Toshibaland

What a month April was for my beasty little Toshiba laptop.  For starters, I’d say for a month or so prior the cooling fan wasn’t sounding exactly…healthy.  It started out as a small noise, barely noticeable over the fan itself.  Then it got a bit louder and grindy-er.  And then she squealed.  As in, the bearing decided to call it quits.  Try as she might she just couldn’t spin.  When I initially heard the sound I honestly thought it was the hard-drive failing, and I panicked quite a bit.  A noisy fan I could deal with, but a failing hard-drive?  That can be quite expensive to fix.  Without being 100% sure I went online and searched for external hard-drives to store my backup data onto.  For some reason I was almost certain it was the HDD, but decided to take it to a friend’s house before spending money on a 500GB external HDD.

Thankfully, that move proved to be well worth it since it was just the fan afterall.  What I initally estimated at being a well over $100 fix turned out to be a simple $30 one.  I ordered the replacement fan online and waited.  And waited.  Apparently it was shipping out of Hong Kong and didn’t show up until 2+ weeks later.  During this time I was back on the old desktop, which was hell to put things nicely. And what a week to die on me too.  4 days after placing my order, Tribes: Ascend launched with Raindance and a new game mode.  So there I was stuck on the old desktop while people jizzed over HiRez’s version of Raindance.

But finally the time came.  The fan arrived, and since I know nothing about the internal workings of a laptop, I took it over to my friend’s house for replacement.  I picked it up after class and enjoyed a few games of Tribes: Ascend, Mount & Blade: Warband, and of course Tribes 1.  Things sseemed to be back to normal for me and the laptop…until one fateful day in late April.  The 28th, to be exact.  I logged onto the Legions: Overdrive forums as I normally do and see a new message in my inbox from a private tester.  Apparently he made a new Legions website for a new mod for the game (Matrix Bullet-time).  The message said that it was a new website and that I would need to install a plugin to view any images or videos.  Naturally a few flags should be going off right about now, but Chrome didn’t spot anything suspicious so I installed them.  Nothing happened.  Oh well, I close the site and move on.

I then notice a new blog post about recent security breaches on the website and game.  I heard one of the testers had issues with this a day or two prior, but thought it was just him.  I decided to play things safe and run a quick scan with MSE.  It immediately picked up a threat.  I found it strange nothing popped up when I initially installed the plugin, since MSE is generally good at that sort of thing.  Or hell even Chrome.  It displayed a severe backdoor trojan, to which I clicked ‘Clean PC’ and the threat was removed…or so I thought.

I went about my day normally.  I fired up the new Sniper Elite V2 demo (which is quite fun I might add) that I downloaded the day before and shot away.  At one point I noticed the game mysteriously brought up the escape menu.  Again, strange but I didn’t think much of it.  Dinner came around so I closed the game and nomnomed away for a while, then went back to the laptop.  I noticed that Chrome was open, and was displaying the history page.  The ‘clear history’ box was also open.  But the worst, and creepiest part of it all, was that the webcam was on.  As soon as I noticed everything, the webcam was shut off.  Fuck.

This isn’t good.  This is bad.  No, this is beyond bad.  I ran all the malware tools I had on the laptop and quickly realized I wasn’t prepared, or protected, for this sort of thing.  MSE, Spybot S&H and Malwarebytes weren’t really suited for this type of attack.  I quickly tried to remember what other anti-virus tools were out there that I’d heard of, and downloaded SUPER right away.  As soon as it was done downloading I disconnected from the internet and started the scans.  Of course both Malwarebytes and SUPER detected the virus, which was actually 5 different files.  After ‘removing’ them and prompted to restarted, I prayed the tools had worked.

Upon starting the laptop again and getting connected to the internet, things seemed normal…until the webcam came on again.  It wasn’t gone.  Worse yet, he wasn’t gone.  I decided to run MSE once more in the hopes of it getting removed, but also to see the full path of where it was located.  The same trojan popped up, I clicked “Clean PC” and…shit hit the fan.  The command window popped up as I removed it, which then cascaded extremely fast across the screen.  The laptop was essentially frozen.  I couldn’t do anything, not even access the task manager to end the process.  I had to force a shutdown, and upon restarting I noticed I was automatically getting connected to my wireless network.  I don’t quite remember enabling this, but I could have.  If not, it makes sense for him/the virus to do this, since he’d have access to my laptop right away.  I disconnected, ran Malwarebytes yet again and for some reason decided to reconnect to the internet for something (I can’t remember why).  As I connected the scan was stopped and the laptop automatically shutdown.  At this point I realize I’m pretty much in over my head and kept the laptop shutdown as I did some research on the ol’ desktop.

