Chaucery Blog

After I installed an Nvidia Geforce 7600GT to replace my ancient Radeon 9200 I thought I'd try out one of my favourite games from yesteryear, American McGee's Alice, to see if it had improved graphics. Unfortunately, I found that it crashed on the splash screen. The official Alice web site offered no patches or solutions.

Here's the Windows XP crash error message:

American McGee's Alice has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Luckily, some other people have encountered the same problem, and found two solutions, a no-cd patch and removal of the controversial Starforce anti-cracking driver. It seems that Starforce is fatally interfering with Alice's attempts to check the CD drive for a valid CD.

I can confirm that both of these methods successfully cure the problem. In my case, Starforce was installed by the racing game Trackmania Nations, which came bundled with the 7600GT. It is freeware that can be downloaded, so I don't know why it needs to interfere with the CD driver at all. Uninstalling Trackmania did not remove the Starforce drivers (which is bad in itself). I had to run special Starforce removal software to completely rid my PC of the fearsome pest.

I find it appalling that the installation of a game can prevent the running of other games, and that a law-abiding non-technical user has little chance of identifying and remedying this problem.

Posted by James at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although Microsoft aren't admitting the actual figures, retailers and educated guessers suggest that 30% of Xbox 360 consoles are dying. This compares with the Playstation 3's official failure rate of less than 1%.

Does this deter prospective purchasers of the Xbox 360, especially now that Microsoft have belatedly offered a 3 year warranty? At the very least, it might make some people delay buying till they're sure Microsoft have got the problems sorted out.

Posted by James at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite being seven years old and constantly overshadowed in the media by its newer, shinier competitors, the Playstation 2 has such a large user base that it reigns supreme in game sales. Here are the statistics from The Age on final quarter 2006 game sales in Australia.

Posted by James at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In these days of environmental concern about energy consumption you might think that games consoles would be becoming more efficient. In fact, the increasing efficiency is completely overshadowed by the increasing demands placed on the console. This example, of the first and third generation Sony Playstations, shows the result of over 10 years technological advancement.

Posted by James at 6:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I won't be rushing out to buy the PS3 when it is released in mid November, but price isn't my main issue. In Australia at least, the Basic PS3 isn't much more expensive than the PS2 was on launch:

Equally of concern to me is its excessive girth. They done a good job of disguising its size with futuristic lines, but that won't help it fit into a narrow space any better.

I was prepared to wait for the svelte Nintendo DS Lite, and I'm prepared to wait for a slimmer (and cheaper) PS3.

Posted by James at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now that the next generation of games consoles is starting to appear, it's a good time to review who won the battle for market share last time. According to the Wikipedia it was a clear victory to Sony.

Posted by James at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have finally found the time and motivation to complete the wonderful real-time strategy game from The Bitmap Brothers, 'Z: Steel Soldiers', the sequel to their hard-to-google DOS game 'Z'. Although I purchased it a few months after its release (according to the receipt at 4.09pm from salesperson Mustapha on 14^th October, 2001), I had only made a few aborted attempts to play it through to the end. I was mainly dissuaded from playing by the annoying necessity of inserting the game CD prior to starting, which became even more of a problem as my CD drive was progressively dying at the time. After all, what's the point of installing the game to hard disk when the CD is required anyway.

Fast forward to a month or two ago. This time the CD requirement annoyed me enough to do a google search for workarounds, and I struck lucky. What you're after is a 'game fix' or 'nocd' patch, and they're readily available. Once that's installed you'll find yourself playing a lot more often, and the time-wasting search for the CD EVERY TIME YOU WANT TO PLAY A QUICK GAME will be just a horrible memory.

When a game offers the choice of easy, normal or hard, I normally select easy, kidding myself that after I finish I'll play again on a harder difficulty level. With Z:SS I assume I chose easy, but I couldn't find any way of finding this out a month after the fact. Anyway, the levels were pretty well set up in terms of difficulty for the first half (ie. the first 15 of 30 levels), but then something wacky happened and it all got really easy. What I want is for me to have to restart a level 5 or more times, trying slightly different strategies to try to get the advantage. This is how it worked out initially, but after about level 15 I would easily get through on my first attempt, apart from perhaps 2 of the remaining levels. Although it was nice to win, it lessened the sense of achievement.

Once you're worked your way through the single player missions you might be tempted to try some skirmishes against the CPU, but for some reason it is incredibly easy to win, and thus exceedingly boring.

Lastly, you'll be enticed by the multiplayer option. This was truly the greatest part of the original 'Z', which I played for many hours against my brother in LAN games. Whilst Z:SS advertises multiplayer, this is an unfortunate situation where real life intervenes. The game was originally released with a horde of bugs, most of which were eliminated in patches. However, while the single player game is bug free, the latest patch (from 17th August 2001) admits that:

MULTIPLAYER - Fixes - GAMESPY

- Reduction of critical errors although there is still one problem we are currently trying to track down hence the 'BETA' nature of this patch.

