Coming Up For Air

My video card died on me. Thank goodness my Dell laptop can handle most of my gaming needs. The 6800GT has stopped playing 3D games. I get all sorts of graphical artifacts and then the system seizes up and crashes. I think I am going to buy a relatively cheap Saphire X1900XT for about $130. It seems to be more than enough power to run the games I’m playing, since everything was working fine with my 6800GT.

One result of this is that I’m not on AOL as much as before because I don’t turn it on when I’m on the laptop and playing World of Warcraft. Don’t like the screen minimizing right when I am dealing the death blow to an unsuspecting creature. Jonathan was the first with the “where have you been” flood and ten more complaints were filed with the Johnson AOL Better IMing Business Bureau. I’ll be back up 24/7 on AOL once I fix the video card issue.

This means my Lord of the Rings Online purchase was very poorly timed. It plays like a dog on my laptop at 1280 and I don’t want to reduce all of the settings because it’s a new game and I like to drink in a new game’s essence. So I will wait to get in more detailed play after I fix the video card issues.

I was thinking the other day that LoTR is another example of why video gaming press/web sites are pretty useless in 2007. I did not read about LoTR in any “press” area. Many forums were read and it was based on the comments in the places I trust that the purchase was made. While I may give places like FOFC a hard time, they are much more informative on their worst day than any web site/video magazine writing about text sports gaming. You just have to put on your FOFC lens to filter out the good information.

But not all forums were created equal. I haven’t visited Operation Sports in years with one exception. Their much discussed “review” of OOTPB 2006 reminded me why I don’t read the site. So when they give OOTPB 2006 a 9/10 and OOTPB 2007 a 10/10 I say meh, who cares? I’m not visiting their site to read the 2007 review because the 2006 review was completely off target. They may know something about sports gaming, I don’t know, but they know very little about sports text gaming.

Find forums of like-minded people and see what they have to say about a game before purchasing it.

Share

One thought on “Coming Up For Air”

Leave a Reply