I thought I'd better clear all of this up. Apparently, 38% of Steam users dislike it. I am also not a huge fan of Steam and here's why:
I have a desktop PC which runs Windows 7, and if you know Windows you will know how you have to reformat your system every 6 months to retain its performance, otherwise, you will end up with loads and loads of things slowing it down (although I have currently had my PC like this for 1 year and 3 months). So what happens with Steam? You cannot just reinstall Steam and point it to the game executable (as of yet anyway). So Steam will never know that they are there without a lot of work.
My other major reason is because I hate third-party companies coming in and running the place. Look at how the App Store and Play Stores run their respective operating systems. Surely we do not want PC gaming to end up that way.
Steam is also full of problems. For a start, it takes up approximately a whole 50MB of RAM, but when I start chatting to others my RAM usage goes from about 50MB up to a whole 1GB. Now considering that is running in the background, that is a whole lot of RAM. That is totally unnecessary. Sure the amount of RAM in your PC is going up year by year but it does not justify wasting RAM. This test was performed on a MacBook Pro with a Core i5 and 4GB of RAM and a custom Core i7 system. The RAM difference between the Mac OS X version of Steam is about 800MB. I'd like it if you could run your games without needing to open the Steam client everytime.
On the plus side for Steam, it does offer excellent pricing, one market place for all PC games and exclusives that are brilliant.
That is why I dislike Steam.
One of my absolute favourite games in my lifetime (possibly second or third) is Age of Empires II. I have always liked strategy games and Age of Empires II is no exception to this. In fact, Age of Empires II was the first game that I had asked for, all the other games (Warcraft Orcs and Humans, Goldeneye and F1 Racing for the Nintendo 64 to name a few) were all bought for me without me having any say at all. I had the original game, The Rise of Rome, on my father's CTX Via Cyrix laptop and I occasionally played it whilst we were going away. I had been playing the trial of the game for a few months with my good friend Nick. We had our first multiplayer LAN game several weeks after owning it and that was the selling point of the game to me.
I got Age of Empires II just before my 9th birthday and it had a big cardboard box. The excitement was running through me and I could't wait to play it. I took it straight to my other really good friend Calum's house.
We played for hours and hours and I fell straight in love with it as I had expected. I went home and continued to play it.
I played it right up until about 2007, and then Windows Vista came out. Windows Vista caused a problem with LAN play as it doesn't support some of the protocols that Age of Empires II required. I tried and tried but I didn't get it to work properly - occasionally kicking me out and stopping me from playing.
I resorted to playing a game which although was beautiful and fun, lacked on the some of the LAN features in the previous. Age of Empires III was one of the best games I had played in a long time; however, it did have one serious drawback. When you create a map or scenario in Age of Empires III there is a huge problem when trying to play it over LAN as you could not choose one of your own maps without having to do many different programming extras. To me this seemed like a lot of work for nothing.
So in 2009 I remember signing some petition to have a remake of Age of Empires II for Windows 7 just as they did for Starcraft (you can download it from Battle.net or purchase the Best Seller version). Well to everyone's surprise they did release it again. On the 9th of April 2013 it is to be released (I already own it because I preordered) to Steam, where everyone can download the game. Right now my father, who has also downloaded it, is blasting the enemy with his Teutonic Cannon Galleons in the background whilst I am typing this and my brother was playing a game with me earlier. They all loved Age of Empires II as much as I did. Nick and Calum have also already purchased it. It seems as popular, if not more popular than it was before.
So now to the beefy bit...What I thought/think of Age of Empires II HD. Firstly, the game is nearly perfect in my personal opinion because it is a pure remake. That's unique in its own respect because there are so many games that are remade but with improved graphics and all the rest and it just doesn't seem to work as well as a pure remake. My original score for the game is 100, but instead of adding points I will deduct for the bad features in this case. Here are the bad points:
- No LAN play - I liked the idea of inviting friends to my house to share my local area network.
- Map size - there is no difference for the map size. The maximum size of a map is still 'Giant' and cannot be any larger than this. This seems a shame considering on a 1080p display like my own it feels like you get about an eighth of the map on the screen at once.
- The trigger editor is still the same and has not had any added triggers to help make the map editing more flexible.
- It has achievements - I dislike achievement based games. They make gaming too competitive and although I used to be a competitive gamer, I gave up on that and play games for leisure (as you'll see from a list of different games where I really play them once in a full moon).
