EA/Origin Battlefield 4 Shortcut Bundle Fail

Posted by Old Man on April 13, 2014
Posted in: fail, video games. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a Comment

So after not playing Battlefield 4 for a couple of weeks I decided to fire it up today and lo and behold, shortcut bundles!

Now feel free to flame me but I have more money than time (cause, ya know, I have a full-time job) so I’m a sucker for these things. Yes, 14 year old, you ‘earned’ those jet upgrades that allow you to constantly destroy me… Which is why I’ll never earn enough experience to unlock the upgrades to allow me to ever fly more than 20 seconds at a time for the remainder of the game. Say what you want, EA encourages this race to the top since it just makes them money. But I digress.

Ok, so I drop $40 on the ultimate shortcut kit, log on and…. nothing. Yeah, absolutely nothing upgraded. If you’re interested in what is included in the bundles check out this EA Help page. Hmmm. Search the forums, seems like this is a pretty common problem (fail #1). So I decide to throw caution to the wind and contact support (I mean, if no one ever does, they won’t know the severity of the problem right?) So I initiate a support chat and am promptly informed that my wait time for an agent is 10-15 minutes (fail #2). Wait, what? Isn’t that the whole point of ‘live chat’? Not having to wait like you do with email? Hmmm. So I keep it open and bust out 15 minutes of Braid while I wait. Then Cheryl gets on. She’s nice enough but just interacting on chat is a pain in the ass since they have a known issue in the live support chat client that doesn’t support backspace or delete in Chrome (fail #3). Seriously? Ummm, that’s kind of an interesting commentary on your quality if your support tools are broken. At the end of the chat I’m informed it’s a known issue with no ETA for a resolution. How challenging a bug can this be? And there’s no way to override on someone’s account to say unlock a bunch of stuff as a work-around? I guess not.

It goes without saying that I haven’t been a huge EA fan for a long time now but it seems like even though they own some IP that I’m a fan of (huge Mass Effect nerd) it just seems that their products are always broken and they don’t really care. I mean, I guess we keep paying them so why should they change?

New(ish) Laptop

Posted by Old Man on January 25, 2014
Posted in: hardware, in the mix. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a Comment

Ok, so last fall I decided to migrate back more towards the PC gaming side of things from consoles (maybe another post on that later). I wanted something that I could play PC games on while I sat on the couch with my wife. Hooking a media PC up to our TV seemed like a good idea but then I started thinking about how nice it would be to play in the basement or play while my wife watched something on the TV. Now understand that I’ve always been somewhat of a desktop guy. Laptops just seemed underpowered, fragile and overpriced. But as I did some research I started thinking that a 15″ could meet my gaming needs, fit in my budget and have a comparable relative screen size as my TV when sitting on the couch. So after way too much research I took the plunge on a Sager NP8255-S through Xotic PC. Quick plug for Xotic, the process was fast and painless, great experience. Anyway, I went with the best video card available (part of the reason for going with the 8255) to try to get a more desktop-comparable experience. The card was the Nvidia GTX 780m, easily the single most expensive piece of hardware in the new laptop even after upgrading the processor and hard drive to an SSD. I figured this puppy better be worth it.

Well, let me tell you, I friggin’ love this laptop and the graphics card has handled everything I’ve thrown at it and hardly broken a sweat.

In the last few months I’ve been playing Alan Wake (still love that game), BF4, Eve, Fallout: New Vegas, Dishonored, StarCraft 2 maxed out on graphics settings and still getting 60FPS+. One thing to note is that when playing some of these demanding games the machine gets a bit warm and the fan kicks on to the highest speed which isn’t terrible but certainly not ideal (for the components, my lap or the noise factor). An easy fix was to get a Cooler Master NotePal LapAir to have the laptop on which is really comfortable and helps cool the laptop with a near silent fan powered off a pass-through USB.

I love having a hardcore gaming experience with something I can take on a plane, train, to the coffee shop, etc. It just blows my mind. Additionally the GTX 780m is a pretty easy card to upgrade so in a while when I need a bit of a boost it should be pretty painless to upgrade. Just like a desktop! Crazy.

So all in all, I really have to recommend everything about this machine and especially the mobile video card. Despite all the research I was still a little nervous what running some of these demanding new games would be like but so far it has been awesome.

laptop

Welcome

Posted by Old Man on January 25, 2014
Posted in: uncategorized. Tagged: , . Leave a Comment

Get off my digital lawn!

Wait, sorry about that. Sometimes I’m not just an old man but a grumpy old man. And sometimes, but hopefully not that often, the world of technology needs the opinion from someone of a certain age. This blog is meant to help with that.

Now don’t expect a bunch of Luddite views expressed here; I’m a tech geek and a massive video game dork. That being said, it really burns me up when I see something that seems pointless, is implemented poorly or is so painful to use that I’d rather just not use it. So on this little plot of digital frontier you can expect to hear about things I’ve recently played with and think are really cool as well as things that piss me off. And every now and then I might post something about the good old days with C64s, cassette tape based storage, AOL chat rooms and how much I wanted my friend’s ColecoVision.

I’ll try to keep it as even handed as possible. :)

Make yourself at home, leave me feedback (especially tips for complaints I have or where I’m wrong) and don’t take it all too seriously.