So, while some of us live in hope that one day the Bitmap Brothers will pick up the source code and spend a few hours fixing the multiplayer code, or release it to the open source community for fixing, the current situation is that this is a truly great single-player game that can now be purchased for not much more than the price of a blank CD.

Posted by James at 1:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It looks like we've survived the PC games dark ages relatively unscathed. For a number of years, from the introduction of Windows NT, through Windows 2000 to Windows XP, numerous DOS games were lost to the world. Abandonware web sites sprang up to provide the software where the original publishers had disappeared, but unless you had an old DOS/Win95/Win98/WinME machine to play them on, they were just bits on a disk.

For a few years PC emulators have been in development, allowing modern PCs running Windows 2000/XP to behave like an old DOS PC. And now, finally, the emulators are sufficiently advanced, and the computers are sufficiently fast, that even the most demanding of the DOS games are playable. The years of Z sitting on my bookshelf, gathering dust are over. The renaissance has begun.

Posted by James at 3:42 PM | Permalink

The Guardian has an interesting article about the origins of the great Acorn game Elite. I think I only ever reached deadly, in about 1985...

For Christmas 1981, an 18-year-old boy in Epping was given a computer by his parents. David Braben's Acorn Atom cost £120. He knew this because he had requested it. In the way of parents with technically-minded offspring everywhere, his mum and dad had asked for guidance about what he wanted and he'd picked the machine that seemed to cost a plausible Christmas-sized amount. For the £120, he got a kit of parts.

Posted by James at 11:02 AM | Permalink

Having purchased the original Dungeon Keeper for $89.95 in 1997, I finally got around to finishing it a few weeks ago. Each of its twenty single player levels lasted about 45 minutes. I saw it in the shops on a budget label the other day for only $4.95, which is a definite bargain. The graphics look a bit blocky, but once you get used to that it's a fine game. And it works perfectly well under Windows 2000.

I then saw Dungeon Keeper 2 for only $10. After checking reviews on the Internet I purchased said product. However, trying to run it on Windows 2000 resulted in the message 'Please insert key cd-rom'. I then tried on a different machine running Windows 98. That came up with the same message. Doing a little research on the Internet came up with this page about DKII's copy protection. Using the unsafedisc tool mentioned got me past that 'insert key cd-rom' message. However, more troubles followed.

Under Windows 2000 the game died before starting. I then checked for any patches. The CD came with the patch to version 1.6. However, the EA web site had a later patch, to v1.70. Amongst its changes were Windows 2000 compatability. That sounded promising, though the 30MB patch would take a while on a 56k modem. I obediently downloaded the patch, wondering why my CD, made this year, did not include the patch from 3 years ago.

Aha, with the patch installed the game finally started in Windows 2000. Alas, a high-pitched screech also started. Fiddling with all of the sound settings would temporarily stop the screech, but the sound would still come out too garbled to understand. After some valiant minutes, I gave up and tried on the same PC but under Windows 98. Success! All was working.

I have now played through the first few levels, and I am very impressed. The graphics and sound are marvellous, and the gameplay seems just as good as in the original. I am only left to wonder why it is such a difficult game to get running, compared to the original, and to every other game on the planet. For a Windows game made in 1999 to not work on my system under Windows 2000 is unique. From reading Usenet, it sounds like it's a problem for many other people too. However, it is worth the effort.

Posted by James at 6:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I spotted Tetris Worlds at the bargain price of $20 at my local KMart, and jumped at it, ignoring the bad reviews I had seen. At worst, I thought, I'll have a colour version of my favourite game of all time, Tetris on the original GameBoy. Well, I'm afraid that the reviews were all correct. The game has no redeeming features, and is quite awful. I didn't know Tetris could be ruined, but here's the proof.

There are numerous game modes to play with, but they all end up the same. Each increase in level brings a faster drop in the blocks, until you suddenly reach a level at which you don't see the blocks at all before they hit the ground. You won't ever get better with practise, you'll always end at this level. Where's the fun in that?

Then there's the strange ability to rotate bricks ad-infinitum when they reach the ground. You don't need to plan where to place the blocks before they land, just keep hitting rotate and you get all the time you need to move the blocks left or right. That's just plain daft.

The artists have been let loose on the background, producing a wide variety of nicely animated scenes. The problem here is that the scene continues behind the gameboard, making it incredibly difficult to discern the falling blocks. The gameboard takes up only a third of the width of the screen, so the blocks are tiny to begin with. It's an eye-squinting nightmare.

With all this new technology, why have they not included a battery backup in the cartridge? By default, an incredibly annoying ghost block is visible where the block will be once it falls. However, this just makes you think that it's another block to avoid, a block that won't go away. You can turn off the ghost block, but with no battery backup, you have to make this change every time you play.

With all of these problems, I'll be going back to playing the original Tetris on the GameBoy Advance.

Tetris Worlds on Gameboy Advance rating: 25%

Posted by James at 1:32 PM | Permalink