Often, and I’m not sure what the cause is as it seems to vary depending upon location or “some other set of conditions”, my PC will shutdown and reboot. I’ve been running temperature monitors and everything is well within tolerances. One possible correlation is that it happens soon after I load into a new area.

The googles suggest various bits of voodoo but nothing official. There are also enough occurrences of this that it doesn’t appear to be specific to my machine.

I’m posting my configuration in case others have had similar problems:

• Intel i7 2600K
• Asus P8Z68-V Pro Motherboard
• Asus 560Ti
• Windows 7 64bit
• OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD
• Tons-o-RAM

Please leave a comment if you’ve had this problem yourself. Double-plus bonus points if you have a fix for it.

Update 2012/04/04: It isn’t my RAM:

But one area where iOS has a distinct advantage is in games, or so I thought. They have some awesome titles. For most of them, I’m pretty happy playing on my iPad as it’s a great platform for games. There were a few that I always had with me on my phone though. Games that made sense on a phone, were kind of casual and easy to get into but you can put them down at a moment’s notice to do something else. And I’ve found them on Android.

Orbital (Bitforge Ltd). $4.00 for the “pro” version, Free version to try, but trust me, you want the full game. It’s simple, it’s fun, has a two player head-to-head mode and entertaining noises. I have probably logged more hours on Orbital than any other game on my iPhone. And now it’s on Android! Sweet.

Dungeon Raid (Fireflame Games). $3.19CDN. I used to play this a lot on short-hop flights, in line at the grocery store, couch surfing or well, anywhere. Kind of a connect-three dungeon RPG thing with different character classes and abilities. Humorous loot names and scary monsters. It has endless replayability.

Tiny Tower (Mobage). Free! OK, this is a new one to me having never played it on the iPhone. But with it winning Game of the Year on iTunes I figured I’d give the Android version a try. Also, the price is certainly right. Not disappointed! Takes only a few seconds to keep your tower running. It will haunt your dreams.

Other standbys like Doodle Jump, Flight Control and others will keep your thumbs entertained for hours. You don’t have to fear, there are plenty of good games on Android. You’ll just have to buy them all over again.

Tilt to Live

Prod mentioned this to me this week on IM. A single line message that read “tilt to live”. I was all, “wtf is that? What are you talking about?” I believe he replied tersely, “iPod”. So I did the search, found the game, saw that it was on-sale and said, “why not?”.

And I’m super-glad that I did. This has become my latest “I’ve got 5 minutes to burn” game on my iPhone. After starting, the pace gradually picks up until you’re tilting for your life (as the title suggests), your little arrow-ship being pursued by an ever growing and evolving field of red dots. Gameplay is basic. You have a number of floating power-ups to help you defend yourself against the red swarm. Music is a jazzy little number reminiscent of a Ren & Stimpy cartoon that is pretty amusing, though if you’re like me, you’ll eventually just turn it off or listen to your own tunes. The motion sensing is excellent and fluid.

What really makes this game stand out is some of the online features from AGONline(?). Built-in awards and social networking features keep things interesting. The awards themselves are pretty funny.

highly recommended.

Orbital

My previous “5-minute” game is the surprisingly strategic Orbital. I learned of this game when I saw tech journalist Andy Ihnatko mention it in one of his iPad reviews. I looked it up and thought it seemed interesting.

And it is! Gameplay is simple, you fire a projectile that bounces around the field until it slows to a stop at which point, it balloons into a disc that expands until it touches a wall or another disc. Said discs need to be struck 3 times by your projectiles to be removed from the board and giving you a point. If your projectile comes back to a “death line” and touches it, you die and it’s game over.

There are three different game-types, but you’ll really only want to play Gravity mode where the discs cause your projectile to curve around them as if affected by a gravitational field. The grid background warps in a pleasing way to indicate where the gravitational pull becomes strongest.

It sounds simple, but there’s a real art to surviving for any length of time. As in all good games, it’s quick to learn but takes awhile to master. It’s challenging enough that you can keep going back and enjoying subsequent games.

