I've got a few buddies who are testing out the Warhammer massively multiplayer game, and while it does seem interesting I just can't get too excited about yet another swords and sorcery MMO.... Thanks to Oder I found out that THQ is working on a game based on the Warhammer 40k universe. Now there's something I can get excited about! Be very interesting to see how they pull it off, as the 40k universe is so huge and far reaching.

Wondered when this was going to happen (again). Looks like AMD is cutting pricing on it's processors, in some cases by almost 50% to compete with Intel.(Thanks Dman.)

Seems a guy in Britian has invented himself a flying saucer that actually works. The US military is all over it of course, check out the comments from brits at the bottom of the page, thanks to Rune for the link.

Heading up to Wasaga Beach Paintball Adventures in two days for their season opener and annual charity day. Hoping the weather is a little better than it is today.

Actually it's been out for a while, and I've had it for a while, I just haven't had a chance to play it or post anything about it because I've been too darned busy. Blah. Stupid 12-14 hour work days!

Every so often something comes along that seems so incredibly useless, but is just so darned cool I have to mention it, and the Optimus keyboard is just such a thing. I'd really like to know what it's going to be worth when it comes out in late 2007, gotta be expensive considering that the three key version of it they have out already is listed at $160 USD on the manufacturer's website. Can you say "Ouch!"? I mean, it's neat. It's not THAT neat. Thanks for the link Lute.

Very much looking forward to getting my hot little hands on the Battlestations Midway demo... Which is apparently out on the Xbox 360 already. *le sigh* Looks like an exceptionally tasty game, and a look at things to come in the RTS/FPS shooter genre crossovers that are going to be the next big thing, I hope.

Got Supreme Commander and it's quite good so far. I've just been messing around in skirmish mode with a pile of AIs and big maps and I'll tell you.. I've found a game that can humble an 8800gtx. Humble it I tell you. About 30 minutes into the game when I've got thousands of units operating and I'm running dual monitors the thing is running at about 1-3 frames per second. Even the music is choppy. It's also using 900 megs of ram. I think i'll try a second video card and see what happens.

One thing that is pissing me off is the Cybran naval destroyers. It's sort of neat they they sprout legs and go marching across the land... Except when I've got a naval engagement on the other side of an island and I need my ships to scoot around it quickly and they... walk... very... slowly... across the damned island. Argh.

Well, as of yesterday I'm no longer carrying Linksys products, nor recomending them to anyone? Why? It seems that Linksys' technical support has gone quite downhill lately. I have a router a customer purchased. It's used. We offer a 30 day warranty on used items, but I know that Linksys has a longer warranty, so I called them to see if this particular router was under warranty. I ended up on hold waiting to talk to a tech for 1 hour and 35 minutes. When I finally talked to a tech (a nice fellow from India) and told him what the problem was, and what I had done to resolve it he agreed that it sounded like the router was dead, but couldn't tell me if it was out of warranty or not so he transfered me to customer service. I sat on hold some more. When I finally got someone in service, they informed me that they couldn't help me because the technician apparently hadn't logged what we'd talked about. They also couldn't tell me if it was under warranty or not, but they graciously offered to replace the router if I talked to a tech again. After another half hour on hold I was informed that the techs were too busy to talk to me and so they would call me back the next business day. A week passed. I called them back and again ended up on hold for a long time and went through basicallly the same thing. Again, they would call me back... And suprise! No call back. So I called them back and informed them what had happened again AGAIN they said they'd call me back the next day. What time would be best? 10am -> 6pm EST, but please don't call between 1 and 2 pm as I won't be in. No problem. Three days later they finally call... At 1:10. We talk everything over again, and after 45 minutes I'm informed that yes, it looks like I have a dead router (Duh!) but technical support can't do a return, I have to talk to customer service. So I sit on hold for another 30 minutes and get someone from service.. who then inform me that because I'm a reseller they can't do anything, I'll have to hang up and call back and talk to.. sales? Yes.... sales.. No problem. Call back, sit on hold for about 10 minutes and get someone in sales... Who informs me that... No, they don't do returns, who told you that? Oh. You have to talk to customer service. SO! Back to customer service and sitting on hold. Finally get someone who does the return and promises to email me the directions for the return. Double checked and yes, they have the right email address. It's been three days and no email.

Linksys, (Or technically I guess Cisco) you can just go die in a fire. I will never sell your products again if this is the sort of thing myself and my customers have to go through, and considering how much of your stuff we sell for you, you just lost a fair bit of business.

This sort of service seems to be the norm for most companies since they've started transfering their technical support to India and other countries in that area of the world rather than keeping them here in North America, or in Europe. I'm sick of it, but it seems to be accelerating.

Well, been playing the Supreme Commander single player demo a little bit and it's quite good. The whole dual monitor thing adds a new dimension to the game, as you have a satelite view (zoomable) on your second monitor that lets you keep an eye on the whole world at once, rather than just having a minimap or a toggleable larger map. The only problem with it is that I have to keep reminding myself it's there and I should be just looking at my second monitor. I have to figure out how to move my left view from the right view as well. Just over a week and the full version shall be mine!

I think that time lapse film is pretty neat, and here's one of the coolest videos I've ever seen using it. Hmmm. Clouds...

The Supreme Commander demo is out. *happy dance*. Downloading now, must install. This one's been a loooong time coming. The full retail product should be out in stores on the 21st of this month. Can't wait!

And I just can't WAIT to have to support all the new and glorious bugs that we find. And of course all the people trying to run it on ancient machines with system specs that you'd have problems running DOS 6.22 on. As I look around on this day as well, I see Vista advertisements litterally everywhere. Proto reports that some of the subway terminals in Toronto are pretty much wall to wall Windows Vista advertisments promising that the world will be a better place, and that the war in Iraq will be over by weeks end... you know, now that Vista is here. Ahhh well.

If you happen to be interested in doing a full install rather than an upgrade from a Windows Vista Upgrade version, check out this little article that our buddy VA_Killer sent in.

Grrrrrr. The World of Warcraft logon servers are down right now. I finally get home from work and all I want to do is sit down and play WoW for a bit. Oh well. At least it gave me a chance to finally get the review for Rainbow 6 Vegas done up. Hell of a good game.

Spent a few hours last night sitting in Winterspring on my Warrior killing monsters listening to my guildmates bitch and complain about over camped mobs and lag in outlands. I'll have to get out there in a few days and check it out once things calm down a little bit. Right now I'm sitting in a queue trying to get into the game. *sigh*

Just installing The Burning Crusade expansion pack now. Got myself the collectors edition and man.. there's a pile of cool stuff in there. Probably the best collector's edition pack I've ever seen. More later.

At long last it's almost time to play TBC... It seems like forever we've been waiting and saying.. "When the expansion comes out.." etc etc... and in a few short hours it'll be out. Dunno that I'll be playing it for a few days just because I hate trying to kill quest mobs when there's a few dozen other people trying for the same thing. Maybe I'll just level my warrior a little bit more then decide which toon I'm going to get to 70 so I can start end game raiding again with my good old Ravenous Guild. Still trying to talk Rune into coming and playing with us, but he doesn't understand the most excellent gamingness that is World of Warcraft.

Happy New Years everyone! :)

Just got a motherboard box in from ASUS. The slogan on the box? "Asus: Rock Solid, Heart Touching." Much laughter ensued.

Ever since we reviewed and loved the first game from Moonpod (Starscape) I've been looking eagerly forward to their next game, and it's finally out. I've only had time to clear a few rooms on the demo version of Mr. Robot (Domo Arigoto?) but it's a fun little puzzle game thus far. when I'm done my review on Vegas I plan on buying and finishing the whole thing. Check out the demo here. I hope Moonpod gets Warangels done soon, that's the game from them that I've really been looking forward to.

Watching Protocal play a little Company of Heros today and wow. There's another one I really have to get and play. Incredible detail for an RTS.

Beat the single play portion of Rainbow 6 Vegas today. What an excellent game.

And a very Merry Christmas to all of our readers from everyone here at FRAGtopia.

Merry Christmas Eve everyone! :)

A number of our rural folks in our area (Dufferin County, Ontario) have been getting calls from someone who claims they're calling from Bell Sympatico, and that high speed service is now avaliable in their area. After "checking" their phone number to confirm that the service is avaliable the caller gets all your information, including your credit card number and promises to send you out your equipment. They're not from Bell Canada, they're scammers and now they have your credit card number. If you get a similar call, please don't give out your information. Call Sympatico at 310-SURF to confirm that the offer is real. High speed is generally not avaliable in rural areas.