- You cannot change the resolution - absolute nightmare if you do want to have a 1080p monitor but run the game in say 1280 x 720 progressive which I do. To solve this, run Windows in 1280 by 720.
- A few new confusing icons - the top left Food icon is the most prominent example. I get confused with Food and Gold and if it were not for the fact that I know the order of the resources (Wood, Food, Gold and then Stone), I would keep making the mistake that I made initially with thinking that the Food icon was meant to be Gold.
- Still as buggy as with the previous version - one of my favourite bugs is walking down cliffs which previously had trees on them. This can be done in the Map Editor by simply placing trees and then placing cliffs under them. As soon as the tree is chopped down units can walk up and down the cliff as they please. The Map Editor also sometimes hides the cursor and does not reshow it, which is really annoying.
- The biggest disappointment is that you can still only control 40 at once. This looks incredibly odd on the new resolution as on my 1080p display you use the first row and half of the second row and that's all that is used when you could have another 2 or 3 rows worth of units. An odd choice there.
However the new features that have been added to the game do make it worthwhile:
- New water effects (pictured previously) - the water is nicer than it was before, but was it needed?
- Maximum population is now 500 - an increase of 300 villagers or Longbowmen!
- Internet capabilities again - play with a random selected person or with friends
- Much higher resolution - much more on the screen
And some of the most important reasons for me to purchase it are as follows:
- Support for old maps (although they are still maximally limited as before)
- A pure remake is what I wanted, but it may not be what others wanted
As this game is still one of my favourite games of all time remade, I cannot really give it less than 9 out of 10. So if it were out of 100, I would end up giving it about 85/100.
I am not often one to repost on my blog, but on this occasion, I feel I have to:
A long time ago, I used to have a Facebook page. But during late 2010 to late 2011 (the bad era for my website) I did not maintain the page, and Facebook discarded it as a deprecated blog.
I am happy to announce the page has been reopened. It can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/jamiebalfour04
Microsoft has officially commented on the next release of Windows, known by its codename as "Windows Blue". The update is said not to be a new release of the operating system but as an update for the current Windows 8 operating system but unlike a service pack, it will bring new features that the end-user will notice. It marks a change for Microsoft; releasing a new update to an OS that will change the user experience of the operating system and bring new features.
You may remember that when I reviewed Windows 8 I thought of the new interface as an absolute disaster, stating my hatred for the lack of Start menu and seeming lack of interest in the desktop market.
Some pages have now been turned into PHP equivalent pages, i.e. from HTML to PHP. This marks an important change in the site which is now going through a major change to bring more of an interactive PHP experience. Pages such as Articles, Reviews and Tutorials, as well as the Development subpages have all become PHP pages, as I have updated the site to automatically display articles when I upload them. This makes it much easier for me, but also guarantees the accuracy.
So despite what I said a few months ago about never going to become a web developer, I'm really starting to get some where now and many people have begun commenting on how good my website is beginning to look!
I think it is about time I started to capture some footage of some of my old games, such as Age of Empires II, and show some strategies and ways to play the game well.
This comes because I received an email from one of the sites I am subscribed to and it was describing strategies in this very old, but very good game.
This will be one of my new things that I will hopefully be bringing to YouTube over the summer. I also want to see if others would agree.
Games that I would most likely include are my three oldest PC games:
Warcraft Orcs and Humans
Command and Conquer 95
Age of Empires II: The Conquerors
I would also like to show some newer games including:
Warcraft 3
C&C3
Age of Empires III
And more
I've got FRAPS, which is a brilliant piece of software.
A simple question that I have answered today. This blog needs updated every so often to ensure the best WordPress compatibility. To do this, I need to temporarily close the blog down to maintenance mode. This means that the transition will be as seamless as possible whilst as effective as possible. I will not post before doing this, but I will probably skip most minor updates, only updating on major builds (or perhaps every few builds) as I want to keep disruption as minimal as possible.
I am going to very quickly summarise the next problem I have had with my motherboard, the Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3, in this post because it has reached the point that I can't take much more of it.
Firstly, my previous computer, better known as the Platypus (which I loved but sold most of it to a fellow computer enthusiast), was a marvellous computer. It had no problems. It was simply because I had read about Intel's Sandy Bridge being so incredibly good for video editing, which I was certainly doing a lot of at the time, that made me want to buy one for myself.
