I personally had GTAIV on pre-order with Game, but after receiving an email from HMV offering the game for the same price with free delivery and 1000 MS/Xbox points (worth £8.50) would seem rude not to go there instead 
Only about 40days to go now!
Offer can be found HERE!
Recently Bioware announced a new mission available through DLC on Xbox Live called Bring Down The Sky and available for 400 MS Points.
The mission involves the not yet seen Batarian Alien Race, who gets mentioned in the main installment of the game but never make an official appearance until now.
The plot involves a group of Batarian terrorists taking control of an asteroid setup for mineral mining and have set the fusion thrusters for a collision course with a near by planet.
Of course it’s your mission to stop the rogue aliens and save the planet!
The mission is a nice addition to the game and just simply adds a new direction accessed through the Galaxy map when you’re aboard the Normandy.
Once downloaded you either play it from anywhere in the game that you have access to the Galaxy Map, or do as I did and pull up an old saved game if you have already finished the walk through or aren’t far enough through yet on a new walkthrough.
Bioware claim it will take around 90mins to play the mission although I could see some more experienced users finishing around the 1 hour mark, but there are quite a few extra bits on the asteroid to go and explore and discover just by driving round in the Mako. This can add up a little extra time and my personal time was probably round the 1hr 45mins mark, including taking my time to make it last a bit!
A few new visuals have been added into the mix and some unseen-so-far defense weapons, including rocket launchers that hide in armored bunkers until you are in range, and rocket launchers that move up and down along a linear track.
Also one of the main points of the mission is surrounded by ‘Blasting Caps’ which use a proximity system that you must adhere to or risk being blown to bits!
Also as said before the Batarian’s make a show, which will hopefully become a fixture in future DLC and versions of Mass Effect.On another note Mass Effect has been announced it is being ported to PC with enhanced graphics which the PC can of course deliver if you have the required hardware.
I personally will probably do my next ‘walkthrough’ on PC hoping the mouse will offer much better aiming capabilities during a firefight, as the third person+stick combination of the Xbox made it tricky in some occasions to accurately control.
As for a conclusion if you’re a die hard Mass Effect fan, you will love the addition with something new to do and the extension to the story itself. But if you got bored of clearing the galaxy map in the first place you might choose to skip it.
Personally id give it a 7/10, where game play, graphics and storyline is still top of the range, but longevity is a little lacking…Link below for official site
http://masseffect.bioware.com/galacticcodex/bringdownthesky.html
Well ive been extremely quiet for the last few weeks i must admit, what with the holiday season taking all my time!
But in the mean time ive managed to set up a proper link to this blog, rather than the grim looking thing its been sat on so far!
So if you want to get here quickly…
Is what your looking for 
Heres a quick one!
On Mass Effect for Xbox360 if your doing the Assignment called Rogue VI which involves taking out a computer system that has gone rogue on the Earths moon (Luna) by the time you get to the end, you will recieve a message about white noise and your HUD displays a load of repeating 0’s (zero’s) and 1’s (ones’s) in this form…
01001000
01000101
01001100
01010000
If you know your binary, or just decide to cheat and find a binary converter, it spells…
H
E
L
P
As a self confessed nerd… thats pretty cool!
I recently read on the internet that the 64bit versions of Vista, dont run the 64bit of Windows Media Player by default, all mainly to do with compatability issues.
If you are running a 64bit machine you can alter the system to run the 64bit version if you so desire, although i tried it and didnt see any improvement, but then didnt really expect to with such an application!
If you do want to go 64bit.
Click Start…
Type in ‘Run’ and hit enter…
Type %windir%\system32\unregmp2.exe /SwapTo:64 into Open:
Click OK
This should now switch to 64 bit! To go back again do the same thing but change to…
%windir%\system32\unregmp2.exe /SwapTo:32
Like i said, i didnt see any improvement, but when it comes to the trick where Windows Live Messenger can show what your listening to as part of your name, it seems to stop working, which i would put down to the compatability issues as i doubt WLM is 64bit! So if you like that bit to be active then stick with 32bit!
So we begin 2008! No difference as far as im concerned!
Gaming for the Year2008 seems to be looking good for gaming ill give it that. GTAIV for Xbox360 and PS3 will be an instant smash without fail, hopefully well see the comedy of all the numbnuts trying to get this one banned aswell! With politicians blaming it for kids doing bad things and all that usual guff!
GT5 also set for the PS3 sometime this year, which will be the point that i actually buy a PS3, in which case im hoping the 80gig model makes it to the UK.
Also im hoping Alan Wake is finally going to make a show this year, although i have seen dates for 13th March penned in for its release, ok its a cross platformer, but im looking forward to running it on the PC more than anything, with plenty of GPU grunt to run those gorgeous textures that weve all been teased with for the last year or so!
As for PC gaming in general, ive not really done anything at all on the PC, as regards Hellgate or anything like that, in fact ive not installed it since my OS went tits up a few weeks back, so ive not even had a blast now patch0.7 has been introduced!