I downloaded a program called Combofix to an SD card, then installed it onto the laptop.  After quite a while of scanning it removed a lot of files, and I thought perhaps this would be the end of it.  Combofix is a mighty strong program so my hopes were marginally high.  I started the Malwarebytes scan again and…4 out of the 5 original files remained.  I’d been at this for 8+ hours.  I simply admitted defeat and contacted my same friend who replaced the cooling fan.  I dropped it off a few days later, and was messaged the following day saying he had fixed it.  Initial scans proved him right.  MSE, Malwarebytes or SUPER reported no errors.  Fantastic!

I get home and am still very weary of the whole thing, despite things looking clean.  I decided to install another malware protector just to be sure, this time it was AVG Free 2012, which helped remove this same virus from another forum member.  The AVG scan showed one backdoor trojan.  Well fuck.  I had it removed but of course I expected it to remain.  Another scan showed nothing.  I tried every other program I had and everything showed up clean.  I sighed a brief bit of relief, despite still being a bit weary.  A few days go by without issue, which helped to mostly alleviate any ill thoughts.  I then realized I hadn’t played Tribes: Ascend in quite a while, so I fired it up only to see an error with the HiRez patching service.  I figured something may have gotten messed up in the firewall settings, so I decided to simply reinstall the entire game.

The reinstall worked and the game fired up.  I noticed however that a few things were…off.  For starters my mouse lagged quite a bit on the UI screens.  And the default resolution just wasn’t right (ultra high, and stretched horizontally).  Oh well, I normally play the game on minimal anyways so surely that’ll get things back in order.  Setting things to Minimal didn’t really improve the mouse lag, but I entered a game anyways without thinking too much of it.  I quickly realized the lag was present in-game too.  According to fraps I was getting around 10-12 fps.  On minimal!  Something just wasn’t right…

Before firing up T:A I’d been playing Legions quite a bit without any issues.  Mount & Blade: Warband also worked fine.  Initially I thought this was due to me losing my custom .ini config, which I had since early beta.  I searched and searched for any decent configs but they still didn’t improve my fps that much.  The Minecraft was probably okay, but there’s no way in hell I’m playing like that.  Especially when the game ran fine previously.  Throughout all this I noticed one other peculiar thing: my fan wasn’t running nearly as fast as it used to be.  I checked to be sure the game was using the ‘high performance NVIDIA processor’ instead of on-board graphics, and sure enough it was.  At least, that’s what the settings told me.

I decided to fire up Day of Defeat: Source to see how that ran, but was greeted with a message from Steam saying my graphics card wasn’t supported, and that the game might not run as well.  It then went on to display the card it was trying to use: Intel HD Graphics, which was the on-board card.  By now I quickly piece things together and realize my games simply weren’t using the right graphics card.  The device manager had it listed, and displayed that it was working properly.  I reinstalled the latest drivers for it but it didn’t help at all.  For some reason my laptop wasn’t using the my nVidia 310m at all, nor was any game even recognizing it, despite being set to use it.  Something definitely got messed up during the virus takeover, either through my attempts at removing it or my friend’s.

I contacted another friend about the issue, who told me to download the default drivers for both cards, then uninstall them both from the laptop.  I restarted, installed the factory drivers and…it still wouldn’t recognize the 310m.  A few more experiments proved pointless.  Around 6 hours into everything my friend suggested a very drastic move: reformatting the hard drive.  At the very start of all this I was against that, but at hour 6?  Well, why the fuck not?  I thought about it for a while and realized I have nothing really important on this laptop, other than a few files for school which I simply sent to my GMail account.  Everything else can go if it means I have a working laptop.  So at 8:30pm lastnight I started the process of reformatting my laptop.

