Bohica Gaming Community

by Naxel

Platform : PC
Genre : Shooter (Deathmatch, Capture the flag and such)

It’s been what? 4 month since this one has been released, and I’ve been hesitant to buy this one for a while, BUT steam made it easy for me making Epic’s game available earlier this week. So how does it go?

Graphics are f’n phenomenal. It’s the unreal engine 3 to it’s best and it’s also rather smooth considering the rig I’m testing this on. Is there is better out there now? I doubt it. Crysis looked nice but I had a hard time to boost the engine and see good result compared to this game. Everything is vivid, colorful, lighting is super good and the quality of your sight change depending if you’re too much into blinding light or in snow or in cave, etc. You also get the splatter on the screen when you kill someone else with the hammer a bit a la Gears Of War when you chainsaw’d a locust. Really I haven’t seen graphic that are that good on my PC before. Granted COD4 looks good but this one goes beyond that in the quality of it’s effects.

Gameplay = take UT2k4 Aka the last instance of Unreal tournament and copy paste. The game plays the same BUT There is a bunch of new toys to play with vehicles and updated graphics on the weapons and items, tweaked game play on warfare maps, new elements to play with, but it stays Unreal 100%. Fast paced action shooter period. The assault and ball mode are not present on the game which is really a bummer, which tell me that they’ll probably release it later in another instance of the game or just add the mode with a patch. A novelty would be the single player campaign, which can be played with actual players, if you want to make your game public or with just a bunch of friends. The campaign is a tad like the one in the original UT, you get to do deathmatch, team deatmatch or warfare (whatever the game modes are available) through the monologue of the characters (your general, yourself and your sister) in the fashion of a military campaign overlooking the map of the terrain. It’s more of a campaing with a linear course compared to the older instance of the game where you shoot for the tournament’s golden trophy. Apparently we’re at war and it’s what we’re living.

Sound took me by surprise. The same voice announcing “Multi-kill” Is back but as an hybrid from the original and ut2k4, brighter voice, but still made my sub shake the floor with every mention of double kills or killing sprees :). The voice-over are not perfect, (cuz yes we’re being shown cut scenes) but they sound good enough. Malcolm really sounds like *okay no call for racism here but it’s the only image I have* he sounds like a… an uneducated black man to be fairly polite and not call him a nigga… *oops* Nevertheless it’s hilarious, and realistic where I wouldn’t expect someone that kills people for a living to be philosophical and have a posed tone.

Fun factor goes like this. If you’ve like other UTs instances before, you’ll like this one too. But it is more of the same in majority. There are some novelty in modes such as “vehicles capture the flag” and the hoverboard is always fun to use (makes you feel like Marty Mcfly). If the balance is enough to make you get the game I don’t know, it depends on how much you like the genre, because this game is not redefining anything but makes thing better and more balanced. However I’ll say this as a final word. Any game that makes me stick to my chair and play, even if I really have to go and take a piss but I’ll just keep playing, deserve a fun factor that is fairly high.

So in brief

The good
-Graphics from heavens that can scale to even a mid-range rig without sacrificing beauty or performance too much
-Familiar and solid gameplay for competitive and enthusiasts players
-The maps are amazing and take you through a lot of different environments

The bad
-It’s UT so don’t expect any more than UT
-Where is the Assault mode, damn you Epic

The score : A bloddy 9.0/10

I have bought every UT game since the original, and this one doesn’t disappoint either. It’s not new but still feel fresh, and fun, which is more than enough for me to give that game such a high score.

Buy or rental? Try the demo and judge by yourself. It depends if you’re a fan of the genre or not. The game is nothing new compared to the older ones, which might stop you if you didn’t like the other instances of the game.

And now Pics

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by Navarone

Call of Duty 4 for 360
Single player 7/10
Multi Player 10/10

Single player is very linear, very typical, no great levels or environments, but solidly put together. It’s exactly like every other call of duty game, good scripted events, never ending spawns of allies. It’s your popcorn video game. Simple but fun.

