PC PC GAMES

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:37:04 — 71.9MB)

Good times, turn up the volume and wave at Kommie.

Howdy Folks – we haven’t decided yet if were going to keep bringing more out, but if we do it’ll be less frequently and they’ll be raw and uncut (so you may hear some language or Kommie’isms that you haven’t heard before.) But this was super fun and good times to be talking gaming again with the crowd from PCPC Games. We covered a ton of topics here and we bounced around quite a bit but in the end it all makes sense.

There were some feedback issues from a few folk, so you’ll probably here a few mic scratches here and there and some open mic feedback, but nothing too bad, just wanted to give you a heads-up.

Enjoy. -Fascinator

I think it’s time someone pointed out how this game has affected everyone.  I’d first like to apologize for bringing this drug into the homes of you all since our last LAN at Karsten’s.  A lot of us, including myself, are losing site of why we play games because of the way this single game has changed our gaming process.  Games are meant to be fun and are supposed to be played with friends to increase the fun of the game, not aggravating and selfish.  Winning and losing go hand in hand, you can’t have one without the other.

Here’s a few examples of how players change and become from playing this game.

It’s time we went back to “playing games” and enjoying them like we should. What’s more fun than a group of friends conversing, laughing, and enjoying themselves to the fullest.  Let’s leave the teen highschool drama to reality tv shows and the actual highschool teens!

Thanks Josh for showing me the comic, and Curlen for the title.

This comic is a work of Ctrl+Alt+Del (www.cad-comic.com), please visit the site by clicking the picture for proper viewing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:13:02 — 72.1MB)

Our first live stream while recording. So I hope there is not too many references to things you don’t see when you just listen. We pick up from the week before. Talk about hardware and what cool new gadgets there are. But we switch pretty quick to whats important and you will hear us go plenty about PC gaming.

• Hardware talk and why Curlen purchased Intel
• More Nook and Android talk
• Tims Watercooling Update
• BobJr tells you why you should own Magicka
• Mafia 2 a disappointment?
• Neptunes Pride
• Dungeons impressions
• Cool games we want to play this year
• Portal cross-platform play
• Deus-Ex first hands on
• Homefront goodness
• No more CoH Online
• STEAM makes how much money?!
• Starcraft Themepark (if you travel to China)
• Pachter again… and yes for the record I think he is wrong!
• Crysis 2 springs a leak… who let the code out?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:42:06 — 61.6MB)

This week it was a LOT about hardware. Last but not least Curlen purchasing the Sandybridge (that was before all the trouble with Sandybridge was known). Also why Curlen sold his 30″, why I got a Nook and even all about the Google toy.

• Sandybridge coolness
• Google freebies
• Nook Color
• Magicka
• Monday Night Combat
• STEAM top 10
• Battlestar Galactica

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:48:14 — 66.3MB)

A podcast full of surprises. First Will makes half the people buy DC Universe Online and than Curlen drops the bombshell that he is back on the WOW crack. So you can hear us talk about DC and some participants will breaking and getting the game as we talk.

Other items we touched on are:

• DC Universe Online
• Curlen went back to WoW
• Chronicles of Ridick
• Desktop Dungeon
• Are Lifetime MMO subscriptions worth it?
• Minecraft Server Pain
• League of Legends New Patch
• Natural Selection 2 Beta
• Steam Top 10
• Sony Online and it’s reputation
• Mail call
• Android / Phone Talk

And if you are wondering what we are laughing about in the outro:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uef17zOCDb8

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:46:06 — 68.2MB)

The week of this recording saw snow chaos in GA. Little did we know that we would have a lot of time to work on projects at home that week. or if you are Curlen play some of your 40 games you purchased during the STEAM sale

We talked about all sorts of stuff and did go quite deep into… what would we like to see this year. Here is a rough list of topics:

• WOW looks very different
• DODA
• Battlefield Vietnam inpressions
• Curlen has too many games
• Wired tells us what we should look forward to
• Our weekly LOL talk
• Some 3D talk
• Cureln loves Bulldozer (AMD future)
• Tablets
• CES gear
• Pros and Cons of a Cool Keyboard (Josh still looking for keys)
• Assassin’s Creed 2 DLC
• Warhammer 40k expansion
• Weird patents

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:22:02 — 74.2MB)

So here it is finally. I needed a break and had some work at home that needed taking care of, I am sorry for the long delay in posting this. Pictures of my home project will soon be on the page, so you will see what I have been up to. I also had to switch over to a new system which also set me back a little. Anyway, sorry I kept you waiting, but it is finally here for your enjoyment.

