Guides – Obsolete Gamer

First Time to PAX? A Guide to PAX and Other Large Gaming Conventions

This is when setting a schedule comes in handy – more so if you’re a reporter. Panels are great to attend – but you have to plan to be at them not only the time they’re at, but an hour or so earlier to be in line for that panel. For really popular panels, you may need to be in line earlier than that. I recall one year I had wanted to get into the Tell Tale Games panel. I found out that people had been in line for four hours. FOUR. HOURS. My mind was blown.

Guides

Honorabili

World of Tanks 8.2 Review

The T21 plays a lot like the Chaffee. The T71 is comparable to playing the AMX13 75. The T69 is mainly played as a support tank so don’t play it like as if you are Rambo. The T54E1 is a lot like the Patton except weaker and is more of a support tank. The T57 Heavy has the advantages of having slanted armor and a gun comparable to the AMX 50B that reloads faster as well as being more accurate. The low armor of the T57 will make you play as if you are playing a French Heavy tank.

Guides

Honorabili

World of Tanks 8.0 Review

The game has a completely rewritten game engine that makes it look a more real than before. The graphics to me feel so much cleaner now almost like the difference from a DirectX 9 to DirectX 11 game. It’s that good of a change. On most systems I’ve tested it, it has gained much performance. I compared it to it having the same settings. On my girlfriend’s laptop which has a really poor integrated video card by Intel, she went from getting usually 6 fps to getting 16 fps while having the game look much better. I went myself, on my 2011 main gaming PC, from getting about 35 fps on max everything to now getting 45-65 fps with the same settings.

Guides

Honorabili

Beginner’s Guide to World of Tanks

Know your role and act like it most of the time. If you’re a light tank, you’re the scout. Find as many of the enemies as possible especially their artillery and scouts and kill them (those two, you are not supposed to take on a heavy tank other than maybe to get a lucky shot in their fuel tank). If you’re a tank destroyer fight from cover most of the time since you have less health than a medium tank and almost no armor. If you’re a heavy, you need to “tank” but don’t necessarily be out in the open. If you’re a medium your job is to do everything! If you’re artillery, try hitting all the heavies first. The only time you should not play your role is when the team you’re with is failing so badly that you need to pull a Rambo just to survive!

Guides

J.A. Laraque

First Steps: Guild Wars 2

The idea with this questing system is to keep things fresh and new. The events will change from time to time and what you and other players do will have a real effect on the game. In the main story mode you are mostly in instanced areas, but the random quests still apply there as well. As for dungeons, you first encounter a dungeon in story mode meaning there will be less monsters and difficulty as it is for only you. However, once you finish a dungeon you unlock the “explorer” mode where there are much more monsters, loot and even path choices to make giving the dungeon replayability.

Guides

J.A. Laraque

First Steps: The Secret World

Once you are in combat, I will say it reminded me of Left for Dead in a good way. You start off with a shotgun and two basic attacks and get used to aiming and moving while firing. The combat felt fluid and was not boring nor easy which again, is a good thing. Very soon, you get two more powers, one that slows your enemies and a powerful attack you use on the bigger enemies. Right before the big battle you get a heal spell that you will take use off right away. This tells me the idea is to allow you to stand alone and not depend on the holy trinity of Tank, Healer, DPS.

Guides

J.A. Laraque

First Steps: Tera Online

The gameplay reminds me of a mix between a point and click and a traditional MMO and having various spells and abilities right out the gate makes the game fun. You will need to hit the alt or escape key to bring up your mouse pointer to do things like read your spells or change your quick buttons. It is also a good idea to read what the spells do because some are range attacks while others are not. As for your basic attack you can just hold the left mouse button down and the spell will continue firing,

Guides

Honorabili

Mech Commander 2 Review & Strategy Guide

If you are a hardcore Battletech fan and you’ve never played this, go out and play it NOW. If you want to play an RTS game that requires patience, you will like this game too. I don’t think they’ll ever make another game in the Mech Commander series again, which is a real shame. We’ll see though… If MechWarrior Online starts to do well when it does come out, there is hope. It’s nice to see that Battletech is not entirely dead. It has a special place in my heart alongside Warhammer 40k.

