Titan Quest

Titan Quest by IRONLORE has “got my purr up in a tiff.” This game promises to have it all, including a sleek and user friendly editor. Titan Quest (TQ) reminds one of Diablo/Diablo II but with a makeover. In fact, the designers were huge Diablo fans and have tried to replicate the fast paced and frequent reward driven system. Simply saying this is Diablo with a makeover is unfair as it looks like TQ is steeped in mythology, has thousands of randomly generated items, a what-you-see-is-what-they-drop loot system, free online play, dynamic rag doll physics, more skill trees than a vine, and randomly generated maps. Did I mention the editor? The thick cultural environments are set in ancient Greece, Egypt, and China. They look yummy. It’s a beautiful game. WoW left me hungry for a reward system that provided more trinkets for your time. I may never play another MMORPG simply based on the ridiculous amount of time it takes to build and refine a high level character, all the while paying a monthly fee. TQ is incorporating the most enjoyable aspects of the old with new ideas. This is the game I’m waiting for. Until June I’m hardly playing at all (write, write, write) so TQ will act as my reward. Go check out the videos and screenshots at IGN if you want a good idea what TQ will offer.

You can download the free demo here.

Other Future Games: Quake Wars [2], Spore [2] [3: Video], Warhammer: Mark of Chaos [2], HellGate: London [2], and Company of Heroes [2].

Almost Game - BattleField 2: Modern Combat

For fun I was writing about my all time favorite eleven games but it was talking too long. I’ll get to it later. Instead, I thought it would be more fun to write about an “Almost Game”. For me an Almost Game is one of those near misses, a game with great potential that fell short, a fun romp cut short by a straw so heavy it snapped my mounting joy. Such hard falls make an otherwise beautiful leisure activity a point of frustration. Maybe I should call these games Almost Fun?
BattleField 2: Modern Combat may show up on my top 11 list because it was so damn good…to a point. When I could actually play BF2 it was absolutely amazing. As I start thinking about it I want to stop writing and try playing again – it’s been months. At the time BF2 had to compete with World of Warcraft so it was running with the big boys. It held its own for a while. The problem with BF2 was all technical. The game itself was everything you want in a tactical shooter. Everything. However, load times were outrageous. BF2 took 3x or 4x longer to load than the next slowest. It took approximately 5 minutes after you logged in. This was a common complaint on the forums and is pretty unacceptable. In addition, the expansion pack, Special Forces, was unplayable. The game stuttered, graphic clipping and other anomalies abound, and it would eventually freeze. Numerous tweak guides sprung up to help others who struggled with this but if it takes me over an hour of reading just to fire up a game it’s enough to make me pass on future additions of the series. It was a bitter sweet experience but too much effort to stick with or invest in future BattleField games.

Home Computer & Gaming Rig

Computers have always been a point of fascination for me but did not hold my interest throughout the years. Back in the summer of 1979 I was programming with DOS, before it became MS-DOS in 1981, recreating the game Pong. Pong was old news at that point, having graced our black and white TV’s seen since 1972 and best known for its Odyssey appearance. Nonetheless, it was challenging enough for a kid with limited experience. I had some success but would rather have run threw the woods instead of sitting behind a monitor – seriously. I quit the summer class and ran around he apple orchards and dirt pits near our home. It was not until graduate school in the 1990’s that computers caught my interest again and that probably had something to do with the visual nature of later machines. Nonetheless, word processing was the main use, then posting content to the web via HTML, and finally computer games.

After the turn of the century I was tired of the buy-a-new-Dell every two years cycle so I built my first custom machine. Ah, freedom from tech support! I encourage everyone to do the same. It takes a little reading and frequent visits to online forums (unofficial tech support I guess) but the process is not hard. For a high end machine it’s a cheaper option. The lower end machines are now so inexpensive that you might as well buy a $400 mass produced workhorse. If you build your own you will find out it’s not a magic box but a conglomeration of parts, each with its own slot. You end up with more responsibility but if you use the thing enough it's liberaing. It certainly makes you less dependent. You can not future proof a machine but if you do it correctly you can build some life into that box.

The specs for my “dorkbox” are listed below. It runs all the current graphic hogging games smooth as butter on a hot pan. Ok, not all of them but I don’t think that’s the fault of my rig. With a little online investigation the rare problematic game usually reviles its “known problems” and poor code. Anyway, I love my current gaming setup. When FattyLumpkin is not camped out in front of the keyboard there’s a lot of space for work, fun, and spacing out.

My System:

• Case - ASPIRE (Turbo Case) X-Superalien Blue Aluminum Server Case
• Power Supply - Aspire Turbo Case 500W 12V Black Dual Fan Aluminum Power Supply
• Mobo - MSI "K8N Neo2 Platinum" NVIDIA nForce3 ULTRA Chipset for AMD Socket 939
• CPU - AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 512K, L2 Cache, 64-bit Processor 939 Pin
• RAM - 2 Gigs of Corsair Value Select 184 Pin 512MBx4 DDR PC-3200
• Video Card - BFG GeForce 6800GT, 256MB GDDR3, 256-Bit, 8X AGP
• Hard Drive - Maxtor 300GB 7200RPM SATA, 16 MB Buffer, Model 6B300S0
• Monitor - UltraSharp 2001FP 20.1-inch Flat Panel LCD
• OS - Windows XP Pro