Overall it was definitely worth it.  For starters, I can safely assume the virus is definitely gone now.  A few other issues I had with the laptop are now fixed.  Tribes: Ascend is now using the correct graphics card, and I have a shitload of space now.  Unfortunately this meant I lost everything else, including my beloved InstantAction archive of goodies.  It was well over a gig’s worth of content, but it’s time to say goodbye to all that.  I have a working laptop now, and it’s essentially like the day I got it.  I am happy, and will be extremely cautious on what I click on from now on (even though I was before).

Firefall Closed Beta Impressions – NDA Lifted

This is all based on 8-10 hours of playing in the open world.  I don’t have enough experience in PVP to write about it.

When Red5 Studios revealed Firefal at PAX 2010, I was immediately interested. The game had, at the time, some strong Tribes-vibes to it. There were several references to ‘tribes’ on the game’s official website, along with having Scott Youngbllod on board. To those not aware of Youngblood, he was the lead designer for Starsiege: Tribes (1998) and Tribes 2 (2001). I first heard about the game over at the TribalWar forums since one of its members was also working on the game. As a long-time Tribes player it isn’t that hard to see why I, or any other Tribes fan, may be interested in a game based merely on these few facts.

Once we finally saw some gameplay footage my interest remained, despite seeing that the game wasn’t very Tribes-like at all. Red5 has called it a spiritual successor to Tribes in an interview or two, which I guess would make sense if we’re looking at the Tribes franchise before ‘skiing’ took over. It’s more akin to Global Agenda and Team Fortress 2 than what Tribes evolved into.

I still immediately signed up on their forums, since doing so automatically signed you up to be part of the closed beta. I stayed interested in the game for a while; several months I suppose. I was moderately active on the forums during this time as well. However, with no word on when the beta would start I began losing interest. Months passed unti it was a year after the initial announcement and the closed beta had finally began, with me being one of the lucky few who got in.

Firefall’s closed beta started out, well, incredibly rocky. I think a lot of other testers would agree that it was more of an alpha build than beta. It was riddled with bugs; to the point where it was almost unplayable. I got a measly 12 fps during my first test, despite lowering it to the lowest settings possible. Since the game streamed and loaded all of the textures as they came into view, this only added to the already noticable lag.  It took several attempts before I could even get into a game to lower the graphics, mind you.  For some strange reason it set everything to Ultra High.  I had mere seconds to access the video settings before the client would crash.  Once I finally set it to lower settings it was generally crash-free.

Things really didn’t change over the next few tests. We were only given access to the PVP game mode, which to be honest wasn’t my main interest. I wanted to explore the open world, like we saw during the many gameplay demos with developer commentaries at PAX and later conventions. For a game that had been in development for several years prior, it certainly didn’t feel like one.  I know its harsh to say something like that for a beta, but it really was that bad for a lot of players.  Being on a brand new engine probably had quite a bit to do with this.  I doubt they could optimize things in time to provide a smooth ride for everyone.

With PVP being the only game mode, not-so-great hardware optimization, and lacking any kind of Tribes feel, I decided to wait a while for them to polish things up a bit before trying again. It wasn’t until they released the open world content that I finally decided to fire the game back up, and I was honestly surprised by how much things had improved. My fps had more than doubled, and I no longer had to play on the lowest graphical settings. The lag was (and still is) definitely still there though. I explored the open world not really knowing what the hell I was supposed to do, and decided to just follow a group of players who were slaughtering some creatures.

The weapons felt decent, though I admittedly have yet to fully explore each class. The Assault Battleframe has been pretty fun to play with, so I’ve stuck with that and the Dreadnaught class for the time being. The Assault’s Plasma Cannon is essentially Firefall’s spinfusor.  A slow, blue projectile weapon that explodes upon impact and will probably become the game’s most iconic weapon. All the other weapons are fairly generic (assualt rifle, sniper rifle, healing gun, etc). Each weapon also features a secondary mode. For the Plasma Cannon it basically turns it into a Flak Cannon, while the Assault Rifle just gives you iron sites (something I’ve never really enjoyed in FPS’, but not an issue).