Multi player is the pinnacle of perfection. No game has ever played this well online on a console. LIVE takes it further with great achievements, awesome lobby system. Game itself has tons of unlockables, fantastic challenges and keeps that carrot in front of you. Balanced great, always fun to play.

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by Naxel
Game type : Real time strategy
Context : Space stimulation
Similar Gameplay : Fuze Homeworld, Starcraft and C&C together
Platform : PC GAME

I picked the game earlier this month as a desperate seek for space sim that are worth any attention, and damn it was a good idea. Stardock made other game of the same genre and now they are taking this to the next step

Gameplay is like a strategy game, you balance your resources from income, crystal and metal coming from the economy for your planets and the upkeep your military presence have in the world. It’s mostly a conquest game, either you break the other armies and take over their planets, or make peace with em and join forces against another one. The scale of the game is giganormous. A 1vs1 game will spawn over 10 12 planets and the biggest games can go with systems containing over 100 planet systems and 12 different players. There are 4 factions that plays relatively differently according to their research pattern. But the fun part s that you can have capital ships that acts as heroes on the battlefield and they are crucial to the balance of your conquest and the strngth of your armies. What’s also interesting is that pirates are a neutral faction you can bribe to attack other factions in the solar system, and the higher the bid is the more ships they send out there, but you have to be careful cuz they may be jumping on you if other players wants your head on a silver platter.

Graphics are really good, and the interesting part is how you zoom in to see and select a ship, and zoom out to see the entire solar system, which makes the scale of the game very big and also where there is a need to carefully move your units to safe spots to insure the defences or attacks. The visuals are more precise when you come close to see every laser shot ripping a hull apart or out when looking at a planet bombardment making mushroom clouds.

Fun factor is the strong point of this game. You guys remember playing starcraft where you have to have your mind everywhere to plan your actions on the battlefield? Well this game has the same feeling, while the pace is quite slower than other strategies games, you just can’t rst your mind off as you play for the quatity of things you need/ want to manage. It makes the game incredibly addictive and hard to complete as well.

Sound is what you expect out of a RTS, units have an annoyed tone when you select them or give them an order and are characterized by their race and purpose. The music is fun because depending on how much you’re zooming on the action, it will change to the epic battle song to the more relaxed spacey context. You almost immediately know when pirates are around with that kind of interaction.

In Summary

The good
- The addictivness
- The graphic scale
- The gameplay is very balanced and provides a challenge to each play
- Finally a good RTS in a space sim, better han homeworld IMO
- Game is totally unprotected which fucks up less your computer, and no need for cd to play makes it easy

The bad
- No single player campaign
- Learning curve quite steep, it’s not too bad, but the tutorials are essentials
- The addictiveness

Final score, 8.8/10
Why that score? : The lack of a campaign and graphics/ battle stimulation that lacks a bit of dynamism in the end as well as the slow pace of the game detract from the higher score, but the game is extremely well balanced and in sum is really better than it sounds even if it’s not exceptional. A single game can span over 10 hours of game, it’s even beyond the scale of risk. If you like space sim games in any iteration, you HAVE to AT LEAST try this one

There is a demo out there and it’s totally worth trying at the very least
Demo at Gamer’s Hell

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So over the last few days, I have been getting my butt kicked on this whole ‘dual-boot’ thing with my new Dell. As part of my therapy, I am posting this guide here, on the Ubuntu forums, and on Moschetto.net

A few days ago (March 2008) I purchased a Dell 1420 preloaded with Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy). It came with a 2.2 Ghz P4, 4GB RAM, 160GB SATA HDD, Wireless-N, and integrated Webcam. Now this is my first experience into any Linux environment, and I found myself fairly lost as to how to dual boot with XP. The following is a step by step guide on how I took an out-of-the-box 1420 with Ubuntu 7.10 and put XP Pro on it too.

