that supposedly does not suffer from de-fragmentation so there's no tool in the OS to compact what is on the disk. After a bit of researching, I found this tool called iDefrag that did the job in two hours for $30. I now had 30Gb of contiguous space and BootCamp installed smoothly.

It's kind of funny - updating XP after the install takes longer than the install itself. I must say that after using a Mac for such a long time, it really feels messy with all those balloons popping up in the lower right corner telling you that you don't have any antivirus installed, windows update needs to be updated, I need to activate my XP, I need to prove that I have a Genuine copy, a bunch of updates must be installed and so on. OSX is just so sleek and "wise" compared to that. Anyway - Supreme Commander runs beautifully on the MacBook so I'm picking up a copy of the full game tomorrow. Great Fun and the zoom from World View to Battle is amazing! Runs pretty smooth on the native 1680x1050 resolution on the MacBook Pro.

Too bad that I didn't try this before ordering a new motherboard and a MSI GeForce 8800GTS 640MB for the gaming PC. Guess I'll install Vista then since I'm soon the owner of a DirectX 10 capable Graphics card or maybe I should cancel the order? Hmmm...

Posted by Jensa at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Linerider has sweeped the inboxes, filled up Youtube with insane rides and proven that super-real 3d is really not required for a good game (if one can call it a game). Along comes another great game in the same style: SketchFighter. Not done in Flash, but looks like heaps of fun!

Posted by Jensa at 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Make sure you view the video to fully grasp what this could do to future gaming! This is bound to be more fun than any other console! Here's a good read about the Nintendo showcase.

Posted by Jensa at 07:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)