Bought Rainbow 6 Vegas the other day and man... That is a hell of a good game. Check out the little video clip I made this afternoon of a room entry. Be warned, the game has certainly earned it's M rating, lots of swearing and violence. Not for the kids.

Finished my article on my latest little upgrade, to the Geforce 8800GTX video card and Intel e6600 processor. Check out the benchmarks and other goodness here.

May the gaming gods have mercy upon us all should Rune ever get his hands on a Nintendo Wii system. The carnage would be the stuff of legend. For those of you who have seen Rune's strange gyrations and flailing about while he's gaming, you will understand. It's sort of like watching someone have a siezure, but funny.

A while back we did a review on Jet's n Guns, one of the funnest little side scrolling platform shooters I've ever played. I've been playing it a little bit again and I'm going to beat it, yet again. This time I think I'll beat it a few times, it's just that much fun. It's nice to take a break from complicated games that require thinking and just blow lots and lots of stuff up.

My name is now Mohmar Achmed Allim and I've decided to move to Iraq and go into the illegal arms business. Is sounds like way more fun than what I do right now, and with the US military apparently being stupid and not keeping track of the guns they hand out over there, I could set myself up quite nicely. GG guys. Shesh.

I've always been fascinated by history, and it always amazes me when I read about the pyramids just how they've lasted. Amazing what people could build over 4,000 years ago isn't it? And with precision we have problems matching even now.

Seems that people are wondering if EA Games may be having problems maintaining their good name. With what's been happening with the patches for Battlefield 2 and 2142 I can't say I'm suprised. Learn to not break your games. There seems to be a huge number of gamers giving up on Battlefield 2 and going back to playing Battlefield 1942/Desert Combat. I was playing Desert Combat on a customer's computer for a few minutes while testing a new video card the other day and it was fun. Really fun. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy that game. I'm reinstalling it over the holidays I think, getting a little bored with World of Warcraft all the time, at least until the expansion comes out. There's also the fact that they release their sports games on an annual basis, and frankly unless you skip a few years I can't really see any difference between them, so why bother buying the new version every year?

Yes, yes they have. If you have a business in Orangeville, and you wish to rent a portable sign, there's a tax (they don't call it a tax of course, but if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and has feathers, chances are pretty good it's a duck.) of $25 per month to have your sign out by the road. I don't really see the town's justification for the sign tax. It's my sign. I paid for it. But whatever. I'll pay the damned $25 per month ($300 per year!) to have my sign out by the road. This year I got my little renewal notice and I am to say the least..... annoyed. I gave the town by-law officer a call. (Nice guy by the way, I'm sure he's catching flak for this one.) It seems that the town council raised the fee from $300 per year to $900 per year. A 300% increase. THREE HUNDRED percent. I thought the $300 was too much, I'm certainly not going to pay $900 a year just to have a sign. They can kiss my shiny metal ass for this one. The fee isn't a huge deal if one has a sign that you're putting up for a few weeks for a sale or something but it really hurts when you're a small business and you have a sign out year round.

So I'm debating. I've written a letter to the editor of the local newspaper and I may just get around to going to a council meeting and complaining. Problem is that I don't live in town here, so I doubt they'd give a damn. They might just wind up with a big computers for sale sign on their front walkway come January 1st. It really depends on how mad I am by that time. So it looks like it's time to cross Richard Nixon off my list, and add Orangeville Town Council.

Been having a few people lately calling with lost data. Back your data up. Go get a flash drive or an external hard drive and back things up. Syncback is an awesome utility I've been using lately to back all my data up automatically every morning. Best of all, it's free. I'm using the commercial version and it was a wopping $40. There's no excuse to loose data.

Was nice to hear from my buddy !FT!Reverand the other day. He's been in China for quite some time and is apparently doing well and now married. Congrats man.

Thinking about buying that $2 extended warranty on your $10 watch battery from Radio Shed? I've been saying for many many years now that extended warranties are a scam for the most part. In fact, a company that was trying to get me into selling extended warranties at my store told me pretty much exactly that. It's pretty much free cash for the company selling them, especially since many customers seem to have problems getting the warranties honored if they are needed. Here's an article on extended warranties from folks over at the CBC, who are far smarter than I. (Or at least that's what the CRTC tells me.)

Dman from Synaptic Distortion (He helped out at the FRAGtopia parties... Well... He was drunk and on a bike at the first one, but dropped by to say hi. He did the webpage and camera work at the second party) has a new preview track up on his My Space page, check it out. He's got some great tunes

Yay! It sucks having trees come down on your power lines in a bad wind/ice storm, as happened all over the place here a few days ago. I was a little annoyed as I'd planned on spending my day off at home getting some work around here done, as well as some webdesign work I've been slogging away at. As it was I ended up just going to work for the day. On a positive note I've got the ASUS P5N32-Sli Premium mobo installed, with the very tasty e6600 Intel Core 2 Duo processor and I've got to admit, it's pretty damned impressive. I picked that particular Intel for a few different reasons: A) They're cheap. $360 compared to almost double that for the e6700, and four times that for the e6800. B) It's the same clock speed as my AMD Athlon 64 3800+, so it's easy to compare the same processors running a the same clock speeds. I'll be doing an article up on the whole thing soon. Thus far I'm liking the e6600. My machine is noticeably faster running Windows and my apps, and the benchmarks are up, even with the old 7800gt video card. The mysterious performance issues with the new test 8800gtx video card also seem to have gone the way of the dodo. That'll all be discussed in the article when I get it done.

Christmas time is almost here, and amid all the advertisments, greed and money grubbing there's always a few stories that really touch my heart. Larry Stewart is a fellow who really embodies the spirit of love and generosity that is what Christmas is about. Read this and make sure you watch the video that's embeded as well.

I've always found Jib Jab to be highly entertaining, and their animated works quite often hit close to home. One of my major complaints about our so called wonderfull "global economy" is that companies keep outsourcing to other countries. And realistically, why not? If your competition movies their operations to India, and they can pay people 1/10th what they're paying here, you really don't have much of a choice. The problem is of course that eventually we're going to loose so many jobs over here that no one here will be able to afford to buy the companies stuff. Everyone likes cheap Wal-Mart crap but I don't when it costs jobs here or in other developed countries. Also I end up talking to Sinjab from Pakistan every time I need tech support at almost any large company. HP, Dell, Sympatico, Microsoft... It's always the same. I called.... Hmmm. I think it was Dell... and complained a while back because I got hung up on by one of their techs when I told him that I was really having problems with his accent, and I needed to talk to someone who spoke english a little more clearly. Apparently that makes me a racist of some sort the fellow was quite upset and told me just that. I wasn't rude or anything, I just couldn't understand him. The lady from Dell was quite understanding and said that they've had many complaints, but usually from Americans, she was suprised a Canadian called to complain, we usually just put up with that sort of thing. *sigh* I think I'm going to just go buy a self sufficient island somewhere, where I don't have to deal with these sorts of things. The rest of the world can go to hell, and I'll be sitting on a beach drinking coconut rum and getting a tan.

Ohhhh. You can get a headcrab hat! All of the other Half Life playing nerds will bow before you, you will be their king. Small children and women on the hand will run screaming before you. Huh. It's good to the king. Thanks Goshwin. :)

Well, I've got a Core 2 Duo e6600 chip and board sitting on my desk. I'll get around to installing it and reporting back on it soon.... It feels odd, this is the first time in a loooong time I'll have an Intel chip in my rig. The last Intel I had was a Celeron 366 overclocked to 550 if that gives you any idea. After that I got me an original AMD Athlon 550 and overclocked it to over 750mhz and I've been an AMD man ever since. Sadly all things must fall by the wayside, and in this case it was AMD. Hopefully they get their act back together soon and get a chip out to compete with the Core 2's and I can get another AMD. I'm hoping that this mobo swap out might help out with the slow performance on the 8800GTX as well.

I always wondered how the l2extreme guys got away with running Lineage 2 MMPORG servers. Looks like they finally got their asses nailed.... Just a matter of time I guess. I figured that sooner or later NCsoft would get around to shutting them down. My friends who play on their servers will be upset. Thanks for the news Proto.

