Friday Video: "Welcome to the Borderlands" HD Trailer

Looks very Mad Max don't you think? And that's totally fine with me!

87 Bazillion Guns? My kinda game!

Speaking of Borderlands, for those of you who missed, or simply couldn't attend the "Production Consistency Through Chaos" presentation a few weeks ago here in Montreal, the IGDA's Montreal chapter was kind enough to record Lulu LaMer's presentation. Here it is embedded below, and you can find it on MotionBox as well.

And speaking (again) of IGDA, last night I attended their GameCafé Discussion on social media in games. Three different variations of this topic were discussed in small groups; in 20 minute sessions, after which we would change tables and discuss a new topic. It was very interesting to see how the Montreal Game Developers are approaching the social media revolution as it pushes into gaming - see CCP's COSMOS initiative for the EVE Online correlation.

Finally, here's a 30 minute video review of the game from the guys over at Giant Bomb, where you see some of the co-op play.

As I said, it looks darn fun! The game is scheduled to come out on console next week, and on PC the next after (through Steam), and though I'm really looking forward to it, I'll probably won't get it right away when it comes out. I just don't have enough time these days to add another game to my roster.

UPDATE: G4's Borderlands Launch Primer

Out with the Old, In with the New: A PC Upgrade Story

Before I get into the details of the new rig I'm about to put together, let's take a trip down remembrance lane.

I first heard about EVE Online sometime circa 1999-2000. At the time I was working at IBM and had jut gone from a Mac to an IBM PC300 tower. I could run Diablo at an average setting, but that machine wasn't what you would call a PC Gamer's Dream Machine, far from that! Really far... as in far far away in an other galaxy kind a distance.

Fast forward to 2002, when I finally got EVE and put it onto that machine, I believe it ran at about a frame a minute. And I'm being generous here! Suffice to say, this gamer needed a better rig. And so began the quest to build myself a PC. After reading profusely various computer power user magazines and books, I finally put together a decent system (at the time). It ran a P4, 500Mb of RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro (after an early upgrade from a 9200).

Over the next few years, the system would see some much needed improvements, as well as an unforeseen mobo replacement. The last major upgrades being a replacement of the 9800 Pro for an XFX GeForce 7600 GT, 256 MB DDR3, 580MHz, AGP 8x and then maxing out the P4 with a 3.2GHz. Suffice to say when the system finally failed a few months ago, I was in need of a much better gaming rig!

Which brings me to earlier this week, when I finally placed my order with NCIX.com. Having discussed my needs with a few gaming buddies at work, and after getting the advice of Mathieu Bourgie (@MathieuB), author of Hardware Revolution, I finally placed my order for the following:

• AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition Dual Core 3.1GHZ 7MB Cache
• Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3 PCI-E16 2PCI SATA2 RAID 1394 HD Sound GBLAN
• G.SKILL PC2-6400 4GB 2X2GB DDR2-800 240PIN Dual Channel Memory Kit
• XFX Radeon HD 4870 750MHZ 1GB 3.6GHZ GDDR5 PCI-E 2XDVI HDCP
• Corsair VX450 450W ATX 12V 33A 24PIN ATX Active PFC 120MM Fan
• Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB 7200RPM 32MB Dual Proc SATA 3.5IN
• Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64BIT DVD with Win7 Upgrade Offer

Add that the 3 items I'm keeping from my old PC:

• Antec SX1040BII Black Performance Series II SOHO File Server (without the PSU)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS 320GB Hard Drive
• Plextor PX-716SA 16x DVD DL SATA Burner

Before placing my order, I checked for the best pricing using PriceCanada.com and then using NCIX's price matching, was able to save $60! Too bad for NewEgg.ca which doesn't offer price matching!

Everything shipped last night, except for the processor. Hopefully it'll be on its way soon!

No home access to the web since Sunday!

On Sunday, my home life as I knew it ended. My PC died or something and I lost my access to the net , the web, to the world as I knew it!! And I survived...

Sort of. Thank god for work or else I would be able to post this at all. My PC problem is something I had yet seen and still haven't resolved 4 days later. I mean, I've had to replace a faulty graphics card or a dead HDD, but I had yet to encounter the melodramatic voice message that came out of my speakers when I booted my PC that morning: "System failed CPU test". Repeated over and over. Actually I never figured it out until I asked my better half what she heard and pointed to the ASUS manual to that sentence above.

So I did the only thing I could think of: pull out the CPU, a nice little P4 2.6G a bit over a year old. Every looked normal; neither the CPU nor the heatsink were hot or anything. Cleaned the dust off and around the casing and put everything back in and booted up again. It powered up normally, or so I thought. That Sunday we had planned to work outside, get ready for winter and plant some tulips for next spring. So I shot it off and told myself I was lucky.

Boy was I wrong.

Monday morning, I get up, put on my PJs, walk into the office/PC room, boot it and go down for OJ. When I came back up the monitor was dead (led blinking) and only the fans were humming along. I rebooted the PC and that message of agony was back: "System failed CPU test"!!!!! Ahhh man!!!

Shut it off and go to work was the only thing I could do.

Once at work, I looked up some online forums and asked around the office. The diagnostic was the same: nasty problem which could be a bunch of things (CPU, PSU, video card, RAM, etc).

So here we are, Wednesday, and still no access to the net from home. No email, no web, no gaming, no MMORPG, no EVE Online! And to add insult to injury, my skill training in EVE Online finished over the week-end, and now I'm not training anything and loosing all these days!!

Tonight I'll be doing a few things I've told I can test, and if that fails then I'll bring the PC to Microbytes for them to fix. Which means no PC for the week-end either!!!