Creative Sucks Ass!

Here's how to kick a guy in the teeth who has been helping the Creative community.

My first sound card was an ISA Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16. My second sound card was a ISA Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 Gold. My third (and current) sound card was a PCI Creative Labs X-Fi Fatal1ty.

My next soundc ard will be one of the following:

Razer BARRACUDA

Asus Xonar D2X

Auzentech HDA X-Plosion

Unless Creative do the proper thing and release decent drivers, I will never buy a Creative sound card again, and I will urge all my PC-building friends to ditch them too.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

PC gaming may not be dead, but its freaking annoying!

My last post talked about issues with PC gaming, and how I thought it wasn't dead yet, so this follow on post shows the other side of the PC gaming coin...

I built a gaming rig for a friend last night, he bought an Athlon X2 6400, 4Gb RAM, a 8800GT, a Gigabyte motherboard and a LiteOn DVD drive.  In total he spent around £500.  Three of us helped build the system in around an hour and a half and we were all surprised when it powered on for the first time with no hardware issues.

An hour later and Vista x64 was installed.  Twenty minutes later after the motherboard drivers had been installed and the system was booting to a BSOD every time.  An hour and twenty minutes later after a format and reinstall and we were booting to a BSOD again.

After some Googl'ing it turned out that Vista has an issue with 4Gb RAM.  The way around this is the remove 2Gb RAM, install Vista, install a hotfix, then put the 4Gb RAM back in and install the drivers.  Great.

Okay, so now the system is up and running (I had to leave the build by this time and was getting updated by phone!) and Crysis won't install.  Apparently the SecuROM copy protection has issues with SATA drives.  Great.  It would have been easier to have warez the game via a torrent.

THIS is why PC gaming can suck.

PC Gaming is Dead? Who says so?

Over the last few weeks I have heard many different web sites that PC gaming is dead. Lots of news from the GDC was about how developers are looking at consoles as primary platforms instead of PC's.

I haven't been a PC gamer since my AMD Athlon 800MHz and GeForce256DDR machine died, but games like Crysis and Company of Heroes have made me save and build a new PC just for gaming. Sure, its expensive, but the saving I can make on some games justifies it for me. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is £34.99 for the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3, and £19.99 for the PC. Console gaming will still be where I play most games, but if I have a choice between an RTS on a console or a PC there is no way in hell I am going to struggle using a controller when I can use my mouse.

I think right now, PC gamers are their own worst enemies. Evidence that PC game piracy could be the cause of low PC sales figures makes me wonder what PC gamers will do when developers decide to ignore the PC as a gaming platform. Right now Window gamers laugh at Mac gamers. If people don't start paying for their games, it won't be long before console gamers will be laughing at PC gamers in the same way.

Hopefully with the rise of online, community based services like Steam, and with of subscription and online games developers can find a way to make it impossible (or very hard at the least) to pirate games. I wouldn't mind if I couldn't play the game without authenticating against a server of some sort first.

Developers don't help the situation either. Why does every ground breaking game require you to upgrade your hardware. I think one of the reasons World of Warcraft is so successful is because you can run it on just about anything. Why don't the developers look at what the most purchased hardware for last year was, and target that, rather than look at whats going to be the latest and greatest next year?

Pata-pata-pata-pon!

Patapon is supposed to be a really cool game. For me, the game is probably going to be 10 times cooler. Everything thats free always seems better than if you had paid for it. I enter a ton of online competitions, and so far the goodies I have received are an official SOCOM hoodie from Sony, (which I won a few months ago and am wearing right now!) and a Patapon promotional pack from Three Speech which I won this week!

Thanks Three Speech!

Wingman!

W00t! I ranked up on Warhawk at last. I am now a Wingman!

Home....

While the screenshots look great...

...is anyone else sick of it already? I have seen what it looks like, I know what Home is supposed to do. Either ship it or can it. Just do something with it other than show screenshots of it....

80710102

About two weeks ago I started to get networking problems with my PS3. I would be playing an online game of Call of Duty 4 or WarHawk with no issues and all of a sudden I would get kicked out of the game. Eventually I would see a message in the top right hand corner of the screen saying and error had occurred and I had been signed out of the PlayStation Network. if I tried to re-sign back in without re-booting my PS3 I would the following error:

An error occurred during communication with the server.
This is an DNS error.
(80710102)

A quick Google seemed to give forum recommendations from restarting my router to deleting my network settings on my PS3 to buying a new router.

I knew the issue was specifically with my PS3 as during this time, my laptop, XBOX 360 and other devices would be happily connected to the Internet with no sign of DNS issues.

After looking around the router settings I soon realized that the ARP table was listing a different MAC address for the IP address of my PS3. The MAC address for your PS3 is shown when you go to Settings->Network Settings->Network and Connection List within the XMB. Most routers will allow you to view the ARP table, but you will need to look at the instructions specific to your router. You may be able to get the information another way, such as listing the connected devices.

Once I saw the MAC address listed wrong, I soon realized that the reason I was getting kicked off of PSN was because another device (my PDA!) was connecting to my network and using the IP address of my PS3! A quick change of IP address for my PS3 and I no longer get this error and can play online with no interruptions.

Hopefully this blog entry will help people having the same issues.