Pumping Irony

I’ve been bitching for a few months on Twitter about the extremely unstable state of my PC, but I haven’t been in the mood for any PC gaming at all, so I’ve just let it go. I’m slowly getting back in the mood to play a single MMOG — which will be LOTRO, naturally — and maybe a couple other normal games.

This all started awhile back when I first had the bright idea that maybe I’d upgrade my PC this fall, so I went ahead and bought an ATI 4890 card. Unable to resist temptation, I popped it into my existing system and all hell broke loose. RAM chips spontaneously flash-fried themselves and things in general just stopped working. I had to cut the power several times — while the PC was booted — just to get any control over the system. I eventually put the crusty ol’ 7950GT back in, which is still in today, but I can never trust the system to work correctly, even when it seems things are ok.

Random apps will crash; sometimes it’s a browser (or all browsers); sometimes apps simply won’t load; sometimes I’ll get a memory error or a .dll not found error; sometimes it decides during booting it’s discovered major errors on the hard drive so it runs CHKDSK. Despite saying quite plainly on the screen that the disk check can be canceled, this is a blatant lie, as it refuses to respond to any input whatsoever.

Yesterday I had an all-out battle when it rebooted itself for no apparent reason, then for over an hour decided that the 7950GT could only handle a maximum of 640×480, 4-bit color. It took several (yes, several) vanilla boots into Safe Mode and re-installing NVidia drivers before finally the thing booted back into native resolution, mere nanoseconds before my head would have physically exploded and my body would have alighted with hellfire as I summoned the minions of Satan himself as my black temper consumed the last vestiges of humanity — and, indeed, sanity — to utterly destroy the misbehaving electronics causing me such stress. Think I’m exaggerating, do you? Ha! You mortals…

Games can get interesting when the system otherwise appears to be “normal” for a change. I apparently lost (or failed to take) screenshots in Guild Wars where enemy 3D models were replaced with white 2D bitmaps. It was like fighting swarms of blind (they had no eyes, after all) Spongebob Squarepants. On the one hand, I could see those white squares from miles away so there was no hiding from my party’s wrath, but on the other hand it was quite immersion-breaking. Feel my QQ! Sorry, I just love poking fun at the Immersionites out there.

The one that truly scared the shit out of me was a few weeks ago I decided to check back into LOTRO to see if I was ready to start thinking about MMOG’s at all again. I logged in (it was one of those rare occasions that the unstable system didn’t crash the client), was happily chatting with a few friends and kin-mates then decided to hop on my horse and ride around to do a quest. The icon for my mount was missing. What the hell? My finger stretched up to click the ‘i’ key to bring up the inventory, where I would just click the mount icon itself, only to my horror the inventory was empty! I had nothing! Had my account been hacked? Amid my panic, a few neurons managed to fire and I realized that if my account had in fact been hacked, the password would have been changed and most likely the characters would have been deleted and totally naked. Arwellyn was still wearing her gear and not shaming the elves of Middle-earth by parading around in front of dwarves — dwarves! — in her unmentionables. A few reboots later to get apps (including the LOTRO client) to stop crashing, it was just a graphical glitch where no item icons would load.

I did manage to get two glitched LOTRO screenshots recently:

My client refused to load anyone’s mount graphics, but the mounts themselves worked fine. Everyone was just gliding bow-legged through the air. Amusing, but aggravating nonetheless.

Running around the Ettenmoors, none of the distance imposters in the entire zone worked, they just showed up as glitchy bitmaps. When I was in range of the model they were replacing, the imposter-to-model transition worked fine.

I’ve just about had it, though. Especially after fighting with it yesterday and my temper very nearly getting the best of me and unleashing a severe bout of violence upon the offending electronics, which as you know never accomplishes the desired effect. I was hoping to hold off until the holidays were over but I think I’m going to end up spending some money this week and ordering the remaining parts to build a new Windows 7 64-bit system…

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 10:51 am and is filed under LOTRO, MMO Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.