For some time now I've had an issue with the Steam server search facility and my Netgear DM602 ADSL Router.

To cut a long story short, whenever I did a search for any online Counter Strike:Source or Half-Life 2 Deathmatch servers I'd get about 50 - 60 servers listed and then my router would die. I was normally lucky enough to end up with a couple of local servers listed that would work once the router had sprung back to life.

Anyway, I found the following instructions on a Steam forum thread which have solved the issue for me completely:

Telnet to your DM602 using the network address assigned to it. In my case

telnet 192.168.0.254

You'll be prompted for your username and password (the same as for the web management interface). Once done issue the following commands:

modify nbsize maxipsess 512
modify nat global udptimeout 10
commit
reboot

Hopefully you'll find that everything now works! However, please bear in mind that this procedure is undocumented and although it worked for me without a problem, I cannot be held responsible if it causes irreparable damage on your own unit.

 

 

I'm really grateful to id for releasing Doom3 back in September. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of near pant soiling terror, the shocks when turning on my flashlight in a darkened area to see a zombie poised to rip out my throat, the awesome special effects like the heat haze around the imps' fireballs and the creepy 'System Shock 2'-esque PDA plot device.

An excellent game that I still highly recommend.

But, if Valve had released Half-Life 2 before id had got its magnum opus out of the door, I doubt I would ever have played it. Once again, the bar has been raised when it comes to first player action; in fact, not so much raised as moved wholesale by several miles.

I got home from work last night, started Steam which promptly started to unlock the preloaded copy on my hard drive. Off to the kitchen to make hot steaming cup of caffeine, and when I came back the game was ready to play - no hassles, no dramas. I know some people have had problems, but for me the experience was seamless.

And then on to the game; first things first - the videos that we have all been drooling over for what seems like forever (insert obligatory DNF joke here) do not do the game justice. The game feels smooth, the action is fluid and the facial animation is something else. OK, I don't have the most sluggish rig in the world, but it's certainly not the best (FWIW; Asus P4P800-SE Deluxe; P4 HT 3.0GHz; 1Gb 2700 RAM; MSI FX 5700 Ultra; 160Gb DiamondPlus 9 SATA); by contrast, Doom 3 struggled to get a decent framerate at 1024x768 on this machine whereas Half-Life 2 simply seems to take things in its stride.

So far, I've only played for a couple of hours (I'm still on the wonderfully named 'Route Kanal' level), but already I've come across a couple of wonderful touches; in particular, Barney's jibe that a degree from MIT must have come in really useful for throwing a switch is priceless.

My other favourite touch at the moment has to be feeding exploding barrels to the barnacles, and then exploding them.

I cannot recommend this game highly enough. The temptation to throw a sickie was very strong - but as I work in an IT environment, I suspect I would have been rumbled! Go buy, go play. End of story.

Counter Strike is a phenomenon that has largely passed me by; although I've owned a copy for a while via a Half-Life bundle I bought a while ago, and of course through Steam, it's not something I've ever really got into. Maybe it's because of having an ever increasing family and the attendant lack of time required to play the game and learn the maps, or maybe it was the attitude of the l33t 13 year olds playing the game towards n00bs (like myself) that put me off. Anyway, I decided to buy the Half-Life 2 Silver package via Steam the other day (I already had Half-Life 2 on order via Amazon, but I've decided against the additional wait of hanging around for the postman after the game has officially been released). Intrigued as to how the Source engine would perform on my setup, I decided to fire up Counter Strike: Source. Well, blow me down if it's not a cracking game. The graphics are gorgeous, and the gameplay definitely has that 'just one more go...' feel to it. Oh well, better go; I've got years of terrorist related gameplay to catch up on before Half Life 2 is activated....

RE: Doom 3 Reaches Gold Master, Due August 5th

Rogerpq3 writes "Yes, this is the official word that [long-awaited PC FPS] DOOM 3 has been code released and has been approved for manufacturing! According to ...

[Via Slashdot]

I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm going to be struck down with a mystery virus around the 6th August....

I've just came across this article on Slashdot about a demo FPS from a bunch of coders calling themselves .the.produkkt

The game itself is standard fare, but what's absolutely extraordinary is the entire executable is 96k. That's it!

Go get it here, and marvel at the ingenuity of the developers.

 

Childish, stupid and completely amoral. In other words, great fun!

http://www.meph.eu.org/pinguin.swf

OK, it's official. This is the best Marble Madness inspired game ever. Truly awesome!

One of the threads over at www.remakes.org has a link to the beta version of Hamster Ball which I tried out last night; jesus it's addictive. Do yourselves a favour, download the beta version and give it a try. You won't regret it.

I've come across an absolutely fabulous vertically scrolling shooter called Warning Forever which you can find here: http://www18.big.or.jp/~hikoza/Prod/index.html#wf

The site is in Japanese so I've absolutely no idea who's written it or why, but it's a really addictive and simple game with some gorgeous effects. Class stuff.