Thanks for everyone that called in or send us greetings. It was and is very much appreciated! I hope you guys have as much listening as we have recording the show.

Thanks to all my friends that are a part of this and enjoy hanging out with me and each other! Wouldn’t and couldn’t do it without you guys!

In this Podcast:

• Looking back on a year of Podcasting
• Games we are looking forward to
• UBI DRM
• Assasigns Creed 2
• Our Youtube Cannel – 1080p gameplay baby
• Darksiders Gameplay and impressions
• My little phone story
• Phone talk
• How much did you spend on STEAM games?! !!!!!
• Get your message from Duke Nukem

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:18:44 — 56.6MB)

Hope you are still in the spirit of Christmas, since we recorded this leading up to the big day. Steam Sales are still in full swing and I hope all of you have found something really cool under the tree!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:21:50 — 27.8MB)

Well… so here we are. Almost a year ago we posted our first podcast. This however, is not the anniversary edition you have been waiting for. That one will take place next week. So call in your well wishes and I make sure they make it into the podcast. It’s as easy as calling (657) 201-7272. So go ahead, and do it! Your chance for a free game will increase quite a bit!

This podcast… some LOL stories, some Cataclysm excitement and some invitations to play with us Oh and I gave some stuff away while recording this. Enjoy!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:40:44 — 34.5MB)

This was another big week for PC Gaming. Yet again a midnight opening around the US and maybe even in some other Countries for a Blizzard PC exclusive. We recorded just a little while before the release of Cataclysm and Josh was ready to go to the store to pick up his copy. So the first half we hear of the hopes and dreams of the ones that sell their Soul to Blizzard (yet again). It will be interesting to follow and see how much stamina this latest expansion has. Here is the list of topics:

• Cataclysm
• Deux Ex
• Why are Rockstar Games not on PC anymore?
• Retail vs Digital Distribution
• Black Friday Deals and Stories
• Blizzard bans Asians
• How not to pay for University
• PS3 move impressions
• MiniLan
• The Walking Dead Season Finale
• Consoles holding PC gaming back
• Where will we be in 5-10 years?
• Why PC’s make more sense (right now)
• Why small Devs need to be supported
• Battlefield DLC
• We need your Audio Files for the One Year Anniversary Edition

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:39:20 — 34.3MB)

One can hear our anticipation of the STEAM Thanksgiving sales in this podcast. We talked about quite the range of things that did keep us busy while we waited for that oh so sweet weekend. If you outside the US… I am sorry!

• Getting ready for Thanksgiving
• Risen sold like MAD
• How low is low enough for a game you want?
• Sniper Ghost Warrior
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Minecraft
• Microsoft has a way to go with digital distribution
• Wikipedia got Kommies support
• League of Legends
• Black Ops Impressions
• Tripwire and Red Orchestra 2
• Blizzard Tournament fail
• Are we done with WWII shooters? (Comments welcome)
• Little more RISEN
• The Witcher 2
• How many hours of Source can you play in a week?
• Cataclysm talk
• Retail Cains threaten boycott of PC game sales
• Will coming Consoles have a media drive / slot?
• Fallout MMO confusion
• Guildwars 2
• New Steam feature – Recommended for you
• Apple talk
• Dell Inspiron DUO
• New ATI Video Cards… lets see them already!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:52:31 — 38.9MB)

League of Legends made a HUGE splash after the Lan Party. So we took a little more time and talked about it. But not just it but LoL but also about last weeks big release “Black Ops”.

Again my appologies for running late, for that you will get another episode in just a few days

We are getting close to our first Birthday and we want your input! So make sure you listen an participate. We will give away a ton of stuff around Christmas to celebrate our anniversary.

I mentioned on the podcast yesterday that I’d do a quick write on single rail power supplies, multiple rail power supplies and ratings to look out for.

I’ll use the situation that I personally experienced as a reference.

