I haven’t played Age Of Empires 2 or the Conquerors expansion in a while so I was surprised when after installing it and starting my first game I ended up with strange colour issues, eg, red grass and purple water, the game would also crash occasionally when trying out different compatibility modes. So I tried my Windows Vista laptop, but the same thing happened with it, I tried using Wine on my linux laptop but 9 times out of 10 it causes x.org to crash and other times it just ran too slowly.

I had since deleted my VMWare virtual machine, so I looked for a quicker option and came across this to quickly convert an XP mode virtual machine to a working VMware image usable in the free VMWare Player, in total it took about 15 minutes to get up and running and at no cost other than a Windows 7 license that can use XP Mode.

The game works fine out of the box, here’s an example:

Having problems? Download video: MP4 | OGG

That example was for the expansion pack but it also works fine without.

First Impressions

First impressions were great, as a PS3 owner with an embarrassingly low amount of games I was ready to buy it on its first day of release, the reviews that I read praised the game for… everything, surely no game is perfect enough to score 10 out of 10 in every category?

I first started playing once I got my copy of the game fresh from eBay; the game was familiar and it was easy getting back into the GTA style gameplay. However my first issue occurred when in the opening cinematic and first missions I found myself completely blanking out when anything regarding the character’s story was involved, it just wasn’t interesting to me, but I was willing to overlook it.

Graphics

Regardless of what you think makes a good game, graphics is the first thing you experience when you play a game. It’s what you use to navigate the game and is important as some graphics issues can cause hindrance to the game.

The graphics have been much improved from the previous games, there is much more going on in general and that helps create the atmosphere of an active city, the weather system works well at changing things up so that it’s not so static and the rain looks great.

The game lacks colour, things like cars, signs etc. have bright colour but the environment is quite grey and brown, this is most notable in areas of shadow, I feel that the game over darkens shadowed areas to the point where it’s hard to see, however at night the game is much more colourful due to the lighting and the general atmosphere seems much more real.

I also found the graphics in general quite blurry on my TV, this may be due to the 720p resolution but most games run in that resolution and are much more crisp, on top of this the motion blur is quite hard to deal with when you are trying to quickly turn around when in a fire fight.

Sound

The sound in the game has not changed much over the years, the familiar radio stations are back, though I found myself listening to PLR, Integrity 2.0 (The station Lazlow from the previous games is on) and WKTT. Ambient sounds have been improved, a nice addition is the ability to hear a car’s radio from the outside.

Gameplay

As I stated earlier, familiar controls get you in to the game easily and for a game that requires you to aim using a controller’s thumb sticks it’s not too hard. The cars seem to be harder to control now and it reminds me of how cars in the 90s PlayStation game Driver controlled, it’s a steep learning curve indeed but more realistic (if you’re into that kind of thing). The only issue I would say is that holding X to run is very hard to handle when you’re busy in a fire fight trying to hide.

Missions haven’t changed all that much from previous GTA games, but as the characters don’t vary all that much you get much less quirky missions and I found the amount of missions where you had to kill some guy or a bunch of guys and then escape the police to be quite repetitive. The locations change and occasionally you get to snipe people from a distance instead but it doesn’t change things enough for me. Vice City is a good example of a GTA game that shows that there can be much more to it than that.

The in-game map and GPS is great and very handy when you need to stop and grab a burger on the way to the next mission. It shows a green line to the destination that you choose and if you already have a mission based destination line it won’t override it.

There are much less side missions in this game, they seem to have replaced them by the annoying “call your friends/girlfriend and take them out” that the game nags you with occasionally, I found myself in a situation where I would need to deal with 3 people before I could get to the next mission or suffer the thumbs down treatment.

The city is expansive, not as much as in San Andreas but enough that it kept me busy for a long time exploring, it would have been interesting to have country areas included as the city got a little repetitive, something that bugs me is the safe house, there are very few of them and it is the only place to save, sometimes it takes way too long just to get back there to save, though this isn’t different from previous games in the series.

Character customisation makes a comeback, though I rarely do it if it’s optional, I did play around with some different looks for the character throughout the game, starting with basic clothes, then moving to a $2,000 suit half way through for that hitman look.

I found the retry mission feature handy but I tended to only use it when I failed a mission, if I end up in hospital or jail I find it much easier to just reload the game and deal with the long drive back to the same mission, which brings me to my next issue.

Loading times are horrible, perhaps I am used to playing PC games but I just can’t stand this game’s loading times, I almost change my mind about playing it while I’m first loading it up.

Story

The core part of GTA games ever since GTA 3 has been the story, it plays out well, each game has had a different story and different characters, GTA is a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

This game however has a somewhat serious theme containing your character, a wisecracking douche-bag that doesn’t shut up and wants to make a new life in Liberty City, he appears to be the only character in the game that was made with this seriousness in mind, many of the other characters thankfully contain the personalities that you expect in a GTA game.

