I haven't seen any decent updates, no game updates, haven't hardly seen anyone I know using Xfire.

It's getting to the point where Xfire is worthless except for old games with no easy way to find your friends (like games from before Steam came out).

Right now the only benefit to keeping Xfire is that it allows you to send files. Steam could easily do this but with so many stupid people on the internet, they'd spend most of their time trying to recover hacked accounts from people downloading shit they didn't ask for from people they don't even know.

"What's this? Strange file from someone I've never spoken to before? Why don't mind if I do!"

Anyway, I guess what I'm getting down to is this: If xfire isn't going to keep up with the current games being released so it will track the usage of those games, I might as well move on to Raptr.

In fact, I bet that's what's happening. Everyone is jumping ship. Of course not EVERYONE is doing it... steam still reports that 10.54% of all steam users are using Xfire, but that's the report from July. It may have rapidly dropped since then.

Another annoyance with Xfire is the fact that it doesn't seem to work well with DX10 or DX11. I had to disable the in-game interface in order to play "Just Cause 2" since it would crash the game every time with the DX10 renderer.

So yeah... Xfire is slipping. If someone at Viacom doesn't stop getting blowjobs from crack whores and start paying attention to what's going on, they're going to find this will turn out just like Myspace... once popular and now overshadowed by something else (in that case, Facebook).

Steam had a sale on some games and a couple of games were down to super cheap, so I decided to buy them for the hell of it. One of these was a puzzle game called Quantz (which Xfire does not support) that was on sale for $2.

$2 is just about the right price for a puzzle game that isn't familiar. I mean, I might pay $8-12 for a good tetris clone, or a columns/bejewelled clone. Not a whole lot more than that though since Puzzle games are limited in their appeal to me. If the game has a really unique setting to it, it has to be comfortable to play (as in easy to do what I want it to do) without being too easy so that I get bored with it.

Quantz kinda fails in the control aspect of it since there were several times I wasn't able to do exactly what I wanted to do, but it's a pretty game, the music is sorta "ambient" type, and overall it's worth checking out for $2-$5, at least if you enjoyed playing puzzle games.

Before I decided to buy it, I did check out the metacritic scores and some of the reviews. I'm guessing they based part of their review on a full price and not a sale price, but even so, 3 out of 4 reviews weren't bad. The 4th review gave it a pretty dismal score which ruined the average. That's not really what bothered me.

When you review something, no matter what it is, you have to be VERY critical of the faults. A reviewer who constantly rates games high fails as a reviewer because he's giving a very biased view of the subject he's reviewing. At the same time, you have to be fair and give them credit for the good stuff. Some people can't do both and you wind up with almost every review as "OMG I LOVE THIS! 9.7 out of 10!" or "Yet another worthess piece of crap, but people like me better when I hate everything."

Ok, so the reason for the blog title: I read the reader reviews on Quantz on metacritic and they actually rated it better than the "professional" reviews. However, both reviewers are fucking retarded simply because they...

...if by Spoon you mean "Steam Folder". I am in the process of moving it to a larger drive because I've overfilled the 250 gig drive it was on (by itself!).

So the good thing is: I've got some space (or I will when it finishes moving the files in the next 2-3 hours) and now the bad thing is... I haven't really had time to delve into any game I bought

I'm taking vacation soon (a small one) and I'll probably dedicate at least 2 out of 5 days to playing Bioshock, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Dragon Age:Origins, Torchlight, C&C Red Alert 3, etc.

BTW: I love how Windows reports the time left to copy the files and it goes up and down so much that it's worthless. e.g. 114 minutes remaining (then a few seconds later) 285 minutes remaining (then a few seconds more) 125 minutes remaining.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJvP8ZigItg

Exactly

Now, I'm not saying everyone on my friends list is stupid or anything like that. It's just that I've had more people add me to their friends list, and then a month will go by with absolutely no contact at all from these people and then I'll have changed my name and/or avatar/icon in that time at least once and then they'll send ME a message accusing me of hax for being on their friend list.

It goes something like:

Idiot:"Who are you?! How did you get on my friend list! ANSWER ME!"

Me:Uh...I almost never add anyone so it had to be YOU that added ME douchebag. (rolls eyes) Whatever... (removes idiot).

Or sometimes:

Idiot: "Hey, I don't know you."
Me: Apparently not
Idiot: "Well then I'm removing you from my list!"
Me: Thanks for saving me the trouble.

After getting yet ANOTHER one of those idiots today I went through and reevaluated my list. If I saw that they weren't someone I talked to and/or they hadn't even been online in a long while and/or I couldn't remember how I "met" them, I just removed them.

