Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

I don't really understand Steam trading cards. I know they appear in my Steam inventory when I play games and I am vaguely aware that they come in sets which can be collected to make something else ( badges apparently ). I have never made a badge and I never even been fortunate enough to acquire a complete set. In fact I don't think that is even without actively buying cards. I would happily ignore the whole business except for the fact that they are trade-able. Trading cards can be bought and sold on the Steam community market for real money (well actually Steam credit but given that I have an ongoing healthy expenditure on games it amounts to the same thing). Every time you examine a trading card in your inventory it tells you how much similar cards are selling for on the Steam market. This causes me angst. There is a market out there with buyers and sellers. There is money to be made and money to be lost.  I image that Gevlon Goblin , if he ever discovers the Steam market

They say you feel hungy again an hour after finishing a Chinese take away and that is sort of how I feel about Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor. I really enjoyed the game but now that I have just finished it I am not sure if it will leave any lasting memories. The game play, the setting and the whole presentation are absolutely terrific but overall it is a collection of fun gaming activities rather than a massive integrated work. The story itself (of the game not of Lord of the Rings) is fairly forgettable which doesn't help but I actually think the enormous freedom the game give you also contributes to this lack of overall purpose. Come to think of it I felt very similarly about finishing Far Cry 3. Perhaps this is a feature of what are being described as Ubisoft style open world games. Another gripe is that the game forgoes a final epic boss fight in lieu of a sequence of quick time events (press X to not die sort of thing). This is a let down in my opinion and is somewhat su

Over-clocking the Ageing CPU was the final stage required to bring my ageing gaming rig up to 2015 specification. Original post here:  http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/11/extending-life-of-my-gaming-pc.htmlhttp://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/11/extending-life-of-my-gaming-pc.html Earlier trials had proven my i5-760 had plenty of over-clocking headroom while maintaining stability but that the stock Intel heat-sink was unable to dissipate the additional heat generated. A  Zalman CPS10X   heatsink addressed that problem for a modest €26 additional investment. Zero points for neat cabling but at least the airways are clear.  I had taken  measurements well and fitting the large heatsink posed no real problems although it took a while because I had to remove the motherboard to fit a rear retaining plate. The i5-760 has a factory locked multiplier so over-clocking is a trade-off that requires adjustments to cpu, ram and IMC voltages and timings. I used the utiliti

This is third in a series of updates about the steps I am taking to extend the life of my gaming PC. You can read the original post  http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/11/extending-life-of-my-gaming-pc.html My error in buying a 64Gb standard SSD rather than a dedicated cache drive means I have to look for separate caching software. Owners of newer Intel motherboards may be able to avail of Intel's Smart Response caching service but I have to look for a third party solution and the two leading contenders seem to be Romex Software's PrimoCache and EliteBytes VeloSSD . There is only one desktop version of Primocache and the cheapest single computer personal license is $29.99. This doesn't appear to have restrictions in terms of number of disks or disk size and it supports two level caching (ram and SSD). The base version of Velossd does not support ram caching but they offer a new product MaxVeloSSD which offers two level caching and is directly comparable to Pri

Nvidia are giving away free  Ubisoft games with their GTX970/980 video cards and I chose Assassin's Creed Unity. Eighteenth century Paris was too tempting a prize to turn down. There is a lot of forum discontent about the game because the initial release was apparently badly optimised and buggy in places. The  minimum system specs are huge but Nvidia cards seem to fare better than AMD in this game so I reckoned that AC Unity was a good a way to test my recent upgrades . I have only played for about an hour so far but I am delighted to say that the game is running very smoothly so far. I am playing in Very High quality, 1680x1050, 60fps with Vsync on. I am a little surprised at it running so well because my ageing cpu is below minimum spec. No evidence of glitches or stuttering yet. Fingers crossed. I am even more delighted to say that the rendition of 18th century Paris is absolutely stunning.   The clothes, the architecture and the furniture are completely gorgeous and the cit

