The inner chaos of a web guy's mind.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 – Review
Aug 1st
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 – X BOX 360
Well EA has released another year of the Tiger Woods PGA Tour franchise, after the crap show that was 2009 I was hesitant about purchasing this version as I just did not want any more of the ridiculous AI and pointless use of the controller as the game has a tendency to make up it’s own mind where the ball is going to go.
So a few months after the release of the game I was done with my Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2009 X-Box 360 so I caved in and decided to grab the newest version 2010. After loading the game up the first time I did notice some things that I liked better than the previous year. The interface was much better and the textures for the courses had gone up a level. Gone was the Tiger Challenge and replaced with the Tournament Challenge which seems to bypass the AI all together as the players shots in that you are against are preset in most of the events so you are playing against actual shots that have been made during past real PGA Tournaments.
This was a welcome surprise in the game and I played through a few of the courses and challenges to build up some skills and some cash to buy equipment before tackling the event calender for the PGA Tour season.
At this point I am impressed with the game and the new precision putting tool is awesome, far more intuitive than the old putting system. More control over the power of you putt but the same control over reading the line. The RB preview of the putting path is spotty at best and I would not bank important putts on this pre read of the lie. It like the games in previous years I found to randomly decided to show the wrong path during a very important putt.
I am not going to be writing much more detail in the review as I only got two rounds in the season before I realized just how incredibly pathetic the game this year is. EA in all the great idiocity has made the rubber band AI and random crap shot even worse than ever this year. Wind of 7mph randomly has the same affect as a hurricane gale on your ball flight. My character was pretty decked out after playing through some of the Tournament Challenges and I had 10-11 in all attributes (Including some Beginner equipment giving some boosts). Not a bad character and should fare well in tournaments.
The second tournament “The Buick Invitational” was when I realized that EA has really butchered this badly. I played 4 incredible rounds of golf in the game only to end up T5 at -30 with Tiger Woods finishing at -40 for the win. Are you kidding me where the hell do these scores come from? He finished round 3 at -28 but when we started round 4 he had not completed any holes yet was at -30. Where the the magical -2 come from? Is there some 300Yrd Par 5 19th hole that was not available to anyone but him. I was in 2nd place at the end of the 3rd round at -23, So in theory Tiger Woods and I would be the last to start in the final round however this was not the case other players in the round Tee’d off behind me and jumped up the leader board as my character played through the round. Shooting a -7 to finish at -30 was only good enough to tie for 5th place in that tournament.
For all the effort that EA tried to put in to making this game more and more realistic and true to the real players with tournament mode etc. I would have figured that the season play would be more realistic and true scoring. I guess I gave EA Sports too much credit there cause this is the worst I have ever seen in the game. Good luck ever getting the achievement for winning all tournaments in a season when the AI scores obscenely high scores randomly while having players in lower position tee off behind you and pass you in the final round.
EA SCREWS THE POOCH ON TIGER WOODS PGA TOUR 2009 . Total write off. Psyc3d.com score 2/10 and only a 2 because the graphics are better and there are some interesting add ons in this version. I have deducted all value in the game from the score because of the impossible rubber band AI.
*UPDATE* - Been playing through this game a little more only to update this to THIS IS THE YET AGAIN A TOTAL PEICE OF CRAP EA – YOUR RUBBER BAND AI IS SO ANNOYING THAT AFTER A FEW ROUNDS THE GAME IS ALMOST UNPLAYABLE.
When will EA Sports get their heads out of their collective A$$es and do something with the AI in this franchise. You have lost a customer EA I would rather not play golf videos games than to have to provide you with another penny of my money on whatever CRAP you decide to put out in 2011.2
Transformers 2 – Review (Spoilers)
Jun 26th
Well it is time for another moview review, I only review a movie when it is really good or really bad. It is with great displeasure and a broken heart, that I bring you the following review of Transformers 2 – Revenge of the Fallen. There are spoilers in the review so if you still plan on seeing it don’t read ahead any further.
Never before have I been as dissapointed in a movie as I was tonight. Anxiously have I awaited the release of this sequel to one of the greatest movies I have ever seen. So much potential for this sequel;
Micheal Bay a director famous for good sequels.
