Thursday, October 30, 2008

Call of Duty 5 - World at War PC Beta Review

Over the past few days I've been playing the Call of Duty 5 Multiplayer Beta for the PC. As some of you know, I have not had high hopes for the game and have written a few articles on how I believe that CoD5 would simply be a rehashed version of CoD4 with ww2 skins. This is basically the impression I got while playing Call of Duty 5 and am not too sure if I want to purchase the game.

First of all, I am a PC Gamer and like to take pride in the frags I've made due to utilizing my mouse and movement better than the other players. While playing Call of Duty 5 I felt no such enjoyment. The game revolves around open sighted, running spraying with the Thompson as opposed to iron-sighting and attempting to aim at other players. Attempting to iron sight with any gun resulted in far less kills for me as opposed to simply spraying in their general direction. After awhile I gave up attempting to aim when I saw someone and instead just held down mouse1 until they were dead. Even watching the kill cams of how I died, every player seemed to reciprocate this style of play and I found it extremely annoying to have been killed like this.

Attempting to take the bolt and pick people only made me more frustrated with the game. The weapon is extremely underpowered and pales in comparison to any type of automatic gun. Players rarely died when hitting them with a bolt and afterwards I would have to shoot them 2-3 more time with a pistol to finish them off. The bolt action rifles were one of the things I was looking forward to in this game and was very underwhelmed after actually getting to use them. I was also upset with the way the tanks where made in the game. It seems to take 10 explosives before any visible damage is even done to that tank and by that time its already killed half your team. I suppose its another way to allow players easy kills and to have fun "dominating" in a tank.

When considering that Treyarch developed this game I guess I must say I'm not surprised. Call of Duty 5 was made for Xbox360 and PS3 players and easily identified as a port when you play the PC version of the game. Games for console are developed in easy mode to compensate for having to use a controller. This is why SMGs are very overpowered and the perk system lends itself to allow players to get easy kills in claymore, martyrdom, and grenades X 3.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Getting Rid of Unnecessary System Processes

When you press CTRL-ALT-DELETE and select the processes tab,you will noticed that there are a lot of processes running in the background of your computer. Its very hard to tell which ones are safe to close just by looking at the list, and often times ending the wrong process will crash your system and you will lose any unsaved data.

In my personal computer at home, after the system boots up there are over 60 processes running in my task manager, many which have accumulated from various program installs over the course of two years. While none of these processes are necessarily causing my computer any harm, they are definitely eating up CPU resources while idling in the background. If you are interested in learning what exactly are all the processes running in the background, check ProcessLibrary.com which is a great site for searching up unknown processes.

The solution I use to getting rid of all these unwanted processes is a program called KillProcess which can terminate any process on a Windows machine in a matter of seconds. The program is able to use a "Kill List" in order to determine which processes are needed by windows and those which are unnecessary.

The program will execute the kill list in a matter of seconds and terminate all those bloat processes. I personally use a modified version "Clean XP.lst" kill list from Orange Lamp in which I have added a few processes I would like to keep to the list. All in all after using the KillProcess program I have about 19 processes running in the background, a huge difference from the 62 I have at boot up.