Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

I did decently on a counterstrike game today; won the match with 41:6, kdr of 6.83!

I plunked down the $49 to buy BioShock on Steam, and except for some transient errors and logging in and out to refresh the state of my purchase, everything went as expected. If you’re thinking of buying this game, check out the requirements first:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo processor; System RAM: 2GB; Video Card: DX 9 - Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512 MB RAM (NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT or better), DX 10 - NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or better

My E6600 dual core with an ATI 1900 XT is barely good enough for decent frame rates at moderate quality settings, but it’s good enough to play with:

The plot is the best since Halo–you’re in the 1940s and have fallen into the ocean near a remote island. Surviving the crash, you make your way to the island and descend into Rapture, a society hidden beneath the earth. In Rapture, the inhabitants decided to experiment with DNA modification, giving them the power of gods. Unfortunately, it also twisted them into a hateful, violent society now decaying. The art deco is quite amazing:

As you go through the game, you try to acquire different plasmids to modify your DNA and gain new powers:

Another thing I like is the items in the game glow, so you know what to pick up and do. It’s very user friendly

And here is the first look at one of the “Big Daddies”:

The release and 97% aggregate review shot the stock up about 10% today. Go Take2! Post your reactions to BioShock here, guys.

If you’ve ever played Counterstrike CS or you might have gotten the error error verifying steam user id ticket. It basically means that the server couldn’t authenticate you with the steam authentication servers to make sure you’re using a legit version of the game. It could be that Steam is down, but more likely it is a transient glitch. Here are some tips to solve:

• Restart steam. Close the stream from the tray, and run your game again.
• Log out of steam, then log back in. Try your game again.
• Close steam. Go Program Files then find ClientRegistry.blob in your steam directory and delete it. Restart steam.
• Close steam. Then update your system clock and start up steam again.

If this doesn’t solve it, you should email steam / valve tech support, or go leave a post on their forums.

I know the steam error doesn’t look quite as good as ^, but I figured a mockup was better than none.

Imagine some kid putting this on his SAT or homework:

So there’s a new Company of Heroes multiplayer patch out, and no good place to download it from. The official site doesn’t even have it up yet, and every time I try to run it from inside the client I get an error message. So, in the spirit of gaming I’m releasing the Company of Heroes 1.5 patch as a download:

COH_EN_140_150_Patch.exe

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