Just a quick note about how I (finally) got my mouse 4 and mouse 5 buttons to work the way I wanted in Thief: Deadly Shadows. I also managed to get the left/right rocker action of the scroll wheel to page back and forth through my items while the scroll wheel itself scrolls through weapons. Very nice.

I’ve got a Logitech G5 mouse, and I just downloaded Setpoint from Logitech’s website. I couldn’t get the mouse 4 and 5 buttons to register my keyboard actions no matter what I tried. I even downloaded and installed uberOptions, which I believe ended up being totally unnecessary.

Then, instead of selecting t3.exe as the program that received the actions, I selected t3main.exe, which is another file in the system folder that you don’t actually run yourself. Voila.

It really works nicely. I guess the key here is picking not the program that you run to start whatever game you’re gonna play, but rather finding the program that will be running when you need to use the commands. Hope someone else finds this useful.

A couple nights ago, I decided to reinstall Thief 3: Deadly Shadows and give it another spin. The only catch: I’m running Windows Vista, and old games can be very iffy on this OS.

My problem was that after installing, any time I tried to run the game, I got the following error:

(Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library)
Runtime Error!
Program: C:\Program Files\Thief – Deadly Shadows\System\t3.exe
abnormal program termination

When this happened, the cursor would get stuck as a spinning CD, which normally indicates that the computer is accessing the CD. Only this time, it would stay that way until I restarted the machine. I don’t think I could open the CD tray either.

After a few hours of mucking about, I finally got the thing to run, even though some parts are a bit buggy. I figured I’d share all the steps I took to get it to run in Vista. I’m fairly sure that not all of these steps were necessary, but I’ll list everything I did just in case.

1- First, I should mention that I’ve had UAC turned off for a long time now. I never had any trouble with malware in XP, and the UAC was actually preventing me from running a lot of my software, besides being very annoying. According to this page, it’s important that if you turn UAC off, you do it before installing the game. If you’re installing the game, you might also find this tweak guide useful.

2- After installing, I downloaded and ran the Thief Deadly Shadows v1.1 patch.

3- I don’t think that this is any part of the fix, but I downloaded and installed John P.’s Thief Deadly Shadows texture pack.

4- I downloaded and implemented the no CD patch. I don’t feel guilty about it, since I legally purchased the game and I’m just trying to get it to work.

5- I right-clicked t3.exe, visited the compatibility tab, and set it to XP(SP2) compatibility mode. This was actually one of the first things I tried, but by itself it didn’t fix my problem. In the end, this step didn’t even matter for me, since I used the no cd exe rather than this one, and I haven’t set any compatibility on the no-cd exe.

6- Here’s one I put off until the end because I was hoping not to have to do it. I disabled DEP. Following the instructions in this forum thread, I went to a command prompt, typed bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff, and rebooted.

7- Lastly, when I actually run the game, I right click the no cd exe and pick “run as administrator”. Yeah, it’s a pain to do it this way, but the game runs. I should re-emphasize that I don’t have compatibility set for this exe, not that I’m sure whether that matters.

Here’s the other quirky thing. During every loading screen, this error pops up.

Every time a loading screen pops up, the machine goes back to the desktop and I see the error again. When this happens, don’t go within five feet of the mouse or keyboard. Just step away. The game will continue. The one time I clicked OK on the message, the game crashed. If you don’t touch anything, the game should continue normally.

Hopefully, this article helps someone else get the game running on Vista. It’s a heck of a pain, but Thief: Deadly Shadows is a great game, so it’s worth it.

I’m replaying Beyond Good & Evil for the (don’t laugh at me) fifth time with Brainy Gamer‘s Vintage Game Club. It’s true – I’ve played the game four times before, and purchased four copies of the game over the years. But about a year ago, when I made a list of my favorite 51 games of all time, Beyond Good & Evil took the number 1 spot in fierce competition with Half-Life 2. So the question then is why Beyond Good & Evil is my absolute favorite game of all time.

Read the rest of “Replaying Beyond Good and Evil” »

Since I’m replaying Beyond Good and Evil right now, it seemed an apropos time to create a Beyond Good and Evil wallpaper. As usual, we’ve got three different aspect ratios sure to tickle your LCD’s fancy.

Download Beyond Good and Evil Wallpaper (1024×768)
Download Beyond Good and Evil Wallpaper (1280×1050)
Download Beyond Good and Evil Wallpaper (1680×1050)

This is the best thing I’ve seen on YouTube in a long time. Being a huge fan of Half-Life, seeing a really well-produced fanfilm made in that universe makes me giggle like a little girl. Look at the Combine Airship!

From what I’ve heard, the Purchase brothers made this film on a $500 budget, which is really impressive.

Yeah, it’s a blatant Zelda knockoff, but it’s a neat little game, designed by some guy at home. Instead of pixels, he used love.

The game rearranged the icons on my Vista machine’s desktop, but I expect that’s because I’ve got a dual-monitor setup. Maybe it’s just because today is Friday the 13th. Who knows?

Download Legend of Princess

We here in Lungfishopolis were very impressed by the DesktopGaming’s retro gaming wallpapers, and have been inspired. So today, I bring you the first of what we hope will be many retro gaming wallpapers, constructed locally right here in Lungfishopolis.

In a distant galaxy the civilization known as the Yars were attacked by the fierce Qotiles. Though badly damaged, the Yars’ fought back using their mechanical ships that look like giant metal insects. The Qotiles have many laser cannons shielded behind celluloid barriers which are capable of destroying the Yars. It’s up to you to control your Yar ships, dig your way through the shields and fire your powerful Zorlon Cannon into the Qotiles. The enemy is relentless; there are thousands of laser cannons surrounding the people of Yar, each one is capable of firing deadly energy swirls at the Yars. They are also protected with a destroyer missile that will constantly track you down and detonate your Yar ship. It’s up to you to save the Yars, good luck!