Yes, and it's not just the Chinese. It's oriental people in general, and their advertisements in specific. Highlights today from the ASUS website, with the launch of their new motherboard:

"Asus: Revolution of Motherboard!"

"Because the Crosshair supports all the latest CPUS, GPUS and came heavy-loaded with awesome gaming-centric features out of the box. You will sure be armed and ready for any gaming challenges."

"Remove the barrier, burst with performance!"

I won't be laughing when they finally get around to attacking Russia, or foreclosing on the USA, so I might as well get my chuckles in now I figure. One question though.. Why don't these huge tech companies have at least one white guy on staff, who just sits in a room and corrects the grammar on their press releases, websites and boxes?

Got myself a Geforce 8800GTX today and I'm thus far pretty disapointed. I managed to shoehorn this monster into my little case, and my performance in 3Dmark and Aquamark increased a tiny tiny bit over my venerable 7800GT. Seems other people are having the same problem, I'm out of ideas. I've emailed MSI to see what the problem might be. The card also seems to run quite hot.

Well, after my little rant yesterday Hitman sent me a message to inform me that the majority of the people standing in line for a week to get Playstation 3s are probably just going to sell them on Ebay. Most of the articles I've been reading seem to hold to that, with some estimates running as high as 90% of pre orders are people just buying it as an investment to sell it to fools at an insanely high mark up. I guess I can't blame the people standing in line. I mean, $2,000+ USD profit isn't bad money to make in less than a week. Heck I don't make that in a month of honest work. Rune informs me that Ebay is limiting PS3 sales on their online auction to try and put a ding in the privateering.

Thus far I don't know anyone personally who's gone out to buy a Playstation 3 on Ebay or another auction site, but if you did I'd love to talk to you and see just what the hell motivates that sort of insanity. Seriously. If you, or someone you know did this, send me an email or ICQ. I want to understand.

*Sigh* I realise that DICE and EA GAMES are evil, evil corporate monsters who haven't come up with anything really good since the original Battlefield 1942, but I'm tempted to purchase BF2142? Why? There's a few reasons. I've held off because I couldn't get the demo to run on my computer, but I've done a Windows reinstall since then so it'll probably work. I've heard nightmare stories about the various issues people have run into with the game. But quite a few of my buddies have it now. I might have to cave in tomorrow and purchase it, thereby giving my soul yet again to DICE and EA.

Might and Magic: Dark Messiah by the way is an excellent if somewhat short game if you're looking for a good first person shooter/RPG to play. The plot is great. They could have done quite a bit more with the ending and the story felt like it could have been expanded on more I was a little disapointed in that regard. Overall though not a bad game. I have to try the multiplayer and see how it is, so far Protocal isn't impressed with it.

I've always held out that video games don't cause violence, and that those who argue it does are clearly idiots and incapable of rational thinking. However, after reading about the Playstation 3 I realise they're right. Video game consoles at least, do lead to violence and camping in parking lots for long periods of time. (These people are also idiots.) I was tempted to wander over to my local EB Games and pitch my tent then spend the rest of the night singing Koom Ba Yah and loudly asking if this is the line up for the Xbox 360 release. Unlike the twits who camped out for days however, even I have too much of a life to do that sort of thing. Also consoles suck. I'm sorry, but it's a scientifically proven fact. Write me hate mail if you have to but my PC eats the Xbox 360 and PS3 for lunch. Sure the stats are impressive on it, but it's hard to spend $600 on something that just plays games and plays DVDs. To me it's money better spent to drop that money on a new video card.

Pappy sent me a link to the machine that beats up on the speedy little system I built him a few months back. This is just disturbing. I mean, wow. I'm seriously considering getting rid of my SLI 7800GTs (I think I have them sold) and getting a single X8800 GTX.

Looks like HP is buying boutique PC maker Voodoo PC. With Dell buying Alienware one has to wonder if it's going to be all big box for the boutique PC manufacturers from now on. Sort of wierd having those massive corporate sorts buying up gaming companies.

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

To all the veterans out there, thank you. Thank you for all your sacrifices.

Illustration by Brian Fray, for the Guelph Tribune. Thanks to Dustbunny and Ddaywear.com for the image.

The Dominion Institute hass over 36,000 signatures on their petition to have a state funeral offered to the family of the last WWI veteran to pass away in Canada. If you're Canadian, and you haven't yet signed the petition, please do.

The Dominion Institute has a heck of a good idea, that the last World War I veteran to die in Canada should recieve a full state funeral of the sort that's usually reserved only for Prime Ministers and Governer Generals. There's three of them left allive, two who are 106 and one who's 105. They've collected almost 6,000 signatures in the last few days. If you're from Canada, sign it please. They also run the Memory Project, which keeps the memory of our veterans from all wars alive and teaches children about what they've done. Amazing website.

Yup, looks like someone at Microsoft was listening and they've clarified the licensing on Vista. "You may uninstall the software and install it on another device for your use. You may not do so to share this license between devices." Good. Now I may just buy it. That'll just be for the retail versions, I imagine the OEMs (which I always buy) will still have the same licensing as XP, where it can't be transfered to a new computer. Hopefully Microsoft still just gives you an unlock key when you call, as they do now with XP. Thanks for the link VA Killer!

Happy All Hallows' Eve (ex. Halloween) chilun!

In the spirit of Halloween we've got the following spooky link from Praetorian. It's a satelite photo the reveals ancient mysteries... Says Prae: "A strange image, previously undecipherable, locked in the hard bedrock of the earth: BEHOLD! AN INDIAN... LISTENING TO AN IPOD! A MESSAGE FOR THE FUTURE, BURIED MILLIONS OF YEARS IN THE PAST"

I'm a little concerned about Microsoft's licencing and how it's going to work for Windows Vista. I've no objections to purchasing an operating system. In fact, if you're pirating Windows you're a bad person. There's nothing wrong with spending a few hundred dollars on something you're going to be using for years to come. I bought XP Home almost five years ago and I've put new parts into my computer constantly. In fact I've put a new motherboard into my system close to a dozen times since then and had to reactive my Windows every time. I've been reading up a little bit and from the sounds of it, Microsoft will only allow me to reactive Vista once? Needless to say I'm not going to be repurchasing an operating system every few months. No way in hell. Hopefully they're not going to be jerks about this whole thing. There's an article here that Proto sent over that answers a few questions, but Microsoft's answers seem a little lacking in specifics. This line especially concerns me:

"Validation will fail if the software detects a substantially different hardware configuration.

At that point, the customer is able to use the one reassignment for the new device. If, after using its one reassignment right, a customer again exceeds the tolerance for updated components, the customer can purchase an additional license or seek remediation through Microsoft's support services."

Remediation through Microsoft's support services? Errrrrr......... I'm not shelling out a pile of cash on the off chance I might be able to argue with some guy in India and ask him to pretty please give me a new key.

Microsoft's licencing practices really do piss me off. I bought the software, it's mine. I should be able to load it on any one computer I choose. Technically I should have purchased a new XP everytime I totally rebuilt my computer I supose, but I should be able to transfer my licence. It's just not right.

Dman speculates that maybe this new Microsoft licencing will push PC enthusiests towards Linux and other operating systems. I guess we'll just have to see what happens and how they handle it.

Wierd to see AMD and ATI on the same page, and it's going to be really wierd to see an AMD branded video card. Thanks for the linkage Proto. :)

Got into The Burning Crusade and Supreme Commander betas last night. More excited about SC honestly, really really looking forward to that one.

Been talking to lots of people about the Battlefield 2142 demo. Every person I've talked to so far has had issues getting the damned thing working, including myself. I couldn't get the beta to work, and I can't get the demo to work either. I've had a huge number of solutions suggested to me, but here's one for DICE and EA Games: Stop releasing buggy games you jackasses. I'm not going to even bother buying a game if I can't get the demo to run. Betas I expect to have problems with, demos are supposed to inspire me and make me want to purchase a product. When there's this many problems with the demo I'm sure not going to spend my hard earned money.. Sorry.. WASTE my hard earned money on something that I have to screw around with to get it working. I'm waiting for Quake Wars. Unfortunately it's been pushed back, which makes baby Marauder cry.

Happy Anniversary to Planet Quake. Hard to believe it's been around for 10 years. That's a hell of a long time in the madness that's the internet, much less the gaming related section of said 'net.

