BSD & Gaming

Join Cryptic for their Star Trek Online festivities, the event will run from around 10:00am PST on Thursday, February 2, 2012 through around 10:00am PST on Monday, February 6, 2012.

Celebrations include missions to acquire the new flagships for both the Klingon Empire and the Federation faction, as well as a daily ‘Q’ mission for other prizes!

Download a free to play copy of Star Trek Online today.

Yes you heard right Star Trek Online is now FREE to Play! [LINK]

There are differences between Gold (subscribers) and Silver (Free Accounts), get the details on the F2P Charts. [LINK]

Klingons, Humans, Ferengi, Vulcans, and Bajorans, oh my!

Download the game for Free! [LINK]

Last year I stated [link] the disappointment of Fallout 3 from 2008 left me in no hurry to pick up a copy of  New Vegas. The initial reviews for FO3:NV looked promising but that quickly changed with a barrage of negativity about the game’s technical problems. To make things worse, I also had an aging computer setup that would have left me running the game on mid-level or low end graphics settings, yet one more reason buying this game quickly got filed under the “why bother” category for me.

…Fast forward one year and mix in a new pc.. Booyah Babuh! FO3:NV rocks like nobody’s business! Since I took forever to get my hands on a copy, it appears the developers had time to patch all the technical issues everyone complained about. So far I have had zero problems. The quality of the storyline and general content of FO3:NV is ridiculously better than Bethesda’s work on Fo3, it really shines with competent story telling from Obsidian Entertainment. I would love to have seen what these guys could have come up with for the Capital Wasteland, I imagine it would have been light years better than anything Bethesda squeezed out.

Naturally it still wouldn’t be a great PC Game without a lot of mods from the community to make it ever so much better, stock games are usually bland at best.

Finally! At last a new system. I was recently able to get enough cash to build a new computer, and with frugal shopping I came up with really decent hardware. I also had in mind a goal of future expandability instead of needing to build a whole new computer later on.

ASUS VW246H 24″ 2ms(GTG) HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor
IN WIN Dragon Slayer mATX Mini Tower -Great looking case IMO!
OCZ ModXStream Pro 700W Modular Power Supply
Intel Core i7-2600K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
EVGA SuperClocked GeForce GTX 560 1GB GDDR5 HDCP Ready with SLI
GIGABYTE Intel Z68 Micro ATX Motherboard
SAMSUNG 470 Series 128GB SSD – dual boot Win7/FreeBSD
SAMSUNG 1TB 7200 RPM HDD – storage

It’s been a week now and compared to what I was working with it’s a huge leap in performance and capability. It’s taken every program and game I can throw at it with the highest settings and responded ” Is that the best you got? Bring it on!”. Wow it’s been a long time since I could build a system like this for myself. I know there are bigger and better builds, but for me… for what I was able to spend this leaves me grinning from ear to ear.

Future expansion capabilities include:
- unlocked cpu for overclocking
- motherboard setup for overclocking and includes beefier components such as solid core capacitors instead of liquid electrolytic capacitors.
- 2 more slots to double the ram
- another slot to pair up a matching video card and run in SLI mode
- tons of room for more drives

Let’s face it no matter who you are, you have your preferences about what operating system you like best, we all do. Some are so fanatically driven that they will go into a frothing rage fit when they find their opinions challenged. I try to see things as a learning experience and hopefully take away some useful information from. I even admit Windows has it’s place in the computing world, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it!

Despite the fact that BSD has been around in one form or another since 1977…. Linux based operating systems have always gotten the limelight in the press. From my observations I think this is mainly due to BSD getting tied up with IP fights in the courts [USL v. BSDi] as well as the fact that  for a long time development was focused on servers not on the desktop. In fact Linus is even quoted as saying in an interview that “If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.” In my mind linux and BSD devotees should consider themselves on the same team rather than at odds.

With all that said, many Linux fans have poo-poo’d BSD for the desktop as long as I can remember, while controversy one way or the other will never truly be put to rest because of emotional zeal, Phoronix has a nice article detailing a default install of PC-BSD 8.2 vs a default install of Ubuntu 11.04 with an eye focused on gaming. The end results were a respectable show of performance by PC-BSD that took the win. To me it’s not proof of who is better…. it’s simply one more statement in a long line of examples over the years,  that there are other choices for your desktop besides Linux based distributions if you don’t want Windows.

Read all about FreeBSD’s results here at this link – [LINK]

The new game coming out for linux based OS’s  and Mac OS X called Oil Rush looks like a lot of fun! It is currently in beta testing and if you want to pre-order you can have instant access according to their web page.  The graphics look really good and that’s a huge treat since most games playable on something other than windows look like they escaped from 1982.

