that geeky dude

So yeah, I got the bug to finally try out The Burning Crusade. Keep in mind, I’ve been clean of WoW for almost a year now, maybe a little more, so I’m pretty far behind on the curve as these things go.

I picked up a copy of the expansion and a new video card for the machine (remember HP desktop I bought? Onboard video not so good for games), a GeForce 8500GT, which installed pretty painlessly, given that it’s an OEM machine. Thank whatever god exists that they included a PCI-E 16x slot.

I dug up my old install discs, and proceeded to do the installation shuffle, except I noticed it was going painfully, painfully slow on Vista. The install of the base game took almost two hours. I decided to forgo the disc swapping dance with the expansion, and just copied all four cd’s to the same folder on my desktop, and ran the installer, going to bed after I finished with the interactive parts of it. When I woke up, it was at a piddling little 60% done…I killed the install and figured I’d have to do something I’ve been meaning to do about a week after I got this machine… install Windows XP on it.

I harvested the license key from my Dell laptop (happily running as a Hackintosh, more on that later…), plugged up my old 36gb Raptor drive, and installed XP on that. I had already acquired XP compatible drivers for all the hardware from HP support for the inevitable format, but being unable to quickly install a game sort of irked me.

Once I got Windows installed and configured, I proceeded with the installation again, this time with lots more success. The game installed in less than twenty minutes, the expansion installed in record time (since it was already on the hard drive) and I had already downloaded patches to get me up to date from various mirrors I found on WoWWiki. I went to Blizzard’s site and signed up for the “Free 10 day trial of the Burning Crusade” for returning players, and logged in my level 60 Warlock.

The expansion is definitely fun. I pretty much blew out this entire week playing it. I even moved my character to Ysera to join David, Geoff and Jen.

Every since I got a 360, I’d been looking for ways to stream media from my PC to the 360. The HP came with Vista Home Premium, but the 360’s media center extender function doesn’t work with Xvid or DivX video, preferring Microsoft’s WMV codec (which you can’t find anything popular in)

I had been using TVersity to stream media, since it shows up in the UPnP browser for the 360, but the quality loss is evident, with major artifacting evident in action scenes or scenes with a lot of movement, not to mention that it’s a resource hog and you can’t do anything on the computer while it’s transcoding.

Well, a couple of days ago WinAmp bugged me to upgrade to the latest version, and when I went to the about page, I saw something about Winamp Remote, which ostensibly would allow you to share your music and movies over the network, including to your Wii, PS3 or 360, and over the internets. I couldn’t resist and had to try it, even though I’ve never enjoyed upgrading Winamp (anyone remember Winamp 3 and how fast Nullsoft backpedaled on it?)

Well, I have to say I’m impressed. After adding my Music and Video folders to the Winamp Remote systray applet and giving it sufficient time to wander through my library reading the metadata (10,000+ MP3s and a couple hundred Xvid/Divx/WMV videos), I turned on the 360, disconnected from TVersity, and connected to Winamp Remote. I saw a better organized selection of folders than TVersity offered, along with thumbnails for the videos, typically the first or second frame of the video, which isn’t helpful on a lot of TV shows since it’s fading in, but for movies it was fine.

I picked a video pretty much at random to play (not really, it was the first episode of ESPN’s coverage of the $50k HORSE tournament at the World Series of Poker), and was amazed at how fast the streaming started compared to TVersity. I was also pleasantly surprised to note that Winamp Remote apparently lets you fast-forward and rewind the streaming video, whereas TVersity can’t do that until it’s done transcoding (basically you can’t ff/rw on the first view, but you can all subsequent views) — Also, the videos started off at full screen, rather than being little widescreen video boxes surrounded by black screen.

Granted, I probably could have done some manual tweaking to the TVersity settings, but as evidenced by my purchase of an HP desktop versus building my own, I’ve gotten lazy in my ‘old age’ and would rather not have to fiddle with settings and the like to get it to look the way I want it to.

Five stars for Winamp Remote’s media streaming.

So…three days after getting Halo 3, I’ve returned to the world of the living to bring you a “review” and some thoughts on the game itself.

First, some amusing backstory… my friend Mike had preordered his copy at EBGames, and was in line there at 10:30 for the “midnight madness” sale. I hadn’t bothered preordering, and wasn’t actually that desperate for a copy, so I figured I’d just go there and keep him company. For about a half hour or so, we hung out and talked with the people in line around us, then I decided I was going to go to the Wal*Mart down the street and see if there was an equally large crowd…

In short, there wasn’t. The parking lot was nearly empty. I walk in, head to electronics, and ask the lady stocking DVDs if they were selling Halo 3, and she said “sure, would you like limited edition or regular” — being the nerd I am, I got the limited. I headed outside, called Mike, and apparently the line hadn’t moved since I left. I went back and taunted him and the guys around him a little bit. He finally got inside for his copy, and we headed to WaHo to get some food for the inevitable eight hour playfest. We headed back to his place, popped the game in, and were promptly immersed.

So, the game…it’s more of your standard franchise fair, with a few extra weapons tossed in. Your tried and true battle rifle is there, along with the old Covenant favorites (but you can’t dual wield the needler anymore? wtf!) Some new vehicles (including a new flying vehicle) and…that’s about it for the new stuff. Oh, yeah… the Flood are back, and they can apparently aim their sniper fire now with some blistering accuracy.

For those of you that are like me and are into the plotline of the Halo franchise, the ending might leave you a little bit…wanting. I’m sure in the inevitable post-release marketing onslaught for the holidays, there will be a novel or three explaining exactly what happened between the last two cinematics of the game.

All in all, a good game, although not a particular standout in one way or the other. Multiplayer might be the decision maker there, but I dunno. My XBL friends list is too short to have a regular crew to play with. Now I just have to wait for Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect and Call of Duty 4.

Freaking awesome.

More to come later. Sleep now.