Original post here:  http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/11/extending-life-of-my-gaming-pc.html The parts I have ordered to extend the life of my gaming PC are beginning to come in. First up was the additional 4Gb memory. Although I bought these second hand to keep costs down they turned out to have almost identical specifications and timings to the memory already in place. This could be useful for over-clocking of which more later. The second part to arrive was my Inno3D GTX 970. I haven't had much opportunity to play with it yet but I am very impressed so far. Shadows of Mordor on my HD5850 benched at 42fps average with medium settings. The GTX970 is hitting over 120 fps with the same settings a 3x improvement. It manages 100+ fps with ease in very high settings. In practise I always enable Vsync for gaming so the practical implication of this is that I can play modern games at 60fps again having gotten used to settling for 30fps on the HD5850. This uses a non referenc

Over the last few weeks I have found myself getting  sucked in to Shadow of Mordor. I don't normally indulge in recently released AAA games but the combination of Tolkien and Arkham was enough to convince me this one time.  The game ambience owes more perhaps to Petr Jackson than to Tolkien and it is unusually violent (albeit the spouting blood is all Orcish black). Nevertheless I am enjoying it greatly.  I have seen this style of game called "Ubisoft like Open World"  similar to the recent Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games. You have a beautiful open world to explore with many optional side-quests and mini games in addition to a main quest line.  I have also seen criticism of the repetitiveness of it all.  Shadow of Mordor does have many repetitive elements and yet it offers a large range of different game play opportunities. When you are first thrust into the world the  vast array of things to do is quite over-whelming. You gradually learn how it all work

Update here:  http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/12/extending-life-of-my-gaming-pc-update.html Further update here:  http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/12/pc-update-3-ssd-caching-software.html Yet another update:  http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/12/pc-update-final-piece-of-puzzle.html I realised it was time to upgrade my gaming PC when I read the minimum specifications for Far Cry 4 : Win7 64bit Intel i5-750 4Gb Ram Radeon HD5850 1Gb  I have a marginally faster i5-760 but otherwise this describes my PC perfectly.  Very few games have such steep system requirements yet but I suspect that FarCry 4 and the even more demanding Assassin's Creed Unity may be the fore runners of a new wave of hardware hungry games. For the last few years system requirements have been held artificially low by the need to support last gen consoles and the 32 bit memory limit. Now Xbox one and PS 4 are firmly established and the 32 bit limit has been breached. So

My trusty Radeon HD5850 has served me well since 2011 but the time has come for an upgrade. I have long been a fan of Tom's Hardware recommendations and the Nvidia GTX970 which offers great performance  with low power consumption is tempting me at the moment..The   video card performance hierarchy chart at the back of Tom's guide sparked a bit of nostalgia so I have used the chart to plot the cards I have used over the years to power my gaming hobby. Here is my personal video card history (all credit to Toms Hardware guide  http://www.tomshardware.com/t/graphics/ for providing such a useful chart): The image is large so be prepared to zoom in and pan around a bit.  EDIT: Graphic now fixed. It was harder than I thought it would be to convert a large table in Word into a picture file.  The dates are the years that I recall acquiring each card which is not always the year that model came out. Some allowance has to be made for hazy recollection but I thi

Hostile Waters: A bout of Nostalgia cause me to drag out this overlooked classic from yesteryear. Medal of Honour Warfighter: I will generally play any shooter good or bad but I am struggling to finish this one. The execution is competent if unoriginal but to be honest the game feels over the top racist to me. Brutal Legend:  I played a couple of hours of this was was reasonably impressed but other games have since distracted me. Enslaved: Odyssey to the West - An unexpected pleasure a short third person action adventure with a good story and fun gameplay. As a bonus the PC version comes with an extra adventure "Pigsy's Perfect 10" which has a completely different play style based more on stealth and guile than strength and athleticism. The only downside is that your sidekick for the main campaign is an annoying beyond belief at times and does everything possible to put themselves in dangerous situations which you are left to sort out. The fact that this sidekick

