It’s me, live with it

This Discovery Channel’s ‘I Love the Whole World‘ Video has caught me.

Boom-dee-yadda Boom-dee-yadda Boom-dee-yadda Boom-dee-yadda. . . .

Right, another quick look about pc games. This time, I’ll talk a bit about Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (Since I’m too lazy to type that, I’ll refer to it as ‘V2′).

First I’ll talk about graphics department, since that’s what greets you first in a game. I’ll let a screenshot do the talking:

The model and the weapon details are nice, with nice reflective surface. Yes, I can see some neat lighting tricks as well as HDR rendering here and there, but that’s pretty much everything there is. I especially long for more detailed textures. In a few words, not bad, but not astounding either. That’s how it is.

The story is, well, imagine your favourite 1990s action flick, about the good guy saving the world from the bad, bad terrorists. That’s right, then you already have a nice picture of how the story is. Let’s move on to the next part, then.

The last part I’m going to discuss is the gameplay. It is surprisingly good. This game combines first-person and third-person shooter. Normally, when you walk, run, or anything you can do in Counter Strike except jumping (you can’t jump in this game). But when you go into cover like the picture above, or rappel down a building, the view wil change to third-person, enabling you to watch the suroudings better. Not to mention it looks pretty cool.

Like I said, this will be a short post, so this paragraph will be a conclusion. Overall, this game is fun. really fun. In fact,this game has one of the best gameplay I’ve ever seen. Especially when you’re rappeling upside-down and shooting through the windows (Didn’t I mention that?). So, I’ll reccomend it to shooter fans out there.

And I’ll write more about this game in my later posts. I’m re-starting this game on harder difficulty now.

This video brings back a lot of memories… guess what it is from?

For those who don’t pay attention to the hype that happened in the beginning of the third millenium, this is the ending theme song of the drama ‘Meteor Garden‘.

Yes, I watched it, I like it, any more question?

The opening song is great, too, but Youtube won’t let me embed the video for some copyright reasons, I guess. You can find it here.

Two weeks have passed since the last time I wrote anything long enough to bore you. So now I’m doing it again.

Lately, I have been saving money to buy myself a nice monitor. My old monitor, an IBM G74, is already showing its age (it was made in 1999, I’m actually surprised it’s still working).

It does not have any apparent problem, though, the colour is still fine, the picture is still sharp, nothing nasty that I noticed. But when I said it showed its age, I actually mean it. The first problem is that if the analogue VGA cable is moved, the monitor will turn somewhat blue-ish, which means that its solder is dried out.

The second is that the pictures would vibrate sometimes. This happens randomly, but each time it happened, I hate every second of it.

Now, I don’t really want to fiddle with the insides of a CRT monitor for my own good, It’s pretty dangerous, you know.

Which leaves me questioning: which monitor should I buy as a replacement?

I have already decided that I would buy an LCD instead of another CRT, Not because I don’t like CRTs. But I just think that LCDs are now rather cheap, compared to a few years ago. Besides, LCD technology now are much more advanced than before. Ghosting problems are minimised, few to no dead pixel on any given monitor, and again, it’s much cheaper now. So for the next few paragraph, I’ll only be talking about LCDs.

Next, let’s talk about the size. It does matter, I am not going to buy anything smaller than what I am already using. Since I’m currently using a “17-inch” monitor with 15,9-inch viewable diagonal, I’m going to rule out every 15-inch monitors available in this world. Which leaves me with either a 17 incher or a 19 incher, which is the hard limit for my budget.

Which one should I choose? Good question, but let’s take a look at the prices first. a 17 incher will cost me around IDR 1.700.000, which will get me a either Samsung, LG, or Viewsonic. Don’t mind the price, I only put those links for the specifications. While a 19 incher will set me back around IDR 2.200.000, that will get me another Viewsonic or a Philips, maybe an LG. All widescreen (16:10), of course.

Now, for the money, which of those two options will give me the most screen area? with a little calculation using the homemade formula:

Sqroot((16x)^2+(10x)^2)=screen diagonal

Okay, it is Pythagorean theorem, I know. Anyway, with the formula above, I understand that a 17 incher has 129,6 square inches of screen area, while a 19 incher has 163,2 inches of screen area. This means that a 19 incher have more than 25% more screen area than a 17 incher, while costing around 29% more.

This means that a 17 incher has more screen area for the money, so I’ll choose one of it. Unless, of course, I somehow enter impulse-buying-mode and buy a 19 incher instead.

With that matter settled, let’s move to brand selection. I only listed Viewsonic and Philips above, that’s because they are the only two that have a widescreen 19 inchers for reasonable price. I have heard good things about Viewsonic monitors, and experienced a good memory with a Philips. So I’m pretty comfortable with any of those two, though I think the Philips one is a little more to my preference.

The problem i’m facing right now is holding back myself from buying anything else. When you have some money handy, you would want to spend it. That happens to me too. I can hardly resist the urge of buying a 9600GSO or a 3850. Though I might buy one of them anyway in the future to accompany my gaming needs along with a new power supply.

I just returned from Semarang last Sunday, and I didn’t have the chance to write any update yet. Sorry about this. I’ll bring something soon enough.