My PC is an emachines T3828. To say that it's a piece of shit would be an insult to actual pieces of shit, which have a better rendering ability when it comes to bump mapping or the specular mapping on loose chunks of corn. My parents bought it when I started art school two years ago because they don't know the meaning of the term "value" and were trying to be nice. Indeed, it was appreciated and I've since upgraded it. First I bought some RAM, one whole gig, which ran me about 80 of my hard earned dollars. Since then it's run much much faster. This is to say the piece of shit no longer clogs the inter-tubes.

Still, one cannot live on memory alone. If you're to do anything in a 3d program such as Maya or 3DStudioMax you're going to need some raw horsepower, or at least some raw horse-meat. Not one for eating glue, I opted for what I thought at the time was a low-end starter card for my PC. The Nvidia FX 5200 is best known as the worst thing the company has done since that time they killed a hooker at the office Christmas party. It was forged in the depths of hell...by Hitler...I saw him doing it...he gave me a thumbs up.


It runs on baby seal blood. Do you know how expensive that shit is?

Now here's the shit-kicker of the whole thing. The computer cmes with a 2.8 GHz processor, 80 gig of storage, five USB ports and those cool little speakers where one of them shits-out on you after about a month. All this and a monitor was about $300. It seemed for a while, while I was upgrading, that eMachines had finaly made a redeemable product or that perhaps my family had pulled a fast one on them. However, now that I look to upgrade my graphics card I notice something, the damn thing is PCI. If you don't know what that means, imagine working on your car and just as you go to put a new engine in you notice a note from GM telling you to go fuck yourself.

So at least I can take comfort in the fact that my 256mb graphics card will run the latest games on the shitty-looking minimum settings the companies that make them spend all of five minutes developing for. Sure Team Fortress 2 looks like it should be being played on a Nintendo DS, but damnit it's still fun. However, once again PC gaming decides to kick me in the balls and steal my wallet. A while ago I had to reformat, because while I was away at school my sister did something and killed the whole rig. Now not only does the damn thing limit it's own potential, but the drivers are being mistaken for the standard drivers the card installs on.

Every time I try and install the latest drivers, taking all 2,345,245 precautionary steps including but not limited to:
Removing the old drivers
restarting (in safe mode)
using driver sweepr pro
restarting
installing the latest drivers
preforming a sacrificial blood-oath
restarting
getting pissed off when it doesn't work
And what's every technical support type forum's answer? "Download and install the latest drivers from blah blah blah blah blah." It's as if everybody on the internet can't read. The drivers appear as correct on the device manager, but dxdiag and steam's diagnostic tool disagree.

So yeah, my options, if I want to game or animate at a framerate in the double didgits, is to either buy an entirely new motherboard and graphics card combo that probably won't work or an entirely new computer.

Fuck PC gaming.
Fuck PC gaming.
FUCK PC GAMING.

Happy non-denomination holiday time to everybody here at Destructoid. Make sure to go to bed early tonight so that Sam Fisher can sneak into your house without having to snap the necks of you and your loved ones. And if he sees that you've been lighting the phalic shaped candles for seven days he'll leave behind some vaguely game related gifts and something something pacman visited by three ghosts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZyJCV_dyug

Also, why the fuck isn't my bbcode working?

You are now just Some Jerk. Congratulations. Now make a blog about ponies.

On Dec 16, 2007 10:11 PM, <s0me_j3rkv2@sbcglobal.net > wrote:

Hey,

I'm currently posting on destructoid as some_jerk, and apparently the underscore in my name has hit destructoid's weakspot (presumably for massive damage) and nobody can read my blog. Is there any way you can perhaps take the underscore out of my name and unleash my blog as a form of punishment toward the public?



--
Hamza "CTZ" Aziz

Community Blogs Manager & Associate Editor for
Destructoid.com
Japanator.com

So, that being said, I guess now's as good a time as ever to introduce a regular feature I'll be calling...
Games You Didn't Buy Because You're Stupid
...until I can think up a better name.


Pictured above: $50 worth of unrelenting awesome

"Deathrow is a sports video game for the Xbox that was released on October 22, 2002, about 1 year after the release of the Xbox. The game was developed by Swedish developer SouthEnd Interactive and produced by Ubisoft Entertainment. Although the game’s sales were unspectacular, it won awards and reviewers applauded the game's uniqueness and character" if wikipedia is to be believed.

The game takes place in the year 2219. After a year of bloody, brutal and exciting exhibition matches of an underground sport combining hockey, rugby, frisbee and fighting, Blitz is greenlit for a 14 team championship tournament.


