NAG September 2011 Issue Out Now

I went to the local convenience store On Thursday last week to pick up the NAG, and lo and behold, it wasn’t there. Friday I returned and it still wasn’t bloody there. Saturday I went back and finally, I managed to get it. So instead of doing anything constructive on a Saturday afternoon, I sat there watching all the trailers on the DVD. Don’t judge me.

And to add to all this, it wasn’t until later on in the week that they even got a post up on the main website’s blog, or on the forum about the September issue. Tsk tsk.

Still, I’ll tell you if this issue has anything worthwhile in it, if you haven’t bought it by now. There’s a feature on 10 games that changed the industry, as well as Diablo III – the fellas at NAG go mad over anything Blizzard. Then again, a lot of people do.

There’s a preview on Bodycount – a game that I sometimes confuse with Epic’s Bulletstorm, or maybe Brink. I think it’s the titles of these games. There’s a few lacklustre reviews on games such as Call of Juarez: The Cartel, which I knew was going to suck as it made a complete departure from the series theme. Then there’s Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows: Part II – like the reviewer states: at least it’s the last one. The Sims 3: Generations doesn’t look like it ads much to the original game, unlike its previous expansions.

The DVD has a few good things on it. There’s the Cheatbook database 2011; There’s a few demos, including a demo of Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows: Part II so you can try it out for yourself and see if it’s that terrible; there’s several free games too, and a soundtrack to be had, in addition to the usual trailers. If you’re looking for graphics card drivers for Windows XP, you won’t find them here. So you’ve gotta download ‘em yourself, seeing as NAG only does Vista and Windows 7 now.

Can anyone say “boycott”?

Check out the links below to get to NAG’s website and the forum thread dedicated to this issue. Highlights from the September issue thread: an off-topic argument that spans 2 or 3 pages, and has nothing to do with “what did you think of this issue?”.

By the way, the DVD suggestion thread for October isn’t up yet, as of publishing this post.

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NAG September 2011 issue

[NAG] September 2011 issue

NAG September 2011 Issue Out Now

New Review Published: Dead Cyborg

Just this week I got my act together and published a new review, which has been sitting around for a week or two, practically finished.

It’s a review of Dead Cyborg, which was released late last month. I managed to play through it thoroughly over a couple of days recently.

Dead Cyborg is a donation based freeware title. How this works is the first episode of the game is released for free, as a teaser or demo of sorts. From there on, the next episode will only be made available once the donation meter fills up. And currently, Endre is looking to make $4000 dollars before releasing the second episode! That’s rather ambitious although he is all ready a third of the way there. I just wonder if I’ll ever get to review the second episode and beyond, though, with demands like that.

Dead Cyborg is a mix of old school text-based adventures, point ‘n click adventures and more modern sci-fi titles, such as the aforementioned System Shock games, BioShock, Fallout, etc. You can see several similarities in theme throughout the episode.

Anyway, head over to HubPages to check it out. I was going to publish this as one of my Thrifty Thursday pieces, but I much prefer HP for reviews because the layout is more customizable.

New Review Published: Dead Cyborg

HubPages Turns 5 Years Old

August is a special month to me for two reasons. Firstly, it’s the month that HubPages was originally founded back in 2006, and the content publishing, revenue sharing website turned 5 years old just the other day. August is also the month when I joined HubPages back in 2008, and I received a notification email in my inbox the other day telling me that I’d been a member for 3 years now. I can hardly believe it!

I’m not as active on there as I was back in say 2008 or 2009, but I’ve been gradually trying to get back in to publishing hubs. I’m also revising, editing, and updating a lot of my old articles, too. After the subdomain switch the other day, I began this process, and I’ve been adding photos and other content to existing articles that are two or three years old. And it’s worked – I’m seeing a slight increase in traffic to hubs, overall. So it’s good to see that the effort is rewarded.

I don’t make it a point to cover every HubPages story out there, but I certainly do still read the weekly HubPages newsletters, the blog, and of course I log in to my account from time to time, and occasionally post in the forum. I just thought that this month is reason to celebrate for at least two reasons, as I mentioned above.

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Source: HubPages’ 5th Birthday & The 2011 Hubbie Award Winners [HubPages blog]

HubPages Turns 5 Years Old

Finally! Pippa has come back to The Verge!

If you didn’t get it, that was supposed to be a reference -quote-wise- to The Rock, Dwayne Johnson.

Yes, it’s true. Pippa Tshabalala left The Verge for a few months, for reasons still unknown to me. In her place, Thomas Gumede hosted the show right from about January this year until now. That was a gruelling six months or so. Pippa still appeared on the show in some form doing some retro reviews of old gaming series, technology and the like, but wasn’t physically there in person, as far as I could tell. Likely just taped.

But on Monday and Wednesday night’s live episode of The Verge, I was actually pleased to see that Pippa is back! Never again will I complain about… practically everything about her. She’s nothing compared to Thomas anyway. Thomas is a special, one-of-a-kind person*.

