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…My PC cooked its processor and was out of commission at the time the full version of Left 4 Dead was released
This did seem to be a good reason to upgrade it though. I got a new motherboard, CPU and 4 gigs of RAM from Komplett and got it all up and running on Thursday evening, then spent much of the weekend slaughtering the zombie horde with friends on Left 4 Dead
The new CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, one of the shiny new 45nm ones that runs much cooler than my older 65nm E6600 that killed itself. I am impressed at the difference in frame rate I’m getting in games on the same graphics card as I had before - it must have been CPU-limited by the old processor.

The game, by the way, is awesome, especially in versus mode where you can play as the zombies. Its having a hard time finding lag-free dedicated servers though. Hopefully Valve will get this fixed.

I’ve also gone and stuck Windows XP SP3 onto my Eee PC after a few months of Ubuntu. Eventually got pissed off with it. I’m actually finding XP much faster on it. The only problem is the fact that the C drive is a measly 4GB (as the Eee’s solid state drive is split into 4GB of fast but expensive flash memory, and 16GB of slow but cheap memory) so some fooling around had to be done to move user profiles and stuff to the larger but slower D drive. Battery life is noticeably better under Windows XP too, mainly down to the availability of Asus’s power saving apps I reckon. All of the ACPI on-screen displays and hot keys and stuff worked without any fucking about. To get that stuff working in Ubuntu was a total headache, involving kernel modules and acpi scripts and what not.

Added bonus: This means I can play Peggle on it, woohoo! Couldn’t get that to work through wine on Ubuntu either.

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2008 is a great year for games. See my recent post about Saints Row 2 for an example. Hot on its heels comes Valve’s Left 4 Dead. The free demo became available to the masses on Steam and Xbox Live yesterday, and is a wonderful example of the high quality, polished experience I’ve come to expect from Valve.

Left 4 Dead is a co-operative multiplayer festival of zombie* slaughter. Its not just got your traditional, shambling and slightly thick zombies - oh no, Left 4 Dead has a whole range of the bastards, many of which are athletic, fast-moving, high-jumping murder machines, much like the zombies from 28 days later. Others can do things like vomit on you (nice!), which attracts hordes of them to you for a few moments. There’s a few other varieties too, including boss type zombies which are huge bastards that take a lot of killing, although I haven’t seen them in the demo besides in the introductory cinematic.

(* zombie/infected/undead/whatever - you know what they are)

Its a great looking game, considering that the Source engine has been with us in one form or another since 2004, and it really emphasises the need for team play - there’s only 4 players versus hordes of zombie scum. If you get pinned or trapped by one of the zombies, you can’t escape unless one of your team mates kills the zombie in question. If you get killed you can be revived with minimal health by your team mates, but whoever is reviving you is left exposed, so they need the other remaining members of the team to cover them. If they’re really fond of you they can use their one and only medical kit to heal you up as well. And so on. One thing that sets it apart from other zombie-themed games I’ve played is that ammunition seems plentiful. This is good, since there is no shortage whatsoever of targets!

You can also play by yourself with AI taking control of your team mates, but its nowhere near as much fun. Its well worth getting a few people on your friends list on Steam and getting together to play this. I can’t comment on the Xbox 360 version as I haven’t tried it. I require a keyboard and mouse to be any good at shooters.

A few hours playing the demo was all it took to get me to whip my credit card out and buy the full game from Steam. It will be released on November 18th, and should hit bricks ‘n’ mortar shops a few days later. There’s a five dollar discount if you pre-order it on steam, which gets immediately wiped out when they apply Irish VAT of 21.5% At today’s exchange rate with VAT and preorder discount included it came to about €44.
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You may have noticed that the Windows 7 pre-beta PDC build is out in the wild now. What you may not have noticed is that Windows Vista beta keys work with it, so if you took part in the Vista public beta (like me) you should be able to give Windows 7 a whirl too.
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There’ve been far too many politics-related posts here in the last few weeks, so here’s something more fun: Saints Row 2, currently available on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 and coming “soon” for PC.

I bought the Xbox 360 version on Friday evening and have become quite addicted to it over the weekend. It is quite obvious to compare this game to Grand Theft Auto 4, so that’s what I’ll do. I loved GTA4 and played the hell out of it. A lot of people moaned about GTA4 after the hype died down, but I still like it. Saints Row 2 is in some ways very similar, and in other ways completely different. Both games give you a large city to drive around and cause mayhem in with a variety of weapons, but Saints Row does a lot of what GTA does best and leaves out the crappier elements, such as irritating tail-the-car type missions.

Saints Row 2 is definitely more forgiving, allowing you to resume from a checkpoint when you fail a mission, and not taking all of your weapons and other goodies away from you when you end up in hospital (i.e. get killed outside of a mission). It also has a Halo-style regenerating health system - if you’re getting your arse kicked, run away and hide for a few seconds while your health bar refills.

SR2 is not as technically accomplished as GTA, but it is just as much fun in my opinion. Volition have concentrated on making the game fun more than making it beautiful. The graphics aren’t great and the radio stations leave a lot to be desired compared to GTA, but I’ve had so much fun just playing the game that I don’t care.

For instance, today I played a mission where one of my gang members has been impaled with a Samurai sword (yes, indeed) and needs to get to hospital. Another gang member is driving the car, and I’m put in the passenger seat with a rocket launcher and infinite ammo. Hordes of enemies attack in cars and on motorbikes and I get to blow the shit out of them with my rocket launcher all the way to the hospital

Another example is one of the “activities” the game gives you to do to boost your reputation and unlock further missions, called Septic Avenger. This involves driving a tanker truck full of shite and spraying it at various targets (people, police cars, buildings, trailer parks, etc) in order to bring down property prices!

One thing worth a mention is the level of character customisation available in this game. As soon as the game starts you are prompted to customise your character, and you really can customise the hell out of him (or her!). This includes making your male character wear female clothes six sizes too small for him if you like. My character is a big fat guy with a beard in a pinstripe suit and a top hat!

There’s tons more stuff to do in this game - I think I’ve barely scratched the surface, but I would highly recommend it. It is certainly much better than the first Saints Row game, which I was not a fan of. Eurogamer gave this game 9/10 and I agree with that score.
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