Goal:
5.1 output from my PS3 through my computer.
Why? I don’t have any other way to output to 5.1 from it without spending money (receiver + different speakers).

What I have:
First gen PS3, HDMI and TOSLINK cables.

Monitor has HDMI -> analog stereo output
Problems: Constant low hum (monitor has bad quality output) and only 2.0 sound. This requires the monitor to be on HDMI output to passthrough audio as well.

This motherboard. It has a Realtek ALC888 chip. I also have the separate bracket for TOSLINK in.
Problems: This can do stereo but no DTS/Dolby, but it fixes the buzzing problem. It can also play when the monitor is on different output.

And a Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio card.
This has S/PDIF in, but I am not spending $100+ on the options they have to actually use it. Instead I am trying repin the gigabyte bracket and have it connect to this card. It does have DTS/Dolby decoding

So, the gigabyte manual says that the bracket has three pins.
1. red – Power
2. yellow – SPDIF_I
3. black – GND

So I switched black and yellow to match up with this pinout diagram of the creative card (top left, +5V, GRN, SPDIF0 IN)

Plugged that in and… nothing. I can hear feint popping when I switch audio output devices on the PS3, but the Creative card never shows a signal (“Unknown or invalid signal”, just like when disconnected).

Any help or insight would be appreciated, thanks.

P.S. I think I may have destroyed any input on my sound card by fooling around with this. My microphone no longer works on that sound card

Heavy Rain was pretty damn good and a unique kind of game I wouldn’t mind playing again. Could have used some more polish in places but it was a great foray into a new kind of game. I want more of it, just… not too many. I don’t want another age of brown WW2 shooters.

God of War 3 felt like more God of War. Which is a good thing. I got to finish my God killing quest although the ending was a built lengthy and not-so-action-game style, all I wanted was a prettier game with more killing random things for the hell of it.

Final Fantasy 13 was, as many people have already said, very linear. Takes about 20 hours to actually make a decision in where you go. I wasn’t disappointed with this though. I went for this game purely for the visuals and they don’t disappoint. The hair on every character especially. As much as it is partially overdone asian JRPG hair, it’s much better than the everyone-is-bald-or-ugly syndrome of Mass Effect. Not to mention the combat mechanics which I absolutely love. Every character can fulfill three separate roles (or all 6 later on) instead of being stuck with a healer all battle when you don’t need one. I may not be always picking my attacks (auto feature does a pretty good job) but I am constantly switching paradigms. I’m not really a fan of the lore and the universe, but it works well enough for me.

On the PC gaming side I’ve been working on Battlefield: Bad Company 2 which I picked up for $40. It has many buggy parts to it but it still ends up being a bunch of fun. I’ve already maxed out the recon class (love those long range sniper shots) and I’m working on the rest. If this game had a few bug fixes it would probably top my favourite shooters this year.

I’ve also invested a bit of time into Plain Sight which is a little nauseating but the core mechanics are inherently balanced for risk/reward. Kill people to get energy, more energy for people who have more energy, turn energy into points by blowing yourself up. More points if you had kill streaks and if you catch people in your suicide blast.

Also recently I’ve been playing League of Legends (although this has died down a bit). A DotA clone that manages to be fun although bit rage inducing at times. The problem with games like this is that the learning curve is ridiculous. A player is basically required to know everything before playing a game. There is at least a tutorial in this clone (and I’ve played other before so I was fine) but there is still way too much content to cover.

P.S. Still waiting for that SC2 beta invite Blizzard.

1. Steam offers me many, many deals, especially on older but still relevant games.
2. Steam offers large packs of games at discounted prices.

I began using steam back in 2004 when they were throwing around Half-Life 2 with every video card, but before it came out you could play the older games. And a $10 upgrade got me Day of Defeat: Source and I could keep the back catalog. $10 for Half-Life and all associated mods PLUS a new game that I was waiting for? Sign me up.

From there I bought a few more retail games, some were older collector’s editions on the cheap, that could be activated in steam. Almost every game since then has been a game on sale in one way or another. The last time I bought a game in a store was last January for Mass Effect, Bioshock, Fallout 3 Collector’s Edition and a few others. And then Bioshock went on sale on steam the next week for $5… d’oh!

Last week steam had some very nice sales (25-90% off various games) and I ended up with 7 games for just under $50. Even if a store was having the same sales I would have had to go to the store 5 days in a row to see them. That is never going to happen.

So I love steam, and pretty much everything comes out on it anyway. Except for collector’s editions that’s where I am buying all my games for the next LONG while.

It’s just as humourous as when I was a kid except now you know if someone was being a jerk and randomly changing things. And then you report them and they get banned. Oh, and you can play like 15 games at a time. Definitely going to keep playing around with it until I get bored.

I hit 75 last Sunday night and that felt good because now I finally have the shadowpriest ability that allows me to do massive AoE damage while still in shadowform. Since 65 I’ve increased my haste and SP considerably but I’ve dropped about 10% in crit chance. Now I get more consistent damage which is nice. Here is my Apocryphai’s stats if you want to check them out, I’m a Blood Elf Shadowpriest on Mug’Thol.

