Crysis Warhead

I’ve recently been following the second Crysis game in the expected trilogy called Crysis Warhead. Now, the previous Crysis has the best PC graphics ever, just to run the game you had to have about 1.5GB of RAM, and those were to minimum specs. The was incredbibly demanding on the system, many gamers couldn’t even play it. This new game, says it will be much easier on the system, which is good because that will give the game a larger market. I know many people who said, “I would have got Crysis, but it wouldn’t work on my PC.” limiting the market on the game itself. Naturally, this game will take some ‘grunting’ and system ‘unf’ to run, but I have my fingers crossed it is less demanding than it predecessor.

The Requirements for Crysis Warhead are featured below:

CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz (3.2 GHz for Vista), Intel Core 2.0 GHz (2.2 GHz for Vista), AMD Athlon 2800+ (3200+ for Vista) or better
RAM: 1GB (1.5GB on Windows Vista)
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro for Vista) or better
VRAM: 256MB of Graphics Memory
Storage: 15GB
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c Compatible
ODD: DVD-ROM
OS: Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Microsoft Vista
DirectX: DX9.0c or DX10

Despite the game being less demanding the graphics still look incredibly awesome and for the second time this year, there is an English person in one of my favourite games series (the last game with English people in being the SAS in CoD4). You can probalby recognise the English accent in the video. Many games lack people from the little country across the pond and tend to fill it with, light, but still noticeable American accents. When I play a game with an English person in, it kind of soothes me and makes me feel at home and am actually in the game. It also amuses me how many of the Americans mistake the English accent for an Austrailian one and vice versa. But, this will be an awesome game, it has everything any FPS fan could want. I’m hoping to pre-order it from Steam (yes, Crysis is on Steam now) soon to play on my XPS which should be here tomorrow, according to an email.

I agree I will not smuggle WMDs…

OK, so I have ordered my new PC. I am in a rush at the moment. However, I just thought I’d place a screenshot of Dell’s order page. Read the bottom where it asks if you will use your PC in connection with WMDs.

I’ll post the specs later. Hope that bought a smile to your face. And for you American TF2 gamers who frequent my blog: I’ll be back on TF2 real soon… And my PC will blow your head off before I even click.

Mission Control has been set up.

OK, I know I have been posting some rather boring stuff with me ranting on about my computer failure and my new one that I am looking for but all shall end soon. I am currently looking at a rather impressive PC with an Intel Core 2 Quad-Core Processor running at 2.5Ghz per core, that’s 10GHz al together, not only that it comes with the latest NVidia 9800GX2 Graphics Card. Now I must stop, not only am I starting to drool, it may all be a dream… But I have my fingers crossed I will get this PC.

Now, with a messy desk that has more or less been the same for 15 years, with the same wallpaper on the wall, I thought I’d have a clear up. Yes, lol, me tidying. I removed all the computer systems and gadgets and wiped the desk down. Now, for those of you know I like to code away at HTML and CSS for fun and to experiment in Notepad, the below pictures are for you (by the way: the Quad Core on the left is no longer with me). See how clear it is now?

Right, that’s what my desk is currently like. The only problem I have now is getting it back all there so I can sleep. My bed is kinda cluttered now. And we have yet another picture, possibly because I rediscovered my camera that was lost below the mountains of technology that towered upon the ostentatiously large gaming desk.

Well having said that it appears I should be back on Team Fortress 2 pretty soon, I have my fingers crossed for that new PC anyway.

Time for a new computer.

OK, I have decided to get my money back for my old Medion PC. Even though it was one hell of a beast technology has moved on rendering it obsolete, thus meaning the money I get back from that PC I can probably get a better one anyway. I wouldn’t want to be seen with a computer about six months old anyway, as Weird Al said in one of his songs if you’ve had a PC more than a week, it is, indeed, and antique. I know that is a little dramatic, but it is true; technology ages dramatically.

It’s a shame too, I was gunna keep that PC and build upon it. I am now hunting for a PC which I can buy, and pimp out with some extras I will build into it. Of course I am looking around the net comparing prices, I won’t forget that even though I haven’t heard of a certain brand, it doesn’t mean it isn’t good; in many cases it will be better than Dell. Although I do like to rant and spit upon Dell computers, after reading reviews and having some experience it seems that they only seem to rip people off on ‘normal’ computers for the average Joe. I own a Dell server which I run Linux on and hope to convert into a web server when I get the time, I have had no problems with that and it was dual core and had reasonably good specs, costing £99. Now, Dell’s XPS range are quite expensive, however after reading reviews, it appears that the XPS range are good gaming computers. As I said it appears they don’t seem to care about their computers for average Joe. Why? Well quite simply, XPS’s and Dell Servers are used by people who are often ‘techies’, techies will often go for the good spec machine and avoid the ‘normal’ average Joe machine, and if something goes wrong or they get ripped off on their computers, they will post about it on forums and eventually Dell will get an even worse name for there computers than they already have. However, if average Joe buys a computer and he gets ripped off on a low quality Dell machine, what will he do? Chances are, being average Joe, he’s not too much of a techie, and like many of the public buy and get ripped off by Dell on a low quality ‘normal’ machine. Dell know that the average Joe isn’t too handy with computers and won’t rant about them on forums, so they build the average Joe computers to the lowest possible quality and give them high prices, but with XPS machines and servers Dell know the techie buyers know a bit about computers so they build these systems with good quality bits and pieces so the techie uses it, likes it, and writes about how good Dell are online. Average Joe then sees this review written by a user of the XPS, and not being a techie goes for a normal, low quality overpriced computer and the vicious circle continues. 