Welcome back!

On a related note, Pippa now also writes for NAG magazine as a columnist and has been doing so for the past few months during her break from hosting The Verge.

* Sarcasm

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The Verge on Facebook

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Finally! Pippa has come back to The Verge!

New Review Published: The Dark Mod

You didn’t really think that verbose series of posts about this mod was the end, did you? Shame. You wanted a review; “ask and ye shall receive”. This will be the last time for the foreseeable future I post about this mod. Promise… until the next version of it comes out, anyway.

After playing Duke Nukem Forever last month, I decided it might be time to play something a little more intelligent – perhaps even subtle. What could be further from in-your-face, all-out action than a Thief title?

But The Dark Mod isn’t a Thief title – not officially. But it’s damn near the closest thing available out there for the time being, next to playing one of the original games or the numerous FMs for them, anyway.

Despite being released originally nearly two years ago in October 2009, I’ve only just played the mod - really a total conversion for Doom 3 – in the past month. This was version 1.06, released on June 19, 2011.

After spending some time getting reacquainted with sneaking through a place instead of shooting everything up, I set about writing a review of it over the past while, and assembling everything on HubPages just recently before publishing it. I’ve now got the piece up if you’d like to have a look – some of you all ready have. ;)

New Review Published: The Dark Mod

The Dark Mod Experience: Part II

After the reformat, I obviously had to get everything in working order on my system. After some trouble with some programs, including the ATi drivers for my graphics card (I eventually had to roll back to a previous version), I was about ready to install Doom 3, and then after that, put TDM on my HDD. So after about half an hour or so, I had it all set up, and then ran the TDM launcher. I was at the main menu of this mod, which had eluded me for nearly two years since its release – and I’d craved to play it for about twice as long.
The only game I’d wanted longer than this was Duke Nukem Forever, which I also managed to play last month – and if you were wondering, sort of inspired this two-part series in a way. Yatta over at duke4.net wrote a series called “The DNF Experience”.
But there were problems once I tried to actually play the game. After installing one of the FMs and attempting to play it, the screen froze once the game was restarted, and I also noted that the Doom 3 intro screen flashed in front of me at one point. So I had to hit alt+ctrl+del and go back to the desktop. I tried firing up the launcher again, but then I ended up with a blank screen.

After this, I ran Doom 3 itself, and tried loading the mod from there, but that was also a no-go. I couldn’t figure out what to do.

I perused the TDM forum online to see if anyone else had the same problem, and came across some similar ones, and there were several suggestions thrown out – some pertaining to ATi drivers and other similar issues.

I really need to get rid of this graphics card and go back to nVidia. I rarely had any problems back then.
But I thought that since I’m only running v 1.3, I should really update it to v 1.6 to see if that would fix the error – I’d read of others having fixed problems this way. So I waited nearly another month.

A month later; I hadn’t played any games for weeks and I was starting to feel the strain. I needed a break from reality. I had just under half of my data left, so I took TDM off my HDD and put a clean version on there in the Doom 3 directory and ran the updater. It was so slow; it would have taken hours to get the process done. Even though I’ve since learned that the updater can resume downloads, I didn’t know that at the time. So I cancelled, and instead waited until the next day.



On the Monday, I ran the updater, and it was much faster. I was able to get all of 340 MB down and installed within an hour and a half. It only took longer than that, because while I was in the bath that evening (it’s winter here now – I don’t shower this time of year), my firewall started blocking the TDM updater’s access to the web. After allowing it through, it finished up, did a bit of housecleaning and patching, and it was done.

I then backed up the full v 1.6 and all the FMs I had at that point (about 35+). I wasn’t too sure if this would fix the problems I had with it, and instead of trying it, I left it for that night, instead opting to play some DNF.
Then the following night I had the courage to fire up the TDM launcher, and got to the main menu again. It had been weeks since I’d last been here. I installed just the included training mission, without loading in all the FMs to the appropriate folder, and TDM restarted. I was anticipating yet another blank screen or something. Then I saw a loading screen for the first time.

“I haven’t got this far yet,” I thought.

I crossed my fingers and waited. Bloody long loading times.

To my amazement, it happened - I was in the game. I was in the training mission – in the room with doors all around me. I couldn’t believe that running the updater actually worked! I thought I’d at least have to try the torrent again, or perhaps run the updater and grab the full 2 GB of TDM that way – which I hear is the most painless way of going about it.

I played the training mission a bit, and exited. I wanted to see if I could get back to the main menu again and not see a blank screen. I could.
It was working just fine.
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I always find that when I’m so eager to play a game or mod, then it’s like life chucks everything in front of me, not allowing me to have any fun. Whereas all the games I’m not so amped about work fine. Murphy’s, or Sod’s Law, I guess: if something can go wrong, it will.

