Mittwoch, 15. August 2012

Space Marine, Hacks, Sony Vegas, Viruses

It's Gamescom time in Germany, meaning all the magazine people I work with are checking out tons of kickass new video games and I'm sitting on my ass in Nottingham with nothing useful to do. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means I'm enjoying a rather unusually large amount of spare time. Spare time I spend doing one of my favourite things in life: Enjoy games the rest of the world doesn't give a shit about. Such as Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine.


If you're bored enough to watch until the 8:30 mark, you can see what a vengeful bastard I am. Some dipshit in a shiny, yellow outfit double-teams me, because he's too much of a pussy to face me by himself (actually, that's just really smart), so I dedicate the rest of the entire match to hunting him down, again and again. Which is easy, what with him being all nice and yellow.

I love the online multiplayer Annihilation (team deathmatch) mode on there. As you can see in the video, there are no dedicated servers and the shitty p2p-hosting causes insane amounts of interruptions and quite a bit of lag and most of the time there aren't more than 2 or 3 open Annihilation sessions going on at any given time. So yeah, not the most popular game on the planet, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. See, I don't always play Space Marine. But when I do, I win. Because people on there don't cheat as excessively as they do on the more popular shooters like Call of Duty or Battlefield.

With games appealing to more people than ever before, finding aimbots and other stupid 3rd party hacks has become as easy as using Google. You can actually buy whole software packages, which will actively turn your camera towards enemy players as they approach you, help you detect them through walls and even fire the shots for you if you so desire. Tons of people spend a whopping 20 Dollars on those programs to boost their scores in a computer game. How fucking sad is that? People are so concerned about what random strangers on the internet think about their gaming performance that they spend real, actual money on cheats! What in Godzilla's name is the fucking point? You don't win anything if you get a nice score, there are no prizes, no ladders, no tournaments, no nothing. At least with games like Counter-Strike you'd make it to the big leagues and start competing for money, but if they catch you cheating, you're banned for life, so good luck with that! Why the fuck would anyone do that kinda crap in Call of Duty? Beats me, but it ruins those games for me.

It's sad enough to get shot in the head by some guy who is at the other end of the fucking map, through several buildings, solid brick walls and everything. When people are so lazy or so stupid, they don't even try to hide their cheats. But the really annoying thing is paranoia. Am I having a really bad day? Am I lagging? Is every other player just really awesome? Or are there lots of cheaters around? Instead of actually enjoying the stupid game, people constantly worry about that kinda crap and on the rare occasions where I actually end up in first place with a decent score, people accuse me of cheating. Heck, it's the first thing I suspect when someone is really good!

Then there are games like Space Marine. Games played online by maybe a thousand people, if that. I'm sure you can find an aimbot for Space Marine if you're desperate enough, but I have yet to encounter some mysterious player, who pulls off headshot after headshot through walls, miles and miles away from their target. And strangely enough, I'm doing incredibly well on there. When I created that little video up there last night, it has been the first time I've played Space Marine in 11 months. And I'm still kicking the crap out of pretty much every other player. Why is that? Am I some kind of natural when it comes to this game, are all the other players incredibly shit or could this possibly be related to the fact that it's a lot harder to find hacks for this game than it is for Call of Duty? :P

But it's not just the fact that I win most of my matches on there or how most of the time people refrain from insulting my mother when I shoot them. It's the setting. Every other shooter needs realistic guns now, scopes, silencers, grenade launcher attachments, yada, yada, yada. It has to be real. Special units against terrorists. Believable soldiers. Real war in my living room. Hooray America, saving us from terrorists and all the bad people in the world! Nazis, communists, nazi zombies, even! But you know what? When I get to move around with a massive jump-pack, cleave a bunch of suckers in half with a huge-ass chainsword or a power axe and spend the rest of the day painting little skulls on my ridiculously oversized suit of armor, then Mr. Realistic Soldier Guy can kiss my ass. I'm not saying a more life-like scenario can't be fun, but we're getting that same old game again and again, every god damn year, with minor changes at full retail price. I'm so incredibly bored!