I am trying to figure out why I hated the ending of Mass Effect 3 so much. (Spoilers abound). I played the game several years after release and I had the benefit of the extended edition patch so I didn't feel the pressure to engage in forced multi-player or to buy unwanted dlc that so incensed early players. Merely by playing the game the way I wanted to I managed to amass a high enough score to unlock all endings.  I can understand why the perception of forced dlc and forced multiplayer upset people when the game was initially released but these were not my concerns. My dislike is more fundamental and has to do with the ending itself. It made me think about the relationship between games and stories and about the conflict between narrative and agency. Mass Effect is a monumental role playing game series that offers the player many choices about how they develop their character and how they interact with the game world. This gives the player a tremendous feeling of age

I regularly have two documents open on my screen and I try to make notes in one while I read the other. Having  a big widescreen monitor helps. Twin monitors are even better but there is an annoying windows feature that slows things up. Only one window can be active at a time (has focus) and if you want to do anything to the other window you must activate it by clicking it. Typically this means clicking a window to scroll up the text then clicking the other window to start typing again. It doesn't sound like much but the constant switching of focus disrupts my work flow and inevitably I get it wrong occasionally and try to type in the wrong place. WizMouse from Antibody software is a simple, fix for this with an unlimited free trial. When it is active then the mouse wheel controls the window under the pointer WITHOUT CHANGING FOCUS. In practise this allows you to keep typing away in the active window while using the mouse wheel to scroll through the other window. Brilliant.

For a time in the last decade, there was a sense that an immersive 3D communal place was a substantial thing unto itself, and likely to become an important media offering. That has not happened. Instead, we've seen an unbundling of the parts of virtual worlds. Sociality went to Facebook. Complex heroic stories went to single-player games. Multiplayer combat went to places like DOTA and Clash of Clans. Economy games went to Farmville and the F2P clones. Virtual currency went to Bitcoin.  Edward Castronova final post on Terra Nova, 25th September 2014 This succinct analysis strikes a poignant chord with me. Having grown up with 1980's Sci Fi I have always had a secret hankering for Gibsonesque virtual worlds that would allow humans to escape from the tethers of the physical world. For a brief moment in time it seemed that mmorpgs might be the first tentative steps towards making those virtual worlds a reality. Sure they were games but they were also so much more than games. Th

I have been re-playing a bit of Spellforce-Order of Dawn this last week. I find it curiously compelling even though I can't really recommend it to a modern audience. The rts/rpg hybrid gameplay was probably innovative back in 2003 but the game feels dated today. Moreover it plays very very slowly. A key feature of the game is that your character and accompanying army spend a lot of time just walking slowly around large maps to find enemies and other objectives. A curious design decision is that every time you load a game or use a fast travel portal the entire map covers with fog of war again. This means that unless you have a photographic memory the only way to search a map properly is to walk the whole map area in one long (an hour or more) session without quitting the game and without availing of any fast travel abilities. The game is also rather easy (played on normal at any rate) and encourages a turtling strategy. It is very easy to defend your base from sporadic enemy attac

In the last month I have played about twenty different games. Rather I should say I started to play about twenty different games. In some cases I stuck with the game to the end of the campaign. In others I gave up with no intention of going back but there is a third category of game which just  got sidelined when my attention wandered to something else. These games remain in my "to be played list". Analysing the list it breaks down like this: A. Games I am currently actively playing: 1 B. Games that I played to the end of the campaign I started: 6 C. Unfinished games on hold that I will probably get back to: 4 D. Unfinished games I am unlikely to go back to: 9 Categories A and B are not really problematic except to comment that I really like finishing games. Those games in category B where I have finished a campaign give me warm fuzzy feelings. Given that the large number of unfinished games in categories C and D might seem worrisome. Ten years ago I would have been h