Movement-wise, things are pretty much your standard shooter layout. Sprinting feels quite weak, but I’m pretty sure this can be upgraded. Pulling off abilities like the Crater is quite effective against enemies; at least the smaller ones. Gliders can be fun to use, assuming you don’t go face-first into the ground shortly after taking off.  But it isn’t that hard to get used to the controls. I found gliders to be an excellent means of transportation, more-so than I expected, mainly because it truly is an open world without invisible boundaries (…mostly). The unfortunate thing about them is that they’re only available at certain ‘launch’ pads, which are scattered throughout each city.  From my experience I’ve found them to be too scarce; maybe one or two per city. It’d be nice if we could deploy them at-will when jumping off a cliff. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this as a Battleframe upgrade.  The jetpacks are also quite weak, but this is likely due to playing Tribes for so many a years.  Jetpacks were crucial in Tribes, whereas in Firefall they merely exist to get onto higher ledges.  While Tribes is a game where you’ll be spending the majority of your time in the air, Firefall is most definitely a ground shooter.

Back to the group I played with. I found this to be a lot more fun than I originally thought it’d be. I didn’t know it at the time, but if invited you can join a party and share XP.  I likely knew this back when the game was first revealed but totally forgot about it.  The party leader can then create waypoints which will show up on each party member’s HUD. THIS is how the game should be played; with a group. Going out on your own is rather boring. Being with your own small army is just fun, and required when taking on more advanced enemies or when trying to protect a Thumper.  Firefall is a game meant to be played with a group of friends, or even just a group of strangers. That said, it’s quite strange (and unfortunate) how there’s no friends list functionality in the game. I also noticed that XP gain with a party is either non-functional or incredibly low. I saw no noticeable difference in progress while leveling up when playing by myself or with a party.

As for the enemies in Firefall, they vary from moderately smart to incredibly and utterly retarded.  The game features a variety of enemies, from bugs that have a very Starship Troopers feel, to The Chosen which are humanoid soldiers.  The bugs are quite weak unless surrounded by a large variety of them (some fly, some spit acid, some simply gnaw at your body).  Larger creatures have abilities than can make things a bit difficult when mining, such as becoming fire bombs or turning into giant bowling balls.  But again, if you’re with a group you shouldn’t have a problem.  The Chosen on the other hand…I’m not sure what’s up with them.  At times they can be very dangerous.  Their weapons can take down lighter classes within seconds if you don’t find cover.  But a lot of the time you’ll encounter a group of Chosen soldiers who don’t do a damn thing.  You can literally walk up to them and just fire away without any problems.  You’ll often hear them whisper threatening remarks which can admittedly get a bit creepy, but when you can empty entire rounds into them knowing they won’t fire back, they just become laughable.  Whether or not this is tied to some leveling system I can’t say.  As I said before, they can be dangerous.  It’s just not very often.

Throughout my time with the game I’ve picked up several items along the way but had no real idea what to do with them. The game lacks any kind of tutorial, so while your inventory fills up with Crystite and other items, the game fails to tell you what to do with them exactly. I managed to figure out on my own how to upgrade my Battleframe and buy a better Plasma Cannon, however this is all assuming the stations actually work when accessing them. Many times I found the station screens to not show up at all. When they did it wasn’t uncommon to be stuck at a loading animation, only to be told it couldn’t sync up properly.  Since bringing the servers online 24/7 I’ve found things have improved, though I still have a few issues with the UI here and there.  But it’s the lack of information on what I just picked up that irks me the most, or how it affects my Battleframe/gameplay.

The health and ammo system is refreshing for a first-person shooter these days.  For starters, the game lacks any kind of health regeneration, which seems to have taken over the gaming industry within the last few years.  This means that damage taken during battles actually matters.  You can’t just goes balls first into a fight, get 80% of your health taken away and expect it to magically come back if you simply hide for 10 seconds.  Your secondary weapons have infinite ammo as well, which also means they’re considerably weaker than your primary weapon.  I’ve resorted to using them when taking down enemy structures from a distance.  Sure it takes a bit longer than using your main weapon, but with infinite ammo it isn’t an issue.  If you do need more health or ammo, you can either find a resource station or call down ammo/health packs if you built them at the appropriate station.