Some time ago, I bought a 750w Silverstone unit.  The Strider ST75F, I believe was the model number.  Got rave review, served me well for a year or two, until……   Upgrade time came around.  I had caught a sweet deal on a pair for Radeon HD4850′s at launch and was planning to run them in Crossfire.   At the time, I was using a P35 Asus board.  Well with the P35 chipset, crossfire support on the PCI-E lanes was off balance.  I was running one card at PCI-E x16 and the other at PCI-E x4.  After some testing, I found that I was not getting the performance that I should have expected because the second card was starved for bandwidth.  I needed to get a new motherboard.

So I did.  Settled on the Gigabyte X48-DS4 (first mistake).  Ordered it on newegg.  Got the board in a few days later.  Tore the rig apart, put it all back together.  Did a fresh windows install, got crossfire working as advertised. YES!  Now it’s time to overclock!

This is where things went downhill.  At the time, I was using a Q6600 as my CPU.  Since I was running it at 3.2Ghz on my poor old P35 board, I figured I could at least get that same speed out of this new highend X48 board.  Right?

Wrong….  I was never able to get the rig to run stable with both Radeons and the overclocked Q6600 at the same time.  I tried everything.  After a week or two of dealing with an unstable system, and I was becoming pretty desperate.  On a whim (and grasping at straws), I called Karsten and asked if I could borrow his PSU (a 750w PC Power and Cooling) for a few hours.  After a little explaining and agreeing to put his rig back together, he agreed.  Needless to say, I was at his door with my rig within 10 minutes.

So I swapped the PSUs out, fired up my rig and all was good.  Rebooted to try the overclock on the CPU again.  Low and behold, it was stable!  I even got a little greedy and bumped the speed up to 3.4Ghz.  Ran some tests, played some games for a bit.  OMG, this thing was stable!   So, what was the cause of my instabilities?   Both units were 750w.  There shouldn’t be much difference…  Boy was I wrong.

This is the sticker on the side of the Silverstone I had.  See in the center under output where it says +12V1, +12v2, +12v3 and +12v4.  That means this particular unit has 4 12v rails.  Not a big deal, right?  That’s what I thought too.  Well, if you look again, you can see that each rail can handle a max load of 18Amps.  That is were my problem was coming in.  After doing some research, I found that one of those rails were dedicated to powering just the CPU.  With my modest overclock, apparently 18Amps of current simply wasn’t enough!  WTF?!  I just bought this unit about a year ago!   A PSU has always lasted me at least 3 computer builds!

Now, compare that to the sticker of the unit I borrowed.  See that 1 +12v rail with a whopping 60Amps?  Sure, its less than the combined amperage of the Silverstone, but what good is that if you can’t get the power where it needs to be?   Even with this unit being 12A down from the other, it STILL ran the rig stable.  My guess is that the CPU needed 20-24Amps in order to maintain stability.  While it may not have needed that power at idle, it was definitely needed under load.  When it couldn’t get the power it needed, the PSU freaked out and tripped, causing the machine to reboot.

So, word to the wise.  When shopping for a PSU that you are expecting to last you a few builds, you can’t go wrong with a big ass single 12v rail.

Be Easy,

The Wanginator

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:10:49 — 50.1MB)

I finally had a chance to try the new voice recorder and since we still Lan Partied it up at our usually recording time on Sunday we sat together last night and talked about the Lan, the people at the Lan and the hardware issues during the Lan.

I rounded the podcast out with a couple minutes of sound recording from the Lan… and yes you can hear all about Joshes Party foul!

I’ll add some pics as soon as the Fascinators Offices release them

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32:09 — 33.2MB)

Special treat for this episode is our second interview with Cliff Harris (if you didn’t catch the first one yet, go download it here) the creator of Gratuitous Space Battles and man behind Positech Games. We talked about a lot of topics, but one of the highlights has to be the “run-in” with Mark Rein. To hear Cliff tell how it happened is just great.

It’s also great to get his perspective on Indi Development and the recent success of Minecraft. I hope Notch will get a chance to listen

Here is the list of things we touched on:

