Tag Archives: Games and Gaming

Diablo 3 – Freakin’ WOW!

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Let me start this post by saying that I am a game addict, and not just video games either. Yep, years ago I was a pen and paper RPG nerd, and still am although I don’t really play much anymore. I love the books though, I love the stories, and therefore I have gravitated to computer games. What does this have to do with this site? Well, when I find something really cool, especially if it has to do with computers and/or related technology, I want to share it.

I played both Diablo and Diablo 2, including the expansions, and I don’t think anyone can argue that the Diablo series set the bar for many other games. How often have you seen games out there that were pretty much blatant Diablo rip-offs? From the GUI to the gameplay, they were trying to ride that same wave and catch some of the masters glory. Never seemed to work, did it? Just like World Of Warcraft is setting the bar for MMO’s with plenty of copy cats to follow, Diablo did the same thing years ago.

Well, now it’s doing it again. I got a chance to watch the HD gameplay trailer for Diablo 3 today and I was blown away. It looks like Blizzard is redefining this type of game all over again. The trailer was graphically awesome to be sure, but the gameplay and new features were insane. I wanted to play this game so bad I could taste it. Trust me, it will be a very long wait for this title to come out. Let me say too, I don’t see this is hype or vapor, this trailer is simply the game, and someone playing it narrating what is going on. Very cool.

Here, I have a link to the trailer that you can download in chunks. The whole trailer is almost 600MB and you can get it at FilePlanet [Link], but for those that don’t want to bite off all that at once, you can get it here in 12MB pieces. There are lots of places on the net to get bits and pieces of the trailer, but I can tell you that the entire HD trailer is an awesome thing, I highly recommend grabbing it. Then you can sit back, fire it up and just get lost in this magnificent game.  Grab the smaller chunks here.

Age Of Conan Download Links

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I have seen lots of folk out there trying to find ways to download the AoC client, even though it’s a hefty almost 13GB.  I was looking too and what I found was this:

  • There is no (official) digital download/delivery method in place for the AoC client from Funcom.  Right now, if you want the game, you have to buy it retail.
  • That being said, I found that the early access client that was available for download by the players that signed up for early access to the game, will work for playing live right now.  After the download, it will patch up to live (another ~800MB) and you can then play.
  • There are two clients, one for the US and one for the EU.  If you are in the US, you need the US client, and the same for EU.

So, after much searching, I found links to the early access downloader.  This is a small file that will then download all of the game install files.  I don’t know how long this will work, but as of 5/23/2008 it was still working and allowed me to buy a key from an online retailer (Offgamers), download the game and start playing.  Make no mistake, I paid for the game, this is not a way to play for free and I don’t in any way condone stealing. However, for people like me who live in rural areas where you can’t buy it off the shelf without a long trip to another town, and didn’t want to wait for Amazon to ship to play the game it’s a great thing.

Here are the links that I found to the US and EU downloader tool:

Good luck!

Installing World Of Warcraft On Vista

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Having trouble installing WoW (Word of Warcraft) on your Windows Vista box? Well, I was. Recently I wanted to go back and give WoW a try once again, and by now I have a new machine from Alienware running Windows Vista. I popped the original first CD in and low and behold … I got an error, it wouldn’t run the executable. I got an error number 132 and something about a bootstrap problem.

I thought this might just be a problem with the older installer and Vista, since I got these disks years ago, so I downloaded the latest installer from Blizzard’s website. So, 3.5 GB later I try to install from the download and it doesn’t work either. Different error, this time Vista just popped up a box saying that the installer wasn’t working. Support at Blizzard was no help, in their opinion I had bad memory but I didn’t think that was the case since every other game I have runs great. After some log searching and Google-ing, I hit upon something that clicked for me. It seems the installer was failing because of a problem with the LAME MP3 codec. Aha!

The answer was there in front of me. I took a shot, downloaded and installed the LAME MP3 codec and tried again. Lookout, now the installer worked! I didn’t go back and try the old CD’s, but the installer that I downloaded worked great.

So, if you are having trouble installing WoW on your Vista box, and especially if you get any kind of LAME MP3 errors, go and download the codecs here (http://www.freecodecs.net/files/lameACM-3.97-final.zip) and see if that helps.