The first impressive thing about EVE is that it is big. Very big. It's also very empty. Both of these were pretty much a given the space setting, but it's still impressive to see it. The emptiness is cancelled out by the Warp Drive, meaning you aren't spending ages staring at black space, yet because you need to use gates to go between systems, the sheer size is still obvious.

The possible routes there are for EVE seem to be these:

• Trading: Buying stuff cheap, selling it dear. Easy to explain, hard to do well.
• Mining: Resource gathering. Is there anywhere this isn't boring?
• Manufacturing: Making stuff. Get x, y and the blueprints, wait some time. Might be OK for some, not for me.
• Combat: The highlight of the game. This is really quite fun, and well done, as you control all the various weapons/defenses on your ship. Of course, being a noob, I'm still at the sucking and dying stage, so haven't done any PvP yet.

A nice feature in game is that skill training takes place in real time, and continues when you are not online, meaning you don't have to play obsessively to get anything useful. I was a bit confused over what to do after the first few days because my two friends who played it went on holidays, but I managed to work my way through it. Learning the game could certainly be easier, but it's not as bad as some people make it out to be. A few things were confusing, but even when my friends were gone, I still didn't find anywhere where I was going "What am I supposed to do now?"

However, MMOs really aren't my thing, and while EVE was a good game, I am unwilling to give out €15 a month for it. If it was a game that cost €45 once, and that was it, I'd jump for it. But at over €100 a year, it just isn't worth it. It's a good game, but fails on the area of value for money. Which is something a lot of gaming sites don't always take into consideration. That €15 a month could be spent on getting a new game every 2 or 3 months, rather than just keeping an old game.

Introversion Complete Pack

Another recent purchase was the Introversion Complete Pack, which I bought during the Steam sale for €5. The pack contains 4 games - Darwinia, it's multiplayer successor Multiwinia, DEFCON, and Uplink. The one I've played most was Uplink.

Unlike EVE, which struggled to prove its value for money, Uplink alone is worth more than the €5 I payed for the set on Steam. Uplink is a game about hacking (of the script kiddy variety seemingly), where you have to break into various systems by using the right tools. The gameplay was simple, and the game's soundtrack was good, in a retro way.

The other one of the set I've played is DEFCON, a RTS based around nuclear warfare. The game starts slowly, as you build up your units and stockpiles, then move them into position, until the timer reaches DEFCON 1, and the nukes start flying. Again, it was quite enjoyable, even if I wasn't that good at it. Though from what I've seen from comments by other people who have played the game, the AI is quite hard to defeat at first.

Darwinia, and Multiwinia? I haven't got around to playing those two yet, but the other two have already paid for themselves several times over, so these two should be good as well.

Left 4 Dead

The final games I bought recently were Left 4 Dead 1 & 2. Again, I got these in the Steam sales, and given the price reductions, I bought the 4 pack of Left 4 Dead 1 so I could play games with friends when they were over. The co-op element is really fun, and most of the online community is luckily as good as Team Fortress 2, as opposed to the likes of Xbox Live and Counter Strike.

I know I'm rather late to the party with this one, but it is still a fun game. The zombies like the Charger and the Tank add the need for extra strategy than the "Get a good weapon and keep shooting while hiding in the corner until they are dead" of my other favorite zombie game, Nazi Zombies mode in COD5 (which was the only reason to play COD5 once you cleared the campaign).

The matchmaking system also works very well - I've found myself in matches with players of comparable skill most of the time, rather than being stuck ruining someone else's game by being a noob, or being stuck with people who are even worse at games than I am.

Playing locally with friends on Left 4 Dead 1 is fun as well, so the 4 pack was well worth it. The one problem I did encounter, is that the multiplayer element in Left 4 Dead 1 is rather unbalanced in Versus mode if you don't have 8 players, as there are no AI special infected, unlike in Left 4 Dead 2 which had this feature added in a patch. Oh, and the lack of melee weapons is also a bit disappointing.

There is a tutorial for the game on the offical wiki to get you started. Once you've read through it and understood it, you are ready to play the game. After a while, you'll probably want a few, more in-depth tricks to the game. So here's a few basic ones:

• Coal -> Power and long distance passenger travel by air are the easiest ways to make money early on.
• Pay close attention to your slopes and curves. Although the game will allow it, making sharp turns and going up long hills straight away will slow you down, just like real trains.
• You can grow towns with a few bus stations and buses going around within a turn, which will produce more available passengers.
• Put signals close together so trains don't keep stopping and starting because of a train loads of tiles down the line. (You can hold ctrl, then click and drag to make signals all along a section of track)

If you want to learn how to play the game really well, I suggest you spectate or play a few games on #openttdcoop. They are very advanced, so if you don't understand what they are up to, don't worry. It is kind of a case of learning in the deep end there, but it does help a lot. While I'm still barely a newbie compared to what they build, most of my friends think I'm really good at the game. Don't ask me why. I certainly don't think so. The official wiki, and the openttdcoop wiki also provide a good few tips.

