Michael McNamara

Planetside 2 – Gaming With Scale

Michael McNamara — Sun, 19 Oct 2014 19:13:57 +0000

I’ve been playing multi-player first person shooters since the original Doom more than 20 years ago. Last year I was introduced to Planetside 2, a game that truly brings scale to the multi-player first person shooter. I’ve played quite a few multi-players games including Battlefield 2, Counter-Strike, Day Of Defeat, Fontlines, Battlefield 2142, Battlefield 4, Call of Duty, Left for Dead, Rising Storm, Medal of Honor, Red Orchestra 2, Team Fortress 2, etc. And while most of those were great games and provided me plenty of entertainment you usually couldn’t play with any more than 63 other players on the same server. In Planetside 2 you can play on a continent (map) with upwards of 2,000 other players. There’s something to be said about seeing 100+ enemy soldiers running down the hillside at you.

Planetside 2 is free to play if your at all interested, although you’ll need a fairly powerful desktop/laptop to truly enjoy the game. I should also mention that you’ll probably need more than a few hours to download the entire game as it’s reigns in at almost 15GBs in size.

Cheers!

Battlefield 3 – PunkBuster breaks!@#$%

Michael McNamara — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:28:50 +0000

I’ve been a big Battlefield fan ever since Battlefield 1942 and the mod Desert Combat. I really enjoyed Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142, so I was expecting a lot from Battlefield 3 when it was released late last year. While the graphics and basic game play are truly amazing the team work aspects of the game seem very much an after thought which is very disappointing. In the initial release of the game you couldn’t manually select which squad you wanted to join, a feature that’s been in every Battlefield game since the beginning of time. And where was the in-game voice communications? A feature that revolutionized PC gaming was gone and replaced again by a solution that seem to be an after thought, ESN Sonar. With all those issues the game has still been a lot of fun, however, recently it seems that hacks and cheats are becoming spoiling the fun.

Which leads me to the current issue facing Battlefield 3 players. PunkBuster appears to be broken and is preventing a large number of Battlefield 3 players from enjoying the game. Players are getting kicked from server almost immediately after joining. Here’s an example of the log message you’ll find on the server side;

PunkBuster Server: RESTRICTION: player1 (slot #2) [1610dac7419406201db5a46fxxxxxxxx(-) 75.111.11.111:3659] Service Communication Failure: PnkBstrB.exe driver failure (PnkBstrK.sys) ffab
PunkBuster Server: RESTRICTION: player1 (slot #2) [1610dac7419406201db5a46fxxxxxxxx(-) 75.111.11.111:3659] Service Communication Failure: PnkBstrB.exe driver failure (PnkBstrK.sys) ffab
PunkBuster Server: Kick Command Issued (RESTRICTION: Service Communication Failure: PnkBstrB.exe driver failure (PnkBstrK.sys) ffab) for (slot#2) 75.111.11.111:3659 1610dac7419406201db5a46fxxxxxxxx player1
PunkBuster Server: Lost Connection (slot #2) 75.111.11.111:3659 1610dac7419406201db5a46fxxxxxxxx(-) player1

It didn’t take too long until I stumbled across a Battlelog post from EA/Dice that acknowledged there was an issue with PunkBuster. There was an article on PC Gamer that alluded to some issues around hackers potentially injecting unauthorized bans into the ban lists that are streamed from PBBans and GGC.

Several Game Service Providers (GSP) posted the following note on their sites;

We are hearing reports that GGC / PBBans are being exploited and many players are being incorrectly banned by an exploit in the streaming process. We suggest customers disable using the GGC / PBBans banlists until this is resolved.

There was also a recent blog post from EA/Dice where they claimed they were going to start clamping down on the rampant hacks and cheats that are pervasive throughout the multiplayer servers. It looks like they might have broken something when they started clamping down, let’s hope there’s a fix soon.

You can try updating your installation of PunkBuster but this time around it appears that the problem is somewhere in the cloud. Sorry!

What game(s) do you play if any?

Cheers!

Updated: Friday January 27, 2012 – apparently the PunkBuster problems have been resolved.

Digital Content Delivery – Steam

Michael McNamara — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:00:34 +0000

A man can’t be all work and no play. As a few of you know I enjoy first person shooters and strategy games, everyone needs to have a little fun every once and a while right?

With all the hoopla around Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 I decided to give it a go. I enjoyed Call of Duty 4 although I still have yet to find a game that beats Battlefield 2142 in terms of cooperative team play. I’m really impressed with the Steam solution. Thanks to Steam (and Verizon FiOS) I had Call of Duty Modern Warefare 2 purchased and installed onto my home PC within about 70 minutes. Steam also allows me to play with the friends I’ve met on the Internet and perhaps even meet new friends.

If you like first person shooters you’ll most definitely like Call of Duty Modern Warefare 2. The graphics are amazing and the game mechanics felt spot on. While I’ve heard the single player campaign is relatively short the real fun is in the multiplayer games.

Cheers!