For gaming in general, all my attention has been diverted to the Xbox360 playing Mass Effect over the Christmas/New Year period which is all ive done appart from the various celebrations and parties!
Now Mass Effect is an RPG set in a future and by default, you take control of Commander Shepherd, now i say ‘by defualt’ as you can create your own custom charachter at the start of the game to take pretty much any shape or form that you may desire! Personally i couldnt be too bothered, so just carried on with the main man himself.
The main plot and map is based in an absolutely huge… well galactic…. well… you map IS a galaxy! In which case you spend a bit of time on the ‘Citadel’ built by an alienrace supposedly 50,000 years ago, yet slightly on into the game you are given the freedom and your own space craft to start exploring and carrying out missions and assignments throughout the game.
There is one main plot so far, with an agent called Spectre, who are special operatives of whats known as the ‘Council’ or the 3 races that currently govern an area known as ‘Concil Space’. Although so far the rouge agent has gone AWOL and is set to resurect a dangerous AI race to what would seem, destruction of civilization!
I must admit this game has been out for a short while now and im only so far in, but savouring it as much as possible at the moment as this is truely one of the best RPG’s i have EVER played!
I was talking to my brother and mentioned the fact mentioned before, and that ive never played an RPG this good since my days on the Amiga600! Seriously, i think decision orientated RPGs have been crap since way back then, so this is an absolute refreshment in the RPG genre.
Although to that statement my brother replied… what about Shenmue? A long lost forgot gem!
In which case i rephrase! This is the best RPG since Shenmue on DreamCast!
BUT… there is a huge problem with this… Shenmue was an immense RPG game with a superb story line in which you took control of the charachter Ryo Hazuki. This was followed by the huge world of Shenmue2 which had me fixated for the months completeing every last little bit.
Now any Shenmue fans reading this, will now be thinking the same thing… Shenmue was ported to DreamCast only, and was always aimed to be a trilogy, and part 2 was left on an absolute cliff hanger… so everyone was left on the edge of their seats waiting for the final installment to come along…. and then the DreamCast brand went bust!!!!
This was around the time when the first Xbox came out and alot of hope and speculation rumoured that the 3rd part was to be made for the Xbox, but nothing ever came about. So will we ever find out what happens?
Well if you check the net every now and then, theres always something recent and floating about that the final installment will be made one day…
i hope so! As some of us have been wating about 5 years now for the end of the story, you wouldne be impressed if Rowling got to the last third of one of the Potter books and said…. ’sod it, me pens runs out and i cant be arsed!’
Well, ive managed to be offline for a while, as i managed to completely screw up my operating system and have had to endure a complete reinstall!
I some how managed to do this as such!
I needed to check something as regards the RAM installed in my machine. So duely shut the thing down, turned off the PSU and opened up the side panel… removed a RAM stick… checked what i needed to know, and duely returned it to the slot.
Starting the machine up again and the Nvidia RAID control on the way in tells me my RAID5 C:\ system drive is degraded :-S so i hop into the RAID settings and discover that one of the 4 drives is missing… so im thinking one of the drives had failed? Although firstly i decided to check the insides of the machine before going to that length, and sure enough i had caught one of the power leads and managed to disconnect the drive.
You would think i could plug it back in and away i go again…. not so!
The RAID screen continued to tell me the RAID5 was degraded, so i duely jumped in and had a look.
The random thing here is the drive i managed to disconnect has now ’split’ away from the other 3 in the original array, but the controller thinks it has 2 750gig RAID5 arrays?
With a bit of thinking i managed to get the rogue disk back where it should be, and set the system to ‘rebuild’ in which case it seemed happy to do so…. so good so far…
Again… not so! Vista was having none of it and complained that the classpnp.sys file was corrupt or missing, and if your not sure what classpnp.sys is… its something to do with SCSI hardware control… namely… hardrives!
I tried doing a boot from CD and attempting the repair command to be found on the installation disc, but no luck, Windows couldnt sort itself out at all.
So i tried booting from CD and then doing a manual repair of replacing classpnp.sys from the X: boot drive and putting back into the system32 folder.
From this i managed a partial result, the classpnp fault had gone, but now there was a complaint about winlogon.exe, so i again, using the Vista disc and the X:boot i replaced that file.
Retstart… and everything is looking good, POST is exexuted and the green ‘knightrider’ startup screen shows and i start to feel quite proud(!) only for the screen to go black…. and then blue…. damn.
Error codes im giving represent something to do with a complete failure of critical system files (no shit!) and no matter what i try from here on.. i couldnt get the damn thing going again!
I was hoping to be posting a solution for a duffed OS but in most cases, square one is where you must begin!
But my problem now is… i have about 400gig of data on the array, but if reinstall Vista, everything goes… not an option, as the RAID5 array was there in the first place to keep things safe! Now the array is still good but the OS is shot, so my only real way out is to get a new hardrive and do a new install.
On this note i decided id use up the 2 available SATA ports on my board and run them as RAID0 as a system drive using 2 Samsung Spinpoint 320gig 16meg cache drives.