I don't seem to have that problem on Xfire though. I mean, I can have Xfire tell me who everyone is even if they change their "nicknames" a thousand times, and not only that, but their profile names would remain the same anyway.

Actually, I was going to say Steam could do that too, but most of the time when you're looking at someone's profile, it's a series of numbers that means nothing to you and I believe you can always change the "url" of your steam friend page without having to make a new account.

At least I've never had anyone try to send me a random xfire message asking me to verify my account info so they can steal all my games.

Steam has far too many idiots and little kids on it, but I still like it better in most cases.

I hated that OS. It's fucking stupid. They added shit that bogs it down, they took away stuff that made XP run smooth, they teased you with "Oh but DX10 is Vista and higher only!" and then almost nothing uses DX10 effects...

First I was amazed at how my fast (or decently fast) computer was bogged down by that stupid Aero interface, which looked ugly (In my opinion) didn't add much to make it more comfortable to use, and again, slowed me down.

Then I switched back to Classic mode which was almost as good as XP, except they took out support for DirectSound 3D and replaced it with some other shit that's supposed to be "new and improved" only it breaks or seriously fucks up some games.

Fallout 3 is a perfect example of this. It ran fine on XP but on vista, you had the sound come in all choppy. There were no decent fixes for this. The closest I came was by increasing the sound buffer to some huge size and hoping that it was big enough to smooth out the choppy sounds and small enough that it wouldn't make my game crash more often than it does already.

The final straw for me was with some kind of hard disk error the other day. I couldn't play anything on TF2 because it would go for 3-5 seconds, then freeze for 2 seconds and repeat. Well, it wasn't always 3-5 seconds of play and 2 seconds of freeze, but it was about that ratio.

I don't know what the hell Vista did to it, but it was seriously starting to make me pissed... especially if I was trying to play a game and the game would decide to just lock up for 8 seconds.

So yeah, vista is history, and I'm about to break the disc into a thousand pieces so I'm never tempted or foolish enough to try installing it again...not even as a dual boot. It's fucking WORTHLESS.

BTW: If you're on vista and like it, you either don't know better, or you're a glutton for punishment...or maybe you've learned to live with the flaws as part of life. NOBODY SHOULD BE FORCED TO LIVE WITH AN INFERIOR PRODUCT.

Unless you've got one...

It blows.

My computer rates a 5.2 on the Vista experience scale, which apparently is the number of times you'll want to bang your head against the wall in an hour while using it.

I had heard of most of the complaints with vista, mostly being that it would ask you constantly for permission to do stupid shit that basically trained you to answer yes before reading what it was. I haven't had this experience. Maybe that's been fixed?

No, my problems have been mostly in strange areas that I can't even say for sure is Vista related, but it only started after installing vista so I can't rule it out.

Thing #1: One of my hard drives has started this thing where it'll stop spinning, and then when I need to access it, it'll have to start up again. That could be the hard drive about to die, or it could be some kind of vista bullshit. Maybe they're trying to save me some energy by turning the hard drives off while I'm "not using it"?

Thing #2: Some of my most used functions have been moved or removed. I used to be able to right click on the desktop to show the "properties" and/or change resolutions or whatever, and seems like the only option that shows up now is "personalize". That's close to what I wanted, but it doesn't give me everything I had on XP.

Thing #3: A few things work better on vista, and quite a few things work much worse. It's like the old "two steps forward, three steps back" saying. I had much fewer problems getting the Xbox 360 controller to work properly on vista, but I've had much MORE trouble getting surround sound to work properly.

Thing #4: It slows my computer down to run this crap. Yeah, I know, I've got a 5+ computer system so why am I having trouble? The problem is that the Aero interface is too flashy for its own good. It's actually possible to make XP look like vista and have it STILL run faster. What the fuck was Microsoft thinking with this one? (facepalm)

There are a few things I kinda liked with Vista. Some...

Playing on my usual 2Fort server, I come in to find the situation as follows:
Red has 7 wins, Blu has 5.
There's less than an hour left on the clock.
Blu has 2 caps to 0 for Red
Nobody on Blu is pushing.
I had changed my name to "Lucky" before the game.

I start out on Red by virtue of the random team placement. I chuckle at the fact that everyone on Blu has no balls and all they're doing is turtling. I continue to play and doing a lackluster job of it.

Eventually I switched classes, and in the middle of switching I got teamswitched to Blu. At this point there's less than 30 minutes on the clock and the situation is looking grim.

Red actually managed a cap or two because blu was doing a piss poor job of turtling. I yelled at my new team for being a bunch of bitches and watching a potential win slip through their fingers. They did the verbal equivalent (and text equivalent) of a shrug.

Nobody cared. Apparently Red had gotten tired of sitting in their base doing nothing so they packed up their sentries and left only one guarding the hay room in a crappy position. I could hear it, I just never saw it.

