LA Noire - Poor Performance and Possible Solution

I had suffered through more than half of the game with such appalling performance on LA Noire on my aging Vista laptop.  I'm not one to complain so I chucked it off as just less than low performance.  It's almost like my Witcher 2 days coming back to haunt me.  On one particular case, the frame rate woes were really starting to get grating so I just had to dig up information on this.

All my graphical settings were set to low and I was playing on an 800x600 window and it was still stuttering.  The only option I didn't touch was 'Threading' which I left at Multi.  It seems like my research has lead me to believe that the game has issues with the threading on specific hardware (e.g. dual core processors) so I took a leap of faith.

Changing the Threading to Single was the kind of performance change I needed.  The improvements were dramatic and the game was playing fairly smoothly now.  I feel like a fool for even tolerating such poor performance.  Now it's time once again to find where the performance threshold is on my Intel Core 2 Duo laptop.  I hope this helps others who are suffering from performance woes.

Random Thoughts: 39 Steps and Rhythmbox

I've been playing a lot of Story Mechanics' 39 Steps which is a digital adaptation of the book of the same name (I presume).  Ever since I played Sega's 428, I've always thought that that presentation nails what a story adventure could be.  Story Mechanics takes the presentation style almost exactly the way I would have hoped.  I don't like so much the pixel hunting that happens in a few of the sections, but generally, this is bang on.  Good job on the game as I'm enjoying a lot of the experience.

Also downloaded their soundtrack for free but, it's a bit strange as the formats aiff and wav seem to play tricks on Rhythmbox.  Rhythmbox would not allow me to set the album details, and I had mistakenly set the album art for all "Unknown" works.  Bah.  I went to look at ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml to see if I could figure it out but there were no details on the album art.  

Turns out the album art is stored in a trivial database format in ~/.cache/rhythmbox/album-art/ and I just used the file timestamp to find the latest one and erased the file.  Album art gone and then I used audacity to re-convert the music files into mp3.  Love the soundtrack chaps!  Love the game too!

Brütal...

These past few days, I've been playing more and more of Brütal Legend and while I have enjoyed the action bits immensely, I am starting to see more and more flaws on this game.  When the game focuses on Eddie alone, things are fine.  When I got those idiot hair bangers, things get a bit more management heavy and overbearing with the constant use of guitar solos and troop management while being there in the battlefield with them.  After some failures, I got a bit of experience and pressed on.  Then... stage battles.

Boy, these blasted stage battles.  Now, instead of being an action game, I have resource management, commanding hordes of idiots, use the guitar solos and then figure out which of those fan geysers to get.  I absolutely did not enjoy them.  I thought they were a chore.  Guess what?  I play to have fun.  When it becomes an absolute drudgery to play?  I quit.  That Tim Schafer has to write an open letter to explain how this game is supposed to be played just underscores how out of place it is in this game.

Shame because the soundtrack is awesome.  The writing is silly and awesome as well.  I cannot tolerate the stage battles.  I just can't.  Uninstalled.

Public Service Announcement: Do not upgrade FGLRX to 13.9 STABLE

I've been on the fence on upgrading to 13.9 after reading that it's possibly based on an older driver.  Right now, there seems to be a clear sign that that is indeed the case.  Hang on till October, 2013 for the new driver release.  I hope they actually FIX the dual screen issues though managing code for 2 different graphics manufacturers (muxless hybrids) is quite a tall order.

Brütal Legend and Steam

So, after going through some really disappointing Indie games, I get to Brütal Legend which was a great surprise.  It works on Linux and it plays really well.  I had minor problems figuring out the controller support but this Steam thread should be helpful.  First thing is first though, you should configure the gamepad on Big Picture.  The shell script needs some Linux reworking to get rid of the dos \r stuff, but once you've cleaned it up, it will grab the SDL configuration for you.  The script is modified for Costume Quest (which funnily enough is modified from The Cave), but it's easy to change the paths for your install of Brütal Legend.

Good luck and save that SDL config file!

Random Thoughts: Dragon Age, LA Noire, and more...

Another edition of the Random Thoughts for me and it kicks off with Dragon Age: Origins.  I've finally gone through all the extra content the game had to offer.  I had played through Awakening, Golem of Amgarrak, Witch Hunt as the last pieces of unfinished business on that game.  So, here I am to ramble a bit.

Blasted Dragon Age Bugs!

My experience with Dragon Age Awakening sure is deteriorating.  First off, I got slammed by a damn bug that prevented Sigrun from taking the joining.  After reading wiki pages about the quest, I had to repeat the last part just so I could trigger another bug that would get her to do the joining before the conversation ever comes up to convince her to join the Grey Wardens.  After that, I thought it was going to be smooth sailing, but then, here comes another one!  Mischa is inexplicably missing in Amaranthine!  Damn it!  Damn it!  Damn it!