So, what's the weather like? Got your Christmas shopping done? What did you think about that crazy email story coming out of England? What's the best game you've played lately? Ok, so I'm desperately trying to make conversation. :)

Special thanks to The Mick for setting up these boards.

Mark--

Suspect the weather up here in Chicago is nearly as cold as it is in my beloved hometown of St. Louis. Wish I was at Cicero's right now waiting for the start of the Missouri-Illinois game...

Ah, the Missouri-Illinois game! That's always a classic battle. Do you remember that game a few years ago where the Illinois player missed a couple of free throws that would have won the game after time expired? Instead it went into overtime and the Tigers won. Heh -- what a game.

Thanks for stopping by, and yes it is cold!

Speaking of the Mizzou-Illinois game coming, I'm supposed to head up to Hotshots here in St Louis to watch it. :) I just wanted to say hi, and say I like the site!

Craig

Thanks Craig. I wonder how many fellow gamers are here in St. Louis? Do you guys know of any LAN parties in St. Louis? I'd love to get together with some gamers.

And Triggercut, if you stop back by, I live about a mile from Ciceros. I love the Loop. The beer's a bit overpriced, though. :)

You guys need to come to LA. It's warm and there's a LAN party at my house once a week.

-Tom

No, don't tell anyone to come to LA, it's too crowded already. Really, guys, Tom is way off base. It is a horrible place to live, you don't want to be here. The houses are a million dollars for a tarpaper shack, you stand a 65% chance of a freeway shootout everytime you change lanes, and out-of-work actors hog up all the good seats at Wendy's. Even OJ moved away. See? Bad, bad, bad.

Oh, and the weather you see during the Rose Parade is all done with Hollywood special effects. In reality, there are gloomy skies and smog, just like in Blade Runner. We even have those blimps trying to get you to move to the offworld colonies.

So, Tom, where is the LAN party?

It's bitterly cold here in Champaign tonight, too, but that didn't stop the Illini :)

Nooo! Mizzou lost by 5 in OT! First the Rams on Monday night and now this! Noooo!

Damn, I'm gonna play some computer games and kick some AI opponent's ass! I'll play some UT and rename some bots Warren Sapp.

Hey there! (Are "Mark" and "Mark Asher" 2 different Marks, BTW?)

To answer a question of "St. Louis gamers?": KeithG here, from St. Louis (and dropping in here from Jaded's Pub). Sorry that I have to run (work and Xmas stuff, you know), but let's chat more soon and I'd love to hear of any LAN parties (shoot clubs, ;-)). I don't have a LAN setup here, but could add a warm body and a target for many games. And drag a P2-450 around as needed. Take care, all.

Mark and Mark Asher are one and the same. I just switched to the latter to post messages under, thinking it would be more clear.

If we could get enough people interested, it would be fun to do a LAN party. We might have to rent facilities, but if there were enough involved the cost could be modest.

All this talk of LAN parties, are there any readers out there that live in the Bay Area in Northern California? I would love to set something up sometime.

Quick question for Tom. How they hell can you afford to maintain four machines? I try my best to keep two machines up to par for when friends come over, but even that gets costly.

And finally, just a quick word of praise. You guys do a fantastic job. I really enjoy the entire site.

Thanks for the kind words Roger. Be sure to tell fifty thousand of your closest friends. :)

"Quick question for Tom. How they hell can you afford to maintain four machines? I try my best to keep two machines up to par for when friends come over, but even that gets costly."

It's actually not too hard for a guy like me who keeps upgrading RAM and video cards and has a few extra mice laying around the house. The hardest part was finally biting the bullet to buy enough monitors, but I could get those for under $200.

Don't get me wrong, however -- it's not a state-of-the-art network. One of the computers is actually an overclocked Celeron 300! Nearly any game we play has to be turned down to the wireframe equivalent of its graphics. And it's painful to run stuff like Giants on that machine. But as long as we can keep the framerate up (which we can't), it's tolerable.