I went soldier, ran in, grabbed the intel, made it to the courtyard before they killed me...and you guessed it, nobody on my team went after the intel. One guy maybe headed that direction, but he didn't get far.

Ok, so take two, I tried going scout, ran the same way (straight stairs) and this time, some pyro set me on fire as I was heading down. I put it out with the health pack and grabbed the intel. By the time I was heading out, the pyro was going to try HIS luck at a taunt kill...and missed! Seeing the straight stairs were blocked this time (by the pyro) I ran for the spiral.

Now, before I go on, I forgot to mention that I was using the Force a Nature. This made a huge difference in the next part. As I'm coming up the spiral, a medic meets me head on, blam blam, he gets knocked back and dead...I think I got shot by a sentry or something, and a sniper...

For whatever reason, Xfire in game doesn't work for me. Maybe there's some setting I haven't checked or something.

The sound it makes when I get a message is barely noticeable and I'd have to be straining to listen for it to recognize it. No messages pop up in game and I usually (90% of the time) don't really want to stop playing to answer a chat anyway.

I usually exit the game to see someone left me a message and then when I'm ready to answer (maybe an hour or more later) they've already logged off.

Anyway, I just wanted to say it's not that I'm ignoring you. I don't even see/hear the messages till I'm done UNLESS you're sending me a message on steam. That works for me.

Well, I've played a bit of each one and my thoughts? Fallout 3 (FO3) is a fun game and it's cool to be able to shoot people's heads off and stuff, but it's too freekin' short.

I played for 50 hours in Oblivion and barely felt like I scratched the surface. I played for 50 hours in FO3 and almost hit the highest level allowed.

Oblivion has more stuff to do, and prettier scenery to see, but FO3 is less frustrating in terms of quests and seems to run better on my computer.

Oblivion is a lot more fun to do exploring in... With FO3 you're walking around a bleak wasteland with not much to look at, and yet despite how open the land is, you'll still find times where a monster will seemingly appear out of nowhere to attack.

Another annoyance is the fact that the terrain in FO3 is limited by some strange barriers. In Oblivion, with the exceptions of the edges of the map where you must turn back, most of the time if you saw something, you could go there...In FO3 you may see something, and due to all the rubble and crap you'll have to go AROUND it to get to the destination.

I found it extremely annoying that I couldn't just head towards a landmark and arrive at my destination. If I entered another location in between my origin and my destination, I would often have to back out and go around because that location wouldn't have any exits in the direction I wanted to go in.

It's kinda hard to explain I guess. But Oblivion had far fewer places where you would have to go around an obstacle, or if you did have to go around, you didn't have to go as far around it.

In Oblivion, I think the maximum level is 40 or whatever level you happen to be at when all your skills are maxed out. In FO3 the maximum level is 20, and lots of stuff gives you experience so it's easy to level up.

I guess that's the annoying thing about Oblivion. You only get to level up by raising your skills a set number of points, and you only get to raise your skills by using them. In Fallout 3, you have a set number of...

Ok, so I decided to buy Fallout 3 on Steam. That's great huh? Well, it turns out that when you buy it on Steam you have to use a CD Key to log in to Windows Live.

Why the hell would you want to log in to Windows Live? Well, because of all the Microsoft Bullshit™ gay ass motherfucking stupid achievements and other assorted kiddie crap! Why else?

I figured, "Well, this couldn't be too difficult, right?" and so I went ahead and entered the CD Key (which was thoughtfully provided to me in a little window on Steam so I didn't have to write it down and remember it later) and entered my email address and well, there was problem #1: I didn't have an account.

So I go to set up an account, and then it says I already HAD an account. (WTF?!) I never remembered setting one up, though it COULD have been set up automatically when I set up a password for MSN Messenger or something since Microsoft likes to try to force everyone to use nothing but Microsoft products from beginning to end. (But that's another rant)

So now I have to go through the rigmarole of getting my password reset. This wasn't too difficult. I start to think maybe it'll be ok. I go to the game again and put in my email and password and... NOW it tells me I have no gamertag. (sigh)

So now I go back to set up a gamertag, and it tells me that "arleas" is already taken. I don't think that was taken by me (so if you are on Xbox and see an arleas, no... that's not me) so I'm forced to go with an alternate name (nobody needs to know this because Windows Live sucks donkey balls and I won't be using it for anything important).

Anyway, so I finally got all of that crap out of the way. Whew! But hey, it was worth it right? WRONG BITCHES. Now it appears that when I play the game my save files aren't going to work. Why? I don't know...Maybe because Microsoft wants to track your progress from beginning to end and save all the data so they can sell it back to the company who makes the game or whatever. I don't...