Personal blog of Prasad Ajinkya
On my birthday this year, my family decided to get me a Diablo themed cake. The excitement around the game’s launch earlier this year and my fascination of the game for the past decade was more than enough for me to enjoy this cake.
Thank you folks for this :)
Yep. I just bought this monster of a graphics card.
Yes. Another navel gazing post, but I think it’s worth the trouble.
After I bought Diablo 3 and started playing the game, I noticed major lags with this game on my desktop. I was not able to diagnose the problem initially, and was relegated to my laptop. I cleared the Normal mode, but the graphics were a bit lost on the minimum requirements .. and something felt missing. I went back to diagnosing the problem and turns out that my video card was overheating for the past 3 months, causing the PCI Express bus to shutdown and thus stopping all PCI devices (including my wireless card!).
The main reason of this, was that the video card’s fan was gone. This was the point when I started delving in the world of gaming hardware … and I followed the white rabbit.
The way I came to this conclusion was by using a software called MSI Afterburner, a software which works with most graphics cards. What it does is that it provides you real-time information about the metrics of your card such as temperature, GPU usage, Fan Speed (of the Graphics card) and Fan RPM. What’s more, with the right hardware, it also allows you to change most of these values. So I tried overclocking the fan to run at full throttle, but to no avail, the fan just would not start!
Now, the hardware used in gaming is all about performance, about driving the hardware to higher and higher … to get that extra bit of richness for all your pixels. With performance, comes a host of problems – heat for instance, where do you transmit all that excess heat? Power wattage is another, the energy required to deliver this performance requires higher wattage. A normal desktop computer requires 115W of power, a gaming computer on the other hand can demand as high as 400+W of power … higher than that of a server!
So, when I purchased this card, I was suddenly in a flux … a new SMPS … a new cabinet perhaps? Where does this stop? Fortunately, I had a 400W SMPS, which meant that this card runs perfectly on my system. I fired up Diablo, and voila … the GPU usage hit 100%, temperature went from 40% to 80% … and stayed. Stable for the entire while.
Finally, a card which cools faster than it heats up! Added to the sheer beauty of each and every game … things are looking good!
I have been playing this game for a month or so now, whenever there is a weekend, I do put in my 4-5 hours in this game. Some of the features in this game absolutely drive me nuts! Here are 10 reasons why Diablo drives me nuts!
One of the main reasons of me loving Diablo II so much was its great replay value. But what D3 has done is forced me to replay this game even when I do not want to!
I have been waiting for almost three years for this game to release. Along with me thousands of other Diablo fans are waiting for Blizzard to announce the public beta launch date. Truth be told, it’s going to negatively impact the subscriptions of the other Blizzard games, especially World of Warcraft. Perhaps they are working out on when to announce the launch of the 4.3 WoW patch, and when to announce the Diablo public beta. Here’s a list of all things that I have heard about the game.
Having said all that, the game is still widely awaiting and you can start checking out the game play videos of Demon Hunter, Monk, Wizard and Witch Doctor. With the private beta now live, you can always hope to see a lot more content and videos on youtube.
Here’s hoping that the game releases before 2012!!
After power leveling my first level 85 Dranei Hunter on World of Warcraft, I kind of realized that I need to slow down on the WoW front. Not only was it eating a significant amount of my free time, but I had gotten a bit jaded by it.
So after staying away from it for half a week, I tried to give this a whirl. FortuneOnline is a free MMORPG which has the look and feel of Diablo 2 … took me back to my days of engineering … bunking lectures so that I could stay back and slay Diablo/Baal or his uber-minions. I think that game is the only game I played to its fullest (for a full 6-7 years).
Pros:
Cons:
All in all, a good whirl and you can idle by a few boring hours with this game. I do hope that the Torchlight folks can turn out a better MMORPG
I am a huge fan of the Diablo series, so much so that when I had an important exam to study for, I had a friend come over and play on my machine … that way I could study and not get tempted to play the game!! 3 months later, I cracked that test, Nikhil got hooked on Diablo :-). After battling the hordes of Baal, both of us tried different variants of the game, I think I have completed the game with all characters while Nikhil has completed the game in all difficulty levels (yep! Hell!!).
It was 2009 and the folks at Blizzard were keeping the Diablo3 plans hush-hush. So how do we fill the void? Believe me, I have tried … Oblivion, KOTOR, Assassin’s Creed, Fallout … RTS games like Rise of Nations, Rise of Legends, Anno 1404 … the list goes on. My thirst for Diablo remains, until I saw on the xfire community a game which seemed to resemble Diablo, a LOT!! Screenshots looked like an old friend with a new hair-do … sleeker, trendy … but underneath, it was the same old friend.
I did my research and read through the wiki of the game, an excerpt –
Pre-production on Torchlight began in August 2008, shortly after the dissolution of Flagship Studios. Runic Games was founded by Travis Baldree (lead developer of Fate and Mythos) and veterans of Blizzard North and Flagship: Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer and Peter Hu. The “entire Flagship Seattle team” consisting of 14 people (the branch of Flagship which created the original Mythos) signed on to Runic Games at the time of its formation. Having lost the rights to Mythos, the Runic team saw the development of a new game as a way to “finish what [they] started,” although they would have to start over with none of the code or art assets from Mythos.
The game is touted to be the best Diablo clone that is there in the market. With a standard storyline, and lots of drops, I found the game an excellent hack and slash game. Also with an upcoming MMO to be launched soon in tie-up with Perfect World (a Chinese firm), the rights to play online would be free with the game.
One more game to look forward to in 2011 :-)
When I was doing my engineering (way back in 1999), one of my very good friends, Choxy told me of this original game CDs that his friend had gotten from the US. Now trust me, back then an original game CD was a big thing (it still is, but now you have torrents :-) ), and needless to say, Choxy with his awesome networking capability had those cds with him.
After meeting with him and getting those CDs, I was excited … heck, I was jumping up and down and aching to just play the game. But how to make the game run without those CDs… that was the question. After much soul searching, I found the right crack (had to install the game twice before I got the exact crack!!). By this time it was night and my mother was heckling me to go to sleep (yeah, it was so back that I actually listened to my folks). You could say that this was the turning point … once, the game started running, I said bye bye to a normal life, and the next 3 years of my engineering life were spent late-nights, surfing, playing, days – sleeping, eating.
I was hooked, and how!?! One of my best friends also got hooked to the game, so much that he used to visit my place just to play the game … and boy he was a good player. During my CAT preps, I took his help in occupying the machine so that I would not play Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction instead!! So part of my MBA’s credit is also due to Kombdi!!
After almost 5 years, Diablo2 is completely out of my system. Or so I thought, yesterday I learned about Blizzard announcing Diablo3 :-)
The craze is on.