You'd really think the Moslems in the world would find something good to get offended over rather than just an Apple store. Personally I find Mac owners offensive, but I'm not going to blow anyone up over it. Look over there guys! A woman with her face exposed! Thanks for the chuckles Runez0r.

Speaking of those wacky Moslems, I guess this fella was upset that the Pope implied in a speach that someone once said that the Moslems were violent and conquored various places... And so to show him differently he highjacked a plane. Should probably shoot a few nuns as well, just to drive the point home. Some people really are jackasses.

Dman sends in the coolest school presentation ever. This kid's got himself some mad techno skills. Wish we had stuff like this when I was in school, it's much cooler than vinegar volcanos.

Generally I think that it's pretty stupid to have your troops babysitting reporters when you're engaged in a war, but the United States seems to think it's a good idea. There's an interesting article here from a Time corespondent who lost has hand while reporting from Iraq and his struggle to recover from his injury.

My good buddy Killer sent in a link a few days ago about a prototype printer that has the potential to print 1,000 pages a minute. Now that's a fast inkjet.

I loved Oblivion. It's a darned good game. I especially enjoyed the missions from the Dark Brotherhood. Well! Looks like theres a huge third party expansion on the way. Can't wait. Thanks for the news Rune.

I've never liked the NDP. I don't like Jack Leighton. I think the man has good intentions, which would perhaps work out in a magic land run by pixies and powered by farie dust and candy canes. In the real world his sort of politics and ideals just lead to trouble all around and don't help anything. On that note I made a little "We support our troops" button and I'm putting it up here and on my business site as well. Screw you Jack.

Strangely I've been working on an article on classic gaming and Rune sends me a link to Midway Arcade Treasures. Nice. :)

Pappy's new system that it. Here's the tasty benchmarks, which are just stupidly fast... Basically double what our test rig gets.
3DMark 2003 - 40,111
3DMark 2005 - 15,259
3DMark 2006 - 10,019
Aquamark - 136,523

Hey, who the heck let a Canadian into space? These are the sorts of disasters that happen.

Protocal's been playing around with CT Profiles. Pretty neat little website if you're a World of Warcraft junkie and want to show off your paper doll. Here's my warlock. Ohhhh... Ahhhh.....

Audigy 4's don't have a digital out, except for use with their little proprietary breakout box. Swapped the Audigy 4 for original Audigy 1, problem solved. All hail the Audigy 1!

Sitting here in Pappy's basement. I was supposed to be here earlier yesterday but I ended up spending a good chunk of the day on the phone with Sympatico trying to get a customer's email issues worked out. After their dialup stoped working when Bell changed some settings and were unable to resolve the issue with the email I finally just gave up and headed south for two hours and ended up here with his new comp. Once we can get the darned digital output on the Soundblaster Audigy 4 working we should be good to go. Right now there's just headphones hooked up to it. Darned fancy speaker system.

I got myself a G15 keyboard from Logitech. I like the feel of it so far and the little LCD screen is very snazzy. Now to download some mods to make it do pretty things. By default it cycles through serveral different displays: Clock/Calendar, Performance monitor, and media display. I found that rather annoying so I disabled the cycling and put it to manual. We'll see what it can do a little later.

Death to Bell!

Happy seven years at Planet Quake to the one, the only, Pappy-R. :)

I'm installing Microsoft Windows Media Center edition on a PC here at work today for a customer. I've never been really impressed with this version of Windows, as I have yet to see anything you can't do with the normal Windows XP, but I have had reports of various peripherals and devices not working properly with it. I was entertained when it asked for "The disc labeled Windows XP Professional CD 2." XP Pro? Thought this was Media Centre. Stupid Microsoft.

Also on my list of people I'm unimpressed with today: The Ontario Government. Seems that the Ontario Gaming and Lottery Corporation is changing their name to Ontario Gaming and Lottery...... And it's going to cost between four and six MILLION dollars to "rebrand" themselves.... For what? Oh, and to top it all off the advertising company seems to be all buddy buddy with the Liberals. Suprise. *sigh* It's nice to know that the government are good and trustworthy caretakers of our money.

Waiting on some Corsair RAM from a supplier and I can finish assembling Pappy's new gaming box, which will basically be the computer version of a threesome with asian twins. Argh.

I can't believe this. This is possibly the stupiest thing I've ever seen... A gaming network card..... for $235 USD? Thanks for the link VA_Killer. I tried to contact these guys to inquire about purchasing one of these cards for testing, they never got back to me. Meh. No loss.

It's the long weekend and it's gloomy as hell outside. I was planning on going and playing paintball today but I rather suspect it's going to be a sit inside, play games and watch cartoons sort of day. Maybe I'll also get some writing done, as even the great Pappy-R has noted that I haven't been updating FRAGtopia lately.

Speaking of The Pappy, we were having a discussion about which games we're pumped about and both of us could agree on ET: Quake Wars and the oft mentioned lately Team Fortress 2, with QW coming in first. There's a new screenshot of the GDF "Badger" up on Planet Quake and it's looking hawt.. and alot like a humvee. Thus far I'm looking forward to trying both sides, but the human tanks very much appeal to me. Pappy seems to be rather big on the "kill all humans and assimilate them" idea. We'll see how it goes when the game actually comes out which I'm guessing will be in time for Christmas. (It's the most wonderfull time of the (gaming) year!)

Tried out EVE the other day and... Hmmmm... I dunno. It's interesting, but I can't see paying a monthly fee to play it, especially since as near as I can tell you can grief/steal loot/kill anyone you want. Me no likely. It is a very pretty game and I've had a desire to play good space shooters ever since the original Wing Commander graced my XT many many many moons ago. It really was an incredibly good looking game with amazing game play for back in the day. A few games have joined it's ranks of space shootery goodness in my heart, such as Freelancer and of course Freespace, once of the greatest games of the genre to ever come along. I picked up a copy of X3: Reunion last night on my way home so we'll have to see how it is.

I'm really begining to dislike Yahoo as they can't seem to do anything right. First their stupid toolbar kills hundreds of computers. (Admitedly this may have actually been caused by a Microsoft patch, but everyone else's crappy tool bars seemed to keep working.) Lately I've been noticing that my comp is slowing down for no apparent reason..... Other than Yahoo Messenger is using 80-90% of my CPU all the time. GG Yahoo. Time to see if I can get Trillian's Yahoo plug in working again. Oh. And the Yahoo search engine completely sucks. Three strikes and you're out.

Creative Labs isn't high on my list of favorite people either. I'm still getting crackling, static and poping on my X-Fi Platinum although it's gotten much better since they finally patched their drivers. I might just send the damned thing back in case it's a defect with the card itself. I dunno. I am greatly annoyed.

Blizzard has posted the new spells and talents for the Burning Crusade expansion pack and I'm quite intrigued. Some good looking stuff in there, especially for my Warlock. The Soulwell spell would save me one hell of a lot of time in raids handing out Healstones.

Have I mentioned before how hot and bothered I am about Team Fortress 2? I'm really liking the new cartoon look, it's very NOLF meets The Incredibles. Can't wait to see how it plays and what the HUD looks like.

A little while ago I downloaded the Call of Juarez single player demo and it was pretty darned good. I've got a thing for westerns and that whole era, and when you're playing you can practically feel the prarie wind on your face. Dimox informed me today that the multiplayer demo is out. I've downloaded it and can't wait to try it out!

I beat Prey the other day and wow was that ever a great ending. Loved it. It's hard to end a game in a way that doesn't leave you feeling disapointed, but Humanhead got it right.

I've been rather busy at Wasaga Beach Paintball Adventure the last little bit. I got to be the General for the Human Coalition in the Operation Halo 2 big game and ended up commanding 700 or so players into battle. :) Nothing like sending people to their deaths I always say. I'll have links to some photos soon.

Like dance/trance music? I know I do. My buddy D-man, who did the webcam/updates for the second FRAGtopia big LAN party, as well as the music for the website has a new tune up on his myspace page. Afterhours. Love it. Check it out.

Wee. I hate browser addons. Especially the Yahoo Toolbar. We had nine computers yesterday and 2 today that had Internet Explorer opening then immediately closing. The problem? Something in the Yahoo Toolbar died yesterday. Very nice. Remove the damned thing, all okay. I hate you Yahoo. Die.