Introduction of more transformers and characters.
A perfect ending to continue from.
Instead this movie is of the same caliber as King Kong by Peter Jackson. I mean this movie was so bad I almost walked out of the theatre half way through. At every turn I was hoping something would happen to save the movie but it never did. At every opportunity to save it Michael Bay screwed it up even more.
Top reasons why Transformers 2 – Revenge of the Fallen sucked – let me count the ways.
- Michael Bay has invented a new race of Transformers the moronicons, these are the endless stream of little “Decepticon” robots that flooded this movie. Their moronic behaviour, babble and the seemingly endless stream of them alone was enough alone to wreck this movie.
- Lets just jump right ahead 2 years without any introductions to the new Autobots that have arrived and are working with the humans in a special task force. Except of course idiot twins which reminded me of a really bad cheech and chong movie.
- Someone forgot that you need to develop new characters when making a movie instead of just having them appear guess chevy owned the movie and wanted to show off the new Corvette.
- A giant chevy commercial, OMG I can totally understand car companies sponsoring a movie but seriously General Motors logos showcased on the screen at every opportunity. What a total waste. Why not allow other car companies to have vehicles in the movie, add some variety to the Autobots. But I Guess GM spent ALL there money making sure that it was only their cars in the film when they should have been worrying about the state of their company. Shame on Michael Bay for letting this happen.
- I am all for comedy in a movie but really this was so over the top rediculous that it hurt to watch.
- The little moronicon humping Megan Foxes leg! – Seriously what idiot thought this would be a good shot for the movie. Sure the audience laughed but come on!
- The giant testicles on the constructicon at this point I was wishing that they would just aim the big rail gun at the theatre and end my torment.
- Jetfire – As the movie introduced the SR71 it looks like there is going to be something that changes the downward spiral it is on. But no! Why would you save the movie instead lets make a decrepid cenile old robot that walks with a cane. Who let all the idiots into the writers group, just because it seems funny in your head doesn’t mean it will help the movies you talentless hacks.
- Super prime – OMG Optimus Prime went to Canadian Tire and bought all the stick on parts he could find and went into battle.
- The human Decepticon with the super tounge, WTF you seriously added a Terminator T-X into the movie. Did someone not tell him that they made Terminator Rise of the Machines already and that you did not need to add one into the transformers.
- All the transformers have breath. Yes they have breath and spit alot, Note to writers: You did not need to make them more human like for the audience to love them WE ALREADY LOVED THEM YOU IDIOTS!
- BumbleBees little emotional breakdown in the garage where he cries. Hmm lets see his character was established in the first movie now he is a brooding & bumbling little whiner instead of the gaurdian that he was supposed to be.
- Action for the sake of action, lets just blow shit up ALOT, forget plot, story and character development. If we just blow stuff up and have lots of big robot battles people wont realize that movie sucks.
- We have all seen Pearl Harbour and don’t need to watch scenes from it in transformers. The bodies floating down after the aircraft carrier sinks jesus man why would you need to add that scene into the movie it does nothing for the movie other than give you a 14A rating.
That is the major reasons that this movie sucked balls. Such a fitting term considering all the references to balls and sacks in the movie. I wish there was something good I could say about the movie but it is so tarnished by crap that there was nothing that could save it. No matter how good the special effects were or how much stock military footage you through into it, CRAP is still CRAP.
1/10 is all that I can rate this movie. I have never been dissapointed to badly by a sequel as I was by this. I am fed up of over hyped directors thinking they can do whatever they want with a movie franchise and wrecking it. Not that I am an advocate for piracy but if you want people to goto the theatres and buy the DVD’s instead of pirating movies make something that is worth the price of admission and waiting in long lines to see. Judging by IMDB it looks like Michael Bay has been listed as Director for Transformers 3. I certainly hope you fix the mess of this franchise that you made with Revenge of the Fallen.
Well that is all I have to say about this, I think I will go watch Transformers (the first one) and find a way to get over this horrible night.