So now, roughly 6 months after the beta started, the game still feels like an early beta build with a number of bugs. Lag and UI issues are my biggest complaint I’d say right now, though there were times where I’d get stuck in the terrain as well. No friends list feature or tutorial system is a downer, but will surely come eventually.  The health and ammo systems are nice, but the generally dumb enemy AI doesn’t put them to their full use.  To those Tribes fans interested in the game and are expecting something similar, you’re better off sticking with Ascend or checking out other Tribes clones. It’s nothing like Tribes. Is that a bad thing? Not at all. If things continue to get ironed out I will likely play both Firefall and Tribes: Ascend. Despite my many complaints and issues with the game, there’s no other game quite like Firefall right now.  Plus, no one should forget that this is still in beta.  This has merely been my experience while testing it, and shouldn’t be looked at as a review.

I am considering making another post talking specifically about the world itself, and may finally plunge into PVP.

Thoughts on Tribes: Ascend Releasing

The community is pretty much in unanimous agreement about releasing Tribes: Ascend a month from now: too soon, Hi-Rez.  Being a F2P game pretty much guarantees that Hi-Rez will actively update Ascend on a fairly regular basis, offering new stuff to buy and such.  It’s the only way they’ll be making money, after all.  It’s also the only way to keep a lot of players interested in the game; they need to keep it ‘fresh’, considering user-made content is obviously a no-go (prayin’ for a map maker though).

However, releasing the game so soon means Hi-Rez is pretty much done making major changes to the game, and feel everything from overall balance, function and physics are correct.  This goes for weapons, maps and the player models themselves.  While a somewhat small but vocal minority were rooting for 100% projectile inheritance, I’m much more concerned and disappointed that we likely won’t see any buffs to disc jumps.  As I’ve said in the past several times, this has been a complaint of mine since day one.  Neither their early buffs or later perks helped improve player impulse.  It’s crazy going back to games like Legions: Overdrive or Tribes 1 and being able to actually propel yourself from a standstill.

The optimist in me is hopeful we’ll get some crazy updates during the next few weeks, including disc jump buffs.  And Hi-Rez have shown they can push out a large number of updates within a short amount of time, and have also listened to quite a bit of our feedback. Sans disc jump complaints, sadly.  But their planned outlook seems to suggest otherwise:

1) Stability and performance
2) Fix annoying issues and bugs such as deadstops, etc (including some things that feel bad at higher ping).
3) Private servers
4) Improved social/friends features
5) New and better maps

While all of those are awesome, nothing about physics tweaks is mentioned.  Neither is demo functionality, unfortunately, which was stated as ‘coming soon’ back on December 4th.  I just wish we were given the chance to at least test things like 100% inheritance, improved jetpacks, and better discjumps.  Instead all of that was left for their internal testers to figure out, who made quite a number of questionable decisions for the game only to be rectified once the actual players got their hands on it.

Copacabana

Over the past 3 days I’ve been battling a pretty nasty cold.  I fought this exact same bug a few months ago, shortly after starting this semester of college.  I am convinced that I got the bug from school, but where I got it from doesn’t really matter I guess.  What sucks is that I have a bit of work ahead of me within the next few days, seeing as next week is my last for the semester.  Thankfully most of it deals with either writing or creating a few Powerpoint slides, so at least it won’t be very challenging.

Within this week I’ve also lost a lot of interest in Tribes: Ascend, and I can’t really explain why.  It wasn’t a gradual process, but more of a sudden ‘this game now bores me’ type of feeling.  I played in a match today and not a single fuck was given throughout the entire match.  Win, lose.  Didn’t matter.  Just wanted it to end shortly after we started playing.  I have no interest in PUGs either, mainly because as I said before, they aren’t exactly open to new stuff(Temple, larger teams, etc).

So today brought two games I never thought I’d play for at least a few more months.  The first game I fired up was Minecraft.  I don’t look at patch notes or when a new update is pushed out.  If the game asks me to update, I update blindly.  This means I’ll likely experience something completely new and unsuspecting, which is what happened the last time I fired up the game.  At times it can be a bit frightening, but equally refreshing.  Unfortunately I didn’t spot anything new this time, but then again I really didn’t explore that much.  I might fire it up after publishing this post and continue where I left off.

The other game I played today was Firefall.  I downloaded the client a few weeks ago but didn’t know when tests were held, so I forgot about it until today.  I started the client and saw that a patch was available for download, which didn’t surprise me at all.  The size was fairly large, and it finished downloading just in time for the servers to open up.  The main reason I stopped playing Firefall was because of the game’s performance.  Without breaking NDA or anything, lets just say it wasn’t what I’d call ‘playable’.  Fast forward a few months later to tonight, the game has progressed significantly.  It’s to the point where I actually want to play the game, and look forward to testing it again.