Those of us who cut our gaming teeth on the Atari 2600 will remember this game well, and as such it seemed like a good starting point for gaming wallpaper.

Download Yars’ Revenge Wallpaper (1024×768)
Download Yars’ Revenge Wallpaper (1280×1024)
Download Yars’ Revenge Wallpaper (1680×1050)

Microsoft did a hell of a thing when somebody there thought up achievements. Although born on the 360, they’ve come to be fairly ubiquitous amongst games today.

Not being an XBox 360 owner, my first real experience with achievements was in Team Fortress 2, which I tried briefly during its beta testing. Soon after that, the other players online became so much better than I that playing soon became an exercise in pain. I did manage to get five Team Fortress 2 achievements, but that didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment, and at that point I wasn’t trying specifically to get any of the achievements. I think the first time I started gunning for achievements was with Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal, where I did pretty well. I’m glad Valve started their own achievement system, and if they go back and put them into any of their older games retroactively, I’m all in to replay those games. But some of those are damn hard. Anybody who got the Little Rocket Man achievement has got way too much time on their hands.

My second achievement experience was with the Playstation 3’s “trophy” system. To be honest, most of them in games I’ve played are a bit lame. I’m picking up some trophies as I move through Dead Space, but I don’t even know what most of them are. I just note them passively as they appear. Oh, I just dismembered my fiftieth limb. Ooh. No big deal.

I’ve got to admit though, the addition of trophies to Pixeljunk Monsters is something I’ve very much appreciated. I still go back to that game from time to time. I’ve now successfully completed every level in the main game, and I’m working my way very slowly through the considerably more difficult expansion. I’ve got about a half dozen trophies, and every once in a while I’ll go back and add another, but they’re no cake walk either.

Fallout 3 has got to be my first legitimate attempt to collect every trophy in the game. I’ve got 81% of the game’s achievements, via Games for Windows Live. There are ten left that I don’t have. Four of them are from the Operation Anchorage expansion, which is lame because you need to shell out cash to get the achievements. Three of them are gotten by going through the game with a neutral character – something I’ll do if I ever play through again. One is “The Nuka Cola Challenge”. I’ve gotten 27 or 28 of the requisite 30 bottles of Nuka Cola Quantum, and the next time I feel like firing the game up, I can probably get that achievement quickly. And the last two, to me, are the hardest achievements in the game: Silver Tongued Devil, and Data Miner, which require you to succeed in 50 speech challenges and 50 hacking attempts respectively. The problem isn’t beating the challenges, it’s finding them. I’ve got somewhere around 30, only because I actively sought out everything I could. What a pain.

Mass Effect for the PC has achievements, but I haven’t given them much attention because they don’t connect to anything – I can’t link to a web page that shows them, and nobody I’ve added as a friend anywhere can see them. Kind of like PS3 trophies, which you can’t view online. It really makes you realize that achievements are all about showing off your accomplishments in video games. Too bad that 90% of the games I play don’t have them.

Seeing how Greg so eloquently laid out what he’s playing right now, I figured that I’d do the same, even though the pickings are slim indeed.

1.) Rock Band 2 – I am always playing Rock Band 2, even when I’m not physically playing it. If I’m in the car, I’m either singing songs that I’ve purchased already, hoping to match my pitch up just right, or I’m listening to songs with an ear to whether or not they’d make good tracks for the game. At this point in the game I’ve completed the tour, as well as all of various tour challenges and am working on singing 25 challenges on Expert. I’m less then half way there with 10 under my belt, so I don’t think that achievement is going to pop any time soon, but it’s always fun to belt out a few songs every now and then. I should go back to drumming, especially since I bought cymbals for my drum kit, but honestly, those drums scare me. I’m such a bad drummer I keep thinking that I’m going to hurt myself. Lord knows I’m hurting the song.

2.) Gears of War 2 – I recently picked this one back up to help a co-worker get his co-op achievements. I was pretty disappointed in how this game ended up. Oh sure it’s pretty, and the co-op is nice, but all of the intensity that the original brought to the table has been removed. Once I’m done on the co-op side, there are some new multiplayer achievements I need to get. Some require maps that I won’t be buying, so Ye Olde Completion Percentage is just going to have to take a hit on that one.

3.) Left 4 Dead – By far, this game is taking up most of my time right now. Every Friday night I get together with three other guys and we tackle a campaign on Expert as we work towards the “What Are You Trying to Prove” achievement. Expert sucks, but so far we’re 75% done. Only Blood Harvest stands between us and victory, but Blood Harvest is a cruel, cruel mistress. I’m hoping that we can be done with it tonight so that I can mop up the remaining achievements and put this one to bed, but if last week was any indication, that ain’t happening.

So, that’s it, not a lot of games there. My handhelds have been dark for some time now as I await the glory and splendor that is Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. I’m sure I could find something to play on them, but I do have a review copy of Inkheart in the mail to me, and Galactrix drops at the end of the month, so why bother? February also brings Deadly Creatures for the Wii and the new 50 Cent game for the 360, both for review purposes. Killer spiders and pissed off rappers. Should make for an interesting month.

Closure is a cute little puzzle platformer wherein light is key. You’ll quickly learn that if something is in the dark, it essentially doesn’t exist. In that way, it’s similar to PSN’s Echochrome, which I very much loved.

Play Closure