We had to get the kids up at midnight the other day (long story) and to help get their co-operation I foolishly told them we would have a midnight ice cream from McDonalds. We ended up stopped at McDonalds at about 2am but they said their ice cream machine was getting cleaned. So we stopped at another one and they said the same thing. I can only conclude that all McDonalds restaurants clean their ice cream machines at the same time, in the middle of the night. This is an outrage! If you’re going to be open 24 hours a day, you need to be able to provide your products and services 24 hours a day!
So sadly, the kids didn’t get their midnight ice cream but we did end up having ice cream at 9:30 the next morning. Not cheap McDonalds stuff either, they had Cornettos.
I just checked and yep, I’ve got way too many games. Given my completion rate this is going to take me a long time to get through. Here’s the list.
Games that I’ve started but have not yet finished:
- World Of Goo (Humble Indie Bundle)
- Gish (Humble Indie Bundle)
- Riddick
- Baldur’s Gate
Games that I have bought but have not yet played (ordered by approximate purchase order).
- Home World
- Baldur’s Gate Mega Bundle:
- Tales of the Sword Coast
- Shadows of Amn
- Throne of Bhaal
- Gothic Trilogy:
- Humble Indie Bundle:
- Lugaru
- Penumbra Overture
- Samorost 2
- Dues Ex
- Resident Evil 4
- Mirror’s Edge
- Dead Space
- Machinarium
- Crysis
- Orange Box:
- Half Life 2
- HL2: Ep 1
- HL2: Ep 2
- Drakensang: The Dark Eye
I got a few bundles so I also have these games but I don’t know if I even want to play them.
- Just Cause
- Dark Messiah – Might and Magic
At some point Wordbooker broke but I only just noticed. To my facebook friends, you probably missed some posts. Just to recap, here they are:
Finishing Games
Upside down games caused by bad drivers
Hot chocolate in a can?!
Saw this at the servo and thought WTF?!
Cool idea I guess. I bet cold beer in a can would sell better though.
So Riddick may have been the first game I found that ran upside down but it wasn’t the last. In frustration I looked around and found that there are updated but non-official drivers available. I’m now running the latest Omega ATI drivers and things are sweet. I actually want to restart Riddick now because it looks so much better at high res and my computer can now take it.
Thinking back, before very recently I was using older Bootcamp drivers. I started this install with the original drivers and updated to each new version. I re-installed Windows once and found that without upgrading through each version the ATI stuff was left half-functioning. Recently though I upgraded to Leopard which came with new Bootcamp drivers and that’s clearly the cause of my display problems. Bad Apple for shipping crappy drivers and not releasing an update!
In other gaming news, I have started Baldur’s Gate. I tried Tutu and the widescreen patch (upside down till I fixed my drivers) and while it’s kind of cool to see more the game doesn’t really need it so I’m just going to go old-school on this one.
Oh yeah… and the installer didn’t know how to handle my whopping 20GB drive (it reckoned I only had 200MB free but it let me go ahead and install all 2GB of game data anyway). The post-install registration thought Windows 95 was the newest OS around!
I finished another game. I got Aquaria as part of the humble indie bundle. Not a bad game but too hard for me so I had to cheat. The game features food that you eat to get certain benefits but with a simple edit to a text file, the simplest of food can make you god-like.
As with Gothic, I finished the game in the early hours of the morning. This is getting to be a bit of a habit…
So I finally finished Gothic (at 2:30am – took a little longer than I’d expected) and started preparing my system for the next game. This one’s an oldie. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Developer’s Cut). Phew! What a mouthful.
So I installed the game, installed the update then applied the no-cd crack and when I ran the game, it was upside down!
I thought to fix it but what I read suggested things like using the EU patch instead of the US patch… I tried a few things but nothing worked and in order to try these things out I had to install the game 4 times. This game has 5 CDs and installing it takes at least half an hour but actually longer because I can’t stang waiting for data to copy but you have to swap the CDs around.
Finally I gave up and thought to myself, why don’t I try it without any cracks applied? I had to install it 2 more times (the first attempt crashed the installer on the last CD!) before I finally figured out that it was the game, not the no-cd crack that was to blame for the upside down video.
Bugger. Could have saved myself hours of stuffing around if I’d thought to try it out earlier.
So a bit of probing revealed that only full screen mode had the bug. I could play in windowed mode but that’s a bit annoying. I though to try some compatibility crap and the game supports Windows 2000 so I tried that… and it works!
So if you try to play The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Developer’s Cut) and everything is upside down, try setting the Windows compatibility to Windows 2000. It worked for me.
Update
Erm… I may have spoken too soon. I think now the problem is that certain resolutions cause the game to go upside down but other resolutions don’t. I normally try to avoid “square” resolutions but in this case I needed to pick one to make the game run properly. Luckily the game has good support for correcting aspect ratio.
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Tagged gaming
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Just now I was listening to music on my N900. The room was a bit noisy and I didn’t have earphones so I cupped my hands around the phone to direct the sound towards me.
My signal dropped from 4 bars of 3G signal to 1 bar of GSM signal.
The culprit was the right hand which was wrapped around the “bottom” of the phone. Ironically I found this just before reading about the Apple press conference about the iPhone 4. Nokia mocked Apple about the iPhone 4 antenna issue. They said you could hold a Nokia phone however you wanted. I guess they lied.
So to all the iPhone 4 users out there, I feel your pain. I guess we really do need to stop holding it like that!
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Tagged n900
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A new WordPress has been rolled out. I do love the auto-update stuff they use these days because it took two clicks and all of 30 seconds to update the site.
There’s a new default theme and it seems nice so I’m using it. I did sneak in the old header image I’ve been using so that should help to make the site feel a little less different but quite a bit works and feels different. It feels like a whole new blog.
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Tagged site
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