Running Out Of Gas

I played a bit more TrackMania United tonight, finishing off a bunch of levels imported from the older TM:Sunrise game. I went online for a bit and found a US server with seven people on it, but it soon dropped down to only four, and they were kicking my ass anyway, so I called it off there.

I also tried to get the dedicated servers of GTR2 and GT Legends working, but I’m not sure what’s wrong. The server runs, the client can see it in the browser, but I can’t connect to it when it’s on the same machine. I’ll have to try installing it on the MBP to see if it at least works from a different one.

Performance Anxiety

There’s an update coming for Trackmania United within a couple of weeks, so I fired it up tonight in preparation. I’d play it more often, but it’s annoying to have to dig out the disc for it just on the occasional whim. If it ever becomes cheap enough on Steam, I’ll be tempted to rebuy it there just so it won’t need the disc.

I discovered I still had some solo campaign tracks that I hadn’t finished yet, so I polished off the rest of the difficulties in the Snow environment campaign. One of the tracks was really annoying since it had two parts where you had to do barrel rolls inside a wire mesh, which is really hard with the truck in that environment. I also finished off the Normal difficulty levels in the Rally environment, but still have the Hard and Extreme ones to go in that one and also in the Island environment. All of the other environments are finished, though I can always try for better times, of course.

I ran into one common problem I’d been having before, though. In order to set an ‘official’ time for rankings on the world leaderboard, you have to spend some in-game currency. Of course, as soon as I spend them and start an ‘official’ run, I start making stupid little mistakes that I didn’t in the offline practice runs, and end up with a worse official time…

I poked my head into the Multiplayer section, but there were hardly any servers up and running in North America, unfortunately. The Trackmania games have always been far more popular in Europe, and France (the developer’s native country) had over 110 servers up. Hopefully the release of the update will bring back some more players.

So That’s Why They Lost WWII…

As expected, Return To Castle Wolfenstein was fairly short and I was able to finish it off this afternoon.

I left off starting a tank escort mission, and along the way I also had to make a detour to rescue a scientist who had come under fire, both of which were timed bits that you could fail if you didn’t help out quickly enough, but they weren’t too tough. I also ran into the flamethrower-using enemies for the first time here, and they’re annoying since you can’t let them get too close, but they can take a lot of damage.

I then had to track down a Nazi commander who went by the nickname ‘Deathshead’, going through some more urban ruins and a trainyard in order to reach his secret weapons facility, and then to a sub pen where he escaped. Along the way I encountered some legless, electric soldiers apparently called ‘lopers’, made as part of the Nazi’s plans. They’re tough since they bounce around a lot and do area damage, but tagging them with the flamethrower and running away works well. From about here on, the different types of weapons actually start being useful in more cases.

I discovered that Deathshead was off to his secret lab in Norway, and that’s where chapter 5 starts. It’s cold and foggy there, and sniping took care of a lot of barely-visible enemies. In the lab, things started getting science-fictiony again as I encountered more of those ‘loper’ soldiers, and a few prototypes of supersoldiers, with chain guns and rocket launchers. Upon reaching the inner part of the lab, I had to fight his main supersoldier, which was much tougher than the other ones seen along the way thanks to having much more health and an electric beam weapon. It was tough, but I managed to gradually wear him down after dumping all my rockets into him.

Chapter 6 began the actual return to the titular castle, but there was still a bit of a trip to get there. I started off by a dam that I had to cross, and then passed through a village, where I had to stealthily assassinate five key officers while there. After that, I reached a chateau where I didn’t have to be stealthy anymore, and bumped off the general staying there. After the chateau, I then headed to an area where they were trying to perform a ceremony, and had to kill two supersoldiers there. It took a few tries, but overall it was actually easier than the supersoldier at the end of the previous mission, thanks to having more room to maneuver.

Chapter 7 started with entering some caves right after finishing off the supersoldiers, and contained even more of them, but at least they were weaker versions. The caves led to more crypts, where I ran into the undead again. I was in trouble since I only had 13 health at this point, but it turns out that the flamethrower is very effective against them. The undead are tougher here though, as they often have to be killed twice.

