Last year when I bought the iMac, I made the decision that it wasn’t a gaming platform, and I would use the consoles for my gaming needs. Since then Steam has come to the Mac, and with the Mac App Store providing the likes of COD4, Bioshock and Borderlands, it looks like I may have to rethink.
Although I am a major Apple fan boy, the Apple Magic Mouse is good, but no good for gaming. Don’t get me wrong the precision is good, but the touch sensitive top…not so good. I recently started playing Minecraft, and found it extremely annoying that every time I rested my middle finger on the right side of the mouse (as we all do) it would randomly scroll through my inventory. I found this to be the same with any game that uses the scroll wheel, and to be honest became a pain in the butt.
So, I needed a reasonably cheap, but mac compatible gaming mouse. Now I know that you can just plug in any mouse and it will work, however I’ve used the Razer mice in the past and I’ve really liked them. The DeathAdder comes with compatible Mac drivers allowing you to configure every last feature to get the perfect setup.
The full spec is below
3500DPI Razer Precision™ 3.5G infrared sensor
Five independently programmable Hyperesponse™ buttons
Ultra-large non-slip buttons
Ergonomic right-handed design
PC/Mac compatible
I have to say, it feels good to have a decent mouse in my hand again, and looks like I’m back to “PC” gaming.
Screenshots below, as well of a video of the cool light on the back.
I like most of you, use twitter, facebook and occasionally pop on to myspace to see how many bands want to be my friends.
Anyway, on the 4th of October, through total fluke read through a twitter conversation, and noticed a load of twitter entries from @squ1r3ll, with updates on his gaming status….linking to a site called raptr.com.
Being a bit of a gamer I’ve tried for months to get my gamertags, achievement, out to my friends and virtual friends, but the only way I’ve found to do this is manually.
I tried a number of facebook apps, and had varied success, they would either change my status to “Darren is playing…..” after a couple of hours of gaming, or just not bother at all. The achievements would post to my feed, however this was a manual process, I belevie the app is called “Xbox 360 Live GamerCard”.
Anyway, raptr.com, what is it…well let me tell you, it’s fantastic, and what I’ve been looking for, for ages. You sign up (using Facebook connect if you like) and add your gamer profiles, eg Xbox Live, PSN, Steam, Warcraft, etc etc, what it then does is monitors and reports on your gaming activities, eg which game your playing, on which platform, and records how long, and any achievement you may get.
Xbox live is monitored through the feed that Microsoft so kindly provide, and updates almost in real time (can be a 5/10 min delay), PSN tracking is currently broken due to Sony putting a restriction on their data. Everything else is tracked by the client.
The client is a custom messenger type client that can also run your msn, gtalk, aim, yahoo, xfire and icq, however this is the key to tracking the stats on your PC/Mac. On initial install it will scan your hard drive for games, and add them to your collection (both on the client, and on the website), any new games installed it will pick them up and also add to your collection.
When your ready to play a game, just start as normal and this will change your messenger stats to “Darren is playing xxxxxxx”, as it does with your online raptr status too, and logs the time played. When finished, it calculates the time you were playing and adds this to your tally on the website.
With the site you also get the option of a couple of signatures with varied information, all updating in real time, varying from currently playing to, the last/most played with you longest played 6 games.
Once you start to build up your friends, it will give you a ranking out of your current friend on a particular game (bases on the number of achievements you have), you can also compare achievements on a game with upto 3 friends at a time.
Finally one very cool feature of Raptr, is that when you get an achievement, it will tell you what percentage of Raptr users who have that game, have gained that achievement, giving you an idea of how hard it was.
The only downside with Raptr, is that it is unable to check your PSN stats, now this is through no fault of their own, it just seems Sony is being a little protective about their data. You can update your playing time, but this is manual, hopefully some day in the future, they will allow this.
From googling the PSN issue, I stumbled on a number of other social networking for gamer sites, GamerDNA, Playfire and Giantbomb.
I haven’t used any of the sites as much as I’ve used Raptr, however they all seem to be kinda tracking my stats.
GamerDNA, does seem to track PSN stats, and pull through the trophies, but there seems to be around a 2 day delay
Playfire, Love the layout, but again doesn’t pull through the PSN stats/trophies, doesn’t track time, and also about a day behind.
GiantBomb, I only signed up for this last night, but it’s already tracking my Steam, Warcraft and XBL, but again, no PSN.
All in all, it’s good to more and more of these sites popping up, I remember the day when gaming was deemed as geeky, however seems every man and his dog is doing it now, and it’s now socially accepted.
Personal recommendation, give Raptr.com a try, it just works and if you do, feel free to add me as a friend
I’ve decided to give Windows 7 another go, as there have been a few driver updates. This time in changed my SATA2 drive to Native mode instead of AHCI, and the install went flawless.
Once up, Windows downloaded 5 updates, and had 4 additional drivers for my Bluetooth dongle, Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit LAN, ATI 2900 Graphics card, Razer Copperhead gaming mouse.
The spec of my machine is as follows
ASUS M2R32-MVP
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
4Gb OCZ 6400 Memory
ATI 1Gb HD2900 XT PCI-e
1 x 500Gb Western Digital SATA2 Drive
2 x 250Gb Western Digital SATA2 Drives
1 x Pioneer 112 DVD-RW (Again wiped out the Pioneer 212 SATA drive as this again caused issues)
Onboard ADI 1988A Soundcard (Wiped out the SoundBlaster Xtreme Gamer sound card, don’t ask !)
Acer AL2216 Monitor
Acer AL1916 Monitor
Razer Copperhead Gaming Mouse
Logitech G15 Gaming keyboard
Creative 5.1 Surround speakers.
Windows 7 now works fine, with the new driver updates, and the download of the Logitech G15 driver and utility, everything seems smooth. I did however have a problem where every 5 minutes or so, Windows would give me a BSOD with a tdx.sys error message, however after a little bit of googling, it seems Windows 7 has a problem with AVG Free anti-virus.
Granted I was only up and running for a few hours last night, but I did a little bit of testing.
Steam, worked fine, all games apart from World of Goo seemed to work ok, apart from all games being at a status of “Download Started…”
Warcraft worked fine, infact better than fine, I saw an increase of over 20 frames per second.
Itunes, worked flawlessly
Left 4 Dead work, and worked very well, without a glitch
Gadgets I’ve tried, and worked.
WhetherBug
Multi Meter (D)
Network Meter v2.1
GMail Checker
Utorrent Gadget
Now this is running fine on my main machine, I will create further blogs as I decide if I love/hate Microsoft’s latest operating system. So far I think it’s quicker, uses resources better, is stable, however it’s still early days.
I would like to point out that I have a lot of 720p content on my NAS drive, and without installing any video or audio codec, it played the videos straight out of the box, very impressive
and if you do, feel free to add me as a friend