But now I don’t play TDM. It sits there on my HDD. At first I didn’t want to play it or install any more FMs because I might’ve broken something, and I’d have to reinstall and it wouldn't work… again.
From the screenshots, you can obviously tell that I have played the mod, and at least several of the missions. But now I have TDM and all the FMs out there, and everything’s working – I’m not interested anymore. I spent nearly two years trying to get the mod - jumping through all sorts of hoops, getting around tons of obstacles.

The chase is better than the catch, as they say.

The Dark Mod Experience: Part II

The Dark Mod Experience: Part I

I finally played The Dark Mod the other night.

I first spied The Dark Mod as an interesting project back in 2007, after visiting Thief-The-Circle, which is part of the TTLG network of sites. But the project started way back in 2004, after the somewhat disappointing Thief: Deadly Shadows was released the same year.

I immediately began downloading all of the screenshots and videos that were made available, and viewed them continually for months.

Years passed, and in 2009 the first beta release was out, after approximately five years of work. I wanted it - but at the time, here in the third world, I still had a dial-up connection, which meant it would take at least a full month of downloading to get this mod – and the only way you could get this mod was by running one of those online updaters, which have to run while you’re online, obviously. It would have taken days.

So I had to put it on the backburner for a while.

At about the same time however, I started using data bundles with my Smartphone. I thought about how much it would cost to buy a 2GB data bundle to get the mod. I could easily afford it, but the only thing is that data bundles, with the network I was on at the time, had to last 60 days (it used to be 30). So after downloading the mod (which I think was about 1.2 – 1.5 GB at the time), I’d have to be very frugal with the rest of the data. I could have done it - barely - in hindsight, but chose not to.

Instead, I tried petitioning (or nagging) to get the mod on the Cover DVD of NAG – a local gaming magazine. The DVD is usually full of rubbish including mainly trailers and videos and the like. I thought they’d be thrilled to put something on the DVD. But no – it was the same excuse: “It’s in the queue”. I even tried to get NAG to do a preview of TDM before that, but there was absolutely no interest whatsoever.

If you were to dig around on this blog, you would see that I’ve written about all my frustrations in trying to nab it several times in the past. I do know for a fact that the TDM community stops by here every now and again. Even a TDM developer of sorts caught on and went over to the NAG forums, promising to get a proper direct download package up and running – even with some FMs. That still hasn’t happened.

                    Would you care for some screenshots, young thief?

Fast forward to 2011, and I was using 1 Day uncapped broadband bundles with my 3G provider. I found that not only do you have an option to run the updater to download everything, but you can also download the torrent. I gave that a try. Hell, it was slow – it was barely any  faster than my dial-up connection – partly because the network I was on throttles you after using only 150 MB of bandwidth. It said it would take 20+ hours to download. I had 24 hours until the data bundle expired. I gave it a try, but barely got half-way before calling it quits. I wasn’t going to get it done. When I bought another 1 Day uncapped data bundle and tried to resume that download, I couldn’t because version 1.5 was out, and the torrent I tried to download was v 1.4. The torrent was taken down or something, by the look of it.

It was this year that my dial-up deal was coming to an end, and I had to look elsewhere for options. I spotted a Wi-Fi deal that gives you a modem and 5GB of data per month. I thought that would be ideal seeing as I would be able to use up half through the month, and then have enough to download The Dark Mod as well as all the FMs available, which stood at about 40+ at that time.

I tried the torrent, but once again it said that I would have to wait about 20 hours or more to get the thing. There were barely any people seeding it, and no peers. It initially ran at about 100 KB/s, but dropped to half that, and less, in no time.

“Why can’t they put a direct download up somewhere for Chr*st’s sake?” I thought. Then I actually checked, just out of curiosity, to see if there really is such a thing. I saw that some people had uploaded versions of the mod to Rapidshare and MegaUpload and so on. But I spotted something even better: there was a download available at Gamefront through the Dark Mod’s ModDB page.

I downloaded that instead. It wasn’t the full version 1.5 (at the time), but it was v 1.3, which was close enough. I figured I’d just run the updater later and get it up to v 1.5. Anyway, the download took 4 hours instead of 20, which made me happy. The modem held up under a storm outside which lasted the entire time. I was on edge that afternoon because I wasn’t sure if the server supported download resume. If the connection was dropped, then I might have to start over. Luckily that didn’t happen by some miracle. That modem usually drops under even a hint of bad weather.

I downloaded about 30 of the FMs, until my data reset – it was the end of the month. I left it until the last bloody minute to do all this. I immediately set about backing up all the files, in case something happened to them. I was damned if I was ever going to do all that again.

I ended up making two or three discs with the mod on it. One or two of those discs had some sort of write failure, because there was an internet security program interfering with Nero. I uninstalled the interfering program, and then I managed to get one successful write out of three.

After that I reformatted my HDD, which I’d been planning for some time, after just getting fed up with all the issues I’d been plagued with.

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End of Part I – look out for Part II soon.

The Dark Mod Experience: Part I