Hard to believe that AMD bought ATI. Sort of an odd merger, and it makes me wonder a few things 1) What's going to happen to Nforce chipsets and 2) Is Nvidia going to start making their own motherboards? Maybe ATI chipsets will stop sucking and catch up. It'll be interesting to see what AMD does with their new plaything, or if they're just going to let them keep running as an independant company. Thanks to everyone who sent me the linkage.

It is indeed a strange world. I was getting a multitester and some batteries at our local Source (ex. Radio Shack) when the cashier asked me if we were planning on having another FRAGtopia Big LAN party. I don't recall having met this fellow before, but I guess I must have at one time or another. Apparently he was pretty young at the time of the first parties and his folks wouldn't let him attend. Just thought that was a little odd, out of the blue having someone ask me that. Speaking of which, it's been a few weeks over six years since the first party. How time flies.

You just know that shortly after I review/purchase a new case I'm going to do something to mod it out. On the new Thermal Take Matrix VX I did a hidden optical drive mod that's sort of neat.

Hey, even Rednecks can be nerds! Check out the Star Wars theme on a banjo! Thanks Rune.

A while back I mentioned War Rock as an entertaining little free shooter that was sort of Quake meets Battlefield. Back then however it was a closed beta but it's now open. Go give it a try it's just a few minutes and a 270meg download. From the looks of it it's much more polished than when I was messing around with it the first time.

Goshwin sent in an sweet little link that combines three of my favorite things: Armored combat, remote control vehicles and paintball. Could there be anything cooler than RC Tank Combat?

I do love my World of Warcraft videos, and Dralmonas posted one of the best ones I've seen in quite a while. Amazes me that people spend the time to make something like: The Hardware Store. I love Wierd Al. Must go get his new album.

The guys over at 3Dgameman have done another of their video reviews, this time on the Coolermaster Mystique case which they rated quite highly.

Just got myself a Thermal Take Matrix case to replace my old faithfull Shark. I bring my computer to work with me every day, and the Matrix is SO much easier to lug around than that monster Shark. Check out the complete review here.

I've been thinking a lot lately about old skool gamage. I'm going to post an article shortly about what games mean to me, especially old ones, and talk about some of the better remakes of older games that I've been playing lately.

Found a rather neat little 3d rendering program I'm going to be playing with some more, Wings 3D. I've been trying to find myself an old cheap version of 3DSmax, but maybe this will work instead.

Anyone else remember the old game Abuse from Crack DOT Com back in the DOS days? I loved that game, and it seems a fellow named Jeremy Scott has done a 32 bit Windows conversion of it. Woot. :) I've been playing it for a few days now. I really enjoy when people take the time and convert some of the great old games so that they can be played again.

Off to Wasaga Beach Paintball Adventures to camp out and play paintball for the weekend. Woot. Back Sunday.

Put my computer into a Thermal Take Matrix case last night. I'm getting tired of dragging my admittedly gorgeous but heavy TT Shark around. I managed to get everything to fit, which somewhat suprised me. Review and complete details soon.

During said installation I noticed that my Ultra 500 watt PSU was rattling in an odd manner. I pulled it apart and found that one of the large resistors inside was cracked and shedding material, I'm wondering if that was causing some of my odd issues... Such as the static on my X-Fi and the occasional lock up. I guess the next few days will tell.

One of my fondest gaming memories of all time was back in 1992 when I went to a Network 23 Amiga copy party in my home town. Someone had Lemmings, which had just been released and soon we had 15 Amiga's all sitting around playing single player and multiplayer Lemmings for hours and hours. The thing that got me the most about that game was it's perfect combination of great goofy music and adictive gameplay. A few days ago I found an online version. Unfortunately they've redone the music a little bit, but it still holds the charm of the original game. Go Lemmings! Amazing that the game is still just as much fun a decade after it's release isn't it? Truly stands the test of time.

The Prey demo is great. Can't wait for the actual game to come out.

Protocal got an email back from Thermal Take on the carry strap. They're going to replace his case and failed hard drive, or give him a cheque for the current market value of it. Very nice of them. The only problem is that it's going to take 4-6 weeks to do it, and he has to ship the equipment to California. He's got a big steel case, so I'm not even sure what the shipping will be, and he's going to have to purchase another case in the meantime. He's still deciding what to do. I am however very impressed that they're willing to replace the strap and the damaged equipment. That's great customer service.

Large Japanese men should never, ever jump around in music videos while dressed in speedos with flames on them. Thanks for scarring me for life Dman. You're an evil person and no one loves you. Here's the official video for that song, with worse lip syncing but better production values.

ZOMG! The demo is out for Prey! Downloading now. Must have. Thanks Proto.

Not good. Protocal got himself a Thermal Take A1600 carry strap for his case about a year and a half ago. Today while lifting it, one of the metal clips on the shoulder strap sheared off and down came the computer... On to concrete. Smashy smashy.

Ouch. Needless to say, Thermal Take are not high on Proto's list of favorite people. Ironically the exact same thing happened to me a few months ago with my Geargrip Carryalong, but it's got plastic clips so I wasn't all that shocked. Luckily in my case I had a pretty good grip on the thing, so when it fell the damage was fairly minor.

Let this be a lesson to all of you. Use the handgrip, not the shoulder strap.

Happy Father's day to all you dads out there, and to my father: Ken.

Built a system using a Thermal Take Matrix VX case today. That's a really nice and quite inexpensive aluminum case. Review coming soon.

I've been lazy lately..... Actually for quite some time, and the ICQ madness has been piling up on my hard drive in a storage folder. I've finally gotten around to posting twelve new ones for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

Been poking around in Rise of Legends as I mentioned, and found a great setting. There's a server timer you can set to prevent zerg rushing! The host can actually set how many minutes must lapse before players can attack each other. Very nice.

Rune's been doing a little research lately on just how one could destroy the entire world. It's good to have a hobby. I loved this guy's "Why" section, with number seven being especially close to my heart. Some people collect sea shells, some people build model planes. Around here we plot to blow up the earth. Excellent.

Got myself a copy of Rise of Legends the other day, and I've got to say that it's not a bad game at all. Can't wait to try a little co-op action.

Checking out Windows Vista Beta 2, as Protocal installed it on his system. So far I'm not impressed. It's very pretty and all "Mac-y" looking. Can't get much to install or run on it. Will be interesting to see how it works when it's finally out in retail. Doubt that I'll be running it for six months to a year after it's out, but I'll have to start learning it for work.

Had an interesting conversation this morning with Radical Dreamer from Israel. Seems that he had the same concerns that I did with the side honeycomb panel on his Thermal Take Shark case, saw our little mod write up and was interested in some more information about it. Nice to talk with you bud, make sure to send me photos of your mod when get it done. I'm always interested to see how someone else did something.

After two months of working on it a tiny bit at a time the long awaited and promised Star Wars: Empire At War review is done and posted. It's a darned good game. Funny really. I've commented on it before. Star Wars games either suck really badly or they're really good. This is one of the good ones and worth spending your hard earned paper route and/or drug money on kids!

Okay, this is getting a little bit wierd. I've gotten four emails in the last week or so inquiring about our Counterstrike Server. Proto thinks they're spam, but they're not. A) The people respond and B) Who'd send spam asking about being an admin, or asking why they got kicked/banned? The wierd thing is this: I took the the FRAGtopia Just 4 Fun Counterstike server down more than four years ago. I'm not actually sure what's going on, I'm guessing they're looking for the guys at fragtopia.org most likely, who aren't related to us at all. Looks like they started their site in October 2005. Sort of creepy actually.

Rune sent me a a few interesting links yesterday. Why he doesn't just posted them himself I have no idea. I blame laziness. Lazy Rune! Anyhows, first off: Why couldn't this have hit France, or another country that deserves it.. Like Quebec.

Alienware has apparently lost their minds. I mean... Some people wear Superman Pjs... But do some people spend thousands of dollars on a Superman computer?

Blowing things up is cool. It might just be a guy thing, but explosions are awesome.... Especially when you're blowing up an entire dam in China. Thanks Chisel.

It's been called to my attention that one of the video links I posted a few days had some porn links elsewhere on the page. It's been removed, sorry about that. Should have done a better job of checking the other links on the page.

Rune sent me a rather interesting link a few days ago about the making of X-men 3 and the special effects that went into faking all the locales in the film.