Alienware M17 Review
Jun 6th
Scullcap Alienware M17
For years I have dreamed of owning an Alienware laptop, all of my desktop computers are at my office so other than my Fujitsu laptop I don’t have a serious computer for at home. Looking over the Internet I found a sparse number of reviews of the M17 none of which provided any really good information for me the consumer. Alienware is renowned for their customizable configuration so reviewing them can be difficult due to the multitude of configurations available.
The following is my configuration of the M17 for this review.
- CPU – Core 2 Duo T9550 2.66Ghz
- GPU – Dual Radeon 3870 Mobility in Crossfire X
- RAM – 4GB DDR3
- Screen – WUXGA 17″ 1920X1200
- HDD – 128GB SSD
- NIC – Intel Wireless N with MIMO
- OS – Windows Vista Home Premium
- Headphones – Alienware TactX
- Orion Backpack
Total Price including shipping to Canada $3005 US
Ordering and Intial impressions
The order process was not as easy as expected I had to call the billing line because I am outside of the US. After a quick call to validate my credit card information the order was processsed. Much like Dell I was able to follow the build process of the laptop over the 9 phases of assembly, testing an shipping. I opted for the standard Fed Ex shipping offered from Alienware. Shipping was amazingly fast I had the laptop at my door in 2 days. The system comes in a big black box which contained another box with laptop and accessory pack. The M17 itself was covered with an alienware form fitting felt sleeve. The accessory package is top notch from the leather bound instruction manual to the monsterous 3lb power supply. Even the connecting cables for the powersupply are thicker than average and higher quality than found on most laptops. Pulling hte M17 out of the box and opening the felt sleeve is remenat of a scene from 2001 Space Odyssey all that was missing was the music playing in the background. The casing feels like the material the bat suit is made of. Softer to the touch but a hard protective shell. On my M17 I opted for the original SkullCap lid. Opening the lid for the first time it felt substantial and rigid no concerns about flexing even with a 17″ screen. Overall I am quite impressed with the look and feel of the unit. The only minor flaw I can find is that there is a slightly raised section where the indicator lights and quick touch buttons are but its nothing that impeeds the usabilty or cosmetics.
Side View Alienware M17
Basic Usage
It is difficult to call this Laptop a Laptop seeing as you cannot use it on your lap without a hard surface between your legs and the computer. There are some small vents on the bottom of the case that are not to be blocked. At close to 10 lbs the laptop is also a little on the heavy side but overall it is easy to manouver around. Picking it up with one hand is still an option and when you do there is no flexing of the chasis when lifting. I for one am willing to deal with a slightly more bulky laptop to have the security of a rigid chasis that doesn’t feel like it will break if you breathe on it wrong. I expected this beast to sounds like a 747 when I fired it up but was extremely surprised to hear almost nothing. The SSD drive is partially responsible for the lack of noise from the case. Under normal usage conditions you can barely hear the cpu fan making the M17 an extremely enjoyable desktop replacement while maintaining the mobility of a laptop. There are some minor annoyances under regular usage with the ergonomics. The touch pad is not easy to operate but with some tweaking of the sensitivity I’m sure it will be fine. Most of the time I am using a trackball or wireless mouse on the machine anyway so its not of major concern. The front edge of the case has a somewhat hard edge where your arms are resting so if the position of the computer in height relative to your arms is important to avoid serious rubbing of your wrists on the edge when typing. I found that having the keyboard slightly below so that you wrists are slightly bent when typing will aleviate that minor ergonomics problem.
Wireless performance is incredible, When connected wireless to my WRT160N or my WRT300N router I am pulling speeds of up to 1.8MB/Sec on download, when connected to an old WRT54G wireless G router I was pulling sustained 600KB/s to 900KB/s on torrent downloads.
The keyboard responds to soft touches well and is a little on the loud side for a keyboard but I am ok with that I don’t mind a loud keyboard when typing. The port configuration for USB and audio is extremely user friendly with enough ports on the right side of the machine to facilitate you needs. The volume wheel yes wheel no more annoying buttons works smoothly and responsive and is located in a place that is very easy to operate.
