Enemy Territory: Quake Wars – Limited Collector’s Edition Review – Preorder Issues

I finally got around to picking up my reserved copy of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and it is truly stunning. And I haven’t even played the game yet. I’ll get to that in a second. The packaging is very nice looking, and has a nice heft to it. It’s a thick cardboard shell with a slide-out flip case that holds the game installer DVD, the 10 Collector’s Edition trading cards, a keyboard map, the manual, and the Bonus DVD. Don’t let the fact that it’s cardboard and not metal talk you out of buying this, however. The 10 cards added to the 2 that came with the preorder are now taped on my wall encircling the poster that came with the preorder, as well as a PC Gamer cover I taped up there too. It’s a nice little shrine if I do say so myself. ***PICTURES*** I have the pictures on my Flickr, please take a look. It’s awesome. The Collector’s Edition as well as the Regular Edition include an “Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Desktop Map Guide.” This desktop map guide is a neat idea. It’s basically a flipbook that sits on your desktop and shows you an overhead photo (simulated satellite shot) of each map included in the game, with starting spawns, primary objectives, an explanation of what the attacking team must do to win, and finally what class you need to be to complete a given objective. It’ll be a great help when I play the maps for the first time, as I won’t have to waste my time stumbling around and getting run over while looking for the objectives. Plus it just looks damn cool.

The reason I haven’t got to play yet is because my reserved name is being very finicky. The issue is detailed here (post on the Enemy Territory Community Forums) but what it boils down to is they screwed up somehow and “There is a problem with your gametag, it is basically stuck in the database. This issue should be correctable, but we will need a little extra time to get it fixed (we will be contacting the appropriate people asap). We will let you know when this problem has been resolved and you can Activate your pre-order name.” That’s the reply I got on my Activision Technical support ticket. From what I’ve read on the QW Forums, they should fix it within the next day, and I’m hoping sometime tonight so I get to try the game. My friend reserved his name about three weeks ago and his processed without trouble, so I’m guessing that between then and when I reserved mine (June 6, 2007) their servers crashed or they misplaced all their data or something… Point is, I preordered the game specifically so I’d be able to get my game immediately and play under my reserved name (SupremeBeing). Although I did wait two days to actually buy the game since its October 2nd release due to my busy schedule, I should’ve been playing it within minutes after installing it. I’m very dissatisfied with Activision’s conduct of the preorder, mainly because the preorder only requires them to do one thing, and that is to keep track of what name I reserved and then give it to me later. They sent the email to me containing a confirmation link to click when I purchased the retail edition of the game, and when I clicked it, instead of seamlessly letting me take possession of my phenomenal name, it gives me an error saying I have the wrong code or wrong activation code or something like that. D- guys, try harder next time.

I will, of course, update you when I get a chance to play some of the other maps included in the retail edition, but for now, I’m waiting for Activision to get their act together. Fun fun fun.

Thanks for reading though

UPDATE: I submitted a ticket on Activision’s technical support site at about 4:00 that afternoon, and the problem was resolved by the time I got home the next day.  I’ve been enjoying the extreme awesomeness of Quake Wars since then.

Computer Trouble…

Okay, so the reason I haven’t posted anything new recently is that my computer has basically screwed me over.  I woke up on Saturday morning and decided to plug in one of my spare hard drives to my computer.  This didn’t go so well.  I plugged in the 40gb drive and turned the PC on.  Bios detected nothing, and also my DVD rom had vanished.  I unplugged the HDD, and I eventually figured out that the DVD drive’s IDE cable had come out…on Sunday evening.  Lol… Sunday morning, I turned on my computer, logged in at the login screen (of Windows, unfortunately), and BOOM.  Windows logs me out as soon as I caught a glimpse of my desktop.  I tried logging in to the guest account too, but the same thing happened.  I researched the problem on a different computer, and came to the conclusion that one of my antispyware programs had removed a vital windows file because some piece of adware or spyware renamed it.  This caused the login/logout loop.  The solution was to copy over a new copy of the file from the Windows recovery console.  Only problem was, I hadn’t figured out my IDE cable issue on the DVD drive yet, so I thought I was locked out entirely.  I spent like four hours trying to get my computer’s BIOS to let me boot from my usb drive and stick a new copy of the file into the system32 folder, but it was to no avail.  Eventually I rechecked all the cables in the computer and discovered the unplugged IDE cable, and fixed it.  I tried the solution that was posted in multiple forums, to recopy the .exe into the system32 folder.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work.  At this point, I decided to repair my Windows installation in a desperate attempt to get into my computer.  One problem.  It didn’t work.  I repaired the Windows installation, and then when it went to restart the computer to complete setup, my display shut off as soon as I saw the Windows setup screen.  My monitor went to sleep, its little blue light flashing on and off, mocking me.  My thoughts now turned to file preservation/recovery.  I tried Hiren’s BootCD, which by the way is an amazing tool for PC repair, but so far I haven’t been able to access the harddrive, as the file managers seem only to be able to read my floppy drive, the cd-rom, and the 50mb drive it mounts in the memory to operate.  Pretty unhelpful.  I tried resizing my main Windows partition and creating a new one, and then installing a fresh copy of Windows there, but I either had the same problem or it booted the wrong partition.  Who knows.  This brings you up to the present problem, what data I should sacrifice if it is indeed unrecoverable.  There is a slight chance that if I didn’t format my main partition but overwrote the copy of Windows, I could use a file recovery tool to undelete my old My Documents folder, but it’d be quite risky.  Anyway.  That’s my epic saga/chronicle of computer mistakes.  Thanks for reading.

Quake Wars: a Quick Review!

I have little or not time to write this, but I’m gonna do it anyway, because I’m just that dedicated. I got to spend one glorious hour playing Quake Wars before being whisked off to a college fair thing, and it was one of the best hours of my life. Quake Wars is everything I could’ve hoped for and more. Put simply, “BF2 killer” – IGN. The hitboxes are impeccable, the game runs very smoothly on my mediocre computer, even at full resolution (1440×900) and Normal graphics quality. The gameplay is very similar to that of the game’s inspiration, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a free multiplayer sequel to id’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The classes’ roles are all the same, but modernized, and the game as a whole is familiar but not redundant. The medic, for example, has defib paddles instead of a “revive needle”, but the functions are the same. The mouse/aim reaction time (for lack of a better phrase) was great, especially when compared to games like BF2, in which there could be a .5-1.5 second delay between your mouse and the crosshair. The vehicles were fairly easy to control, but difficult enough that practice and skill would give you a significant advantage on the battlefield. The included map, Valley, has its shortcomings, but if it’s par for the ET:QW course, I’m very happy with the game.

That’s all I have time for right now, got an English paper to write before I go to bed, so until tomorrow, goodnight.

P.S. – I’ve got the name SupremeBeing reserved for the game’s official release, so if you decide to use it in the demo, don’t get too attached.