I hope the above didn’t bore you too much. I was just trying to emphasise how Dell’s average Joe computers are pretty awful, where as their XPS machines and servers are generally pretty good. Allow me to demonstrate what should be done with an average Joe laptop, Click Here.

I hope to have a new PC buy this time next week because it feels as though I have lost a limb. I can’t even play Team Fortress 2. I suppose the good news is when I find and get a new gaming PC I can build upon it and make it a badass PC like my Medion was.

Back at School

As I said in my previous post, I am now back at school now. I didn’t think I’d enjoy it that much, it being my last compulsory year ‘n’ all. I got back alot of my GCSE results today, well, the maths and science ones any way. I was pleased with my results and was even more pleased that I didn’t fail statistics, which was one of my main worries, instead; I got a B in statistics which is above average and I was pleasently surprised. I got an A in my module 1 maths, and a B, A, A, A, A* in my sciences. I was pleased with those results, and despite the fact that some would say I didn’t revise and play too many computer games (Steam score currently 130 hours over the past two weeks), I produced grades that I was please with. It means that this year everyone is expecting me to keep up my performance, which I shall try to maintain.

The first day of school was a weird one for me, not only did I have my sister there, but I really didn’t feel like going in. I hadn’t really kept contact with anyone over the holidays, I mainly talked to gaming friends from all over the world. As it is when you go to a place you haven’t been for a while, I was nervous and being me I was more nervous than others. However, things quickly settled down and we were ordered to go into yet another sports based assembly, I think the head teacher gives out good messages in his assemblys. However, I dislike the way he always relates the messages back to a sport; todays was the olympics and to be quite honest, I couldn’t care less where we came in the olympics or any other sport. But meh, it was a good day really. I had science, in which I now sit next to a good friend which is a nice place to be, I also had English where we sat in the same places, and Maths where I sit with another good friend.

Obviously this year is an important one, and, like every year it will leave me less time to do what I want to do. So there will be a significant decrease in my Team Fortress 2 hours of play… Unfortunatly. I will still contribute to AlliedMods; these are a group of talented game server modders that write plugins for games such as Team Fortress 2. They are very skilled and I run serveral of the plugins written in C++ on my modded Team Fortress 2 Gaming Server.

I have had to send my Quad-Core beast in for repair; the fan on the graphics card has kind of broke and the thing has been over heating and making funny noises. I’ve had a look inside, and have tried to fix the fan, but perhaps it is just faulty. We’ll see. Of course, this means temporarily I cannot play Team Fortress 2 at all because the graphics card on my other computers arn’t up to running it, I will have to play some other games that don’t require as much ‘unf’ from the computer. But, it’ll be back in a maximum of 10 days…

Back to work in a few days…

Ugh, it’s back to school in a couple of days time. I’ll get a tonne of homework and literally no free time until the end of the year now due to this year being the last compulsury acedemic year. I’m dreading it. I guess I won’t have the time to do my usual 9 or 10 hours of Team Fortress 2 a day now. However, I am looking forward to physics, I like physics. I’m hoping this year we will learn more about nuclear energy and perhaps learn a little about nuclear fission or fusion, that would be nice as I have read several books on these subjects. Maybe we will even handle some radioactive substances.

Currently, I am sitting in my neon lit roon, having just validated the code on the website I was talking about in the previous post. I shall post the site up here when I finally get my server working… Or I give up and buy hosting. Hopefully I can use the website as an online playground to host my Team Fortress 2 maps, and it will be nice to have my site URL as a signiture for the gaming and web design forums I am a frequent visitor member of.

Where are web standards going?

A few days ago I coded myself a small personal website. Having finished it, writing the relevant CSS and HTML to get the design the way I wanted I began inserting text and pictures for the pages until I had the site the way I wanted it. I coded it in a few hours so it was the best site in the world, but I liked it, it was a simple, one column div template. I could do better, but firstly, I like the simple layouts best and secondly I couldn’t really be bothered to spend too much time on it, all I wanted it for was to display a bit about me.

Anyway, after I had coded the website I decided to check that the code was valid. So I uploaded it onto the net to check the way it looks on different browsers and submitted the link to the W3 Validator. Because I coded the website of the top of my head, looking up little pieces of code I couldn’t remember, it wasn’t 100% valid. It came up with several errors, only ones that are simple to fix such as tags that hadn’t been closed in the HTML. I started to fix them, but decided to have a little bit of fun (well… my kind of fun), I entered some well know websites and business sites into the validator, only to find that ALL of the major companies and well know websites had errors and invalid code! I guess it’s a either a bunch of employees using a visual web design program spawning invalid code (as they do), or several workers who decided that as long as the site looks good to it’s customers, it doesn’t matter if the code is invalid (which is a concept many websites and companies seem to have adopted).

So where are web standards going? Do they matter anymore? I like to think they do, and I will make my code valid and will proudly place the valid images on my website. I think that web standards matter in today’s society but not as much as they did when the web first started to get going, where then the websites were very simple and easy to keep valid, because in all fairness, keeping huge websites like Amazon (which had over 1,000 errors) valid, must be incredibly hard. I think for small websites, however, like the one I slapped together of my personal use, it shows that the designer knows what they’re doing and they’re not a sloppy coder. I wonder whether web standards will still be there in 10 years and how the internet will have changed…

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my new blog. My previous blog was TheUberNerd, however, I have now made a name for myself on serveral large gaming communities as Lord Max. Therefore I felt a blog with Lord Max actually in the title would be beneficial for those trying to find me.

As with my last blog I will try to write about gaming, technology and my life. There should be many gaming posts here, many of which about Valve games such as Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Source, so if you dislike those games you can escape now.