#openttdcoop built this. Insane, but mostly simple ideas scaled up.

The game has a multiplayer mode, (which is how #openttdcoop build such huge things), which can be played co-operatively or against each other. It's great for LAN games, provided you have a bit of time on your hands. For internet play, you can find loads of servers to play against other people. If you want to just play against your friends over the internet, without joining someone else's server, it can get a bit tricky since someone needs to host it, and firewalls and NATs and all the other issues you normally have do cause problems, because one of you need to host it. I managed to get around it by running it on my VPS a while back, but that's still kind of complicated. I may post a guide for how to do this in a few days.

Most frequently, this seems to come from American users, who have become accustomed to having decent internet (as much as they complain about their standard of internet). There are countries other than America out there. Here in Ireland, I have a 1 megabit connection. An unreliable 1 megabit connection, with an ISP that works 9-5, Monday to Friday. This means if my connection crashed at 6pm Friday, I have no internet until I get home at 5pm Monday. So long internet outages do happen. And, because of my ISP's hours, they tend to happen at times when I might be at home, wanting to, maybe, play some video games.

Sure, it's your own fault, get a better ISP, I hear some of you say. But, there is no better ISP here. I can get a more stable connection alright. It's called dial up. But now I have to pay for usage, rather than monthly, rendering it (a) significantly dearer, and (b) on even less.

And apart from the big outages, between the fact that I have a wi-fi network, and my internet connection is a rural satelite dish pointed at tower on hill affair, smaller ones, maybe a minute long, are par for the course. Do I want to be kicked out of my game EVERY. SINGLE. TIME? Nope.

Oh, well you're a minority, living rurally in a country with poor broadband. If I moved to a city (other than Dublin), I could get 7 meg broadband. And I've read Americans on forums complain at the state of broadband in America (usually whilst comparing themselves to Sweden or Japan), but on the other hand, I've seen Americans scoff at 10 meg connections. Which would leave the average Irish internet connection in the dust, even in a city.

There is another part to the poor internet connection, one that Ubisoft would be delighted to hear about. It renders me incapable of pirating a game, because of the sheer length of time it would take to download. Between unreliable internet corrupting downloads, the fact that I'm not home all day, and my slow speed, downloading a 5GB game would take around 2 weeks. And let's be honest, 5GB is a conservative estimate for the size of a modern game. By which stage, all my friends would have cleared the game, and moved onto the next one, rendering it pointless.

I bought Assassins Creed 2, on 360, before this mess was announced. And now I regret it, having supported a company that does this.

So, I was pleasantly surprised when my new TP-Link WN821N worked straight away on Linux on my desktop PC. Given that is was a €20 Wireless N adapter, I didn't expect it to. All well and good. Then it came to Windows. Expecting it to be simple as usual, I installed the driver. The wi-fi thing showed up, I used Connect to a Network, and... No network.

Several minutes of googling later reveals there is no Windows 7 driver (which is what Server 2008 R2 normally uses). Instead there is a Vista driver, which is no good in this case. So I've either:

• Ran into one of those edge cases where the difference between Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 actually does matter.
• Ran into one of those edge cases where the difference between Vista and 7 does matter

or

• Both

Which really sucks. Especially when the majority of what I do on that desktop using Windows is gaming. (Yeah, yeah, gaming over Wi-Fi, tut tut...). Gaming sans multiplayer is kind of limited. I mean, sure I can play Fallout 3, and Oblivion fine, but what about Team Fortress 2? Oh, hold on, that works on Wine. Actually, so does Fallout 3. And openTTD. And that's basically all I play in PC games lately.

Right, so why am I running Windows on this machine? My copy of Visual Studio is from DreamSpark (as is my copy of Windows, which is why I'm using Server 2008 R2 in the first place - it was that or XP, I've no Windows 7 yet, and my Vista disc is a Dell OEM disc), which I'm fairly certain can only be installed once, and it's already on my laptop. uTorrent and Paint.NET both blow away their nearest competitors on Linux, but uTorrent is useless without an internet connection, and Paint.NET is only one program at the end of the day.

So, screw this - no internet, it's too much effort, I'm going back to Linux¹. And that is something I never thought I'd say when I first started experimenting with Linux. Of course, most of this is TP-Link's fault. If some random outsider can write a working driver for Linux, I don't see why they shouldn't be able to write a driver for Windows 7. I won't be buying from them again.

There are one class of updates that aren't quite so great however. These are the ones that decide they need to sit in your system, all running simultaneously. And when there is an update? It's so important that they need to pop up a window to alert you of this, even if you have no intention of going near said application for a week. Or maybe they are like Apple's. An update to iTunes includes Safari by default. Why?

