Posted 11/04/2009 at 02:46:54pm

The only game I have ever played which required GWL is the recent Batman. It was fairly painless for me since I already had an Xbox Live account. Syncing my achievements was a big plus, and being able to message my friends who were online on the Xbox was cool. I actually liked GWL overall. That said, I never tried to play it offline; and I did buy it through Steam, whose DRM control scheme seems to prevent the oft-bemoaned DRM hassles of today's disc-based play. Also, while I use the Xbox wireless headset (which is Microsoft-branded, lolz) to play Left 4 Dead on Steam, the voice activation in GWL did not play well with it, and the service offers no push-to-talk option.

The glass is at fifty percent.

Posted 11/10/2008 at 10:06:28am

My dad has a fairly old P4 1.8 Ghz with 256MB RDRAM. XP ran fine, at least with a clean install. Two sisters still live there plus a mom, so... but it did run fine, nonetheless. I have seen a fresh install on 256MB of same-era DDR (single-channel) and suspect that the RDRAM made the difference.

My problems with Ubuntu started as soon as I put the CD in and discovered that I could not run the Live CD with 256MB, not even to install (scroll down to "Alternate install CD" at http://releases.ubuntu.com/hardy/). So I downloaded the alternate install version and burnt it. While trying to run that the install hung twice in the same spot quite a ways into the process. By listening closely to the noise the PC was making at the time I hypothesized l that the CD-ROM drive was not spinning up fast enough and was caught in an infinite loop. Fortunately I had a PC with a dead mobo that someone had given me. I took a drive from that one and replaced the "slow" drive in Dad's. It then installed fine. This further confirmed a suspicion that I had formed while installing Ubuntu on my own PC at home: as tough as the software seems to be, Ubuntu seems to be fragile when it comes to hardware issues; where Windows will soldier on, Ubuntu will sometimes refuse to march. Further, excepting boot times, I have not noticed a performance increase. In fact, a fresh XP install seems to be more responsive. Then there is the fact that every time the computer is turned on/restarted the Linksys wireless USB adapter needs to be unplugged and plugged back in; this would be fine if I were the one using it, but my sister gets stupidcomputeritis (otherwise known as, "Oh brother, where art thou?") when she runs into problems.

My point is that to some extent the Linux love seems to be given for the wrong reason: it is currently "in" to bash Windows and Microsoft. Along with what you already know about my dad's computer, I have Vista Home Premium 64-bit and the latest version of Ubuntu on my uber-computer at home. So far I have only found two features to be truly compelling about Ubuntu: 1. it is free, and 2. one-button update for every piece of software installed; other Good Things include decreased chances of malware/virus infection and faster boot times. Those are compelling features but not enough to make me switch. I am a gamer, I keep my computer clean, and, frankly, I love Vista. Admittedly I have 8GB DDR2, a quad-core proc, a Radeon 4870 HD, and a RAID 0 setup, but I really do like the OS.

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 The glass is at fifty percent.

Posted 10/28/2008 at 02:00:44pm

Aww! The Halo theme overrated? Why is it cool to dis Halo these days? I dig it, but I guess I am a sucker for epic scores. Maybe that is why I like Beethoven more than Bach.

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The glass is at fifty percent.