Huzzah!

I won some swag from GameTap's Tuesday Trivia for being a runner up in round 22.

For anyone wondering how long AitD is, there are 8 episodes that are divided into sequences, I just reached episode 5-1, and Xfire says I've played for 7 hours, that includes about an hour or more of me dying in a few spots, heh.

I've really stuck to just using a few items until now, but I was just forced to use the knife, double-sided tape, and a plastic bottle full of flammable liquid to trick one of those annoying spider creatures into making a nice trail of gas all the way back to his hatcher >:).

Before that, I had to use a can of gas with a spray nozzle like a real flame thrower to kill 2 really bad ass guys that threw knives at me for some reason, I mean really, they looked kind of like Nemesis from Resident Evil, why not just come over and crush my head or something? Anyway, it was nice to see what those cans actually did, don't know why I didn't think of it before, but flame throwers are awesome!

I still don't know if you can see your ping when you're in a server, but you can see your ping before you join.

There was less than 20 servers in the US when I looked (much) earlier today, and they all had over 400 ping, needless to say, I wouldn't recommend TMNF for online play unless you directly know some people that want to play.

Just a short post.

exit(0);

This should have been in my last post, but I forgot.

The F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate Demo wasn't working correctly at first, once the game was done loading, the loading screen would go black, and the HUD was gone as well.

I tried changing my settings around, and then I just got a black screen in-game. Turning on my flashlight let me see some things, but it would cut out if you looked down certain hallways at a certain angle, and the flashlight doesn't light up everything, so I couldn't see fire or anything that wasn't being lit up.

Changing my settings back to what they were didn't help, closing Xfire and Steam fixed it though.

Crysis SP Demo:

I finally tried it a week or two ago and forgot to say anything about it, basically, it's got a few bugs that aren't really annoying (physics glitches can be awesome at times), it feels a lot like Far Cry (it was made by the same people), and it's fun.

It also comes with the Crysis Editor just like the full game, which has to be installed manually from within the installation directory just like the full game. The editor is good for a few hours of fun even if you're just screwing around, thanks to the fact that you can play the game from within the editor. Tornadoes, Helicopters, towers of Pickup Trucks, etc.

TrackMania Nations Forever (TMNF) is a really great free game that you can download from Steam or TrackMania.com, there are also other TrackMania games that aren't free, and they can be bought from Steam or TrackMania.com as well.

I had seen TMNF advertised on Steam more than a few times but before today I had never cared enough to download it, maybe because I like very few racing games that I've played (e.g., FlatOut), but more likely it was because I'm lazy.

The title pretty much sums it all up, I played Alone in the Dark for less than an hour according to Xfire.

Alone in the Dark seems awesome, especially the atmosphere, unfortunately it looks like it will be fairly short after a glance at the chapter selection screen, and also unfortunately I've had to get use to short games not costing less than other games these days, oh well, at least AitD seems like it will be a GOOD game. I'd also like to point out that I never played any of the AitD games before, I had only seen a little of an old one a very long time ago, i.e., during the PSX's days. I'd also like to point out that I was planning on getting AitD but was going to wait for a price drop after seeing all the negative press on it, even though I know better than to trust critics, it was Marcus' (Armake21 / NicotineAlien) "Context Sensitive" review on YouTube that made me decide to get the game now.

I haven't actually clicked "Install" yet, but the installer did give me a link to a site that I had forgotten about a while ago. AitDUnlock.com is Atari's site for activation issues with AitD, if you're having problems then head over there.

I'm pretty lazy and haven't gotten around to writing anything lately, sorry.

I uninstalled a lot of things in Steam since I have it all backed up now, unfortunately it was the old games I didn't play anymore and so they didn't take up a lot of disc space to begin with <_<.

I bought SiN Episodes: 1: Emergence on Steam when it was on sale for $4.95, it came with SiN 1 (the original) and SiN 1 MP, which was a nice bonus even though I have SiN 1 somewhere and just never beat it. I haven't beaten SiN Episodes 1: Emergence yet but it's a lot of fun, it even has an Arena which is basically "Survive as long as possible," the arena and the game both have a dynamic difficulty that will try to adapt to your skill level and it seems to work well but I'm not 100% on that one, I haven't had major problems progressing yet but I have gotten into some low health shoot outs. I know that it's very likely SiN won't even continue at this point (look at Ritual's wikipedia page or something to find out why), or at least not for a few years, but for the price it was just too good to pass up, I had wanted to play it back when it was first released anyway. Also, the song at the menu is awesome, I'm going to extract it with GCFScape later on.

Edit: GPU Driver: v175.16 from EVGA. The EVGA driver IS different from the NVIDIA one but I don't know what's changed, maybe just the support website link or something.

BioShock has some hitches when it loads something, which is normal but it screws up the Min FPS in my FRAPS benchmark.

Anyway, I ran 2 benchmarks starting from the same save (the start of the Medical Pavilion right before you see your first turret) -- after waiting for BioShock to stop loading textures and etc -- and duplicating my actions as best I could:

1. Min: 46, Max: 93, Avg: 67.593.