Configuration and Installed Software
The OS fired up in quick time comared to other vista instalations. I opted for both the VitaKey fingerprint scanner and the facial recognition biometric data for logging into Windows. I have never been a fan of these kind of devices in the past they have not been reliable. It has been a week now and between the fingerprint scanner and the facial recognition it is easy and faster getting into windows than using the traditional password input. The fingerprint scanner sometimes take a couple of swipes but in decent lighting conditions the facial recognition usually logs me in before I get to the second finger swipe. Much to my surprise and delight there was NO demo software in the windows installation when I fired up windows. No trials of office, no wildtangent games, no antivirus trial bugging you. All that was on the computer was an installation of power DVD and required device drivers. Finally a computer that didn’t need hours of software tweaking before I could be happy using it. So far so good, I have opted to keep this machine pretty clean and run alot of open source software here is the list of apps that I have installed and are running for productivity.
HTML Editing – Notepad ++
Image Editing – GIMP
Browser – Firefox
Media Player – VLC for video and Media Player for Music. I really dont use Media Center for anything as I hate it with a passion.
Email and Messaging – Windows live essentials
Thats about it for the software portion of this review I haven’t chosen an office suite yet but will most likely use open office. The one bit of advanced configuration required is to reconfigure the soft touch quick launch buttons above the keyboard. See below for how to configure the buttons on the M17, I have listed my configuration for the buttons. You can copy and paste the entire code block and save the file with extension .reg then double click the file to merge the contents into the registry.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MobilePC\HotStartButtons\1]
“ApplicationPath”=”\”C:”\\Program Files (x86)\\Windows Media Player\\wmplayer.exe\”"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MobilePC\HotStartButtons\2]
“ApplicationPath”=”\”C:”\\Program Files (x86)\\Windows Media Player\\wmplayer.exe\”"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MobilePC\HotStartButtons\3]
“ApplicationPath”=”\”C:”\\Program Files (x86)\\Windows Media Player\\wmplayer.exe\”"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MobilePC\HotStartButtons\4]
“ApplicationPath”=”\”C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe\”"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MobilePC\HotStartButtons\5]
“ApplicationPath”=”\”C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Windows Live\\Mail\\wlmail.exe\”"
Gaming Performance & Benchmarking
On the desktop there was a shortcut to a file named ‘My Alienware PC Information’ the path to the file “C:\Windows\System32\Alienware\My PC Information.XML”. In this file is all the information about my laptop including all of the benchmark runs and it is formatting like an Area 51 secret document. Below you will find the results from the burn in benchmark tests run on my specific machine. The rest of the document contains specific details about the components and drivers.
Burn-In/Benchmarks
3DMark 2006
3DMark Score- 13,081.00 3DMarks
SM2.0 Score- 5,712.00
HDR/SM3.0 Score- 7,477.00
CPU Score- 2,410.00
Game Score- 0.00 Points
SM2.0 Graphics Tests
GT1 – Return To Proxycon- 46.22 FPS
GT2 – Firefly Forest- 48.99 FPS
CPU Tests
CPU1 – Red Valley- 0.77 FPS
CPU2 – Red Valley- 1.20 FPS
HDR/SM3.0 Graphics Tests
HDR1 – Canyon Flight- 87.19 FPS
HDR2 – Deep Freeze- 62.36 FPS
Unreal Tournament 3 Demo
Average FPS- 59.31 FPS
Time Spent Over 30 FPS- 99.76 percent of total benchmark time was spent above 30 FPS
Pretty impressive results in a laptop I have to say. I quickly installed steam and downloaded my instal for Drakensang and Unreal Tournament 3 both games played with high framerate at full detail 1920X1200 resolution. I am more than happy with the results of the gaming performance. As far as the noise level when gaming, well what can you expect from a highpower machine playing games you need to have some serious cooling power to keep things running stable. After playing Drakensang for 4 hours straight there is no issues with the laptop getting overly hot and or reduced performance.
Conclusions
Pros: Amazing customer experience, Magnificant machine, Great gaming performance, Very quiet under normal usage conditions.
Cons: Hard edge on the front of the case is a little rough on the wrists under certain operating conditions, Bulky power supply.
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