State of Affairs — PC Gaming

Coming up on two years since I purchased my PS3 — the first console I’ve owned since the original Gameboy — I find I’m enjoying gaming more than I had in quite some time. This has me thinking about the current state of gaming on my old platform: PC.

Mass Effect 2 Review

Mass Effect 2 is one of those special games that you never want to see end. Partly this might come down to its structure, allowing the player to wander through the bulk of the game at their own pace, but always with the impending pressure of the much hyped ‘suicide mission’ that makes up the final act of the game. From the moment that you gain control of your ship, maybe an hour into the game if you take your time, the ‘mass relay’ that will carry you into that final act sits there on your map, a constant reminder as you travel the galaxy building your team. But with that glowing, red icon on the map, there always seems like there must be just one more thing to do before moving through to the endgame. One more thing to make sure you are prepared….

Open Windows

Today’s challenge was installing Windows 7 on my Macbook via Boot Camp. Oddly, the experience was much more complicated than it was when I had loaded on the release candidate ages ago.

The actual install was fairly smooth. Partitioning my hard drive was simple in the Boot Camp assistant. Restarting to actually load on the OS, I discovered that astinshingly Mircosoft has managed to make the process mostly pain free. The process boils down to pressing next a few times - fewer times than I feared.

Now comes the trouble. Popping the Mac OS install DVD in to load on drivers (which worked perfectly when I did this with the RC), I hit a wall. The Boot Camp installer just wouldn’t do anything. Not good.

After an hour plus poking around the internet, I luckily stumbled across Matt Gemmell‘s instructions on how to force the drivers to install.  Life saver. Except that this meant that within an hour of putting Windows on my precious Mac I was looking at the blinking cursor of the Command Prompt. 2010, and I’m typing DOS commands into a black box to launch a file with ‘elevated privledges.’ We really aren’t past this yet?

With Windows once again sitting on my machine the path is ready for some interesting content coming to blog over the next couple of months through, so it’s all woth it. Right?