So long Battlefield 2. Hello World of Warcraft!

In December of 2005, on advice from my buddy Brandon, I picked up a copy of Battlefield 2 and immediately immersed myself into a whole new world of gaming. Whereas my previous vice, Counter Strike: Source, was essentially a repetitive bloodbath this new game required strategy, cunning and teamwork. For about a year, this game kept me entertained what with learning new vehicles and gaining rank. From infantry soldier to general to J-10 pilot, I mastered nearly every aspect of the game and had a lot of fun while doing it.

Yet the entire time there were certain things that bothered me. While the online service was free to use, this also meant that anybody could run their own server. Once the official EA servers went offline, only these user provided ones were available and each had their own unique set of rules they expected users to follow. Oftentimes these rules were lazily enforced and instead used as justification to boot users that the admin simply did not like.

As well, the most important part of the game, teamwork, was one that the game's architecture did not easily facilitate. Users were encouraged to 'squad up' at the start of a round yet they rarely did. So getting on a good team depended more on finding one in the various Internet forums or bringing a group of your real-life friends with you into the game. The latter worked well for me until our group disbanded after which I can count on one hand the number of times I found a good squad to game with.

Contrast this with World of Warcraft, a game which has been out for longer than Battlefield 2 and which I have been avoiding because I've seen just how addicted my friends are. Yet after playing for several weeks, I can see why they are still playing this game over 2 years after it came out. The online service, while somewhat costly at $15/month, is operated solely by Blizzard and thus ensures that no arcane rules by a petty admin will get you booted off of a server.

As for the social aspect of the game, it is light years ahead of Battlefield 2. Support for parties (five people), raids (40 people) and guilds (unlimited) are built right into the game architecture along with easy ways to access them. Early on, the quests that you receive encourage group participation. Since starting play just a few weeks ago, I have lost count of how many times I've relied on complete strangers in my party to help me through a difficult quest. Many of them have ended up on my friends' list which notifies me when they are online. Thus an environment of camaraderie is built around teamwork and it is this feature that will keep users playing WoW for many years to come.

Back in the saddle again

Whilst some people like to keep their computers on the cutting edge constantly upgrading it, I have always tended to do mine in large leaps. My current setup is a real beauty: 2.8GHz Intel-based product with 1.5GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon X700 video card all wrapped up in a Shuttle form factor case by Chenming. Up until very recently this computer had actually become somewhat of a bane. It had a funny habit of rebooting whenever I turned it off. It required me turning off the monitor beforehand so that it would not randomly restart.

All this changed two days ago when I replaced my old & busted 9600 video card with the X700. Not only did Counter Strike Source look 100x better but the random rebooting stopped as well. And when I played Battlefield 2 for the first time with this beast, I was absolutely blown away. Details that had remained hidden from me jumped out in full vivid color at 1024x768 resolution. With this setup, I finally feel like I have the gaming box I have always wanted. Now the question is, how long until it becomes outdated?

SUSE 10 and a glass of gin and tonic

For the purpose of installing Battlefield 2 onto my computer, I had to create more room on my Windows partition. I had considered simply attempting to resize my existing partitions but was advised against this by a friend familiar with fsck (pronounced f-suck due to its unwieldy interface and ability to induce psychosis). So it appeared that I would need to reinstall Linux if I were to expand my Windows partition. Having just found out that SUSE 10 was released via openSUSE, I now had a good excuse to spend my evening installing the latest version of my favorite distro.

But I was to be disappointed because SUSE 10 practically installs itself. After downloading the boot ISO image and burning it to disc, I then copied down all the relevant information about my chosen installation server. In this case I chose suse.mirrors.tds.net (path to install is /pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS/inst-source). The partitioning took a few minutes to set up properly as I ended up having to delete all the Linux partitions, expand the Windows partition, and then recreate the ones required for SUSE 10. Package selection hadn't changed since 9.1 (my first experience with SUSE) and hardware detection got everything. It even got my 11-in-1 card reader which 9.1 had refused to recognize.

Upon reboot, my system came up quickly, much quicker than it had with the previous version of SUSE. Within 30 minutes I had Firefox, Thunderbird and my ATI drivers all installed without any issue. Hence the reference to gin and tonic in the title. It really did take me less time to install SUSE 10, package download notwithstanding, than to drink a 10 oz. glass of my favorite mixed drink. And now that I can get my camera's pictures without having to boot into Windows, the only reason to keep that OS on my hard drive is to play sweet games.