The other day, I was two hours into a Supreme Commander LAN party. While I was about to start the final attack, what happens? The game minimizes, and a message pops up. New update for Adobe Reader. Last time I opened a PDF was a week ago (against my will). On my system, once you minimize any of these games:

• Oblivion
• Supreme Commander
• Call of Duty 5
• Team Fortress 2
• Unreal Tournament III
• etc.

They aren't coming back up again. Say goodbye to your progress if there isn't a recent save. I tried in vain to start the game again. Click the taskbar entry. Up pops another Window:

"Supreme Commander Application has stopped responding"

It closes. I end up disconnected from the LAN game. Up pops to the nearly defeated player "Macha has been defeated". All because some stupid cruddy app to open files created by those too lazy to make an actual web page decided it needed to update itself right now. (Yes, I am aware Adobe Reader and PDFs are useful to some people in some situations. I am not one of them).

While the Java updater was not the guilty culprit this time, it has been at other times, with behavior similar to that of Adobe's updater.

That is one clear advantage to console gaming. The nearest equivalent is the 360's forced update or be signed out of xbox live being applied to single player games as well, and that's not nearly as bad.

I can remove these applications from startup of course, but somehow they seem to always make their way back there.

During the last week, I got Halo 3: ODST. It's the first new Xbox game I've gotten in a good while. I haven't played Halo 3 much since the release of COD4, so before I got it I played through Halo 3 so I'd have something to compare it to. The actual campaign is kind of short, but it's well polished.

The first thing I noticed about was the price. At €45 it's a welcome break from the €60 new releases I'm used to. And definitely cheaper than MW2 which is going to be €70 at release here.

The graphics are about equal to those of Halo 3. So while they are far from bad, they're still outclassed by many other games. Given that Bungie has up until now mainly had to animate armour and aliens, some of the details such as hair and skin have a PS2 feel to them.

The story is where ODST shines. It makes a break from the "infiltrate big forerunner artifact, blow it up, escape" of previous Halo titles. You wake up 6 hours after the drop and have to track down your squad, with flashbacks to the events earlier in the day on finding each piece of evidence. I can't say too much more without spoiling the plot.

During the gameplay, there are a lot of "defend" sections. These are quite fun, and are long enough to be challenging without being boring. The game's special mode is a defense game where you have to last as long as you can, much like COD5's Nazi Zombies mode. It's more serious than Zombies, lacking the powerups (at least on your side, the skulls randomly activate to increase the Covenant's strength), and novelty aspects (ray gun, wunderwaffe) of Zombies, but replacing it with much larger maps and more variations in enemies. Despite much of the hype about the ODSTs being weaker than Master Chief, and a more tactical game, the only part you'll notice this is when you are fighting against the hunters.

Overall, I'd rate it about 7/10. I actually had more fun out of this than Halo 3 itself, which didn't impress me too much.

One of my favourite old games is Theme Hospital by Bullfrog. I still have my original disc, and play it a lot. It has a lot of charm, but it's not always simple to get running. So I'm writing up this guide on playing Theme Hospital on a modern PC. It has been re-released a couple of times, but my disc has both the Windows and DOS versions on the one disc.

First of all, if you are running a 32 bit version of Windows, have the Windows version, and have no intention of playing the multiplayer mode, just insert your disc and install away. It still runs perfectly up until XP. On Vista on my PC, I had to set the compatibility mode to Windows 95, and turn "Run as Administrator" on and it worked from then on. The same steps should work the same on Windows 7 32bit, but I don't have a computer running that to check. [EDIT: A friend informs me that it doesn't work on his Windows 7 32bit, but I still haven't tested for myself. Try the DOSbox instructions if it doesn't work for you]

If you want multiplayer, or you have the DOS version, things become more complex. For Vista, the IPX network protocol, which was used by Theme Hospital, along with many games of it's time has been removed. There is a hack to enable IPX in Vista, but it does not allow you to change the settings, and did not work for me. If you have XP or earlier, installing IPX to the Hamachi VPN software apparently works but I don't have access to a XP computer to test it.

