gaming

Hey guys every tuesday @ 6:00 Play N Trade in Hampton Cove is having a FREE tournament for GoW2 there will be a prize involved and as of right now I believe it is a replica of a Lancer ask for Ben at the store for details tell him Eric sent ya the tourney is Hamton Cove VS the Murfeesboro, TN and Guntersville, AL Play N Trade stores add them to your XBL gamertag: PNTOH come help Hampton Cove crush the competition!! Thanks Guys!

I'm doing it again. The weekend of Halloween, we'll have a HALOween LAN at my place. Saturday, Nov. 1st, beginning at noon. BYOS rules apply. I'm particularly short on tables and chairs, so please bring those, too. H3 will be the primary game, w/ a good possibility of CoD4 making an appearance, as well, depending on what we feel like doing. Primarily, H3 objective-based MLG gametypes, with some rocket-race thrown into the mix.

As a reminder, please download the free Heroic Map pack, if you haven't already. This will open up some new maps at the LAN, and will add to the fun. Also, while you're at it, Cold Storage is free, but is only available by itself, so get it, too.

Spreadsheet w/ attendees and equipment here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pc0RHkXvO21HI7xbpTIHPFw&hl=en

Equipment that you may not think to bring, but we'll need:
1. Power strips
2. Tables/chairs
3. Extra LCD display (for the Brickster)

I recently purchased a D-Link Gamerlounge DGL-4500 Xtreme N Gaming Router. In this thread I will post my thoughts about it in a somewhat realtime manner as I begin using it. It will eventually be a full review, but I'm going to write it as a stream of consciousness rather than a complete review. Read on for my experience thus far.

I just purchased it two days ago and installed it yesterday, but I still don't have all the features configured or any experience with it during online gaming.

First, I purchased it because I run two Xbox 360s in my house, sometimes gaming at the same time, and my current router (~4 year old Belkin Wireless G router) can't support open NAT on both. This creates interesting problems when trying to host and organize online games. Another small problem that it promises to fix is increase in ping times to your online gaming host while another network computer is uploading or downloading large amounts of data.

It supposedly fixes this by prioritizing network traffic to allow gaming data through first. I don't know how it works, but it sounds great. Perhaps I'll learn in the coming days. It also has 802.11n (draft), but I currently don't have any devices that support N, so that's just some incentive for the future. It also has an LED display.

The router is a little expensive at $170 delivered from Amazon. I wasn't excited about paying this much, but my previous router lasted many years. Not only was it getting old, but it lacked several features that I want and would use regularly. I get a lot of utility from my home networking equipment through online gaming, LANs, and my home theater PC, so it was worth the $ to me to buy a quality router with lots of features, because I tend to use those features.

Last night I installed the router, upgraded the firmware, set up my wireless network, and set up MAC address filtering. My wireless security is to not broadcast my SSID plus only allow approved MAC addresses. Yes, it's possible to find out my SSID and spoof a MAC address, but it's not very probable--especially in light of all the open and WEP encrypted networks around me.

Upgrading the firmware was easy. Some reviews complained about it. I think the complaints are unfounded. Setting up MAC address filtering was essentially easy, but I did stumble on one nuance: make sure the first MAC address you add to the approved list is the MAC of the device you're using, or you essentially lock yourself out of the router and must do a hard reset to default settings.

Yeah. It happened twice.

After that things went smoothly. Both Xbox 360s have open NAT and all my devices are online. It integrated seamlessly with my existing 16-port switch that services all my home network drops. However, it appears that I must reconfigure my Vista Media Center machine (HTPC) with my Media Center Extenders (Xbox 360s). Changing the router seems to have destroyed the connection, but that should be simple enough to fix. I plan to drag the HTPC out of the closet and tackle that tonight (hopefully before the debate).

Source: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/884/884154p1.html

Gears of War 2 Multiplayer Hands-On

Like a Fenix from the flames, Marcus raises the meatflag as we blow the lid off GOW2's multiplayer.

by Andrew Stanton, IGN UK

UK, June 25, 2008 - "This is where the magic happens." For some reason this truism rattled unshakably around my head like beans in a tin can over the entire day spent at Epic Games. We'd been flown to the US to be the first journalists in the world to get hands on with Gears of War 2 multiplayer. My strange mantra was often a reminding prompt – there's absolutely nothing cool whatsoever about Epic's HQ.

Based in the beautiful, but nothingy backwoods of Cary, North Carolina (Wiki it: there's lashings of green, wide roads and naff all else), it's a bland, beige building nestling amongst similarly uninspiring science park real estate. But the mantra also came back as a whooping endorsement when we finally picked up a controller and the fragging began.

Some flavour: Epic truly is indistinguishable from just about every other developer we've visited. Two storey, science park monochrome blahchitecture. A reception bristling with heavy, crystal blob game of the year awards and life-size character figure detritus. The desks of the developer staff are strewn with comic book, anime and geek movie vinyl figures. There's a kitchen creaking at the seams with free sugar and caffeine-rich snacks – the ADHD-inspiring engine room. A rank of arcade machines line up next to the most pristine gym I've ever seen in my life (make of that what you will) and positively cathedral-like, gargantuan loos, with magazine racks of game mag serving as "inspirational" reading. It's tidier than most, but that's no great endorsement. And they knew we were coming, so nagging had probably ensued.

Gears 2 promises to be "bigger, better and more badass", plus now it also includes flamethrowers.

Kotaku has an interesting article suggesting this: Age Matching on Xbox Live.

It makes sense- I think. There will always be people who lie about their age but I think this might be a good idea! The timmys of our time annoy the crap out me....I might game more on Live if I knew I had a better chance of meeting up with people closer in age to me, though there will always be douchebagging a-holes on Live who somehow know you are a "Jewbag" and apparently have had relations with your mother.... read it here.

Halo has it's own culture. It has been likened to Star Wars for it's cult-like following, and market penetration. Whether you've been playing it since the first installment, or got swept up somewhere along the way w/ Halo 2, you can agree it's one of the greatest games ever made.

But which one? All 3 have similarities, and although they have the same name, they are 3 very different games, each with it's own nuances and nuisances alike.

Pre-H3, everyone seemed divided. H1 or H2. The early adopters of Halo seemed to favor H1 heavily after being subjected to H2's dual-wielding, turned up auto-aim, and the infiltration of cheaters and screaming, pre-pubescent online players who ruined the experience for everyone.

H2 fans enjoyed the ease of multiplayer gaming over Xbox Live, as opposed to local LANs on H1, or the cumbersome (and unsupported) interface of Xbox Connect. Anyone w/ their mom's credit card could connect to XBL, but LANs and XBC required more work, and more knowledge.

When comparing H1 and H2, the campaigns do not even need to be mentioned. If you've never played H1's campaign, then you don't know what you're missing, and you'll be satisfied w/ the campaign on H2. If, however, you have played H1's stellar campaign, well, 'nuff said. Just mark that up as the biggest reason to prefer H1 over H2.

Enter H3, the end of the trilogy, and Bungie's triumphant redemption to the lackluster campaign on H2. Enter more user-customization than ever before. Map Forge, Theatre-mode, and more. It has possibly more bells and whistles than any other console game, ever. But are the multiplayer extras and customization enough to win over the H1 fans? The auto-aim was turned down, but is it enough to make the H1 crowd forget about their beloved scoped pistol?