And I finally arrived back at Castle Wolfenstein, now overrun with undead, and worked my way through it without too much trouble. Outside, the Nazi occultist managed to perform the ceremony and resurrect Heinrich I, who I guess is supposed to be the ultimate evil badass they were looking for. Or something. He turned out to be a pushover though, as all you have to do is keep your distance from him (he doesn’t even have any ranged attacks), and keep blasting him with the chain gun when it cools down.

And so ends Return To Castle Wolfenstein, on a rather anti-climactic note. Not the best shooter, but not the worst, and it didn’t take too much time (about seven and a half hours, according to the save-game timer) at least.

Somehow, I suspect that’s not a regulation SS uniform…:

Where Do You Attach The Leash, Anyway?

I also felt like a bit of driving today, so I fired up NFS: Porsche Unleashed. It’s one of the best of the NFS series since it manages to get the ‘feel’ right, but unfortunately I probably won’t play it any further, due to…issues…

I resumed my ‘evolution’ mode career, though I seem to be stuck at a point where it’s tough to beat the computer opponents, no matter which challenge I pick. I tried one of the longer tournaments that was marked ‘beginner’, but still only came in 4th or 5th in each race (out of 8), so I probably need a better car. The main problem though, is that I couldn’t finish the tournament because it consistently crashes when approaching the end of the race through the industrial area.

I also started the ‘factory driver’ mode for the first time, which is basically just a series of technical challenges, like doing slaloms, brake-induced spins, delivering cars, finding and hitting cones, etc. I made it up to just past the first promotion exam (which took a few tries, since it’s a tough slalom challenge in the wet), but now I’m stuck here too, as it always crashes in the middle of the next challenge.

It’s probably a problem with Vista, as it worked fine back under XP, but I’m not going to start dual-booting again just for this game, alas. Oh well, I’ve still got a gazillion other driving games…

I Forgot My Keys There

I haven’t played a shooter in a while, so I dusted off Return To Castle Wolfenstein for a bit. Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of other games still ongoing, but this one is supposed to be fairly short, and I’m already through three chapters of seven total.

It starts out as a fairly traditional WWII-setting shooter, and I made my way through the castle guards in order to escape via a tram. Back in the village, I got sent to some nearby crypts to check something out, and that’s where you start encountering the supernatural elements in the form of zombies and skeletons. The Nazis are tied into it and up to no good, of course.

The crypts led into a church, where there were more undead and Nazi guards (often fighting each other), and female Nazi special ops agents in skintight catsuits. Which would be a lot hotter if they weren’t so good at killing me; one room had four or five of them in it, and they could take me down extremely quickly, as each hit from the rapid-fire Sten gun they had would knock off 10 health. At the end was the first boss fight, against the transformed version of the local commander Helga. It took a bunch of tries since she has this really annoying attack which sends out spectral skulls which blind you and knock off a lot of health, but persistence paid off.

After that was the third chapter, which starts out with a stealth section where I had to sneak into a base by hiding in the back of a truck. This part was annoying since it’s often not clear when an enemy has discovered you, so quicksaves could be ruined by being permanently stuck in a ten-seconds-from-alarm-activation state. The inside of the base was fairly uneventful, and led to the airfield, where I just had to wade through some waves of enemy soldiers (including some that parachuted in) to get to the launch facility, where I threw the appropriate switches and stole a prototype plane.

And apparently I’m now off to escort some tank in order to rescue a defecting scientist.

It’s not too bad so far, though it’s rather plain compared to most modern shooters. There’s some weapon variety, but I find myself sticking to pretty much one gun almost all the time (usually one of the machine guns).

Back In The Driver’s Rickety Old Wooden Chair

And the other big thing I did today was to replace the standard Windows XBox 360 controller drivers with XBCD.

The built-in drivers technically work, but suffer from a few flaws and missing features. There’s no built-in deadzone adjustment, for example, and a lot of the older games I just installed don’t account for it either, leading it to drift slightly to the left or right when the stick is supposed to be centered. The standard drivers also treat the triggers as a single axis, so that pressing on one is essentially canceled out by a simultaneous press on the other. This matters in things like racing games, where something like a slight tap on the brakes is not the same thing as letting off on the throttle slightly, which is how it gets treated on a single axis.