The final option which I eventually resorted to using is to install Theme Hospital to DOSbox. This works on all Windows versions from 2000 up, and for Mac OS X and Linux aswell. Download and install DOSbox. Make a folder to store the files. I recommend you make it something easy to type such as C:\hospital on windows on /home/user/hospital on Linux/OSX. Then open up DOSbox. You will be presented with a DOS prompt. Type the following:

Linux

mount C "/home/user/hospital"
mount D "/media/cdrom" -t cdrom

Or Windows (replace E: with the actual drive letter of your CD rom drive)

mount C "C:\hospital"
mount D "E:\" -t cdrom

Next we need to install Theme Hospital to DOSbox. First, when your cursor is stuck in the DOSbox window (as happens later in the process), to get it out press Ctrl-F10. Now, in dosbox type:

D:/setup.exe

This will open up the Theme Hospital DOS installer. Click the install button and let it install to C:\HOSPITAL (note: For windows users, this is equal to C:\hospital\HOSPITAL on the actual system). Then go to the configuration screen. Configure your sound card and music card. I found selecting Creative Sound Blaster Pro worked fine for me on Linux and Windows. I did have to turn my system volume up to full on Linux to hear it as the volume was stuck down low, however.

To avoid typing in the mount commands each time edit your configuration file. On Windows click the edit configuration file shortcut. If you are using Linux, you first have to issue the command CONFIG -writeconf dosbox.conf inside of DOSBox. Afterwards, the dosbox.conf file will be written to your home directory.

At the very end of the file, add the mount commands you entered before installing the game.

Afterwards click exit. The DOS version of theme hospital is now installed on DOSbox. To launch the game, first start up DOSbox, then enter in the commands shown:

C:
cd HOSPITAL
HOSPITAL.EXE

If you want to play multiplayer, read on. Otherwise, you can stop now.

Edit your configuration file again and replace the line:

ipx=false

with

ipx=true

For each additional computer you wish to play it on, repeat the above process. Finally pick one computer as the host. On that computer start DOSbox and type the same instructions as startup last time, but add this before starting the game

ipxnet startserver  
ipxnet connect 127.0.0.1

Find the host's IP address. For internet play, try whatismyip.com. For local network play, check your network connections dialog.

Now on each client computer type the following (replace the 10.0.0.5 with your host computer's IP address):

ipxnet connect 10.0.0.5

And start the game on all the computers, enter the network game screen and play away.

Some Final Notes

Gameplay performance on the same system was much better on Vista than it was on Linux. The game played perfectly under Vista, while under Linux the sound was noticeably choppy. Whether this  is a problem with DOSbox or with my computer's drivers is not certain.

I'm not sure if it is possible to play the Windows version against the DOS version. I have not tried.

The Wii. A console that half the world 's gamers love, and the other half think is a waste of money. Having outsold every console ever, many declare Nintendo the ultimate success but how many people still play it after buying it? Nearly everyone I know has a Wii. Only one of them still uses it. My Wii is slowly gathering dust, even when my 360 was out of action.

So if no-one enjoys the Wii, how has it managed to sell so well? It happens like this.

1. You buy a Wii
2. You play it for a while and show it to a few friends.
3. You get bored of the Wii
4. Your friends buy Wiis
5. They show their friends.
6. They get bored.
7. Their friends buy Wiis.

And on it goes. This hasn't been helped by the amount of games sold for the Wii, with no considerations given to replayibility. Don't get me wrong, there are some great games for the Wii, but the majority of the games aren't good for anyone except the most casual gamers.

I know I'm not the only who thinks this. The President of Epic Games (the company who created the Unreal Engine which is used in many games and the games Unreal Tournament and Gears of War) described the Wii as a virus.

This always makes me laugh for a number of reasons:

1. A lot of those videos are pre-rendered. They might be the intro clip, or other movie clip, not actual gameplay.

2. Youtube isn't exactly known for it's high quality. Most of these videos are encoded on the default quality. If they come from the company, they might just be high quality, which is still inferior to the video quality actual gameplay on whatever game they're saying it's better than. To see just how bad it is, look at the pictures from this blog post.

YouTube

Standard Definition

And remember, most games nowadays are 720p, twice the quality of the second picture, and scaled up to 1080p by your console, nearly 3 times the quality if you have a full HD telly.

One example of this was around 6 months ago, the Orange Box for 360 was priced at €30 pre-owned, the same store sold it new for €20. Another example was during Zavvi's closing down sale. They claimed to have amazing offers. They did but not quite in the sense they meant. Mirrors Edge reduced from €60 to €59.99. Quite underwhelming.

Another case of bad pricing is on Steam. They converted $10 to €10 for Garry's Mod. Another page has a TF2 + Gmod offer at $25 or €25. $1 is not €1. A quick google reveals the current exchange rate is $1 -> €0.71 .

For reference, at the time of this post, €25 is equal to $35.

Combine this with the poor broadband connections in my area (1 meg) and Steam's frequent downtime, and digital downloads don't look very appealing any more. And Gamestop's PC game prices are far more reasonable now than they have ever been before. €40 for the Sims 3 or E:TW, PC games are now cheaper than even Wii games.  When I bought E:TW, that was cheaper than the price on Steam (€49.99) . And Steam is supposed to have lower costs to distribute these games... Like duty-free shops that can charge much less, but mysteriously don't.