Doodle Jump

The game that keeps on giving. You really gotta hand it to the developers of Doodle Jump: They keep adding value to this awesome accelerometer powered platformer. It’s incredibly simple. Your doodle-dude jumps on platforms. You tilt to move side-to-size to position him over the next platform. You try to get as high as you can. Various power ups like jetpacks, propeller beanies, springs and trampolines help propel you to new heights. There are monsters that you can shoot with your doodler’s nose.

It’s 99¢ and if you don’t have it, just go get it. Come back when you’ve made it past 30k points and we’ll talk.

Uniwar

This is another new title (to me) that may have been around for awhile. I’m a sucker for turn-based strategy games and this is basically a straight copy of the online game WeeWars. I never really got into WeeWars not knowing anybody else who was playing it for very long, so kind of forgot about it. There’s something to be said for having a game like this on a portable device as you can play it anywhere.

It comes with a stand-alone campaign and an online component. The kicker here is that they’ve done a great job of implementing both push and email notifications so iPod users can still get notified when it’s their turn.

I’ve only played a couple of games so far, and would like to see a couple of new armies added to flesh things out a bit. And maybe a map editor so you can roll your own games. Still, the implementation is so well done that these are minor quibbles.

Sword & Poker

This is a weird one. I logged quite a few hours playing this through to level 28 or so. The premise is pretty simple. You have a 5×5 grid with the inner 3×3 populated with playing cards. You have a set of 4 cards with which to make a hand of 5 in any of the rows, colums or two diagonals. These poker hands do “damage” to your opponent who you’re fighting in a kind of pokemon-esque battle to the finish. You have shield and a weapon which determines how much damage your hands do. And there’s magic. And you’re in a dungeon fighting monsters.

If it sounds weird, that’s because it is. But it’s surprisingly fun and really well put together. Very addictive and the various weapons and shields you can buy keep you progressing against the steadily tougher enemies you meet in the later levels.

I’ve got a bunch more games installed, including some of the biggies by NGMoco and others. But these are the games that I keep coming back to and playing. What are your favorites?

“Wet” is short for “Wetwork”, you’re informed in the introduction. If you had any notions about this game being about sitting around in the bath tub, I’m sorry to disappoint. You control Rübi, a tough-as-nails assassin with a pair of nine millimeter pistols and a samurai sword for up-close work. The entire game has a gritty, dirty film quality to it which accentuates the grind-house feel. Voice acting is gruff and abrupt.

But all this atmosphere is merely backdrop to the action which starts immediately and seems to continue until the end of the chapter with very few cut-scenes. I’m all for action, as long as the game-play works. In this case, I’m afraid it’s kind of tedious.

I find the shooting controls feel very wooden. It kind of reminds me of Perfect Dark Zero, one of the first games to appear on the Xbox 360 also featuring a female lead character. Controlling your guns doesn’t feel quite right. To make matters worse, to give yourself a chance against the swarming squads of goons hell-bent on killing you, you have the ability to jump, dive and run along walls. This puts you into a bullet-time-like slow-motion mode that makes the aiming somewhat easier and allows you to dual-wield your pistols; the second one auto-aims. The net result of this is that you spend the majority of the action sequences, i.e., the majority of the game in a greyed-out slow-motion mode.

There are other annoyances. Health is delivered via “swigs” of whiskey littered around. Every time you take one, there’s a little animation of Rübi tossing the bottle and shooting it out of the air with a gun. It’s repetitive and adds nothing.

At this point, I’ll ‘fess up and admit that I’ve only played part of the first chapter. I was pretty turned off, especially after completing the unbelieveably good Batman: Arkham Asylum. That game proved that you don’t need bullet-time to simulate ultra-fast reflexes and super-human agility. Hell, I should stop reviewing Wet right now and tell you about how cool Batman was.

So, if you’re looking for a new game to play. Don’t waste your time with Wet. If you did waste your time with Wet and feel strongly about it, maybe you should leave a note in the comments. Otherwise, go get Batman right now.

Wet: I don’t know how many stars to give it because I only played it for 20 minutes and wrote it off.