Some interesting Intel news, also from the Rune. Looks like Intel finally got off their asses and designed a good processor. (The Pentium 4 has never been a good design, I don't care what people say.)

My X-Fi static problems have been getting worse and worse, and have rendered Oblivion practically unplayable have apparently been solved by the new Beta Drivers. Thanks Protocal. I'll report back in a few days.

I've always rather liked the look of the Thermal Take Armor case, but it's such a monster to drag around I've never bothered getting one. 3Dgameman just did one of their video reviews on the Armor Jr, and it's looking might tasty.....

Really busy at work, so I'm just going to post a few quick links.

From Rune, the Jack Bauer kill sheet. Every kill, every episode, complete with photos, video AND a link to the manufacturer of the device used to kill whoever. Pretty cool.

I remember playing this on my Vic20. Go Lunar Command!

Hymnlock sent over one of the best World of Warcraft videos ever. How to play a druid in Molten Core.

Was going to play paintball on this lovely warm long weekend, but it's cold as hell, windy and raining right now. Oh well, tomorrow looks like it's going to be nicer. We'll have to see.

As they say, one man's bad luck is another man's lucky break. How freakin' lucky can you get?

Woot for AMD! I wondered when Dell would realise they were loosing business and start using Opterons. Thanks Killer.

I loved my C64, and Goshwin sent me a link to my new hero. That's just plain sweet.

I've often heard about how dangerous MMPORGs are. People can get adicted to them! They can loose their jobs! They can almost get shot in the back of the head with a .44 magnum slug! Thanks Fainne. If I were this guy I'd buy some lottery tickets... Well, maybe not. He's probably sucked up all his good luck for the next little while.

Bless you Google. I love when something I do is right up there on the search results, right above our friends at World of Warcraft.

*sigh* I've been having problems on and off for a few months now with my Creative X-Fi soundcard. Issues like static and poping. I'm quite annoyed because this is a damned nice card, and it sounds amazing, especially on headphones. I've been in contact with Creative, and their best suggestion so far was that I have a bad motherboard, which I don't believe for an instant. My SB Live and Audigy 2zs were in the same two slots that I tried with the X-Fi and they were flawless. Then VA_Killer sent this over. Suprise, it's not just me. Creative's apparently working on it, but they've had good luck with putting RAM into Dual Channel mode to solve it. Now it might just be me, but I consider that to be a pretty stupid solution. Especially for customers who only have one stick of RAM, or have a somewhat older motherboard that doesn't support Dual Channel. Mine does, and it's already running that way. Hopefully they can find a driver solution to it, or if it's a hardware problem hopefully they take all the boards back and fix it. I'm not pleased. Not pleased at all. $260 soundcard and the damned thing has issues. I've forwarded the HardOCP article to the guy at Creative I've been talking to, I'll have to see what he says about it. *grumble* We really need more competition in the PC audio field.... Actually we need any competition. Aureal was looking promising back in the day, but Creative bought them when they fell apart. I've got friends with a few odd brand soundcards, but they all seem to have strange compatibility issues.

Dopper send over a link to some entertaining little videos posted by a Mac guy. I finally got to see that Intel inside Mac video everyone was talking about a while back. "Intel's been trapped inside dull little boxes doing dull little tasks."..... Like playing new games. (Oh! Burn!) Stupid Mac users. They're just so damned smug. It's infuriating. It's like trying to tell a kid that it's bad to eat mud. (Thanks for the comic Rune.)

The guys over at Moonpod (Developers of Starscape, one of the coolest little games I've played recently) have posted a gameplay video of their upcoming top down shooter, Warangels. Looking good, I love old school gameage.

I've been playing around with game video capture (Oh FRAPs, how I love you) and editing. My WoW guide (Ravenous) went into the AQ20 dungeon when it opened a while back and I made a little movie of our first journey.

Other than Quake Wars, the game I'm currently looking forward to the most is Chris Taylor's sexcellent looking Supreme Commander. I can't wait. RKhan informs me that the EB Games website lists it as coming in November 2007. Lets hope so, cause my pre-order is definately going in as soon as it can. Gas Powered Games has the official website live, and it's got some tasty new content and screenshots. There's a video for Supreme Commander running around as well, but all I've found so far is a crappy video cam taped version. Meh.

Speaking of Quake Wars, I see that the E3 trailer is up on Fileplanet. Damn. That's some fiiiine looking game. There's also a Battlefield 2142 video up and I'm downloading at this moment to take a look at. I'm still more excited about Quake Wars though. We'll see what happens when they both come out. I'm betting that QW will be the better game.

After 8 million dollars and 8 years, apparently Duke Nukem Forever is almost done. *sigh* Somehow I've stoped being worked up about DNF. It's been too long, too much hype. I loved, and still loved Duken Nukem 3D. Hell, I even loved all the ol' 2D orginal Duke Nukem Episodes. Many many hours were spent on my 286 playing those bad boys from 3.5" floppy disks. :) DN3D was one of the best single player shooters I've ever played though, so I've got some faith that the long awaited sequel will be as good or better than the original. So help me, if it's crap I'm going to go hunt down George Brusard and slap hit with some rolled up newspapers. (Thanks for the link Runez0r.)

Apparently Apple became the latest to reign victorious over the French. Frankly I'm more impressed they gave the RIAA a beating. Now THAT'S something to be proud of. It's regretable that the aforementioned rolled up newspaper wasn't used. Maybe wrapped around a brick. Is there any organisation more despised than the RIAA?

Here's a guy after my own own heart when it comes to food. Check out the Interests and Expertise on the left side. Ahhh yeah.

As I'm writing this I'm listening to some old, old tunes from Skaven of Future Crew, arguably one of the finest PC musicians to ever grace the scene. The music he did from Second Reality back in 1993 is still one of my favorite songs, either on or off computer, of all time. I still remember seeing that demo running at a computer store in Toronto when I lived down there. It's the reason I bought a 386. He also does some rather amusing artwork.

Killer and Rune both sent me a link to the first review I've seen of the new PhysX accelerator cards, and I'm underwealmed. Well, mostly just because it actually seems to show a slow down in games running the new card.... uhhhh... ?? We'll have to see after the technology matures a little and we get more games that support it, but I can't see spending this amount on something with so little real world support as of yet. Then again I did buy an Aureal soundcard back in the day.

They're making Halo 3! (*shock*). For Xbox. Yippie. Frickin'. Skippy. Screw you Microsoft. A pox upon you and your console. I'm still all put out that after all the little Nvidia movies and excitment, Halo 1 was pulled and only released on the original Xbox. You will never be forgiven for that. (I'm sure everyone down at Microsoft is all worried now, that I've expressed my displeasure.)

Damn, this guy can dance. I'm especially amused by his MC Hammer impression. Thanks for the link Xan!

There. I have posted more news. My work here is done! Now to see if I can log into World of Warcraft yet.

Yes, yes I do. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get around to getting that Empire At War review done and up.

I watched the trailer for Call of Duty 3 yesterday. To say it looks amazing would be sort of like saying that World War 2 was a bit of a scuffle. I was however rather annoyed to not see any "PC" logo at the end of it. PS3 and Xbox 360 only? Rune just sent this related article over. Marauder grumpy, but not all that suprised. A few years ago Peter Mollineaux said that many of the big game developers were going to start making their games just for consoles due to much higher profits and sales, and much MUCH lower pirating.

The server changeover went pretty much flawlessly, and FRAGtopia is now running on sweet new hardware.

I shall never again tell anyone that onboard soundcards are "fine". My Soundblaster X-Fi decided to take a crap (I think) so I switched to my onboard 5.1 for testing. Uh wow. Now I remember why I've always had a good soundcard. In World of Warcraft and Oblivion it's literally the difference between stereo and mono. That's how noticable it is. Turns out I'm a dummy and didn't plug the power into the soundcard when I installed it ages ago. We'll have to see if that fixes the static problem.

We're going to be moving FRAGtopia over to new webserver hardware today or tomorrow, so if the site vanishes on you, don't panic. It'll be back soon.

The Planet Quake juggernaut that is home to my good friend Pappy-R has changed it's appearance. It's now all green and more sexy than before. I likey. I likey a bunch.

