Tag: Gaming

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Console Gaming without a TV part II..(VD-W2 Wii VGA cable)

I do not usually watch TV, the last TV i had I ended up giving up because it just took up too much space. So I’ve always used my PC to watch Movies, Play games and such , until i purchased the Wii. From my last post
Console Gaming and Movie watching

I have tried almost every PC HD TV card under the sun in order to get a better picture/ less lag time out of the display with results fairing for the worse rather than better. One of my biggest problems was screen lag time.. On the HD Cards you had at least a full second of delay while moving the cursor around, on the analog card the lag time was barely perceivable but enough where it was noticeable if you had played on a TV, also If the PC is doing ANYTHING what so ever , you will get graphical corruption in the display thats the fault of the PC not the Wii. As far as using a TV card the display is fuzzy in fullscreen.

Wii On TV Card
After all those cards my thoughts on internal tuner cards for PC’s are they are all piles of shit… But, looking around i saw one possibility the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable from Vdigi I had taken my time on ordering this because I didn’t see any sort of review for this cable. Also being from HongKong and I am weary of Ordering from sites i don’t know. Resellerratings.com had next to No information about them, After much thinking I finally decided to order the thing…

After an impatient 2 week wait the cable arrived in a simple brown envelope from hongkong. Following the USPS tracking site.. Not really worth even tracking because they barely update you on the location of your goods. Anyways the packaging is dead simple , right to the point, you don’t need user testimonials on how it works. Anyways anything with a billion testimonials usually is a pile of shit.

the cable seems to be built of really good quality, Setup is a breeze as long as you understand the basic premise of what your doing. since the monitor your plugging into does not have an analog tuner, you have to use the component cable plug in on a tv

Wii VGA cable closeThe Green RCA jack you just plug into a TV and power on the wii , After doing so you goto your system menu and Display selection of 480i or 480p , You want to choose 480p , but doing this will look like something bad is happening . the screen will look completely fucked, don’t worry here,  because the TV doesnt know how to handle the signal. after this Power down your Wii , Disconnect the Green RCA than proceed to connect the Cable to the monitor , you will need a male to male VGA connector/Wire to complete this action, After that you should be all set on Connecting up to your monitor.

As far as quality goes , the cable kicks ass.

it removed every problem you would have with a TV card and basically gives you the same response as you would get on a TV screen. with the added bonus of You can turn off your PC to play the console if you run your Console like i do.

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Console gaming and movie watching… When you dont have a TV.. Wait what?

When I got my Wii, it was a thought to exactly how i’d play the console since i don’t have a TV so to speak. Eventually I just ended up going to most efficient route for myself. I connect the Wii to my PC via an analog TV Card, it works fine for me. but there are little things you do notice between having the Wii connected to a TV vs connected to a PC through a TV card.

Personally i use my PC as my center for media, Watching movies, playing games(PC), and playing the Wii. I don’t need a super huge screen, having one would be nice but eh… what can you do. I don’t watch enough TV to validate the idea of getting cable or anything, the way channels are these days its just all rehash of programs anyways… what are we on now “survivor 923 – Night with the power out” edition? About the only thing I tend to watch is mythbusters.

The only thing about having the wii through an analog tv card though is that the screen looks a bit fuzzy and lagged a bit. I’ve tried out many digital Tuner cards with no luck whatsoever, Either I have some sort of weird problem or perhaps my pc is getting a bit aged.

I have tried –

  • WinTV-HVR-1600 – This card is ok, If you have an Via Chipset/Nvidia Video card you will run into an overlay problem, easily fixed but …. the Crashes are not, generally HD channels look spectacular but on occasion the software would crash on channels with a low signal or format difference. Using it to play a console through was worthless, Trying to play the wii on this was like trying to play the Wii underwater , You would move the cursor, and the screen would always be half a second behind becoming extremely annoying fast.
  • Pinnacle PCTV HD Card – out of the box the card was purely annoying… the install software DEMANDED to have WinXP Service pack 2 installed, Nothing would progress unless you did that. as far as channels it did not have the problems that the HVR1600 had, but there was a noticeable unsynchronized Audio, For having the Wii hooked up , Again Display lag issues made this card useless.
  • Visiontek TV wonder 600 – based off the ATI TV wonder 600, installation was painless, Installation of software was relatively painless, Operation was terrible. Trying to pull in any sort of digital channels was totally out of the question no matter the position of the antenna NO channels were received. I even Put the antenna outside the window in hopes of seeing some sort of life from the tuner itself, For the Input part of the card for the Wii, This card got the Worst of the ratings – Display lag was far greater than the other cards, Up to 1.5 seconds of display lag which made any sort of console gaming Completely out of the question.