As I mentioned earlier I wasn’t interested in the story when I first played and I am still not interested, I understand it’s common today for games to have a more serious and darker theme but it just seems like a misguided attempt at realism to me. Realism just doesn’t seem right with what else they have done in this game, it’s almost like they weren’t sure what direction to go.

Bugs

Every game has bugs, this one was a train wreck when it came out for each system, thankfully I was unaffected by the freeze bug that caused the console to lock up, deleting the game data was a temporary fix at the time which I would not have been happy with. The game is fairly bug free now on the PS3, aside from the occasional graphics glitch and frame-rate drop. There hasn’t been an update for it since 2008.

Summary

What’s wrong with it?

Graphics – Bland, Grey and brown, too dark in places, bit blurry too.
Gameplay – Repetitive missions, annoying phone, long load times.
Story – Annoying character, boring story in general.

What’s good with it?

Graphics – Much improved, smoother.
Sound – Brings the best from the previous games and adds to it.
Gameplay – GPS/Map usage, retry missions shortcut, good controls.
Bugs – Quite rare.

Last words

Don’t care for the story, or the character, but the game is still GTA, it’s still fun and it can be enjoyed for short periods at a time.

Score

There is firmware floating around that allows a D-Link DIR-655 to downgrade to pre-1.3x firmware (and also to other countries’ firmware), here are the results of my testing:

First I factory reset my router, it was running the 1.33NA b01 firmware, then I firmware upgraded it to the DIR655A4_FW131RUB10 firmware file that I will make available at the end, this is a modified version of an official Russian firmware, (apparently 2 bytes is all that has been changed).

The first step, upgrade to the RU firmware

Once this was complete I was running the modified firmware, as you can see it is still in English.

Here I am running the modified firmware

Then I was free to upgrade/downgrade to any firmware I wished, so I decided to try the official Australian Firmware 1.21 and this worked perfectly.

Back on the Australian firmware

Here is the chklst.txt info on the firmware to prove it downgraded successfully.

chklst.txt of AU firmware

You can download the modified firmware below:
Modified RU DIR-655 firmware (1.49 MB) 31-01-2010

In my experience it is one of the better versions of the 1.3x firmware family, here is the changelog:

• Fixed: Correct HNAP issue.
• Fixed: DNS relay issue ( WAN Slowdown )
• Added: Advanced DNS descriptions

Remember this cannot be downgraded by official means to anything pre-1.3x or other international firmwares, however you can always try the unofficial way.

You can download it here:
D-Link DIR-655 Firmware 1.33NA (1.47 MB) 31-01-2010

D-Link has released a new firmware for the DIR-655, version 1.33b01NA.

It’s not known yet what has been changed though it appears to be working quite well for people.

You can get it here.

Remember that this is the North American firmware so while it is compatible with other countries’ hardware it cannot be downgraded to pre 1.3x NA firmware OR to any other country’s firmware, so once you go NA, you can’t go back.

Please visit the D-Link forums post about it here before you install the firmware as this doesn’t have support from the usual places. Feedback can be left in this forum post.

Also let us know how it goes in the comments below.

I noticed however that the HTML5 video files that I have been using on a trial basis had stopped working with a big X in the middle of the video frame, but only in Firefox.

This indicates many possible problems with the video, some of which I could immediately dismiss as the file worked fine and other browsers such as Chrome had no issues playing it.

I remembered that it’s important to make sure the mime types are set correctly in apache, easily done with a modification of the .htaccess file in the site’s root directory, however I already had them in place, after trying different things I finally realised that nginx was serving the files directly so I did the following steps:

Open up the Nginx mime type configuration file, eg: /etc/nginx/mime.types
Paste these lines after the last video mime type, in my case it was avi:

    video/ogg                             ogm;
    video/ogg                             ogv;
    video/ogg                             ogg;

Restart nginx, it should then serve ogg video correctly to Firefox users.

Case: Cooler Master Cosmos S
Power Supply: Antec NeoPower 650
Motherboard: Asus P6T Deluxe
CPU: Intel Core i7 920 (C0 Stepping)
RAM: 3GB Corsair DDR3 1333MHz (tr3×3g1333c9)
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX, temporarily only one, normally x2 in SLi, explanation below
Hard Drives: 1x 60GB OCZ Vertex (running firmware 1.40 (TRIM)), 1x 500GB Seagate 702.11 (running fixed firmware)
Other Drives: ASUS 20x SATA DVD Burner

Over past few months the fan on my Intel Core i7 stock CPU cooler started failing, the fan initially halved in fan speed, then slowly lost ~50rpm per week while my CPU temp crept up, fan control was off and there was nothing blocking the fan from physically moving, so I decided to replace it.

Unfortunately getting a new one involves purchasing something, luckily I had an OCZ Vendetta 2 from my previous system lying around, so I shelled out for the OCZ Force 2 Retention Bracket. There were a few problems with the upgrade, the most important being that the heatsink was larger than the acceptable size for my case.