I've long held that Jumpman is one of the finest games ever made. Epyx released it in 1983, and I remember spending many many long lunch hours on the C64 at school back in grades six and seven sweating my ass off trying to get just one more level in before the bell went. (That and Frantic Freddy of course) I came across The Jumpman Project. Released in 2003, it's a complete playable PC port of the original classic. Oh happy days! They even did the PC speaker music. :> I'm in old skool nerd heaven.

Rune sent over a rather intriging read, how would Oblivion be different with physics acceleration?

Nevyll posted this on the Ravenous forums. Definately one of the best World of Warcraft movies I've seen so far. Gotta find me that song as a download somewhere.

I've had a few people around work going on and on about the stupid Dell Renegade XPS and it's Quad SLI geforce cards, for those who have, in my opinion, more money than brains. Thank you Rune, for a link that proves me right. I do so like to be right.

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter got delayed untill tomorrow. *sigh* I can't afford it, but soon it will be mine regardless.

The best Family Guy moment evar. Prepare to die American infidels!

I hate when I get writer's block. I've been working on a review on and off for Star Wars: Empire At War and just keep running out of thoughts.

Oh. I almost forgot: Stick this in your Mac and smoke it. It was only a matter of time, you smug bastards. Thanks for the linkage Goshwin.

At long last the demo is out for Ghost Recon: Advanced War Fighter. Played a little at lunch with Protocal, and I've never seen a game that looks as good, or feels as good. I can't wait till it comes out later this week, I'm going to preorder it tomorrow.

I knew it! It's not just me. Other people have problems with World of Warcraft and it's getting noticed. Good. I like the final bit "Blizzard has to realise they have people hostage." Errrr..... I think that could also be a bad thing for obvious reasons.

One of my guild's PVPers made High Warlord. Check out the interview here.

Keepy Uppy, link brought to you by Karik. Stupid adictive little games.

Been checking out a few screenshots from Crysis and I can't believe how good it looks. Talk about photorealistic gaming. Simply mind blowing. Be interesting to see how it runs on my rig when it comes out. Thanks for the linkage Proto.

The world's smallest RC plane? I'd love to chase a cat around the house with this puppy.

I love Farq photoshop contests, and Rune's sent over one of the best ones so far: Star Wars vs. Star Trek.

I've got a few entertaining video links for you today. First off, World of Warcraft: What would you do if your best friend was a sheep? Secondly, from The Grabber we've got The Easter Bunny Hates You!

Just how much can you put up with from a game? So far from World of Warcraft the answer is "Alot, sucker.". *sigh* The servers have been good the last few days, I'm hoping it keeps up. Except for the fact that I enjoy playing with my guild so much I think I would have quit a while ago.

Perhaps when Quake Wars comes out I'll have something else to take up my time. (Thanks Rune.)

I've had people asking me lately what sort of utilities I use on a regular basis, so I've compiled a list and here it is. Enjoy.

Well I was going to go play some World of Warcraft. I guess I'm not going to though. BECAUSE THE F*(#&$@*( AUTHENTIFICATION SERVERS ARE DOWN AGAIN. Screw this, I'm going to play Oblivion. I don't have enough free time to sit waiting again.. and again... and again.

Savage was one of the most interesting games I've played in ages. Rune sent over a link to the S2 Games website. If you pre-order Savage 2, you get in on the beta. I've ordered my copy, how about you?

  Dustbunny is going in for some surgery tomorrow. You'll be fine, stop worrying! :)

  Still experiancing World of Warcraft logon issues in the evenings, but at least it's only a few minutes wait now. And still getting loot lag. Tonight's Molten Core run will be the test I supose. Playing a warlock when you've got loot lag isn't fun, since you lag badly every few fights. Sometimes for several minutes at a time, you're locked up solid.

  Cool trailer up for the Burning Crusade, speaking of World of Warcraft.

  Apparently those wacky funsters over in Iran got themselves some sweet new toys to threaten the stability of the middle east with.

  A while back I mentioned that I was enjoying Lego Star Wars. Apparently it was a bit of a sucess, so they're bringing out another one.. Which is going to be covering the REAL Star Wars movies. (Ex. Episodes IV, V and VI.) I sent my buddy Killer a copy of Lego Star Wars for winning our little "Write Marauder and email and tell him I want a game" contest there a few months ago, I'll have to ask him what he thinks of it.

  Blizzard can kiss my ass. I'm going to play Oblivion.

  Well, the World of Warcraft servers have been down since early this morning. Apparently they had some problems getting them all back up with the new 1.10 patch. I'm not that surprised. Things seldom go as smoothly as one would wish. I think they're back up from the looks of it. Right now, I'm supposed to be in Molten Core with my Ravenous Guild peeps, but I'm stuck at "Authenticating." and I'm guessing that everyone else is too. I'm thinking that 5.5 million people trying to all log on at the same time killed the servers. Heck, even their website is down right now. They probably got more hits today then they have in the last few months.

  Speaking of Ravenous, someone on the forums posted this. I think I'll go play it and kill some kittens for a bit while I wait for the logon servers to bloody well work.

  Rune sent over a link to just what happpens when Mac users get Windows XP working on their systems.

  On the Mac theme, Gezer just bought himself a Macmini. I'm ashamed to admit I've actually been looking at getting one of these since they were introduced a while ago. They're just so tiny and I've been thinking of getting a cheap Mac just to screw around with it and see how they really are these days. I haven't worked on a Mac since they had black and white screens and looked like little lunchboxes. I seriously doubt that a Macmini would live up to my expectations..... Oh wait.... My expectations of a Mac are pretty darned low, so it should be able to.

  Ever want to just tear the audio out of a video recording and put it to MP3? Check out this little shareware utility, it works like a charm.

  Rune sent over an interesting link about a guy who got a job at Yahoo because he was a Guild Master in WoW. I haven't had to apply for a job in over 10 years, but my resume does contain all of my experiances in online gaming, from running the Tribes 1 ladders for Teamplay.net to helping run and organizing Team Forever Twisted to organizing LAN parties and writing for this site and has for years. Gaming good.

  Normally I just think the Olympics are lame and sleesy, but now I have a new respect for our athletes after watching this video from Choklit.

  Looks like DICE is going to merge with EA Games. Ahhh well, there goes another development studio. Alas poor DICE, we knew yea well.

  There's alot of nerds out there, but Goshwin has located our king, and it's this guy. All hail! HAIL HAIL!

  I'm seriously thinking of picking up either Battle for Middle Earth 2 or Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. They both look so tasty, but I've still got a stack of games sitting next to my desk that I bought to play and review and I'm working my way through them. Right now I'm Empire At War which is actually quite good. The ground combat is teh suck, and I miss building bases, but the space combat is so so very good. I've also got Battlefront 2, Gun and Black and White 2 to finish with.

  I've seen this spoof a few times before, but Rune's the most recent one to send it in. What would happen if Microsoft developed the packaging for an iPod? I like my spoofs, and this is one of the best ones I've seen.

  Rune also sent over a Slashdot link.. Microsoft has released the source code for Mechcommander 2? WTF. Somehow I think Satan is wearing a parka somewhere right now.

  In another Rune link, Nvidia is going to put a bit of a dent into the currently non-existant physics accelerator expansion card market from the looks of it. I bet the guys over at Ageia aren't very happy about it. I've been waiting to get my hands on one of the Ageias cards to see what it does, but I've never been able to find one in the market, other than in a Dell XPS or Alienware system, neither of which I'm willing to waste my money on. In the case of the Dell XPS for $6,700 USD loaded... That's just retarded, I find it hard to believe that people spend that kind of money on a computer.

Oh, the Ageia Physics Accelerator adds $250 USD to a Dell XPS system, Ageia lists them as starting at $299 USD. They're not currently avaliable retail, but BFG and ASUS should have them avaliable soon, with BFG planning on releasing their cards to retail channels in May.

According to Dell "The AGEIA ® PhysX ® physics accelerator is a dedicated PCI add-in card specifically designed to enhance the performance of PC games that can be played on your Dell system. Its special performance features can only be utilized with games designed to take advantage of the physics accelerator. The addition of a stand alone physics accelerator to the gaming hardware line-up represents a radical breakthrough in the way in which you can experience the virtual environment. Click on ''Help Me Choose'' for this section to learn more." I clicked on the choose now button and I get a list of companies that are adding support for the accelerator in 2006. Looks like we're going to have a wave of games coming out, including Advanced War Fighter which I'm quite excited about. There's some good footage on the Ageia website of the difference between normal acceleration and using their card.