So the Platypus left and the new computer, better known as the Zebra (both are named after animals named after their chipsets: P45 and Z68, although the Zebra is also black and white) took its place. The Zebra was built with an incredibly cheap-to-build system, as most of the expensive components from the Platypus could be kept and reused. The Zebra cost around £575 (£100 for the motherboard, £50 for the RAM, £250 for the CPU and £175 for the case), which to me seemed great, but it was terribly flawed.
Now I loved it when I first got it, and still love it now, but it's breaking my heart more and more these days (or maybe just really annoying me I suppose). Here's precisely why:
It started with the motherboard having a device that seemed unknown to the computer. So I disconnected everything and noticed it was still there. Next, I decided to plug a USB flash drive into each USB port, and there we went. The problem was solved. One of the rear USB 2.0 ports was not working. I complained to Gigabyte, who seemingly did nothing to help, apart from saying that my chipset was incorrectly installed, which makes no sense anyway. I filed a complaint and tried to get it sorted under warranty. But it was too much effort after assembling the computer that I decided to leave it, as it was just one USB 2.0 port, and Gigabyte themselves even said they would not pick it up.
It now suffers from another problem: a device that plugs in and then unplugs a second or two later. Listening to the Windows 7 device connected (dum dum) and then immediately after disconnecting (bum bum) was driving me mad. I could not bear it any more. I muted and removed the sound from the Windows sound manager in the Control Panel.
I have decided when I can. I'm going to sell the motherboard and get a new one for my birthday when Haswell is well and truly ready. I will probably sell the CPU as well.
Today, someone (you know who you are!) was going on about how my MacBook isn't up to the specifications for the price. This post is going to briefly explain why this is not the case with myself and why I have stood by the use of my Apple computers.
I have known for a long time that FireWire was a part Apple "invention" (well no, it is actually not, but it was Apple who pushed it on to the market). But it had not struck me until now that I have been using FireWire as my favourite choice of connection to my external drive since about 2007 - way before I got my first Apple product. Now I have a MacBook Pro (and it is well worth the money, PCs have generally more issues and I know this because I am definitely still a PC user first and foremost), iPhone 5 and iPod touch. In the house we now have 4 iPhones and 2 Macs (soon to be three, I think).
I did not realise though that whilst I have been a proud fan of FireWire, what I was saying was that I was really a strong supporter of Apple. Nowadays FireWire is not as big as it used to be, and I have Thunderbolt on my MacBook which I intend to use in the future as it becomes more widely available (it is now available on some PCs and motherboards) and used.
However, it seems to be the build quality that makes me choose Apple. I like many PC manufacturers (not HP though - 3 broken machines due to overheating and not fixed under warranty - that's just saying something) such as Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Samsung and a few others, but I never feel that the quality is any good - especially when someone else you know has a MacBook (I'm talking the Air or the Pro here) or just when you generally compare them side-by-side.
The price point puts people off, but it should not. At the end of the day, I'm still a huge Windows user, I write my software for Windows, not Mac OS X, simply because I have always preferred Windows. But if we are not talking about the software but the hardware, I believe that the quality of Apple's products is much higher than any other. Simple thing likes a magnetic (patented) designed power connection (to prevent pulling the computer off the table if you trip on the wire) are the kinds of things you can expect from Apple. PC manufacturers also put in tweaks, but they tend not to be consistent across the vast range of products (remember those little ExpressCard 54 remotes you used to get with your HP Pavilion notebook?). Another one had Windows SideShow where PC manufacturers would put a display on the outside of lid chassis which could display the song you are listening to or whatever and when the system was shutdown, the user could still use the computer using the outer LCD and could enjoy hundreds of hours of battery life by using the laptop battery but with the small footprint of the outer LCD. Where did that go?
My final point to make is that Apple products are just so much better thermally. My MacBook hardly ever gets warm (although when put under strain it will) but a PC I had would need its fans to run every 3 or 4 minutes when performing the exact same tasks. Why are most PC manufacturers so flimsy when manufacturing them? Apple puts a lot of effort into each product, hence why they end up being the way they are.
I am still though, a Windows user.
I now love Linux and OS X, and I am more of a Mac OS X lover.