What sort of costs are you running into with your machines, Roger? Do you mean just the initial setup?

-Tom

Yeah, the initial setup is definitely a part of it. I guess I also just have snobby friends who would rather not play if they can't have at least 1024x768 and all the bells and whistles turned on. Not that I don't fall into that category myself. I find that I want to get the best video card and processor for both machines rather than have one good machine and one okay machine, but that just isn't in my budget.

It just makes more sense to me to distribute the cost across a group of friends and then they all can have their souped up machines. Then the problem is that nobody wants to lug them around, especially the people with the 21" monitors.

I currently have my original Dell 266 with upgraded memory (128), hard drive, and video card (voodoo 3) and then a second dell that I got from work that runs at 850mhz with 256 megs of RAM and a Nvidia TNT card in it. The 266 is in bad need of an upgrade but I'm kinda waiting to see how far prices are going to fall after the holidays.

Now that I've rambled on for awhile. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the intial costs sounds tough, but I can see what you are doing with the sub $200 monitors and the overclocked CPUs. But I even see the upgrade costs being a little high for four machines if I wanted to keep them running the latest games.

My final thought is that I can just see everybody fighting over the best machines and somebody being pissed off that they got stuck with the crappy one and using it as an excuse for losing or as an excuse to just not play.

"Yeah, the initial setup is definitely a part of it. I guess I also just have snobby friends who would rather not play if they can't have at least 1024x768 and all the bells and whistles turned on."

The guys who come to Shoot Club tend to be casual gamers, so there's isn't a lot of tech snobbery. In fact, we get some guys completely new to computer games. Once we pick their jaws off the floor, they don't mind getting stuck with the overclocked Celeron. :)

"My final thought is that I can just see everybody fighting over the best machines and somebody being pissed off that they got stuck with the crappy one and using it as an excuse for losing or as an excuse to just not play."

The best rig is a P650 with a 21" monitor. Guess who's usually seated in front of it? :) I consider my 'droit de seigneur'.

As for the slow machine, the philsophy here (probably from my flight sim days) is that framerate is king. Some guys may get stuck with ugly graphics, but I try to make sure no one's stuck with a choppy framerate. Games like Giants make this difficult...

-Tom

My main machine is an overclocked Celeron 300 (overclocked to 450) and it works really great playing Half-Life using a lowly original Creative TNT card.

My son's machine is a 400 MHZ P2--$900 just for the danged chip a couple of years ago. OUCH! I'll never pay that much for a processor again (hence, the overclocked Celeron), but I digress--and he regularly kicks ass playing Opposing Forces on line. Of course, it could be his 11-year-old reflexes helping him, or the broadband connection . . . but really, it all looks and plays fantastic.

It could be that I'm being continually blown away anew by seeing the graphics on my son's machine when I see him play, seeing as how I've been spending the last few weeks playing X-COM: UFO Defense and Terror From The Deep. I've never played those games before, so I felt it was high time to do so (Getting ready for Dreamland Chronicles, I guess). As great as those games are, the graphics are pretty darned crude.

To get to the point: Today's games don't seem to really push our machines too much like they did in the past, so it's a bit easier to have multiple computers in the house. Upgrades don't seem to be as urgent, so the pace is more leisurely. Sure, I blew $600 on a pair of Voodoo 2 cards a couple of years ago. Today, I can just wait, for example, a GeForce 2 MX to show up, and upgrade then. Similarly, that overclocked Celeron, and today's Athlon's make CPU upgrades cheaper, and it's not a frantic race like in the "old" days.

"I've been spending the last few weeks playing X-COM: UFO Defense and Terror From The Deep. I've never played those games before, so I felt it was high time to do so (Getting ready for Dreamland Chronicles, I guess). As great as those games are, the graphics are pretty darned crude."