Splinter Cell Blacklist offers three distinct playstyles: Ghost mode where you focus on stealth and non lethal take-downs, Panther mode which combines stealth with lethal take-downs and Assault mode which is guns blazing shoot outs. Different weapons and perks cater to each style and you are more or less encouraged to focus on one style.  Happily though you are not forced to stick to one style and I don't think that you miss out on any story elements by swapping between styles. This is important to me partly because I like variety but also because I tend to engage in a bit of subtle role playing in a game like this. I won't choose a course of action just to get the next achievement but instead I like to act in manner fitting with the protagonists mind set. When highly trained special agent Sam Fisher encounters a humble security guard just going about his job it makes sense that he would try to sneak past unobserved or at worst put the guard to sleep for a while. On the othe

Is "The Bureau" a bad game or has it just been judged to an impossibly high standard? Firaxis's 2012 reboot of the iconic series XCOM, Enemy Unknown met with universal praise so why did "2k Marin's 2013 tactical shooter set in the same universe receive such lukewarm reviews? After reading some of those unflattering reviews I approached the game with hesitation. Now having played for a little over an hour I am confused.  I have only completed the long introductory chapter and one real mission but what I have seen so far is wonderful. This doesn't feel like a bad game. This feels like a superbly crafted great game. When does it start to fall apart?  The atmosphere so far is terrific. There is a beautifully constructed 1950's vibe going on with hard smoking square jawed men and women in severe suits who working for a mysterious government agency which is the last chance to save the earth from alien invaders. Lots of sound effects and incidental detail

I recently played the Minerva's den DLC for Bioshock 2 and greatly enjoyed it which prompted me to get the Season pass for Bioshock Infinite which included Burial at Sea parts 1 and 2. Minerva's Den is a very fun stand alone adventure set in the Bioshock 2 Universe. It is has a self contained story about a scientist who invented the computing machine which controls much of Rapture's infrastructure (the Thinker) but who was double crossed by his partner. The story is well developed and engaging and the gameplay is fun too. It is intended for people who have already played Bioshock 2 so the difficulty level is reasonably challenging but you get a few new weapons and plasmids to play with which gives it a bit of variety. Burial at sea episode 1 is an add on for Bioshock Infinite which brings Elizabeth and Booker DeWitt from Columbia into the world of Rapture. I found the gameplay very challenging but a lot of the blame for this is down to my stubborn insistence on sticking

I and my family have just returned from a multi week vacation around the USA during which Google Now proved invaluable time and time again: 1. It became an essential navigation tool whether travelling by car, by public transport or on foot. Its accurate prediction of bus and train times was particularly impressive and it generally offered a choice of routes. 2. It proved invaluable for its ability to locate nearby services:  "OK Google where is the nearest Post Office" etc. 3. It magically extracted details of flights, car hire and hotel reservations from my email and provided updates and useful reminders such as "You should leave at such and such a time to get to this flight". 4. It provided weather information about our current location as well as our home. 5. It provided up to date currency exchange rates 6. It provided us with tourist information about popular sites near our current location the clicking of which would provide further information inc

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein

Apps are all very well but sometimes you just need a short-cut to a bunch of files in a folder. Android doesn't have any built in method of doing this so you need to rely on a third party app. The one most commonly recommended for this purpose these days seems to be ES File Explorer. This is a powerful file manager so chances are you will find lots of other uses for it but here are quick instructions on how to use ES file manager to create a short-cut to an Android folder on your home screen. 1. Grab ES File Explorer File Manager from the Google Play store. 2. Make sure you have place on your home screen for at least one standard size icon before you begin. 3. Run ES File Explorer and navigate to the folder you wish to create a short-cut to. 4. Long press the folder (it should highlight with a tick). 5. From the menu at the bottom of the screen select "More". 6. Press "Add to Desktop"   and you are done. 7. Go back to your home screen and the short-cut