• Why is there no new Cliff Harris game?
• DLC the pros and cons
• Feedback from your fans… it might be painful but ask for it!
• Some insight into STEAM and DLC releases
• How Positech games get onto the MAC
• More DLC for GSB?
• Planning new games
• Whats with the price difference with the Nomads DLC?
• From concept tp product live cycle
• Minecraft… Notch you did it wrong… but so right
• The Indi Dev community
• Advice for Notch… and other successful indi developers
• Dangers of running a bigger studio
• Casual, MMO, Social Game Gold Rush Dangers
• What Cliff thinks of Cell Phones
• What Cliff thinks of Civ V
• Length and size of games
• The problem with multi-core programing
• Why it is harder to program for the PC
• The Pros and Cons of PC Gaming
• Bumping into Mark Rein
• Will we see Cliff ever at PAX?
• The reason Cliff does not want a special Tax break
• The strange new game of Cliff Harris
• The board of directors of Postitech
• All Points Bullitin Fail
• Cliff is a Trekkie
• Talking with “potential” customers and how it influenced Positech games
• Live shout-out to the people who purchased the DLC in Las Vegas
• Getting Married in Vegas
• Gratuitous Mine Battles
• Parting wisdom for Notch and thoughts on Minecraft
• BUY Gratuitous Space Battles!

Comment on this Podcast for your chance to win GSB!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:48:40 — 44.4MB)

• GIGABYTE woes…
• New Vegas and the Spinning Head Bug
• Minecraft Admin
• WOW Cataclysm looms large
• Call of Duty BlackOps
• FIFA 11
• Microsoft going after STEAM with the LIVE reboot
• How awesome can a SC2 match be
• R.E.D the Movie… go watch it!
• LAN Parties are not easy to organize, be friendly to your host!
• Vietnam DLC gets a price
• ATI6990 is in Tim’s future
• Size Matters (Monitor Size
• 3D…
• Gunnar Glasses, we all will have them
• Blizzcon Streaming FAIL
• Diablo III
• SC2 Tournament
• It’s about the fun when you get together!
• A lot of BlizzCon talk
• PvP in D3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:48:09 — 55.9MB)

• Vindictus
• FF14… Mayor Rage Quit
• Fallout New Vegas
• Duke Nukem 3D Demo Access now for all Borderlands owners
• Steam News and what the Wallet is there for
• Metal of Honor
• Source Engine
• DODA2 by Valve
• The EA Louse
• Battlefield Vietnam DLC
• Starcraft 2 Patch Changes
• Logitech does something right
• Console News
• Steam Top 10
• Cities XL
• Reader Mail
• STEAM Hacked, what now?!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:48:28 — 38.0MB)

• Minecraft chat
• FIFA 11
• Dead Rising 2
• Bioshock 2 no more PC patches or DLC
• STEAM and Microsoft are building SILOS???
• Duke Nukem, you pre-paid… will you get your game?
• Get the Demo of Duke… if you buy Borderlands
• OnLive… now no monthly fees
• Blizzard talk
• Cataclysm
• Hardware talk… AMD CPU performance

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:12:45 — 53.6MB)

So there we are recording and chatting about games and the Dead Rising 2 description hits us… Co-Op and Multi-player… before we made it to the end 3 people purchased the game. Now… as far as the review goes, you will have to wait one more week. And we also talked about:

• Games on our wish list
• What is the Killer Game this Christmas season
• The new improved MOH… now without Taliban
• Starcraft2 vs Friends
• Watch game replays… watching can be fun!
• Sword of the Stars and what 4x games means
• Some Minecraft talk
• FIFA Soccer 2010 and EA Digital Distribution
• BestBuy continues to rip customers off
• 3DS… is 3D worth $300?
• L4D2 New Episode this Tuesday
• Why you should backup your Game Saves!
• Blizzard Real ID now optional
• Bobby Kotick is making waves… yet again
• Team Fortress 2 gets a HUGE update… now you can buy stuff
• Tim has new hardware… New Headset
• Some new Duke questions
• Curlen made us buy a console game (Dead Rising 2)
• Gunnar Optic Glasses
• STEAM top 10
• Blizzard unpacks the BAN Hammer
• World of Darkness

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:42:23 — 42.5MB)

Was it Minecraft that made this podcast so late… close, but no. Sorry to all that waited till the end of the week for our 40th episode.
We did however talk a little about Minecraft and if you listen till the very end you will hear Fascinators live first impressions as he purchased and logged in for the first time while we recorded. Other things we touched on are:

• Sins of a Solar Empire
• Civ V
• Minecraft
• AION
• Microsoft and the commitment to PC gaming
• Tim’s top 15 list of PC gaming
• GOG (Good old Games) is not dead… funny fail!
• Is Bungie making an MMO?
• STEAM top 10
• Josh is discovering Minecraft
• What Curlen is using his new computer for