One of the ways that I like to unwind after a hard day at the grindstone is with a short Call of Duty 4 session each day. I try to limit my time, but spend a few hours at war on Sunday. In the few weeks I have owned the game, I managed to work my way up to within 300 experience points of Brigadier General. Not bad for about twenty-five hours of play. Then the inexplicable happened, my profile vanished. All of the challenges, experience, rank, gone like they had never existed. It was like someone had flipped a reset switch on my game.
I’ve scoured the boards and found little more than rumors. Asking people in game produced predictably mature responses, which I shall not repeat lest I offend those with more delicate sensibilities than my own. There were a couple of people that new someone that lost their COD4 profile, well I am telling you this phenomenon is real and it sucks. I don’t know what caused it, I didn’t have a backup and I have to say, I feel much more inclined to turn my attention to a different game. I love COD4, but the thought of working my way up through the ranks again is nothing short of nauseating. Fix it Activision.
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I have spent the last couple of weeks with a store bought copy of Call of Duty 4 and I have to say that it is without a doubt the greatest first person shooter I have ever played. Single player was a lot of fun, but once I switched it onto multi-player the party began. There are a lot of different multi-player modes. Search and Destroy is perhaps the most challenging, with one life only, die and you are out. Free-For-All mode is a whole lot of fun and some of the other game types are too. I have spent most of my time in free for all mode as I wanted to complete the different weapons challenges. You get a lot more kills in free for all, so you can clear the challenges faster.
Like most online shooters, you are awarded different guns as you progress through the ranks. With COD4 there are a lot of guns and a lot of different rewards. An interesting addition to this game is the “perks.” Perks are different advantages that you are awarded as you advance through the ranks. By far the most useful is Martyrdom, where you drop a live grenade every time you die. About half the time, you will take someone with you. As you rise through the ranks, get more powerful weapons and develop better skills, however, there are other perks that make things interesting. A bandoleer gives you extra ammunition and double tap doubles your rate of fire. Before you know it you have your gun kitted out with add ons, you have tweaked your perks just so and you have developed your skills to the point that you are an unstoppable fragging machine. (more…)
With my new computer setup, I am now able to enjoy some exciting modern gaming. I recently made two computer game purchases, Call of Duty 4 and the long awaited Crysis. I spent a good part of the last 24 hours deeply engrossed in both of them and decided, rather than putting up two reviews, I would do a head to head. First up, they are both really good games. Much of yesterday was spent improving my single player techniques. Today was devoted to multiplayer. The system specs that I used for the test are below:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (not overclocked)
2GB RAM
Leadtek GeForce 8800GTX
WD 7200 RPM HDD 500GB with 16MB Cache
The system was enough to play each game on its optimum settings. Though there would be room for improvement in the anti-aliasing department with SLI, all my settings ran on Very High. Both games looked exceptional, but it was with the look and feel that I believe the winner of the two came out. (more…)
The Phenom project is a monster of a case mod project with a team headed by Bill Owen, who has brought us some fantastic looking case mods in the past. Recently we featured the Ghostrider case mod, but Phenom looks to be the most ambitious project to date. Interested in Bill’s ongoing work, I emailed him and asked a few questions. He was kind enough to respond and give me a little information about his latest project.
If you are interested in modding and want to get some ideas of what’s involved in a big project, please read on. The email interview, a few photos and a very interesting You Tube video are included after the jump. The specs that this monster is going to have are truly mind blowing. I heard mention of quad PCI, new Phenom FX processor and Bill makes mention of a 128GB SSD. I would love to see this thing powering multi-monitor Call of Duty 4 or Crysis. Wouldn’t it be great if AMD could bankroll all of our PC projects? (more…)
AMD has announced some remarkable improvements to the performance of their Radeon graphics cards with the release of the Catalyst 7.10 drivers. The drivers will be released later this week and promises some notable percentage gains in both Crossfire and single card configurations.
The following figures are according to AMD, take them with a pinch of salt.
Battlefield 2142 Crossfire performance improves 5-23% on the ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 2600, ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 2400 and ATI Radeonâ„¢ X1300/X1550 series
Call of Duty 2 performance improves up to 6.7% on both single card and Crossfire ATI Radeon HD 2600 and ATI Radeon HD 2400 configurations
Call of Juarez DirectX 10 Crossfire performance improves up to 42% and single card performance improves up to 34% on all ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 2000 series products.
Company of Heroes DirectX 10 Crossfire performance improves up to 80% on all ATI Radeon HD 2000 series products and single card performance improves as much as 31% on ATI Radeon HD 2900 and ATI Radeon HD 2600 products
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Crossfire performance improves as much as 23% on ATI Radeonâ„¢ 1000 series products and single card performance improves as much as 23% on both ATI Radeon HD 2000 and ATI Radeon 1000 series products
FEAR Crossfire performance improves as much as 16% on the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX, ATI Radeonâ„¢ X1650 XT, ATI Radeon HD 2400 series and ATI Radeon X1300/X1550 series
Supreme Commander Crossfire performance improves up to 30% on all ATI Radeon HD 2000 and ATI Radeon 1000 series products. The ATI Radeon X1650 and ATI Radeon X1300/X1550 series products see even greater improvements of 82% or more.