While PC-BSD (FreeBSD) is not specifically supported chances are it will run just fine if you have the required hardware and drivers setup. Unfortunately my system is old enough that is doesn’t quite meet the minimum requirements, bummer. Even though it might not work on BSD or my system may be too slow, I’m considering buying it anyway just to help out game developers that support alternative platforms. Hell the current pre-order price is only $19.99 and I’ve wasted more than that on a bad meal dining out.

If you are a BSD gamer and like real-time strategy games you should check it out !  [LINK]

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Back in 2000 when Red Alert 2 was first released I fell in love with it immediately.
While I enjoyed the previous C&C game Tiberian Sun very much and still play it occasionally, it just didn’t capture the imagination like Red Alert 2 did.

Growing up in the last gasp of the Cold War I can still remember doing Civil Defense safety drills in elementary school. Those years made a strong impression on me, the fear of war with the Soviet Union weighed heavily on everyone’s mind and even though as children we may not have understood all the details we knew it would be something bad. In fact to this day any book, movie, or game that reflects the feel or imagery of the Cold War era still evokes an emotional response and fires my imagination. That connection has even led to a need to collect some Civil Defense relics in recent years… go figure. There is something about that iconic CD logo that I’m drawn to. Anyway enough of that I’ll get back on track about playing Red Alert 2 on BSD using WINE.

The ‘Good News’ :

Playing Red Alert 2 on BSD [ FreeBSD or PC-BSD ] is possible and it seems to run well now that I actually have it installed.

The ‘Bad News’ :

I have not been able to get RA2 to install easily. I still don’t know what the issue is but for whatever reason trying to get RA2 to install properly straight from the CD just isn’t happening. I keep getting errors preventing it from completing the install. I won’t go into all the gory details but basically I gave up and did what the Ubuntu Linux folks did, installed it on a Winblows box – then copied it to my WINE drive.   @*&# !!! Bah!

Once the installation ‘goat rope’ was over I ran into issues with the damned cd copy protection crap, I hate games that insist on the CD being in the drive in order to play – it doesn’t prevent piracy it just exposes the original install cd to potential for damage. Needless to say I had to continue to take the Ubuntu communities lead and follow their advice on countering that nonsense.

Red Alert 2 is over a decade old, but I think it is still a great game and worth the effort to install. I realy prefer RA2 versus what I consider to be the ‘over the top’ cartoon graphics and general silliness of RA3. If anyone ever finds a ‘finished’ conversion mod making RA3 into a likeness of RA2 please let me know. I found a few mods that are or were being worked on but found nothing complete.

WineHQ’s information about Red Alert 2 – [LINK]

Ubuntu documentation for Red Alert 2 under WINE – [LINK]

Wikipedia information on Red Alert 2 – [LINK]

Red Alert Den’s custom maps, missions, and misc. files – [LINK]

I recently bought Dawn of War II on Steam. I haven’t kept up with gaming news and information much at all in the last few years so  I was surprised to find how different DoW2 was than the first release. There’s no base building, you get a handful of squads instead of armies, and the game is primarily focused on the campaign mode of play. Also, there’s no skirmish mode and you are limited to the Space Marine faction, the other races are not available unless you play online or choose the last man standing mod…. Meh to that.

I personally don’t care to go back and replay campaigns once I have gone through them, there are no surprises so to me it’s no fun, because of that and no skirmish mode option I won’t get much replay value out of the game. It’s ok though …I can get my W40K fix by going back to DoW: SoulStorm.

There’s some fun games at super cheap prices over at STEAM and you’d better go grab them fast! I picked up a couple titles I’ve been wanting and grabbed some that looked fun.

I’m not a fan of the Steam Powered Client you have to use, I like a basic installer that you download and burn on cd or dvd better…..however I got the game Overlord II for only $4.99 – ya can’t beat that!!

Limited time only for these prices, buy them while you can!!!

Only six more days till Fallout: New Vegas is available for those of you waiting to run out and grab a copy hot off the press. I myself am not in any rush and will not likely get a copy till long after the hoopla is over.  Bethesda’s Fallout 3 was a disappointment compared to the first two incarnations of the game, but I do admit that after watching the G4TV trailers I found myself more interested than I expected. Fallout: New Vegas is being developed by Obsidian Entertainment and not Bethesda which may be it’s saving grace.  Let’s hope Obsidian will be able to steer the Fallout franchise back on course.