We'll have to see if the Ageia card is worth the money when the game support really starts to roll, or if we'll just be better to count on Nvidia to do something for us, especially since Nvidia has said that it'll be supported even on older single cards. (ex. 6800gt) Nvidia is working with the Havok physics engine people as well, so perhaps we'd just be talking about minor patches for our existing games, and hey, if it runs on my current cards it's a free upgrade essentially. I'm glad they found something new to do with their cards, considering the odd results I got when I actually benchmarked and screwed around with my sli rig.

I'll be picking up one of the Ageia cards when they come out for a complete tingly review.

  Speaking of Dell, I find it interesting that if you look at one of their XPS gaming system cases, and an older Precision workstation, it's the same case...

  You think you've got a crappy job? Just thank your lucky stars that you don't work for Speedy Pinata. Now that's rough.

  I've had a few people send me the teaser for Battlefield 2142. Frankly to me it looks like they're trying to steal Enemy Territory: Quake Wars thunder, and I don't know how it's going to play out. I do love any game that features 'mechs... But I have doubts that it'll be any better than Battlefield 2. It's a good game, but nothing spectacular, and riddled with annoying bugs and gameplay glitches, so I'm going to go out on a limb based on my experiance with ET and BF2 and place my bets on Quake Wars. Can't wait to see it.

  My odd friend VA Killer has set himself up a little weblog. Hopefully he actually updates it more than I've been updating FRAGtopia lately.

  Interesting issues with Dual Core CPUs. The Dual Core Athlon x2 won't run Everquest.... Unless you set it to use one core, every time you run it. Weee. Sony didn't have any suggestions, but we did find a few other people with the same problem. Switched to single core, no problems. Needless to say, I won't be using a dual core for a while.

  I forgot, it's our very own Rune's 30th birthday today. Happy Birthday bud.

  I'm writing as I wait to log into World of Warcraft. This may take a while. For the last few months on and off, there have been delays loging into the game. Sometimes up to an hour or more, and frequent disconnects. What a pain in the ass. Interestingly it all started around the time that Blizzard mentioned they'd hit 5.5 million users. It's time to get off your sorry asses and fix the damned logon problem guys. It's nice to have millions of users, but not if you don't have the infastructure to support that kind of client base. I was assured by tech support at Blizzard about a month ago that they were working on the problem. This was after I sent in four emails that I got completely form letter replies to. In fact, their answer to one of my inquiries was "Due to privacy concerns we cannot answer your questions." The question was "What are you doing to fix these problems." I really don't know. It's a great game, but if they don't fix the problems with the logon and loot servers soon they're going to loose customers. In fact, I already know of a few people who've quit because of these issues.

  Rune just sent me over a link to Battlestar Galactica: Beyond the Red Line. It's being based off the Freespace engine and DAMN, does it ever look good. And it'll be free. Free also always looks good.

  The Xtrac Ripper XL Mousing Mat review is now up. It's huge, it's sweet, check it out.

  Did the archiving today, just realised the FRAGtopia index page was hitting almost 200k. Not good for modem humpers, and a little big even for high speed users.

  Wow. I just got a box from the US of A today, from Xtracpads.com. Inside the box was a smaller box, and inside that was a bag. Inside the bag was a Ripper XL gamers mousepad for review. Ummm.. They say it's "Monster sized" and they're not kidding. This thing is quite litterally the size of a placematt. I'm not quite sure what to do with it, it's just unbelieveably huge. Review coming soon.

  If you've never heard "Ultimate Showdown" by Lemon Demon, go download it. Pretty darned funny.

  By this time today I was supposed to be well on my way down to Pensylvania to hook up with my Forever Twisted buddies and play some paintball. But I'm sick for the first time this winter, so you're reading this instead.

  Rune sent me a link to the Wikipedia Canadian Slang page. I took found it greatly amusing that "Bramladesh" is included, as was "519er". 519 happens to be the area code I live in, and I like being a redneck, so screw you Toronto hippies.

  Apparently a company in the US has a shiney new technology that will eliminate lag on the internet for us gamers.. What is it? How does it work? It's all a big mystery, but we're supposed to be excited about it. It apparently does something. You know, in a way.. That will help... I guess...

Much like physics accelerators, I'll get excited when I see hardware, and results. Vaporware FTL. Thanks for the linkage, Killer.

  I love independant game developers, and I've got a few links from some of those fine folks today. First off, check out Chronic Logic. I'm messing around with the Gish demo from these guys right now, and it's sort of adictive. It reminds me of many of the old school Amiga games like Flood from back in the day.

  A while ago I mentioned the Tiny Warz online game. Well, Vladmir over at Mob Rule Studios asked me to post this for your perusal:

 Aliens Invade Tinywarz! An alien race calling itself the Sha'Kahr has invaded Tinywarz! New and experience players should be warned - these invaders use technology far superior to anything previously seen. While their current objective remains unknown, it should be noted that the aliens are extremely hostile and all players should use caution when dealing with these "visitors."

Also recently updated - Practice planets have been added to the game. These planets allow players to test out vehicle configurations or conduct duels; without risk of losing valuable units or crews.

TinyWarz is a massively multiplayer, turn-based, strategy-game where players battle each other and computer controlled bandits on distant worlds. In Tinywarz you can create an army, construct / customize units, assign crews, design bases, and battle to control planets. Watch your hired crews improve in combat and select special abilities for your command crew as they gain experience. Grow your army with salvaged units or buy them from other players through the in-game market.

Join the battle today at www.tinywarz.com.

  The Logitech G5 gaming mouse review is at long posted. What a great mouse.

  From Palewind over at Ravenous HQ comes possibly the funniest link ever. It's nice when a scammer gets the living crap scared out of him.

  Reading the good ship Planet Quake a few days ago, and I see that the Pappy's got a link up with some juicy news on Quake Wars. I am SO looking forward to this game and just can't wait to see it.

  If anyone's been ICQing me at work, there's something horribly wrong. ICQ's sometimes come through and sometimes don't. *sigh* I'm not ignoring you.

  BWhahah! Empire at war is mine! All mine!

  Not gaming related, but if you like trance music, get your hands on "A state of trance episode 235" from Armin van Buuren. It's goooood.

  Checking out the demo for Star Wars: Empire at War, the new RTS that should be coming out tomorrow and... It's looking pretty darned good. Space and ground combat, and your usual RTS development toys. I'm going to pick it up as soon as it comes out, and we'll see how it is. The demo unfortunately is very short and won't allow you to build many of the units, or play the Empire. (Bah!) Star Wars games are either really good, or really crappy. There is no middle ground, and the last two attempts at a Star Wars RTS have been weak. I have hopes for this one. But let me down I fear it will. We shall see.

  Sometimes you just feel old. This is one of those times. The original ZORK by Infocom came out over 25 years ago. Sadly I didn't have a Trash80 back then, (Rune had one) but I remember playing it on my C64. Wow. Wondering just what the hell a ZORK is? Click here to download the three original games that were among the first I ever played on a computer.

I remember a few other Infocom games quite fondly, such as Planetfall (the text based sucessor to one of my favorite series of all time, Space Quest... But by different people.) and Hitchhikers. I'm sitting here playing ZORK right now and wow does it bring back a lot of memories.

  Out with the old and in with the new. Protocal let me know that Microsoft has released the beta of Internet Explorer 7 for those of you who like to risk their lives running MS betas. I'll wait a while thanks.

  No snow all winter, then about 2 feet in the last two days. I'm not at work, I'm at home, which means I'm actually getting some work done today. (Don't think about that statement too hard, it makes my head hurt too.)

  Been playing quite a bit of World Of Warcraft lately, the guild I hang with on Eonar, Ravenous has been going into Molten Core and working on the end game stuff. Normally I'm pretty big on soloing and playing with very small groups, ex. me and my buddy Orvill, but recently I've been discovering that there's something really cool about working with 39 other people to try and kill some very very nasty bosses and beat all sorts of interesting challenges.

We took down this happy fellow on Sunday night. He's the Barron from MC, and to give you an idea of his size, I'm standing back about 30-40 yards. Leveling your characters is fun, but when you smoke some big boss with a huge raid it's quite satisfying.

  Dustbunny sent me this image the other day. It's quite possibly the worse network wiring job ever, and the tech who did it needs to be smacked with a loop of RJ45 cable. :) Thanks Bunny!