XBCD solves these problems, and I spent a few hours fiddling around in RACE 07 with it. Unfortunately, gamepads are still a little oversensitive due to the small travel on the sticks, so it’s like you’re frequently slamming the wheel to the extreme left and right. It was still good enough to win a few events though, including one Formula 3000 race in the extreme rain, with even the AI spinning out all over the place. RACE 07 doesn’t really have as much variety to it as other SimBin games, but it’s very well-polished, and the more mid-level cars in it are a lot easier to control than the supercars of GTR2.

I really should be using my wheel more often for racing games, but it’s such a pain to set up and take down…

Worms Have Poor Vocabularies

The next game I had a hankering to return to for a bit was Bookworm Adventures Deluxe, which is kind of a mix between Boggle and an RPG-ish combat system. I finished off the rest of the first 10 levels, reaching Cassandra for the first time (only to have her whisked away again, of course), before remembering that there are two more books of ten more levels each after that, so I wouldn’t be able to finish it off today.

And let me press Attack, dammit! It is so a valid word…

Getting Dirty

While reinstalling all those PC games, I couldn’t help but get distracted, since a lot of them are still unfinished. I remembered that I was still about 2/3 of the way through the career mode in DiRT, and so I finished it off tonight. About the only really notable thing was that the final series was a mix of different types and forced you to use a specific vehicle against a field of the same vehicle, instead of letting you choose yours and varying the others like usual.

I only did them on the easiest difficulty for now, though. The reason for that is twofold: one, just to get them out of the way so I can consider the game finished, without having to retry each race a few times, and two, because of the weird reward structure. When you beat a race, the prize amount for winning it is reduced if you do it again, but it also reduces the reward for all lower difficulties, too. If you want to maximize your earnings, you have to beat each one in order of difficulty, from easiest to hardest, so that you get the full amount at each difficulty level.

I’m not sure if it’ll have any further lasting appeal now that I’ve beaten it though, especially since the multiplayer is rather weak. Oh well, I need to get back to rFactor some day anyway…

Old vs. New

I finally got in the mood to try and finish my migration from XP to Vista, and spent a lot of the last couple days installing a whole whack of my older games under it, with less trouble than I expected. The ones that failed to work well enough or at all (Spellcross, Blade Runner, Star Control 3, Chaos Gate) were mostly ones that I remember having trouble with under XP as well, and I might be able to get them working under DOSBox instead.

One little ‘trick’ I tried for helping the older games was to create a separate directory for them (e.g., c:\old) and setting the permissions on it so that I had full control over it and all subdirs. Games can then create their own save/config/etc. files in their install directory without needing admin rights or dragging in the VirtualStore confusion.

There were still various glitches and minor problems, but they were mostly solvable. Some games needed to be patched up manually before they would run at all (Diablo 2 LoD, Riddick). Titan Quest: Immortal Throne had to be run as admin the first time for the update of the original game files, but could run as a regular user after that. Freedom Force had no sound within missions, until I noticed that it had selected the DirectX Hardware Accelerated sound provider by default, and switching it to the software emulation provider fixed that. Worms: Armageddon initially crashed when a round started, but that was fixed by a beta patch found after digging through some forums. And a couple others would seem to run fine as a regular user, but wouldn’t save your preferences unless run as admin (Raven Shield, probably a couple others I’m forgetting).

StarForce was a bit of a pain when it came time to install GT Legends, but it eventually worked. I had to let it install the included drivers, reboot, let Vista whine about an incompatibility while getting the update from the SF site, installing that, and rebooting again. Attempting to install the update before running the game doesn’t work, it seems.

And in one final surprise, I had never gotten Incubation to work very well under XP due to stuttery performance making it impossible to control, but it’s perfectly fine under Vista.

I’ve only given each one a few minutes of testing though, so maybe there are still mid-game crashes awaiting, but they seem to run fine for now at least. My little trick might not really be worth it in the end; may as well just tag them all as admin and with the appropriate compatibility mode, since it doesn’t really hurt.

Blast From The Past

On a whim, I’ve started installing more of my older games on my Vista partition. I gave Interstate ’76 a whirl, and was surprised to find that it actually works, since it’s supposedly a bit touchy on XP. Well, mostly. The physics seem a bit dodgy in the main campaign and the NPC cars often bounce and wiggle rapidly, though it’s still mostly playable. I wonder if I can still get it to work online…

Update: The dodgy physics were fixed by installing a Glide wrapper and using that mode instead, somehow.