Yeah, they're a bit hard on the eyes these days, especially with a large monitor. I don't understand why they just don't do a SVGA facelift for them and charge $20. I bet they could sell 100,000 copies at least, and there's no way redoing the art would cost more than $100,000. As much as I want Dreamland, a SVGA X-COM would do fine by me.

"Today's games don't seem to really push our machines too much like they did in the past, so it's a bit easier to have multiple computers in the house. Upgrades don't seem to be as urgent, so the pace is more leisurely."

Yeah, I agree. Hardware has outpaced gaming finally. Ultima 9 is the only game in recent memory that taxed top-of-the-line PCs.

I just upgraded to a Duron 800 and I expect it to last me through next Xmas season at least. I've never been one who needed to play every game with all the detail turned up.

Don't mind me... Just passing though

"Ultima 9 is the only game in recent memory that taxed top-of-the-line PCs."

I'd say Giants and even, to a lesser extent, Sacrifice are in the same league as U9. I might even put NOLF in the same category. These are some of the few games that have made me consider upgrading some of the computers.

-Tom

I belive that there is a law of upgrading that moves from around 1.5 years to 3 years. With the average being about 2 years. This is because it takes about 2 years to produce a game and devolopers can only make games for existing technology, so if you upgrade to top or near top of the line every 2 years you will always be in the minimum requirments of your games. Now if i only had the money to live by that rule :(

"so if you upgrade to top or near top of the line every 2 years you will always be in the minimum requirments of your games. Now if i only had the money to live by that rule :( "

No kidding. I've never had a top-of-the-line PC. I wonder what it's like to have the best PC? If I ever win the lottery, I'm going to buy a maxed out Falcon or Alienware system. Ah....

Well, Mark... Lemme tell ya what it's like.

Having a top of the line PC is absolutely awesome... for about 2 months. Then you don't.

:-)

"Having a top of the line PC is absolutely awesome... for about 2 months. Then you don't."

Heh. Yeah, I can see that. I'm just enjoying running an 800 mhz Duron. This is probably the farthest ahead of most gaming requirements that I've ever been.

If I really had unlimited cash, I'd probably indulge myself in one of those cool flatscreen monitors. It would be nice to get rid of these huge, ugly things most of us have now.

I agree with the "every two years" upgrade path. No longer do I agree that it has to be the latest and greatest thing every two years. A notch or two below "latest and greatest" is the best way to go, financially speaking.

By the way, my son's Christmas present was a new motherboard (Abit KT7-Raid) and Athlon 800. This way, the upgrade comes from the family Christmas Fund, instead of from Dad's "Play Money." Clever, eh?

Installed and works like a charm too. I figure Intel's in trouble now, seeing as how easy--and cheap--the whole process was.

I can't wait to get a flatscreen monitor myself someday. The I-Mac has a great looking one, but Maximum PC magazine says it costs $10,000 for the 21 inch version. When they make a PC-compatible version, I'll get one . . . Oh yeah, and the cost has to come down about $9,000 or so.

"I can't wait to get a flatscreen monitor myself someday. The I-Mac has a great looking one, but Maximum PC magazine says it costs $10,000 for the 21 inch version. When they make a PC-compatible version, I'll get one . . . Oh yeah, and the cost has to come down about $9,000 or so."

Heh -- it has to come down about $9500 for me.

I'm running a Duron 800 and I really like it. No problems, and it runs fast. AMD has proven that they're just as reliable as Intel. Let's hope they both make money and both keep competing so we get good chips at a nice prize.

My wife's computer has a 15" digital flatscreen. Only $800 over a year ago. But it is fully digital, hooked into a geforce DDR's digital LCD-out port. So this is close to the ideal even today.

Still, it's not great for gaming due to LCD latency issues (eg, ghosting) and only approximately 16-bit color resolution (eg, banding). Even the most pricey LCD displays will have the same issues.

Stick with the monitors, folks.. trust me, you're not missing anything.

wumpus
http://www.gamebasement.com

Hi guys! I like your board its neat.

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