Gaming - 2

Given, that I work in Activision/Blizzard/King -corporation, every once in a while the job has nice perks.

Today, I got to go to CoD WWII launch party in Stockholm!

It was the first time I've been to a launch party of a game ever! Of course a corpo party is a corpo party. Lot of jada-jada, blah-blah and free booze. But a game launch party of course is about the game. There was an option for every party guest to play the game on PS4. Then they had invited couple of Swedish semi-celebs to play in a friendly competition eSports-style 6-vs-6. Btw, the winners went home with brand new CoD WWII special edition PS4s. Insiders told me that all of the celeb-gamers had an option to practice playing the non-released game at the Activision office in Stockholm.

And of course, nobody went home with empty hands. Everybody was given a goodie-bag with a CoD WWII T-shirt and a PS4 store code for the game.

I'm not a huge fan of FPSs on console, so, I think I'm not going to play much that one. I'll wait for some PC Steam-codes to float around the office (eventually they will) and then start playing.

Yes!

The best-ever time sink is out again!

I'm a huge fan of the GT-series, have been that since the first Gran Turismo was published for PlayStation in 1997. Because the PSX doesn't support racing wheels, I played the game with a NeGcon-controller. Most of you have never heard of it, because it supported only PSX and was discontinued around the time when PS2 was released in year 2000. PS2 has USB-port, which made generic USB 1.1 wheels available to PlayStation/Gran Turismo -world too. NeGcon is one of the weirdest game controllers anybody has ever seen. Its like a normal game controller with swivel in the middle. Twisting the controller makes it possible to act as a steering wheel. It also had three analog buttons in it making throttle and break control reasonable accurate for race gaming.

Fast forward trough GTs 2-6 to GT Sport, which is the latest, best, brighest and first GT for a PS4. The controller I'm using on my PS4 Pro is a Logitech G29, but I'd definitely like to give my NeGcon a go, if the game would support it somehow. Now I'm wasting space for a Wheel Stand Pro, a NeGcon wouldn't require that!

Of course I have to put some miles to my GT Sport, so, not much happening here in my blogosphere.

Today I was helping a friend with his Twitch-stream. Apologies for non-Finnish readers, the stream and accompanying information is in Finnish.

Mr. Larpdog has a pretty cool Twitch-studio:

I've never seen an Elgato Stream Deck before. But having witnessed it being used in a live stream, it sure makes management so much easier.

So, the idea of this particular stream was to assemble a PC and donate it to a follower of the stream. The money (I think 988 €) for the PC parts was donated by other followers.

Entire stream is at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/164849338, and I make brief apperance there in the beginning.

I'll post something about not computers for a change. Its pretty close, but still, not about computers.

Any self-respecting nerd (such as me) loves video games. Doing first-person-shooter games IRL is always both fun and a lot more difficult than on a computer. 

We had a company activity and went to nearby Megazone for couple rounds of always fun laser tag. Since it was my first time ever doing that, it was like a slap in the face. I'm a 2nd lieutenant in FDF reserve, so I have basic understanding of tactics in a battle. Also I've played video games since early 80s and FPS games since first Wolfenstein. On top of that I've been paintballing enough to know that there is enough realism in video games and paintballing to match real military tactics. However, anything I knew about combat, tactics and fighting at that point was usless.

In the game there were three teams and you, so pretty much everybody you see is an enemy. Megazone is mostly about movement and speedy tags of any visible opponents. The worst thing that can happen to you there is that you're unable to fire your weapon for 8 seconds. During a 25 minute round that's not too dangrous. In paintball or war you're out on the first "tag", here you aren't, it's just a game of accumulating points.

Here are my stats from first round:

I sucked!

My handle in the game was Macro (in the Red team), so being 8th out of 14 wasn't that good. Tactically the maze was a nightmare! In the original Wolfenstein it was possible to be hit only from front, back or sides. In Megazone there were 2 floors, but it was a metal grid walkway making it possible to shoot trough. That made it 5th direction where getting hit was possible. At best I found couple locations where it was possible to get some cover and get hit only from two directions. The only even semi-functional tactic I found was to ignore any defence, cover and cautiousness. Just going recklessly forward and out-gunning everybody on a reaction seemed to work good. Also sniping people long-range was a really good tactic, sometimes I could do 4-5 people from a single position. They never saw me. I also did try attacking enemy bases and defending own base, but they were totally pointless exercises in futility, I spent too much time trying to figure out the value of those.

Here is my second round:

Quite an improvement in points and ranking. I was best in our team and 3rd in total!

Megazone was great fun, but with my background, it'll never be my favorite thing. I want to see my opponents suffering when I hit them, in laser tag that doesn't happen.

Normally I wouldn't bother posting about a mouse, but this time I felt I had to. My previous laptop mouse broke. It was attached to one of the machines I use on daily basis and I worked perefectly for years. I don't know why the old Logitech simply refused to function no more. I did every trick I knew, but still no avail. I guess some cheap capacitor run out of its life there. So I had to go purhcase a new one.

In gaming (I do lot of FPS games), there is no substitute for a wired connection. But on a just surfin' or chatting lazily in the IRC, a wireless mouse does the trick more conveniently.