As for my Raptr woes…well…they’ve progressed.  The client still isn’t detecting Tribes: Ascend, which I guess is a non-issue at this point.  One of the developers contacted me after seeing my blog and walked me through a number of steps to help sorts things out.  Unfortunately it did nothing.  Not only that, but the most recent update to Raptr has a fairly major annoyance, at least to me.  Previously, I’d simply double-click on the Raptr icon in my task bar and the IM client would pop up.  But now when I click on it it opens up a window displaying all of my game information, which I don’t want to read because I don’t use the client for that stuff anymore.  All I use is the IM client to talk with friends.  This may or may not be an option I can toggle.  Either way, it’s just another annoyance I’ve had to deal with.

edit: After starting up Raptr again, it doesn’t seem to pop up the window anymore.  Odd, but I’m not complaining.

Games and stuffs.

HiRez Studios recently took Bella Omega off of the map rotation in Tribes: Ascend.  Bella had always been the black sheep of the bunch, for reasons I don’t think anyone can really pin-point.  The map’s main draw was its unique emphasis on generators, but each change seemed to remove a bit of their importance.  Even then, I can’t really remember a time when taking them down changed anything significant.  Cappers knew routes whether the forcefields were up or not, and could get out fairly easy if there was enough offensive pressure.  In PUBs it was easy as hell since no one liked playing defense.  Probably my favorite part of the entire map, the basement, was removed in its last updated version.

It just doesn’t seem like HiRez knows what to do with Bella, and I don’t think anyone has the answer for them because even they don’t know what to do with it.  The generator play is fun as an Infiltrator, but other than that the map is just very bland and mediocre.  The terrain changes haven’t done anything to spice things up(is it snow?  sand?  gold?  Does anyone really care?).  The last two versions of the map have made the generators fairly useless due to how open the flag stand is.  Honestly, I’d be fine with them scrapping 90% of the map and keeping the same name.

While everyone has focused their discussions around the bases, forcefields and generators, I honestly think the terrain itself may be a bigger factor in the grand scheme of things.  It’s one of the few things that hasn’t really changed since its introduction.  The alpha version was incredibly flat compared to the one beta testers have been playing on.  If they make it any hillier they might as well just remake Iceridge and be done with it.

It’s unfortunate that the majority of ‘serious’ Tribes players dislike Temple Ruins.  It’s by far the biggest map so far and has plenty of hills; a seemingly perfect combination for a Tribes map.  Yet, it’s been called too big and too easy to get going fast on.  These same players seem to prefer a much smaller and faster-paced style of gameplay(LT, essentially), as opposed to larger and more complex battles(base).  They have a set of rules, one of which is to not exceed playing anything more than 9v9′s.  With a rule like that it’s no real mystery why Temple is boring to them.  We did try one game of 12v12, which was fairly enjoyable in my opinion.  It wasn’t nearly as serious as previous games, which is likely the best thing to do on such a map.  Just have a fun time on it and don’t take it too seriously.

Another reason why they likely don’t enjoy it right now is merely because it’s new.  Legions and Starsiege: Tribes both had this issue, especially Tribes.  The same group of players would play the same maps over and over again, mastering every square inch of it.  If a new guy came in wanting to play a map the group never really played regularly, the entire group would complain and they’d likely continue playing the same maps they’re used to.  But I think the team limit thing is a bigger issue right now.  Limiting it to 9v9s when you have over 50 people wanting to play is somewhat retarded.   Some variety would be nice, instead of the usual Kata-Drydock-Kata-Drydock nights.

Other than Tribes, I may or may not be getting back into Legions.  It got a pretty awesome update today: demos.  I was messing with the speed controls a bit, and with a freecam it could provide some pretty awesome videos.  I just wish the game had more players.  A lot more players.  I also wish I knew what ‘completed’ meant to the team.  Until then, they refuse to advertise.  I’m thinking this is likely just an excuse not to advertise because they know it’s futile, but I could be wrong.  We’ve been hearing this since the very beginning with no details on what they have planned for advertising, which leads me to believe they have no actual plans.  They also added some new maps to the rotation, but again, somewhat pointless due to the low playerbase.