The only solution being to remove the side panel fan and lose a major cooling force in my computer, once it was removed I had no problem closing the door and the only temp increase was in my graphics cards. I still have one of my graphics cards using the stock cooler and those with experience know that it has incredibly poor cooling performance, the temps increased far too high for my liking so I moved it into another computer temporarily.

From this image you will notice the massive cooler, you might also notice my shockingly bad cable management

I was a little disappointed by the performance of the cooler, I even cleaned/replaced the thermal paste to double check but I simply couldn’t get my Idle temps to go below what was experienced with the failing stock cooler, however load temps dropped from the 80s to the mid 60s, acceptable for normal usage, but unacceptable for overclocking, so I thought I would take drastic measures and get a Corsair H50, the main selling point was the compact design, it would allow me to put my side fan on and would contain the excess heat that the previous coolers radiated towards my graphics cards.

Continue to the next page below

D-link have released an unsupported beta version of the DIR-655’s firmware, this supposedly fixes only the DNS Relay bug.

You can get it here, they seem to be pretty insistent that the firmware shouldn’t be used if you’re worried about your warranty etc so I will just leave it at that link, I’ll be testing this seeing as my router is stuck as a glorified Wireless AP and Gigabit switch due to it’s bad behaviour so it can’t really get much worse.

Fortunately for us end-users there are more options than ever before to let us use this software, Windows 7 Professional/Ultimate/Enterprise includes Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC in order to run applications just as they would in Windows XP and DOSBox allows even 64-bit users the chance to use 16-bit applications and games that were made over 15 years ago.

However up until recently if you wanted to play a 3D Accelerated game that was meant for Windows XP and won’t work in either Windows Vista or Windows 7 for whatever reason, then you were completely out of luck as 3D Acceleration could not be translated in a virtual machine, however that changed when VMWare Workstation was given 3D Acceleration capabilities, since then they appear to have worked on it extensively and now it is a dream to use.

Hidden & Dangerous was created by Illusion Softworks/2K Czech in 1999 and still has a strong following, in 2002 Lonely Cat Games developed an enhanced version of the game called Hidden & Dangerous Deluxe, this game was re-released as a free promotion in 2003 for the sequel that was released in the same year, you can get the game here.

The game works perfectly in Windows Vista and Windows 7, however the networking aspect of the game is broken, there’s not too much that can be done about it, so this is a perfect game to test in VMWare 7.0.

Installing Windows XP in VMWare is really not worth me getting in to, it’s not only easy enough that VMWare installs it for you if you want, but there are countless guides already written explaining every step, the default install and configuration is all we need, the most important element in the configuration of the virtual machine is having 3D Acceleration enabled, apart from that you can probably do whatever you want.

Install VMWare Tools, the tools have an updater now so make sure you keep VMWare and the tools up to date as there may be enhancements and bug fixes in them, it probably wouldn’t come to much of a surprise that this whole thing doesn’t work if VMWare Tools is not installed or is not installed correctly, the ‘Typical’ install type is all you need.

Install the game, in this case it is Hidden & Dangerous Deluxe, just like with Windows XP, install it how you would normally, there should be no need for anything special.

Before we get to starting the game you should download and install the latest Direct X Runtime files from Microsoft, this is not needed at all for this game but it’s always good to keep up to date.

My first starting of the game went well until I tried to view the map intro:

H&D Deluxe VMWare Fail 1

I then tried starting the game:

H&D Deluxe VMWare Fail 2

Clearly there was a problem, H&D Deluxe doesn’t play well in regards to graphics even when running on Windows XP, so I tried Safe Mode instead, once in Safe Mode the game worked perfectly:

H&D Deluxe VMWare Working

Here’s a video of the game in action in VMWare:

Having problems? Download video: MP4 | OGG

D-link have released a new beta firmware for the DIR-655 in the hopes that it will fix an undisclosed SharePort issue.

Changelog:

• This code can be used with all hardware revisions of the DIR-655
• This code only addresses the shareport issue
• The attached Shareport utility will only work with this version firmware

I don’t know what SharePort issue they are referring to and I have not tested this myself.

Once again this firmware WILL NOT DOWNGRADE to pre 1.3x firmwares so if you are on a pre 1.3x firmware then it is suggested that you stay put because chances are you will only have more issues and you can’t go back.

This firmware is beta, it is a test release, it may break/brick your router for no reason.

As the changelog suggests there is a new SharePort utility included that will supposedly only work with this version, I don’t know if SX Virtual Link works with this firmware, but for the record it has a version number of 5.6.2 making it newer than SX Virtual Link.

Download Link:

D-Link DIR-655 Firmware 1.32 Build 04 Beta 1 with new SharePort

Update 27th of October 2009: I have decided to test this firmware out as some users have reported that there are some small wireless improvements, I will leave any findings in the comments below. I will also try a SharePort stability test as the longest I have been able to keep a single SharePort connection alive has been about half an hour.