Pictured above: The banned 15th team, tested positive for not enough horse steroids

This tournament, and the "conquest" mode based around it, are the main meat of what makes Deathrow so great. Start out as a rag-tag group of cyber-modified official players, convicts, millitiamen, or providing you've unlocked them, ninjas, and work your way up to the championship. Along the way new players can be bought, bets can be made, and players can be experimented on with new steroids. Perhaps the best part is the event system, in which random crap happens in a sort of sports-management-sim way. Companies will offer you endorsement deals for doing well. Hackers can get into your team's bank account and steal a chunk of money. The star player might sleep with the mayor's twins, resulting in, well nothing other than some tabloid reports.


Pictured above: Motherfuckin' ninjas.

There are two ways to win a match. One, is to simply out-score your opponents with more disc shots into their floating, circular goal. The other, more fun way, is to simply beat down the entire team until they're unable to continue. The tem "deathrow" actually comes from throwing a fully charged disk shot at an opposing player so hard it knocks them out. There's no over-time, the only sudden death comes when you drop somebody from a particularly high platform onto their neck. The best analogy I could make for this game is to Blitzball from FFX, if you had control over the players in real time, it wasn't underwater, and didn't suck.


I never got past this part, mostly because I wanted to win and Letty is a pussy.

Despite featuring such x-box exclusive awesomeness as custom soundtracks, bump mapping, and profuse usage of the word "fuck" the game was never commercially successfull. So why didn't the best fake sports game since Mutant League Football not do so well financially? Perhaps it was the upped levels of gore, perhaps it was the lack of advertising, perhaps it was the dark humor. More likely it was because at the time the X-Box was known for T3H HALOZ and only said overrated (that's right, I said it) game.


Pictured above: A robot hook-kicking a genetically modified woman in the face, seriously, why don't you own this?

Still, this is one of those critically acclaimed games that for some reason gets looked over (see also: Psychonauts). If you can find it at a local store or on eBay and own an xbox I highly recomend you pick it up, if for nothing other than the intense matches against the team consisting entirely of demons or the amazingly well animated kick-combos of the Black Dragons.


You really don't want to know what happens when you turn safe-search off.

I leave you with the only known footage of Deathrow in the wild.

So, I'm on break form tightening up the graphics(tm) over at the Art Institute. Part of my materials and lighting final was to make a scene and I decided to go for a steampunk scrapyard.



It's full of broken robots and steam boilers and the such...



scrap pieces and severed robotic limbs...



and one very familiar green face.



Sorry if they're a bit dark, for some reason the renders came out sorta hard to see. If anybody cares enough I'll re-render the Mr. Destructoid one with some brighter lighting.

Hello I’m Some_Jerk here on the Cblogs, and the views I’m about to express are my own, but as you’ll see they may be yours too.

In the past 48 hours there’s been a rash of controversy surrounding the firing of one Jeff Gerstmann for giving Kane and Lynch a score lower than what the website or its parent company c-net decided Eidos’ advertising dollars were worth. Two things disappoint me about this.

1. Kane and Lynch apparently isn’t that great

This is a shame, because the previews, hype and generally awesome high-concept had me excited. Having main characters that I didn’t necessarily feel I needed to admire, like or even tolerate would be an awesome way to have any random killing done by the player feel like it wasn’t breaking the story. A 6.0 isn’t that bad though, nothing great, but not crap. That score isn’t to say that Kane and or Lynch should be caned and or lynched. It’s not to say that Eidos is a bad company for making it, nor it’s fans bad people for playing it. At the end of the day everybody here wishes every game developer the best of luck in producing AAA landmark game-of-the-year titles because we want to play them. Even reports of Duke Nukem Forever are met with a secret twinge of hope. Close but no cigar for Eidos. Give up? Throw in the towel? Continue? Join the Nintendo Fun Club Today?

2. Eidos taking their ball and going home.

What disappoints me most about all of this is that it wouldn’t have happened if Eidos took the review in stride. Jeff Gerstmann isn’t a gaming god who’s every decree becomes a law for fans of interactive media. He wasn’t born on the planet Criticon and sent to Earth as a baby to save us from bad games. Although he’s being treated like a martyr for the industry as a whole right now, he’s really just a funny fat guy who likes videogames. You might know a few. A bad review from him shouldn’t put you off a game that you might have fun with. Some of my favorite games are critical failures (not a lot, but enough to justify testing the waters for oneself). If Eidos had any sort of confidence in their product to begin with they wouldn’t have batted an eye at his review, or at least taken it as constructive criticism for future reference. I can’t really say I’m surprised though, after-all they haven’t made anything particularly landmark since the first Tomb Raider and even then it was 50% polygon tits.