I've tried a couple new things on this video, such as onscreen text, sound effects and a little zoom effect thingie at around 8:35. I edit most of my videos using Movie Maker, which I find massively underrated. How come that insanely expensive, professional software like Vegas doesn't come with a single useful rendering preset, that doesn't make my videos look like shit? How come the preview works without hiccups in the free movie maker, yet lags like fuck in Vegas? Why is that stupid thing so damn unstable, why does rendering take for fucking ever and why does it shit all over my hard drive, placing a billion temporary files everywhere, which I have to delete manually when the video is done?
Vegas comes with a lot of really neat features, but stability, user-friendliness and performance are all shit. I know Movie Maker is designed to be idiot friendly and Vegas is for the "pros", but why does Vegas have to be so incredibly frustrating to use in comparison, a billion extra filters, effects and features or not?

Speaking of inconvenient shit: Win32:Sirefef-PL
The last time I caught a serious virus has been nearly a decade ago. I don't fall for Scareware, I stay away from dubious porn and warez sites and I'm pretty cautious with my torrents. And you can use pretty efficient stuff like Avast! for free, so it's not exactly difficult to keep your system clean. But just a couple days after I had finally managed to fix my hardware issues, they got me with a fake Flash update. Know those ugly grey Macromedia windows that pop up now and then, usually when you boot up, telling you to install yet another god damn update? And no matter how many times you disable the fucking popups, they always come back one way or another, even if it's after manually installing a new version when you actually need it. So yeah, I got one of them popups. Decided to install, because it's been a while. I'm a fucking moron!

What I had grabbed there had nothing to do with what it said in the description, but suddenly I could no longer reach most of my websites, my virus scanner kept telling me about blocked Trojans every two minutes and neither Avast! nor Malware Bytes got rid of that fucker titled Win32:Sirefef-PL. Both programs said that they did, but they didn't actually remove anything.
Awesome stuff! Following various guides and forum threads about how to remove the damn thing, I ended up downloading stuff from Symantec, Kaspersky, even weird shit I've never heard about, such as "RogueKiller". And hey, most of them would detect the virus, yet none of them actually managed to do anything about it. The best thing was one particular removal utility, which started deleting random system files without warning, which prevented my PC from booting up altogether - BSOD right after the loading screen!

Let's just say it's been a rather long, busy night, but now everything is up and running again. I've learned my lesson, though. First, my PC dies because of crappy hardware, then I get this annoying virus. Gotta make backups of all my work and tax-related stuff, because next time I might not be able to save everything. Never had this problem before I got self-employed. I mean, how much exactly do you lose when all your data gets wiped out nowadays? Most games store your progress, settings and character data online, you can check and store your email online, you can even watch all the damn tv shows and play every song imaginable online. Makes me wonder if we're even gonna need hard drives in the near future? PCs get more and more memory, broadband connections get faster and faster - maybe we'll eventually reach a point where everything just happens via streaming and the only stuff that actually needs to be stored on the PC is gonna be your OS, user names, that kinda stuff. Heck, even all of my damn screenshots are on Steam, Facebook or this blog here. Is there gonna be a point in having multiple terabytes of storage space on a computer?

Ah well. My virus troubles are gone, but somehow I get the feeling that I'll get to enjoy Win32:Sirefef-PL some more in the not so distant future. Claire's mum just had a weird crash in the middle of her boot scan after detecting 4 suspicious files, Claire's sister's PC has been completely fucked by a virus earlier this week and if, god forbid, they can't fix these problems on their own, then I'm the guy. I'm always the guy. Neighbours can't figure out how to set up their router and get online - I'm the guy. Claire's step brother's mother in law's PC refuses to work? I'm the guy.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. I like being the guy. Makes me feel needed. Makes me feel a bit stupid, too. Take your infested PC to a shop, they'll demand a whole truckload of money and just wipe your entire system. Take it to me and I'll demand pizza, if that. Maybe I should listen to this guy:


Ah well. Time for more Space Marine!

-Cat

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