For those readers who are "whaaat! mouse? why would I want to use a mouse! so 90s!": I simply don't want to plough my finger on a plastic surface for hour every day. Not only my fingertips won't like it, but I find it just stupid. I've tried doing it, but trackpads aren't my thing. In fact I typically disable them, as me and many other touch typists like to rest my wrists exactly there where you other people love ploughing trough to simulate mouse movement. When I do that, mouse cursor starts wandering around when I'm typing. Not cool. So, no trackpads, but a real mouse. Actually, a pointing stick wedged between G, H and B -keys will work for me, but for example Apple doesn't do those for me.

There really aren't too many known manufcaturers in the mouse market anymore. Razer is in gaming business, and I already said, I wasn't going for a game mouse this time. You can make a choice between Logitech or somebody else whose name you either don't know or cannot pronounce. Logitech would like to move away from mouse business, but they are such a big player and making profit there, so I guess they really cannot do any sudden changes.

For a everyday use, Logitech has soooo many different models out there. Literally dozens and dozens. To narrow down my choices, I went immediately to the top-shelf material. Once I saw a wired USB-mouse being sold with 7,- € in a store. I had to get it, just for giggles. It was as much of a 7 euro mouse you can imagine. The worst part is the ridicouls leds making the thing glowing like a chrismas tree. So, no more el-cheapo crap.

When I realized, that there actually exists a rechargeable mouse, I had to go for it. The press release even had superlatives like "Logitech Introduces its Most Advanced Portable Mouse". Ok, they're boasting the thing is good, so they kinda reeled me in. I had to check how advanced or how super the mouse is. The price is around 80,- €, which was in my budget.

It looks like this:

On the outside, it looks like your regular Logitech mouse. I wasn't that impressed with that.

This is the part, that locked down the sale:

It is your regular Micro-A USB connector. Very popular in today's USB-things.

When flipping the rodent over, there are couple of new things, I haven't seen earlier in mice:

There is your O/I switch, a connect-button when your mouse needs a hint, that it should try harder making the connection. My experience about that is, that it does absolutely nothing. Then there is the "darkfield" sensor, which should work on any surface. And finally the new thing: a selector button. Since this beast can do both Bluetooth and Logitech's own wireless signals, you can choose between 3 devices which this thing can control. Actually, I would love to use that feature, but in my daily usage I need to switch between computers fast. Fast, as in, not wanting to flip my mouse over and keep clicking a button to make a choice between the computer I want to start using. On another type of usage scenario, that may be useful.

The pico-sensor is pretty much the same we've seen for many years already:

As I said, you don't necessarily need to use that. The mouse has bi-functionality in it, your Bluetooth connection will do fine.

My experience about this thing is: Wow! Amazing!
Yes, it is that good. The accuracy is there, ergonomic is there, the new Darklight sensor does exellent job on my desk. The thing is so slippery at the bottom, I didn't want to use my mouse mat anymore. Obviously, on the minus side, the thing is so slippery at the bottom it will just slip over the edge of my laptop when carrying it from a room to another. (I guess couple of drops later it will stop functioning, just like my previous one did.) The scroll roll has dual functionality, with friction or frictionless, which is cool. We've seen that in many mice before this. In general, the implementation of this excellent plan is just there. The general look and feel is so good, I might even get a second one.

I went to the support site and got some software for OS X:

You get to see the 500 mAh Li-po charge state and change all kinds of settings. No frills, plain functionality there.

In conclusion: They get this right. It is the best mouse I've seen this far!

The game has been reviewed as a major time suck. Don't get me wrong, the game doesn't suck, it just sucks my (and 70 million other players') time. 

I was playing with my iPad and in Desert-stage and managed to land on front wheel with a motocross bike. The trouble was, that it was evenly balanced. It wouldn't fall on either side, it just stuck there no matter what I did. Eventually I just run out of fuel. See the pic!

Darn! No new record for that attempt.

Steam has this reputation of games re-installing 3rd party prerequisites on every single time you launch a game. Stupid, huh? Find discussion about that on Steam's forums.

The official Steam explanation is that there are so many versions of D3DX-library. Well, in my mind that really doesn't answer the question why there is a re-install on every game launch. You'd think that the library needs to be installed only once. Luckily somebody found out a fix for that. The trick is to edit/delete the .VDF-file which is pretty much the install script for a game.

Here is an example 34870_install.vdf:

"InstallScript"
{
    "Run Process"
    {
        "DirectX"
        {
            "process 1"        "%INSTALLDIR%\\Redist\\dxwebsetup.exe"
            "Description"      "Microsoft DirectX Redist Package"
            "NoCleanUp"        "1"
        }
    }
    "Run Process"
    {
        "VCRedist"
        {
            "process 1"        "%INSTALLDIR%\\Redist\\vcredist_x86_2010_sp1.exe"
            "Description"      "Microsoft VC Redist Package"
            "NoCleanUp"        "1"
        }
    }
}

It pretty much states that both DirectX and VisualC redistributable packages are installed every single time the game launches. A simple rename/delete for the file will fix the problem. Game will start without problems and won't do anything stupid.

The issue has been reported by multiple people for the past 3 years. Shame on you Steam!