Note: When this system came to me, the partition table looked like so:

/sda1 FAT16 80MB (Dell's Restore Partition)
/sda2 FAT32 5GB (Dell's Restore Image)
/sda3 EXT3 140GB (Primary Ubuntu Boot partition)
/sda4 – Extended partition
/sda5 EXT3 5.8GB (Swap Partition)

Since I knew that I did NOT want Ubuntu and XP to co-exist on a single partition, the first thing I did was to boot off the live-CD and shrink the Ubuntu installation by about half. This now left me with an un-formated chunk of 70GB on the drive.

Great says I, so now I reboot, pop in the XP CD, but it cannot find any hard disks. Hmm. I finally figure out that XP doesn’t recognize the 160GB SATA drive that came with the Laptop. I went to Dell’s site and downloaded the SATA drivers (320KB) and then downloaded a program called nLite. This article: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Install-Win…-F6-47807.shtml helped me out immensely.

Once I had the Driver on the XP disk, I booted up the XP disk and try to format… but NO! I have reached my 4 partition limit. To make this section very short, I ended up having to remove a partition in order to allow window to allow me to make a new partition. Since the Dell reinstallation image is readily available online to download, I booted off the live-CD and I chose to wipe both the FAT16 and FAT32 partitions. Afterward a trusted friend told me that any FAT16 partition is a security risk, though I have yet to confirm that.

So now I have a 5.1GB unpartitioned space, the 70GB Ubuntu partition, the 70GB unpartitioned space, and then the 5.8 GB Swap. In order to avoid problems with the leading 5 gigs of emptyness, I chose to grow the Ubuntu partition by the 5 GB. This alone took about 2 and a half hours, so go get some lunch.

Once the grow completed, I again booted off the windows CD. This time it let me format the partition. So now I have XP installed, and the system will boot into XP. Almost there!

I restarted and booted off the live-CD, and now I needed to reinstall GRUB on the Master Boot Record. After a great deal of trial and error, this is what to do: First run Gparted off the live-CD and right click on the NTFS partition (this is windows) and click on manage flags. Uncheck the ‘boot’ option. Now right click on the EXT3 partition (this is Ubuntu), click on manage flags, and this time check the ‘boot’ option. Now to reinstall GRUB, I opened a terminal window and typed:


sudo grub
find /boot/grub/stage1 <- showed me the current boot partition
root (hd0,0) <- changed the active partition to the first one (Ubuntu)
setup (hd0) <- installed GRUB to it


At this point I rebooted with a smug look on my face only to be presented with an “ERROR 17” message. I discovered that this basically means your computer is saying, “I cant find any operating systems!! Help PLZ!” For the next hour or so I played with the GRUB loader, and with the GRUB loader in Ubuntu, with almost no effect. That is until I stumbled upon this guide over at APCMag: http://apcmag.com/5459/dualboot_ubuntu_and_windows_xp and it explained how to get GRUB to remember all these things I was telling it. It turns out that for some reason, GRUB didn’t see my partition tables correctly and needed to be told proper what to do. That’s right – proper.

From the failed ERROR 17 window, I entered into the GRUB setup screen, hit ‘e’ to edit the lines, and modified the first line that read ‘root (hd0,2)’ to read ‘root (hd0,0)’. Since (hd0,2) is now the swap partition, there was my error. Now that the line reads ‘root (hd0,0)’ I hit the ‘b’ key to boot and Ubuntu loaded without a problem.

Now to change the GRUB files to remember that I want hd0,0. Open a terminal and type:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
This opened a text configuration file for GRUB. I scrolled all the way to the bottom until I found the section where it read:

title Ubuntu 7.10
root (hd0,2) <- Ha HA!


And here I changed it to (hd0,0).

Then I make a new boot option by typing:

title Windows XP Pro
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1


This sets up a new option in the GRUB loader to allow XP to boot up without a hitch.

Whew. Finally done. A quick note: This setup made XP install to the F: drive. It makes some installs a bit weird, and thought you might like a heads-up.

I hope someone out there finds this article useful!

Semper Fidelis,
-Dodger

Comments are off, so comment on the forum!

Ok, if you’re lost, go hit the forum. We are rolling with default stuff until we figure out what we want or until I get bored one day and just start changing things. I figure it should be interesting.