Then a funny thing happened. The n3wbs and I started playing Project Gotham Racing 4 again. This is a series that we’ve played since the first version on the original Xbox. I spent an unhealthy amount of time in a friend’s basement playing Project Gotham 1 in head-to-head racing. We got pretty good at it. We still miss San Francisco which was never included in any of the subsequent games and made for some pretty insane racing. PGR2 was probably the game we played the most as a group. Not Halo. Not Gears of War. Project Gotham 2. We have our own lexicon of terms for racing. Some of the less-colorful ones include, “crop-outing” and “toro”.

I recently made some changes to my room, moving my gear around for better viewing position. So when we started playing PGR4 after a year’s hiatus, I was shocked to discover some strange audio glitches coming out of my speakers. Engine noises had drop-outs. Music would skip. It was the strangest thing. I checked other sound sources at the speakers and listened hard for anomalies. I checked cabling to make sure I hadn’t screwed something up during the reorganization. I tweaked sound settings in the game. I put up with it.

Then I checked the Interwebs. Sure enough, a bit of googling turned up some hits about PGR4 Audio Problems. Weirdly, it’s a result of installing to the hard-drive. Why this should be makes absolutely no sense. It has to be playing the sounds from memory (assuming the engine noises aren’t discretely modeled audio simulations which would be very surprising and worthy of at least several papers) and it has to load them from a disk. It shouldn’t matter where they’re coming from. The only reason I can think of is that using the hard-drive is putting extra load on the processor or I/O buss and that’s causing the glitching. Still sounds rubbish, doesn’t it?

At any rate, I’d like to see MS release a patch for this, but since Bizarre Creations have pretty-much stopped caring about the PGR series (*snif*) that’s very unlikely. I’ll have to suffer and play it from the DVD.

I was going to write a little thing about how fun the ngmoco game Topple was, maybe even with an accompanying screen shot, but the App Store is still ridiculously slow here.

Instead, I’m going to write just a little bit about monocultures and why they suck. When everything works, you can almost believe that owning an iPhone and using iTunes is the bees’ knees. “It just works” is a popular phrase bandied-about among Apple fans. Apple just posted a huge $1.6bn profit for their last quarter. Apple is on more desktops and in more go-bags than ever before.

But it doesn’t always work. Systems are bound to fail sometimes, and when a central one like the App Store is inaccessible, it can feel like your device is broken. Sometimes, that little badge on the App Store icon can remind you that you’ve got outdated apps that you can’t get to. There are a couple of apps I wanted to try out and even pay money for (mobile Colloquy for one, Rolando is another) but I can’t get at them. “Try again later” is the antithesis of the impulse purchase and that is largely what the whole iTunes Music/App Store is based on.

Fortunately, the internet came to the rescue and can at least provide some iPhone app shopping happiness even when the mothership is leaving orbit. App Shopper, which I believe I’ve mentioned before is a great web-based app-search system. It even lets you sort by price and view price changes. Right now, I conducted a little experiment, clicking on an App in the (finally loaded) App Store and then typing in and searching for the same name on App Shopper. App Shopper won hands down but clicking “Buy” still takes you to the iTunes store.

is listening to ‘Future In Computer Hell’ by Junkie XL from the album, ‘Saturday Teenage Kick’

PS, get well, Steve.

There’ve been a bunch of big game releases in the last few weeks for the Xbox360. The long-awaited Gears of War 2 was the first on my list of games to play after returning from holidayland. I’ve certainly got my money’s worth out of it so far. The single player game is fun, if not overly challenging or complex. Playing it on Hardcore is fairly straightforward and I’ve only had to repeat a couple of sections a few times. It’s improved, as in the previous game by playing with a buddy in co-op mode. Multiplayer is fun, with a batch of new levels and a free download including some favorite maps (though not War Machine, wtf?) from the previous version. The new “Horde” mode is probably my favorite addition to the game, allowing a team of 5 players to fend off wave-after-wave of Locust in increasingly-difficult configurations. We’re up to level 19 currently, and hope to crack the level 20 barrier this weekend.