Guides

Honorabili

Gaming PC Benchmarking Guide August 2011

It’s been a couple of months since I last wrote a benchmarking guide and since then the video card of my old machine started to fail more eventually leading to me replacing it, not being happy with the performance and last month building a nearly state of the art gaming system. All the theory I talked about in my original benchmarking guide still applies but my new system is able to run all modern games with every setting super maxed out. Since everybody will not have a super new computer, I will keep my recommended benchmarking settings high but still reasonable so you can compare new systems to legacy systems.

Blog Editorials Guides

Honorabili

E3 2011: My E3 Guide

If you are media/press, pick up every free bag of goodies they give you. The best stuff I got was from World of Tanks, which gave me a bunch of toy tanks, a special bag, a World of Tanks T-Shirt, mouse pad, and special game bag, as far as the main floor went, and the biggest gift I got was from Topware which gave me a Collector’s Edition of Two Worlds 2 and a ton of T-shirts. Even if you don’t like a game, who knows, a friend of yours might like it! If you have a gaming website, some of this swag would be great to giveaway in the form of a contest.

Guides

Luis Zena

Retro Cheat page: S.W.A.T.

Here we have even more cheats for your enjoyment. We have lots of Nintendo cheats this time around with a little bit of everything as usual. My S.W.A.T. merchandise is running low so I’ll have something new coming up in the coming weeks. Take care!

Guides

Honorabili

Gaming PC Benchmarking Guide February 2011

Ignacio/honorabili’s massive benchmarking guide for testing legacy and modern gaming PCs together.

Guides

J.A. Laraque

Modding your Nintendo DS

This version of modding is safe because it does not require users to open or make changes to the Nintendo DS hardware. This is known as soft-modding.

Guides

Honorabili

Civilization 5

The first thing you’ll notice is that the AI is virtually retarded, even on Deity. If you are a typical player in all previous versions of the game and set it around the middle to above average difficulty, you will have a challenge ahead of you. In Civilization 5, the AI does dumb shit like move their archers at point blank range of your swordsmen or other similar units that instantly devour them. I’ve seen them try to take over a city with archers, which cannot melee assault a city, a requirement for conquering in this game. That’s one thing that they changed that I kind of like (a miracle), the concept that cities count as a fighting force in their defense and have an attack/defense rating and can shoot ranged (2 hexes away) at their enemies.

Guides

Honorabili

Split Second

You basically participate in races, whether traditional who gets the first place, set amount of lap races, or elimination which is like last man standing, in which every set amount of time, the last car drops from the race. There is also a race mode in which you race against the clock with no opponents and the entire track will just trigger its bombs and have the terrain collapse on you, as you basically try to race a perfect lap (without getting killed). Each time you get killed, you basically lose a position.

Guides

Honorabili

F-Zero review & strategy guide

The goal is to reach first place or as high a place as possible while surviving. Yes, this is a game where if you take enough damage you will die. Your car has a certain amount of power and if you take enough damage the performance of the car will be significantly lowered. When your power bar empties out, you blow up. You can also blow up by taking a ramp and jumping and landing off the track (which can happen especially in the higher difficulty leagues). Touching other cars, touching the side bumpers, and especially touching the cars that are about to explode and do explode, all damage your car, especially the last one.

Guides

Honorabili

Dawn of War 2 Chaos Rising

It took me about 2 hours to beat the last level finally. What is really important to know is that he heals back over time. Try NOT to use the resurrection point unless you’re down to one man and everybody else is down and you don’t think you can res your healer in time. Not only does the fat bastard heal over time but he will heal much more and much faster if your men die around him. You basically have to spam the living hell out of healing (use the scout and hopefully you kept him pure so using the healing uses energy only, not supplies or you’re dead). The longer you take, more the bastard will heal. The less DPS you do, the longer it will take you to beat him too.