Raging Thunder is one of those games we’ve been watching since the App Store was first announced, and now it may have reached another milestone. Polarbit says that with version 1.0.3, which is in the App Store now, they’ve released online, real-time competitive multiplayer. They say it’s an App Store first, and I think they’re right — a few games have offered wifi multiplayer before (Apple’s Hold’em does, and Raging Thunder did previously), and some games have done some non-real time multiplayer (Loot Wars is interesting in that way) but allowing players to play competitively online in real-time is something that hasn’t been done much.

It’s not quite on the level of Xbox Live yet — Polarbit is offering a free beta of their server software on the website, so you’ve apparently got to have your own server running (or sign on to someone else’s) to race against your friends online. I just gave it a shot, and it worked well. The lobby system is a little awkward and without voice chat (strange how much I’ve just taken it for granted in multiplayer nowadays), it’s hard to tell whether people are playing or just waiting in a room (or why they’re dropping out of the race, as a few players did while I played). But once you get into the game, it’s Raging Thunder with other people driving the cars. Well done.

It would be nice to see player names above cars. Easier to do trash talking when you know who you’re talking about. This is only the beginning, however — here’s to many, many great online multiplayer experiences on the iPhone.

Now that is the question… And a good question indeed.  I have answered it not to ReadyBoost any longer.  The REAL thing that I wanted to see major improvement for was boot times… and in all honesty I didn’t really notice much difference.  I hear a lot of people saying ReadyBoost made their computer start up 40% faster and some claim even more than that.  I never saw it myself, maybe they’ve got 1gig or less of RAM I don’t know, but it didn’t seem that amazing to me.  Plus, sometime here in the somewhat near future I do plan on making the move to a 4 HDD RAID 5EE array which should take care of any sluggish load times.

Another thing that I HATED about ReadyBoost was that when it cached items… I don’t know what it was caching, but it must of been big, about three times a day (at least every day as I noticed) it would start to cache (I could tell because the HDD light would come on, and the light for the flash drive would freak out) my computer would come to a halt, using 75% of my CPU and sucking down every bit of resiliance my Hard Drive had it would try to make things easier for Windows to find IN CASE it might need to be loaded… And then inevitably it would do it in the middle of the night when I was trying to sleep, although a relatively silent process the wildly random blinking lights were always annoying when trying to fall asleep.  Because I have so much open all the time (Firefox, Games, Thunderbird, etc.) any time I closed anything it seemed to want to cache that item right away.

I will give ReadyBoost credit though.  It did seem to make game map loads much quicker for certain games.  Ones such as Half-Life:2 and a few others that would pre-cache maps it made the loading screens few and far between, which I was very happy about.

It seems like not yesterday the number one game on both Credal and I’s Xfire profiles was Stronghold 2.  Now with only 162 hours and in third place it seems like we didn’t play the game at all!  Of course it kind of sucks that Xfire has some sort of glitch with Windows Vista and it shows me as ALWAYS in game for Company of Heroes.  Once I get in the game until I restart the computer it shows me as in game!  Which BTW I absolutely hate!  It doesn’t show a true record of how long I’ve been in game… the past 3 weeks I’ve probably gained 100 hours in CoH alone simply because I can’t get “out of game” without restarting my computer!  (I think it has to do with Vista’s caching system, since the game loads UBER faster if I’ve already had it up once… make use of that 4 gigs of RAM!)

Oh well, I still can’t deny the fact that I’ve got a good 600 or so hours in CoH, and at least 200 in Counter-Strike:Source.

Archmaille’s Xfire Profile

Wow, so it’s amazing to finally be back on Archmaille.com

Maybe I should just fill you in on a little history first.  Archmaille.com is and was the oldest and first site that I ever created!  Lets face it though… Archmaille.com sucked back then.  It was “designed” in a crappy text editor that used divisions and pixel placement of those divisions to place images, text boxes, etc.  It looked very basic and childish to start with, and if you used any different screen resolutions you may as well forget it.  The original intent was to sell my sterling silver jewelry on here… but let’s be honest it wasn’t going to happen with that website and a few PayPal buttons for orders.

Some time in 2005 I started using a slightly better system with tables, some basic images, and some copied CSS for the navigation links (that didn’t really fit very well might I add).  The look of the site was only slightly improving, but my knowledge was growing fast.

By 2006 (Actually some time between June 4th and 8th 2005) the site had been completely reworked thanks to some help I found on a webmasters forum, a guy made a simple banner, and helped me with some template/color issues.

The site stayed basically the same for quite a while since it was banned from Google for the use of “scraper” pages… which were my form of payment for using the site.  Since I wasn’t hosting the site, and didn’t own the domain Jordan put the pages up to help subsidize the cost of it.  He made plenty of money from it and eventually the ban was lifted though I never got PR back or really got indexed very well.  So I took the site to a new place ArchmailleDesigns.com and put a 301 redirect to that from all Archmaille.com pages.  Now that I’ve transfered all domains to my new server, Archmaille.com has sort of been in no-mans land for a while… but finally transfering it as well I’ve noticed that with the latest PR update it also has a PR4 from the countless hours of link building done for the site… so I’ve decided not to put the 301’s back in place but instead use this as my “gaming” blog.

I’ve been gaming pretty much most of my life and known in game as Archmaille for the last 4 years.  It’s only fair that I use this domain for my gaming stuff.