Team Fortress 2 Free!

Was playing Left4Dead 2 at a LAN shop when I noticed the announcement that Team Fortress 2 is now free to play! Check out the Steam press announcement:

June 23, 2011—Valve, creators of bestselling game franchises (such as Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), announced today that after four years and over 200 updates, its popular and critically-acclaimed online action game Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is now Free To Play (F2P).
The F2P announcement comes as part of the "Über Update". Released today, it is the largest content pack delivered to TF2 since it shipped in 2007.

New players interested in experiencing what PC Gamer calls "the most fun you can have online" will have access to training and offline practice modes, so they can hone their skills before jumping into the ever-expanding TF2 universe.
To celebrate the launch of the Über Update, Valve has released "Meet the Medic," the latest in its series of TF2 animated shorts.

TF2 is now Free to Play for PC & Mac players via Steam.

For more information on Free to Play, please visit http://www.teamfortress.com/freetoplay.

For more information on the "Über Update" and "Meet the Medic", please visit http://www.teamfortress.com/uberupdate.

The official Steam page to download: Team Fortress 2 Steam Page

Might be a little late, but as they say, better late than never.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Couldn't get to sleep after knowing my results. What better to do when you can't sleep? Complete Call of Duty: Black Ops of course.

Well, I stink at multiplayer so I'm talking about singleplayer here anyway.

I think the singleplayer mode is quite cool. But why did they have to make the controls at the main menu so.. console? Maybe they thought that having a cursor there would spoil the immersion level of the player but there's a pointer visible (and a very prominent one at that) in the cutscenes!

I mean come on, obviously we are not playing as the protagonist when we are at the main menu screen, if we are, there must be a Kinect somewhere built in to detect his head movement or something...

Right, just wanted to whine a little(maybe a bit more than that) now lets get to the part I like.

I like the story. Basically, you are Capt. Alex Mason, a SOG operative. In the main menu screen, Mason is shown to be bound to a medical-looking chair with all those computer screens surrounding him which he seem to be hooked up to. There's even an IV pack beside him. Now the game carries on from here when you select to start a new campaign.

The story is told through the memories of Mason and sometimes of his handler, CIA agent Chris (? Can't remember) Hudson. He is shown to have been through many missions all over the world, most of them being clandestine in nature.

One feature I liked about Black Ops is that the loading screen is some sort of cutscene without any sort of loading bar. It took me a few missions before I realised that that video I've just watched is the loading screen.

I was a little bit disoriented at first with the aiming system of Black Ops. It might be similar to other Call of Duty games but my memory is failing me. However, it does make the game that more realistic.

That might be realistic but being unable to take out a squad of 20 soldiers at one mission then being able to take out a building full of them does not sound(or look) realistic to me. Oh yes, and being ordered around by your sergeant just makes you look incompetent and having bought your rank from the beach road over at the USA.

Now to finally start on Dragon Age..

"Graphic setup" error for Company of Heroes.

The error message:
"Failed to find a supported hardware rendering device. Ensure that your system meets the minimum requirements for CoH. Verify that DirectX is properly installed and that you have the latest drivers for your system."


The solution:
Use "-minvidmem 0" (without the quotes) as a launch option. 


Guess the game thought I'm using the integrated video card to play the game..