These card were all tried through about a years time, and Likely in the future possibly there will be a Digital HD TV card that will serve my purposes for both a TV Card and a Console hookup. but I have discovered theres a 4th option that would remove the PC completely from the math , which hopefully will remove all my percieved points that i dont like about running my Wii to Tv Card to PC output. while its the cheapest of the options I’ve only heard and seen very limited reviews on this I’ve ordered the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable . This will skip having the PC as an intermediary and plug directly into my monitor , which thankfully has 2 VGA inputs and 1 DVI input.

My hope is this will solve all my complaints about having the setup i do and having a more direct setup which eliminates a device which the console Passes through

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Rant: Gaming and DLC/unlocks for money crap

Back in the day most addons or mods for games were created for users by users to extend a games life , but now it seems that the big 3 have taken the idea. Nintendo, sony and Microsoft are all making room on there plates for these DLC micro transactions for content. Usually I’d not write about these things but in the last year or so its caught on to such a point where its bugging the hell outta me. if you want to know why this bugs the hell outta me click read more to continue.

Continue reading “Rant: Gaming and DLC/unlocks for money crap”

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Super Smash Brothers Brawl, post Solo Subspace.

had a short post up yesterday but got rid of it in order to put up a better post.

I’ve so far played out the subspace emissary through to the end, To be honest the way the story is told is kinda of amazing in one respect since not one word of dialog is used. that mode alone takes about 8 to 10 hours to complete and for the ability of having a second player join you is really a nice add-on. Also as far as the subspace emisary the stages age agravating but the good agravating where you dont want to eat your controller

So far my online experience with brawl is limited to a few sessions but they are rather enjoyable. Missing from that is chat but thats a double edged sword right there. If you have played any “on-line” game dealing with the never ending stupidity of certain types of people wear on you after awhile. you are limited to a few different statements you can put in while your playing but nothing huge. as for the lack of a full chat – i don’t mind it since its a console. Sure the Wii has keyboard support but it is very limited at this time.

Plus a full chat client would be worse than a cell phone text conversation. “how r u” “am gd” ect ect text shorthand has its places but it gets annoying after awhile.

Until i play out smash brothers brawl online I’m not inclined to make a total decision on how good this game is. really from a single player point of view i find that Nintendo made a really good effort to appeal to many different players in this game.

As far as the hype that brawl had when it was announce for the Wii I intentionally mostly stayed away from sites hyping it up so i could have an as unbiased opinion as possible with brawl, too which in the end i am in glad I took that road. What really surprised me was the use of the Havok physics engine thats used in half life 2. Playing through you can see the physics at work with items and knocking things around which made me quite happy.

As far as this post is concerned though its relatively a beginning post because later.

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NC Soft – I wish you could hear us….

Lineage 2 -The Chaotic WTF Chronicle. over the last week the C5 PTS opened with a bang.. more like a thud. Where a Russian hacker brought down the server by hacking into the game and giving himself every subclass + who knows what. After that the server went down for 12+ hours and No one knew much other than the servers had been hacked. 2 days later the servers go down for another 10 hours NC soft locked forum access and Claims it had a problem with the forum

WHen the forum went down and you tried to log in the forum told you “you cannot post here because you may have an inactive account or are banned.”

so Watching the forums for hours for any sign of life wondering if i had been baned till another used MSN’d me with the same error msg.

My problems are for one NCsoft is staying very quiet about this and pushing everything under the rug as fast as they can. 2 they changed everyones passwords.

It leaves everyone uneasy, the thought Of someone may have our information . so Whatevers going on NC NEEDS TO keep the users in the loop