It’s not perfect, mind you. There are a few puzzling inconsistencies in the game which I’m hoping they can iron-out in a future update. The party system has removed the requirement for players to signal that they’re ready which is nice to have when you have 8 players all taking breaks for refreshments. Gears rewards players who stick with it but I’m unlikely to ever get all of the achievements for this title as it requires a bunch of them to be gotten while playing ranked online play. For a casual gamer like myself, I’m unlikely to do much of that, and those account for nearly half the points.

Still, graphics from the Unreal 3 engine and gut-ripping sound-effects make this a viscerally enjoyable title. I give it a “fun+” rating of 4/5 stars. ****

I was planning on picking up Dead Space also after some pretty decent reviews, but I was deflected by another title, also from EA, called Mirror’s Edge (EA’s site, amazon is currently being a dick about finding it for the Xbox360, so you’ll just have to find it yourself). This award-winning, free-running-inspired game by ace game studio DICE looks great and has a killer graphics engine. The story is propelled along by a between-chapters anime with decent voice acting and visuals that remind me a lot of a couple of the stories from The Animatrix. Soundtrack is also appropriate to the genre with a kind of ambient techno backdrop that pulses in all the right ways.

This is a really cool-looking title and the game play is fast and intense. And therein lies my complaint: It’s too hard. As soon as you’re out of the training session, you’re thrown into this action/detective story-line that has bad guys (“blues”, usually good guys, or “police”) firing bullets at you and you’re forced to either engage them which is usually suicide, or run away from them, which is often suicide. I’d have preferred just a bit more of the running around along the roof-tops to all-out warfare. Even the included “race” mode is hard enough that I don’t see myself playing it much, and requires one of those annoying EA logins that you need to setup first to play it.

Mirror’s Edge is a neat game though, and if you’ve got the reflexes and tenacity, you may enjoy it. The fact that I’m still playing it and looking forward to playing it again despite its frustrating attempts to kill me, suggests that this is a good game. Rated: Fun. ***/5.

Last up on this list is a surprise acquisition. A friend was very insistent that I pick this title up, so, not wanting to disappoint, I put aside my resistance of, wait-isn’t-this-just-Resident-Evil-mixed-with-28-Days-Later-and-a-little-Dead-Rising? and bit the bullet. Where Left4Dead (warning: flash, amazon search is suxxors) differs from the others and breaks new ground is in being designed to be a co-op game from the ground up. Four survivors can play 4 different campaigns (each lasting between 1-2+ hours) in an attempt to escape some zombie-infested territory. The settings range from urban to rural and are quite decently-designed, though are probably less open than they appear. The feeling of unrestricted movement is pretty good though and the areas you’re thrown into are quite large thanks to the Source engine from Valve.

The other neat thing about Left4Dead is the Director. The AI that’s responsible for throwing hordes of zombies at you and playing creepy music. The game has a great cinematic feel to it that if you weren’t so busy fighting for your life, you might have a chance to be pretty scared. The campaigns each culminate in a final fight to escape that is truly harrowing. I have yet to make it out, but I’ve seen the end credits roll when my partner made the helicopter once. I can tell you that my final moments were both incredibly heroic and poignant as I was pulverized by a tank and what must have been hundreds of zombies as I attempted to fend them off so the helicopter could make good on its getaway carrying the precious cargo. “Go on. Get outta here,” I croaked.

These scenes are what make Left4Dead so neat. And because each campaign is going to be different each time based on where the director puts stuff, it promises to have some pretty significant replay value. Rounding it out, is a multiplayer “versus” mode where each team gets to take turns as the Infected trying to bring down the survivors. Haven’t played it yet, but maybe if a few of my friends pick it up (hint, hint) we can give it a go.

Tentatively, fun+, ****/5.

Bleszinki told the website that there are no plans for a PC version. “Here’s the problem right now,” he said, “the person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know bit torrent to know all the elements so they can pirate software.”

via TVG

I can speculate about the real reasons Epic would do this, like, millions of dollars from Microsoft to keep it on the console only. To actually come out and say that the smart people who can build a gamer PC and have the wherewithal to do it will just pirate your game is pretty insulting. Way to drive another nail into the coffin of PC gaming!