So with that setup and the OS installed (and various drivers) i can now begin to rebuild the whole system!
I must admit, the inclusion of the RAID0 array has boosted performance of the OS and the RAID5 survived nicely and i havnt lost a single thing! All i did do was move everything from the 5 to the 0 and then did a format of the RAID5 as obviously the old duff OS was still on there and everything is sweet! Perfomance is excellent in all respects!
While im here i used to use Diskeeper on my old setup but had never bothered with it until recently on the Vista system. Now the strange thing is, MS have obviously decided to much about with the defrag program which just lets you set a ’schedule’ and that should keep things peachy… well my old disc was shot to bits and fragmentation was starting to cause alot of problems!
I did install Diskeeper, but it was having a hard time of sorting things out, but this time its gone straight on with the fresh system and everything is perfectly defragged right now, and should stay like that, a damn good piece of software i must say, and much better than the old versions that i noticed gave obvious performance lags sometimes. The new 2008 version is 99% invisible in its doings!
And finally to finish off with… this has kind of taught me a lesson, as i was constantly putting off creating a backup of my system… ill do it next week, ill do it tomorrow, ill do it later, kind of attitude… and it bit me in the arse to say the least.
Near future plan is to get an IDE controller card for the PC and use an old 80gig unit ive got to store an OS backup just incase the same happens again!
Well patch 0.6 has been implemented to the game, but the bogging down to a complete stop, is still happening! But then again the so called memory leak problems dont seem to be due for repair till patch 0.7 
Anyway, i havnt been online for the best part of two weeks for gaming, due to work commitments, and this is set to happen through the whole of 2008, so im looking to buy a good quality laptop to allow me to continue while away!
I know a decent laptop will cost more than a decent desktop and the costs are pretty high for what you get, but itll be justified non the less. A good screen will allow good movie playback aswell, as the current laptop i use is a bit crap on most fronts and ‘makes do’… id rather have a bit of quality and then the option to do some gaming on top of that.
So far things are boiling down to the Dell M1730 and the Alienware Area-51 M9750, and i have concidered the likes of Rock and others in the process, but these two are giving best performance for cost. Although Dell does now own Alienware, its a bit of a tough choice!
The Dell does come with a slightly better processor spec, but the the Alienware has slightly better GPU and inbuilt TV tuner spec… both have decent Audio upgrades, and this makes me wonder how you can get these differences between the two ‘marques’?
The thing is i do need the added GPU power to potentially support some of the CAD work i have to deal with. I know NVIDIA to have their Quadro systems designed specific for CAD with the GeForce systems beign game orientated, but ive never had too many problems with ‘medium complexity’ CAD work using the gaming chipsets. Just tends to suffer when things start getting a little more intense.
As for the looks of the two machines, the Alienware has the simple and subtle matt black finish while the Dell has the mad holographic surface finish and array of discolights, to be honest i think the Alienware will get less undesired attention! Although the Dell does also have an illuminated keyboard and the Logitech display as found on the G series keyboard (which i use with my desktop) which is brilliant if you ask me! Shame the Alienware doesnt at least have the keyboard lit.
All will be revealed soon!
Continuing from what i was saying yesterday about HG:L slowly crawling to a painful stop(!) whilst playing today i have been running memory diagnostics with the game running, and it seems a common conclusion, cross referencing to the HG:L forums that some of this is caused by memory leaks.
Albeit, not uncommon for such a new game, its nice to get an understanding on what may be a cause and luckily the HG:L team are in the process of sorting alot of this with the next two patches, being 0.6 and 0.7.
Im not quite sure if 0.6 has been deployed as of yet as the news real on the launcher still mentions 0.5 and ive not seen anything website wise giving a definate time for its addition.
Until then, if you do find the game starts to bind up, just shut it off and restart your machine to clear all the residual crap from the memory and then carry on… at least it gives you chance for a quick break to go and grab some munchies and then pile in full force again
Patch links…
http://www.eu.hellgatelondon.com/underground/patch-0-6-0
http://www.eu.hellgatelondon.com/underground/patch-0-7-nears
Ive noticed a bit of traffic flowing into this blog concerning the problem of HG:L slowing down and locking up.
To be quite honest i suffer the same problem and dont have a solution for it im afraid!
I can personally play the game for some time and will run superb, and then for no given reason it will suddenly just slow to an absolute crawl… in game im talking 1-3FPS at anyone time and trying to transfer from ‘level to level’ on the loading screen can take forever sometimes!
This is normally sorted out by a restart of the game, but this is annoying and shouldnt have to slow you down in such a way!
Ive Google’d the problem myself and the most viable comments on the matter i have come across are to keep you disc defragmented properly and RAM can be a big player with it all (as per usual, i suppose) the HG:L .exe files also seem to be optimised for Large Address Set too, so it shouldn’t struggle if plenty of RAM is available.
Personally i think it may be more of an ‘early days’ teething problem and will be ironed out as new updates are released, in which reading the various internet tips, one will be released sometime this month (December ‘07)