Dropbox and Google drive are great for storing stuff if you have an internet connection but both of them use cloud storage and only download a temporary versions of files when you access them. Sometimes it is useful to keep a permanent offline version particularly if you are going to be without an internet connection for a while. The app Folder Downloader for Dropbox  does exactly what it says on the tin.It downloads an offline copy of any Dropbox folder.  The app  is straightforward to use and does not require any dodgy permissions. 1. Grab Folder Downloader for Dropbox from the Google Play Store 2. Make sure you have Dropbox installed on your Android device and that you are logged in. 3. Run folder downloader. Initially it will ask for permission to access Dropbox so say yes. 4. Now Folder Downloader should be showing you your Dropbox files. Navigate to the folder you want to download and click "Download all to". 5. The screen changes to your Android device fol

I am having a love hate relationship with Witcher 2 at the moment. I love the detailed world, the gritty characters and rich storytelling in many of the quests. I hate ... well let me give you an example of what I hate. Last night I started playing the game in the hope of knocking off a few of the side quests that had accumulated in my log. An hour and a half later when I switched off the game to go to bed I was only half way through a single trivial noticeboard task called "The Nekker Contract". Here is what that task entailed: I got a quest from a noticeboard which explained that the woods near the town are infested with  Nekkers, aggressive goblin like creatures who attack in groups.  Geralt decides to put an end to this menace by finding and destroying the Nekker nests. The nests aren't marked on the map so I had to wander around the very confusing forest until I blundered across one. Witcher 2's useless rotating mini-map was no help at all. Once I found a nes

Alien Rage: Am old fashioned corridor shooter with up to date graphics and great meaty weapons. What is not to love? Well lots apparently because it got mediocre reviews but I really enjoyed it. There is nothing very original about the game but so what? It is great fun. To the Moon: This is more of an interactive story than a game but it tells a good story and it tells it very well. Be warned it's a love story and a tear jerker at that. The Witcher 2: Finally gotten around to installing this and starting it. Twenty hours played and still enjoying it but I am still in the first settlement. After a very action packed opening with a huge siege battle and and dragon the pace slowed down considerably. I did have one boss fight with a giant Octopus but I found it more annoying than epic. Age of Wonders: An old classic that appears to be one of the inspirations for Kings Bounty. There is plenty of clever tactics required and the game-play quickly distracts you form the ancient graph

Having enjoyed Black Ops 2 a few weeks back I am now sampling another Call of Duty title I missed first time around: Call of Duty World at War. The game is enjoyable so far and being a World War 2 game it feels closer to the series' roots than the Modern Warfare and Black Ops games. My enjoyment of the game was initially hampered due to my foolishly selecting a high difficulty level. Missions became exercises in repetitive frustration as I died over and over at each choke point. Playing in such a frustrating fashion reveals several of the flaws that have existed in every Call of Duty game since the beginning: The games give you the illusion that you are fighting huge battles along with many of your colleagues but in reality the only person the enemy cares about is you. Every sharpshooter and machine gunner on the opposing side will aim directly at you  a split second after you pop your head up and there is little point trying to manoeuvre to a hidden spot because they instantly k

I have been over dosing on first person shooting over the last few weeks with  single player runs through Jericho and Timeshift (both from 2007)  along with the more recent Call of Duty : Black Ops 2 (2012 I have written about  Jericho already, a second rate game to be sure but one that I enjoyed none the less. You can read more of my thoughts here:  http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/04/clive-barkers-jericho-seven-years-on.html Timeshift came out at almost exactly the same time as Jericho to somewhat better reviews. Timeshift does have better graphics and more varied gameplay that Jericho but it wasn't good enough to survive comparison with the ground-breaking Crysis which was released around the same time.  Timeshift's main claim to fame is a suit which allows the player to slow, stop or even run time backwards for a short period. You can use these features anywhere in the game. In theory this would appear to open up all kinds of interesting game-play possib