The game feels like a repition of the same sorts of quests for the most part, they’ve thrown a few cool ones in there but everything else I could mindlessly solo. It does feel like I’m making progress though, so I’m happy with that. I keep reminding myself that the real content begins at 80 and I’ll just have to hold out til then. For a game that I’ve already put $120 and almost 200 hours into it had better pay out!

Apart from that I’ve been trying to start FEAR2 but I keep getting sidetracked by WoW or by generally being busy. I’m about 2 hours into it but I’m not feeling the pull that I had with the original FEAR. I’m still going to finish it but there are a few things about it that I don’t quite like but can’t pinpoint yet.

And I’ve been reading. Or attempting to read. Between all that WoW and the other things I’ve been up to I have barely had a chance to start my books. Currently on my to do list is: Diablo: The Sin War trilogy, Ender’s Game, V for Vendetta and Watchmen. Diablo is just some trash fantasy that was supposed to get me back into reading when I picked out a few other books but it’s just been piling up while I try to get to 80. Once I get there I’ll be able to give it more time and burn through them in a few days so I can hit the real books.

The video card is a vast improvement on my current video card, an Asus Radeon X1950 Pro. First, it supports DirectX 10 which means I can use all sorts of cool new effect in games to make it look just a tiny bit more realistic. Secondly, there have been great architecture improvements in the past 3 generations of video cards. The main one I can think of is the change from separate vertex/pixel shaders to one unified shader model. The X1950 had 36 pixel pipes and 8 vertex shaders which means at best it can use 44. The 4850 has 800 which it can split any way it needs to.

There are some problems attached to the 4850 though. With the stock cooling they have reached temperatures of over 90 degrees Celsius. While this is very hot, and the card is meant to handle it, I opted for HIS’s revision with their ICEQ4 cooler which is a dual slot cooler. This means the heat is moved entirely outside of my case and it’s a much larger fan. The extra overclocking freedom might come in handy and it will probably preserve the life of my card.

After I bought those I started looking at monitors a few days later. I wasn’t going to buy one at first but at just over $400 for a 24″ monitor with what I wanted, great dark levels and 1920×1200, I couldn’t not buy the V2400W. I was going to go for widescreen with my current monitor but at the time I didn’t want to lose backwards compatibility with some older games. Now that I’ve gone for 64bit Vista, a DX10 video card and 4GB of RAM (impossible for 32bit normally) I think widescreen will be the least of my worries. Besides, it handles 1:1 pixel mapping of standard resolutions anyway.

So with the new hardware on its way you can expect that I will be much more productive and be able to use my time much better.

Yeah right, time to replay some games with higher resolution and better textures and effects!

Not that I have a Wii, or even had a Gamecube or N64. It was just the most fun game you could play at someone’s house. Quick, easy, fast to learn and faster to learn new characters. Easy to learn, hard to master, just like many great games.

But in those seven years, how much was really changed? A couple of new things were added. Final smashes are probably the most significant of them all. They have various strengths but it’s almost an instant kill against all of your enemies. A few other items have been added (dragoon parts) and brought back from the N64 version (bumper) which is also a nice touch. Another huge change would be all the new characters and maps. Gone are the days of 17 different maps with 3 floating platforms and one big one on the bottom. The new characters also bring in much more depth and variation. Less copies with the stronger/slower or weaker/faster changes and more unique move sets. Every character also has much more horizontal movement in the air which means it’s much easier to recover. The game plays a tiny bit slower than melee as well.

But that is exactly what I expect and wanted to change. More characters, more maps, some slight tweaks elsewhere. I just didn’t want it to take 7 years to do

The game also looks prettier but at the cost of load times. I’d prefer faster loads to prettiness on a game of this style. It’s all about gameplay here which is why people can still play the older games and have fun. It doesn’t matter what you look like, it’s how much fun I have when playing with you.

The rebalancing meant I lost my old main character, Falco. He was changed way too much too much for me to play him the same as I did before. So I went through a few characters that I found intriguing at first and found my new main, Zero Suit Samus.

Why Zero Suit Samus? She has the one thing every other character is lacking, medium range. Most characters have short range or really short range. Second best is Marth/Ike’s swords which take a while to attack with anyway. ZSS has stunning (literally) medium range attacks. Protection against people attacking you from the air, protection against people running at you. And it hits behind you. She has 3 jumps if you include the down+B which also acts as a decent meteor smash. The up+B is a little lacking and prone to edgehogging but the distance is more than you think it would be. The suit parts off the start are awesome for racking up a quick 30 damage against whoever you’re facing with decent knockback as well. Her final smash is also causing me to learn Samus who I wasn’t too familiar with in any of the other games. Samus is a bit slow for me in general. But again, I believe her unique range sets her apart from everyone else.

Til the next sequel!