Blogs - SlickWhiteRabbit

Wow, its been so long since I posted here. I've recently got back into playing battlefield 2, a game I still consider one of the best fist person shooters of its type ever. I played battlefield 2 from its release 14 years ago and religiously virtually every day for almost 4 years. Family, life and other games (ArmA, Crysis etc) got in the way.

I've since returned to BF2 a couple of times, including a couple of months ago, when I realised how much I'd missed playing this game. I had a lot of the old mods and maps backed up on disks and external drives. Annoyingly I dropped the external before I'd had the chance to download everything and becasue of the damage, I lost everything, so for the past several weeks every day I've been visiting all the sites that still host Battlefield mods and maps downloading as i always like to have everything at hand. Anyway, while doing that I was also jumping into the game every day. In fact BF2 has replaced what has been my main game since 2014, The Elder Scrolls Oline. I've hardly touched it for several weeks and have even avoided the latest dlc addon to ESO which was released about a week ago and which I'd pre-ordered. BF2 seems to have grabbed me again. Back in the early days I used to beta test for several modders such as Hayabusa (Mercenaries Mod), The Dark, MadOsga (Marines mod), Froachman, Homegrown and BigFootUS48 for the MCC mod and other mappers such as BeerPizzaChips and ShaneJohn. I love the game and loved spending time checking out new material. I'm even thinking of doing some modding myself. All I need to do is actually start, which has always been a problem for me. Once started I usually sink myself deep. I just need to complete a couple of projects and BF2 may just be my next new project. Maybe its 14 years late, but I see that there is still a very active modding community for the game.

Watch this space (probably once the summer vacation period starts late in July)

This is my very first blog entry ever; its more a rant than a blog. Basically Three AAA games I've purchased recently have not worked on my computer. I've got a home built rig with an i7 2600K 3.5GHz cpu, 2 Gainward Geforce 580 Phantoms with a combined gRAM of 6GB, 16 GB of memory and a Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card. All my drivers are up to date, and my operating system is Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit which is installed to an SSD.

The Three games in question, all of which I pre-ordered and where possible purchased the deluxe versions are as follows:

Need for Speed: Most Wanted (via Origin) cost £39.99/$60

Call of Duty: Black Ops II Digital Deluxe Edition cost nearly £50/$75

Hitman: Absolution Professional Edition cost £39.99/$60

I've spent days trying to get Need for Speed to run. It's been out for over 4 weeks now and all I can get is past the initial intro screen, then it hangs while loading. I've even left it on all night in the hope that it would start up.

Call of Duty: Black Ops was released nine days ago on PC, I've spent the last nine days trawling the Steam forums trying every fix that's been described, from installing the latest Beta drivers for my NVIDIA cards, reinstalling the game and verifying the content, defragging, re-installing all the essential drivers, making sure the onboard audio was turned off (apparently the game crashes if you have a card and onboard audio running concurrently) and even lowering the clock speeds of both graphic cards using MSI's Afterburner, and even disabling one of the cards. When I installed the beta driver the game worked for 20 minutes. I'd been working on it for over two days at the time and by the time i got it to work it was 4am in the morning. So, after 20 minutes despite the game looking fabulous I was in danger of getting a keyboard imprint on my forehead, I closed the game down. On booting up the following day, the problem re-emerged and I've not been able to get it to work since. You can hear the sound and when I click on the task bars icon the game opens up to full screen momentarily then goes back to the desktop.

Finally I was really looking forwards to playing the latest Hitman game. It's been just over six years since the last game was released late Spring 2006. I pre-ordered the game months ago and really enjoyed the sniper level they released to the community earlier this summer. So you can imagine my disappointment when I booted up the game today. The screen flickered black to grey and back to black, with the
occasional flutter, then I got my first ever BSOD since using Win 7. That's got to be something wrong with the game as I've made sure everything is up to date. I suppose it could possibly be the latest Beta driver which was rushed out to cure a problem with NVIDIA cards when Black ops II was released.

I'm sure you can imagine my frustration. I can
usually figure out what the problem is and get a game to work within a
few hours, but the games I've mentioned above have confounded me
for days.

I'm off to bed, its already well after 4am. Will I bother to check Hitman again in the morning, probably, but too be honest I'm getting really fed up seeing as the greater part of the last four weeks have been trying to sort three AAA games that should have worked on release.

Peace to all

Whiterabbit-uk aka Stephen