2 Free Open Source Games For All Platform

Open source community is getting bigger than ever and they have released many many free games that can fill up your boring time. And here I present 2 games that caught my attention : Nexuiz and Warsow. Both are First Person Shooter and you can play with friends or strangers on server.

Nexuiz

This FPS is developed by Alientrap Software(funny name, isn't it). It uses a heavily modified Quake engine called DarkPlaces. This game have teleporters so you can jump into it to avoid being shot at, and don't worry, the bullets aren't gonna pass through the wall. This game has both single player and multiplayer option, so you can play with bots if you have a not-so-fast internet connection.

Shotguns, plasma rifle, rocket launcher are but a few of the available weapons, though my preferred weapon is a fast rapid fire missile launcher. The graphics of the game can bring your graphic card to the knees if you don't have enough graphic power. Take my AMD/ATI Radeon HD 3850 for example, highest quality without 4X AA makes my fps hover around 30~40.

Warsow

If your graphic card is not one of the high end, don't fret. There is a still a fps that provide a good gaming experience with a small system requirement. I introduce Warsow, a multiplayer only fps that looks a bit like Team Fortress 2 rip-off. The graphics looks a bit like TF 2 too as it employ the cel-shading technology to beautify the game. Even a GMA 950 used by netbooks can play this game around 30 fps in low quality.

Like the game above, there are around 7 weapons for you to pawn your enemy, which includes the rocket launcher, electric rifle, disc bomb. The special feature of this game is the ability to bunnyjump, which means that you will move faster as you jump and jump upon touching the ground. Those who played Cs 1.0 before would sure know this move.

Any more free games out there? Played these 2 games before? Please kindly leave your comments here :)

World of Warcraft Killer

"Stop looking for a WoW killer"....I'm totally agree with this post! Ever since I played World of Warcraft beta (which is many many many years ago), I've been looking for free alternative of that God-blessed game. 

Oh well, we all know how it ends up.....I couldn't find any MMORPG that came close to it. The last game that I played is Runes of Magic. You know what? That game mechanics is almost like a clone of WoW. Why do I say that? It's because your game character can jump, the shortcut keys are same as WoW(Ctrl + C to open character menu, Ctrl + L to open quest list), and there's a "?" mark on quest giver's head. Even though the game mechanics is almost the same, it's still didn't capture my heart...because I can't see npcs named Jaina, Thrall, nor Arthas! Simply said, I'm in love with the Warcraft lores.

There's 1 more game that I have spent nearly 6 month on it before deciding to quit it for the sake of my big exam. That game is Perfect World, developed by Wan Mei Beijing Company, and it can jump, fly, ride mounts and 3 races with 6 classes totaled together. At first I was totally into the game, and I thought that it was comparable to WoW. Oh hell! I was gravely mistaken. Poorly translated english, close to none number of quest after lvl 40, overpowered Item Shop character. And that is enough. I rather pay monthly subscription than having to face with overpowered character stacked against me.

And so, like the post said, there's no WoW killer unless Blizzard decided to abandon WoW(which is impossible). So to those of you who are praying for WoW killer, stop daydreaming and play the World of Warcraft. It's WORTH it. And don't blame me when you getting addicted to it.

My ignorance on Netbooks

Last few weeks I posted "my thoughts on netbooks", and I says that they are the closest thing to rubbish. Oh well...I think I will have to eat my words then, because I'm gonna get myself a netbook! I have been looking at Acer Aspire One D150 and I think the specs should be good enough for programming Python, C++ , VB.Net and etc.

I know I'm gonna be laughed for thinking that a netbook can be use for programming stuff, but hell with it. After reading Kamigoroshi comment, and I thought,  a 1.2GHz Pentium-M can do programming, why can't the 1.6GHz Atom cpu do it? With this in mind, I'm gonna get a netbook, and save more $$ to upgrade my desktop, so that my desktop can always play the latest games :)

Once I get my netbook, I'm gonna ditch XP Home in favour of Ubuntu, as I have been eager to use it and it's also suitable for low-end hardware too. Just hope that everything works. My desktop can't waste it's space on Ubuntu as it is a gaming machine and I also don't want my brother to get all grumpy for installing "useless" things.

Now let's just hope that I won't change my mind...yet.

My story about World of Warcraft

Unless you live in a cave, I pretty sure that many people knows what WoW(World of Warcraft) is. Last time when I was playing the open beta, I pretty much hooked on to it, playing day and night. After the beta ends, my life also pretty much ended, because I can't spend RM50 a month to play a game as my dad will surely kill me!

After a few years of playing other online games, I still couldn't forget the feeling of playing WoW. It's just like an addiction, or maybe a desire, that's really, really hard to quench. To quench the thirst bit by bit, I have been buying all the things that related to warcraft, like warcraft novels, comics, manga. Warcraft trading cards is next on my list. 

