Purchased!

All right!  Picked up BF:BC2 on my lunch hour.  Let's see how quickly I can get the wife to bed tonight so I can get an early start playing!!! 

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

As I recall, Battlefield:Bad Company came out about 7 or 8 months after COD:MW. By that time, I had been a level 55 (no prestige for me!) for about 5 months, had a 1.65 k/d and the game had gotten a little stale so I was ripe for a change. I LOVED BF:BC and couldn't understand why my clan at the time (other than a select few members) never embraced it. I played BF:BC for about 5 months until Left4Dead came out and haven't picked it up since.  

I've been eagerly awaiting BF:BC2 which is released today and I look forward to spending a ton of time on it. It's been released a bit too soon for me as I am not quite tired of MW2 (just got to 70 the other day, again, no prestige for me!), but I'm on the BF FoF tag and I know I'll have plenty of people to play with.

One big problem with BF:BC2 as well as the downloadable BF:1943 and even the BF:BC2 demo is the lobby issues where your squad gets split  and you end up on another squad or even on the other team.  I don't believe this is a bug but it's a money saving feature for EA.  Battlefield is server based, not p2p like MW2.  EA spends big $$$ renting servers needed to handle the load of players so it is in their interest to get a group of people into a game ASAP.  Got a server with 1 guy on a squad and 3 guys on another squad?  The solution is to break up your squad, put you on the squad with 3 guys and put the rest of your squad on the team with 1 guy in the squad and start the game.   It's annoying as hell and I hope it doesn't detract from the overall game...... 
 

Upgraded my vid-capping

This past week I upgraded my vid-capping setup. I shipped my Hava (described in
http://www.2old2play.com/Blog/Comments/7572/35577) off to ChiefBunnyScrat/IAmtheLiquor and I picked up this bad-boy

A Hauppauge HD PVR. This will allow vid-capping at 720p (HD quality) rather than the Hava's 480p (DVD quality). Take a look at the difference (make sure you select 720p for the Hauppauge vid):

MW2 TDM on Rust

Hauppauge:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waXt8oPVk6k


Hava:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCY2S8wPJ5E


Neither of these units are specificly for vid-capping of course. The Hava has been designed not just to record your video input (cablebox, xbox) to your HD for later viewing but to make recordings and live TV available to other computers (over your home LAN or Internet) and cell phones. It's a competitor to the Slingbox and as such if you are only using it for XBOX vid-capture, you are using 25% of what it was designed for. Since it's meant to send video over remote connections, it limits itself to DVD quality which is 480p.

The Hauppauge HD PVR turns your PC into a TiVo. As with the Hava, you can schedule it to change the channel of your cablebox and it will record it to your hard drive. But the big quality difference is that the Hauppauge records in 720p (or even 1080i) which is a lot clearer.

Right now the Hava Platinum HD goes for about $130, the Titanium (which lets you attach an external hd) is about $140. The Hauppauge HD PVR goes for $209 on Amazon, however I got it for $175 at a Microcenter near me.

The Hauppauge has standard component inputs (as well as TOSlink for digital audio) so it's easier to setup than the Hava. The Hava uses mini-component inputs so it requires RCA couplers for your component and audio cables. It also doesn't support the 5.1 audio that the Hauppauge does.

I've used the Hauppauge for about a week now and the only complaint I have is that it doesn't have the automatic split by time feature that the Hava does. This made it trivial to record matches such as HQ that go longer than the 10 minutes that youtube allows. If you told the Hava to split at 10 minutes, it would produce a XXX_1 file for the first 10 minutes, XXX_2 for the next 10 minutes, etc. The Hauppauge simply has you specify a time length for the video, it's up to you to edit it to split it up into videos that can be acceptable to youtube. Luckily I've only been playing TDM so I've been under the 10 minute limit.

Recording your gaming is a lot of fun, especially when you can show off your great moments. Take a look at the first minute of this game, it's the best 60 seconds of my gaming career. Just make sure you stop watching after the stab. It was all downhill after that...

Left4Dead2 Realistic mode

I regularly play L4D2 with a co-worker or 2 along with my brother-in-law. Most times 2 of us, sometimes 3, rarely 4.  Since L4D2 is so much harder than the original, we play on Normal.  We've gotten to the point where we can get thru an entire campaign without getting killed so we wanted to ramp up the challenge.  Instead of going to Advanced, we decided to try Realistic mode.  The big differences between Realistic and regular is that the zombies take more shots to kill (unless you headshot them) and a player will not show up later in the level if killed.  L4D2 has introduced a defibrillator that you can use on the corpse of your teammate that will bring them back to life.  When playing Normal, the defibs are found everywhere, but who wants to carry that as it replaces your health pack.  Especially if all you have to do is wait a couple of minutes for your buddy to show up in a closet somewhere.

We've only gone thru Realistic twice but dammed if we could find even a single defib.  Not only that, but other things such as pipe bombs and molotovs are in short supply.  WTF, throw us a fucking bone here, they made this so freakin' difficult that I can't imagine even attempting this on Advanced much less Expert.
 

If you have the achievement where you complete a campaign on Expert-Realistic then I bow to you as an FPS god among men..... 

DICE sucks as much as IW

 So I played some of the Battlefield Bad Company 2 demo today.  And exactly as I predicted last year, they fucked it up.  BF:BC suffered from a terrible lobby system, players on your squad would be dropped, placed on other squads or even on the other team.  I think this was a major factor in the inability to draw players away from COD4.  When BF1943 was released last year, it suffered from these same issues.  I predicted then that the lobby would still be broken in BF:BC2.

Tonight I had the exact same problems that I had with BF:BC and BF1943.  When are these fucking companies going to pay attention to such things?  Why do they think it is acceptable to throw together a half-assed lobby and then not fix it FOR 2 YEARS!!!!!

This may be a deal breaker for me.  I've been looking forward to BF:BC2's launch since it was announced last year but I am seriously evaluating my purchase.  It has gone from a guaranteed launch day purchase to a big fat maybe.  It could just be first night issues with the demo but I think this is a serious coding problem that has never been and never will be addressed.

 I'm not giving up on it but I'm not very hopeful.