Occasionaly I will play as trial account (Yup! I created at least 3 trial accounts), but no to much satisfaction as I can only level up to measly 20 with no AH to use. I have been thinking about buying the WoW battlechest which includes both original WoW and it's expansion, Burning Crusade. But I still don't know whether it's worth it or not to play for 30 days and wait till I earn money before continue playing it again.

Due to this thinking of mine, I have learned perseverence. What I want to buy but I can't buy now, I will think of warcraft, think of how much I have endured NOT being able to play that fantastic, God-blessed MMORPG game. Now, if I can just get my hand on my 1st salary....

February 2009 PC Configuration Guide

Chinese New Year have passed, the non-married people got more notes in their wallets while married couples get a bit lighter wallet. During the last month, Phenom II has been released and it's performance is almost equal or better than Intel Core 2 Quad of the same price. Couple with a cheap AM2+ motherboard, and you get yourself quite a good system. Let's continue to this month's configuration guide.

• 2k pc can play games at 1440*900 or 1280*1024 or 1680*1050 resolution with medium to high settings.
• 3k pc can play games at 1680*1050 or 1920*1080 with medium to high settings

And here's the pc guide for 2k pc (Most items are based on C-zone pricelist as of 5/2/09):

• CPU: AMD Athlon X2 5200+ (2.7GHz) - RM 215
• RAM: Kingston Value RAM DDR2 800MHz 2GB *2 - RM 160
• Motherboard: Albatron KM740G- RM 200
• Hard Drive: Seagate 320GB SATA2 16MB Cache - RM 155
• GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD4830 512MB - RM 380
  
• Optical Drive: LG DVDRW SATA - RM 75
• Monitor: Benq 18.5" G900HD - RM 389
  
• Casing: Cooler Master Elite 340 - RM 125
• PSU: Cooler Master Extreme Power 460W - RM 160
• Keyboard+Mouse: Logitech G1 Gaming Desktop - RM 89
• Speaker: Logitech R5 2.0 - RM 49

Total : RM 1997
Note 1 : Performance of 9800gt and HD4830 are almost the same, so I choose the cheaper of the 2, which is HD4830. The Palit motherboard has disappeared from the list, thus I choose the Albatron KM740G. Even though it has less features, the lower price tag make up for it. Sad news is that the RAM price has increase.

And here's 3k pc guide:

• CPU: AMD Phenom X4 9650 2.3GHz - RM 490
  
• RAM: Kingston Value RAM 2GB DDR2 800MHz * 2 - RM160
• HDD: Western Digital 640GB SATA - RM 220
• Motherboard: Asus M3A78-EM - RM 300
  
• Graphic Card: Palit HD4850 SUPER 512MB DDR3 - RM530
• Optical Drive: LG DVDRW SATA - RM75
• Monitor: Benq 22" LCD (T221W) - RM 545
  
• Speaker: Edifier M1350 2.1 - RM 80
• PSU: OCZ Stealth X Stream- RM319
• Casing: Cooler Master Elite 340- RM 125
  
• Keyboard+Mouse: Logitech G1 Gaming Desktop - RM 89

Total : RM 2933
Note : I changed the motherboard for it's cheaper compared to last month's guide, and changed the PSU for more power.

Recession is still lingering around and we have to take every to reduce unnecessary money output, even on PC configuration. Hope this recession will be leaving us soon :)

Got any opinion about my configuration? Please kindly leave them here :)

My thoughts on Netbooks

Netbooks may be the "IN" things right now but I will never go and buy any of those "nerfed" notebooks. What good are those netbooks for anyway? Other than being light weight and small? They are priced so close to their notebooks siblings that an extra 200 ringgit would have get you bigger screen and processing power that is 2 to 4 times faster than the netbooks.

You might argue that netbooks are good for surfing the web and watching some movies. But, what pleasure can you get from reading text and watching movies on such a small screen? I bet half the time you have to squint your eyes to read the text and spend more time scrolling the site than reading it.

Mentioning movies, nowadays movies are getting hi-def, and the petty ATOM cpu of Intel have to struggle with 720p movies. The graphics accelerator of netbooks are usually GMA 950, which is so yesterday that it can't play any 3D games nor help in processing movies. My friend once even told me that he plans to play games on his netbook. And it made me laugh till I almost lose my breath.

What happens if you have to open a big document files that contains like a few hundred pages? Your netbooks will be so LAG that you thought there might be some virus hiding inside your system. Once opened it, it might take a second or more to move from one page to another.

My advise : don't ever buy a netbook. It will make you suffer hair loss, impatient behavior and worsens your eyesight. Might as well add a few hundred ringgit on notebooks that can do more than what netbooks can ever dreams of achieving.

Disagree with my thoughts? Feels that there's more things that netbooks can do? Then kindly leave your comments here :)