Blog | Page 60 | Martin Crownover

I found myself in the local Target today, perusing the games section of the electronics department. Game releases have all but dried up over the last few months, but I always like to check in now and then, just to see if anything new came out that slipped under my radar, or to see if anything I'd been marginally interested in had been marked down.

Surprisingly enough, I found a single copy of Dead Space, which I'd wanted to try, marked down to $30 for clearance, so I decided to give it a go. I took it up to the register, and waited a few minutes for one of the clerks to notice me standing there.

Eventually one of the workers wandered over and took care of my purchase, and then I met my girlfriend up front and we continued to checkout for her stuff. We drove home, and upon arriving at our apartment, I forgot all about Dead Space and fired up some retro e instead; Wind Waker is turning out to be a great little game for me, but that is another blog post, I think.

An hour or so later, I finally remembered Dead Space, so I picked up the Target-emblazoned plastic bag it was in and brought it into our spare room. I noticed the bag was a bit heavier than a typical Xbox 360 game, so I opened up the bag and peered in, thinking there might be something else I'd bought that had completely slipped my mind. But no, there was nothing else inside the bag except for the game. Unless, of course, you count the plastic security box the game is still inside.

Yes, my new copy of Dead Space is still completely secured thanks to the Alpha Security box that houses it.

I find it odd that the alarm system in the store didn't buzz when I exited the store, because the plastic security case includes a re-usable security device that, to my knowledge, is not supposed to be disabled by the in-counter disabling device used by the clerk.

I am also disappointed that the clerk didn't take the thing off in the first place; I specifically paid for the game in the electronics department because I thought they'd be more mindful of those kinds of things.

So now I'm sitting here, staring at my brand-new copy of Dead Space, and wondering just how I'm going to get the case open without completely destroying its contents. Should I take it back and have them open it up for me? That seems like such a hassle... not to mention a great opportunity to test my own ingenuity. Okay, so it's not exactly a job for a professional safe cracker, but it should provide me with at least 15 minutes of fun. That's more fun than I've had with some of the games I've bought in the past, and this is before I've even opened the game's case!

Update: Case Open, Case Closed

The case has been cracked, as they say, and I now have my Dead Space, with only minor damages to the game's case. At first, I thought the best approach would be to hammer off the hinges. After sever futile attempts to break them off (and the minor damage to the game's case), I took the opposite approach and wedged a screwdriver into the lock casing on the other end of the box, pushed it inside and yanked it around to destroy the lock and allow the case to open. I think next time I mihgt just bring the game back to the store!

Pictured above is the demolished security case, my new copy of Dead Space, and the tools of war.

1211 125 17

After missing out on the first round of tickets a few weeks ago, I'm happy to report that I was able to swoop in and grab a pair of BlizzCon tickets this past weekend!

My brother, Spencer, and I had been planning on attending BlizzCon this year, but during the first round of ticket sales, neither of us was able to get to a computer in time to get some tickets. I had just returned from a short vacation in Arizona and was on the road the same day for another short trip to Lake Tahoe. I had a lot of fun that weekend. Spencer had to go to work in the morning.

To fill in for our absence, we armed my dad with my brother's credit card and all the relevant information needed to make the purchase, but demand was high, and by the time he got in the ticket queue, he was about 25,000 people behind. When he got to the front of the line, the tickets were sold out.

This last weekend, Spencer was again not able to stand by for ticket-buying, but I was, so I set my alarm for 9:00 AM, got up and played around a bit, and then logged into the Blizzard Store and waited patiently for the clock to strike 10. At 9:58 I began refreshing the page every 10-15 seconds, and at exactly 10 o'clock, the drop-down box appeared for ticket purchase. I fumbled for a second, selected the wrong number of tickets, backed out and fixed the error, and proceeded to get in line. I was approximately number 250 in line.

A few seconds later, I was in front. I proceeded with the purchase, and it all went very smoothly. Much more smoothly than last year, where the store continually broke, and left a lot of unhappy people out there. I was pleased that I had remembered to log into the Blizzard Store the night before and update my credit card/contact information, so I didn't have to worry about changing it at purchase time.

Directly after I finished with everything, a friend of mine who had gotten tickets during the first round logged in just to see how long the line was; in about a minute's time, the line had grown to over 31,000 people!

So, I guess I am pretty lucky to have been able to get BlizzCon tickets again. I expected things to be a bit slower this year, with the economy and all, but I guess it's true that during hard financial times, people are always looking for entertainment – a way to escape from the troubles of life for a while.

Hopefully this year's show is just as much fun as the last. It's not until August, but If it's anything like last year, it should be worth the wait.

blizzard blizzcon diablo 3 events fun marty news starcraft 2 world of warcraft

705 109 3

Man, I go away for a small vacation and I miss the next big TF2 announcement from Valve! Not a big deal, really - I did have quite a good time on my trip, so a TF2 update kinda takes a back seat in terms of awesomeness... but more on that later. Valve's got a new update page set up for the next TF2 update, and it looks like it's going to be another sweet addition to the game.

So far, they've announced The Huntsman, a bow and arrow for the Sniper that can stick enemies to walls, Payload Race, a new game mode that's kind of like a two-way Gold Rush, and another item for the Sniper, The Razorback, a back-mounted shield that keeps the Spy from stabbing him.

Oh, and speaking of the Spy, he's also snuck in for some update goodness; he'll be getting the "Dead Ringer" watch and the "Cloak and Dagger" watch, which will let him fake death and stay cloaked forever respectively.

Like the other updates Valve has brought to TF2, these will change play considerably, but also seem very well thought-out, so hope fully balance will not be hurt too much. I haven't played TF2 in a month or two and I'm pretty excited about all this... hopefully this will be the push I need to come back to the game, as it is one of the more fun experiences I've had in online gaming.

Anyway, maybe I'll see you there - and hopefully I'll see you back here soon as well, as I write a bit about my recent vacation. Thanks for reading!

gameage pc sniper spy team fortress 2 tf2 updates valve

754 130 1

Well, this isn't nearly as controversial as my recent rant about proprietary Mac hardware or the problems with piracy, but I'd like to announce that I have updated the Examples & Tutorials page and added a new example/tutorial to boot.

The new addition, an example/tutorial (perhaps an 'examporial'? 'tutample'? okay, I'll stop) shows how to create a somewhat realistic fire effect using Game Maker's particle system, and takes you through the entire process, from sprite creation to tweaking the final effect for perfection. You can check out the write-up and download the example files here.

And as mentioned above, I've also re-tooled the Examples/Tutorials page, so all the ugly boxes are gone, and everything is much cleaner and better organized. You'll also find a partially re-written tutorial for 3D model importing/UV mapping in there, though I'd like to completely re-write this in the future, as my methods have changed a bit since I wrote the original. I'll probably be adding my completely unfinished competition project to the open source/abandoned section soon, too.

If you have any suggestions for other examples you'd like me to make, sound off in the comments!

examples game maker marty blog news tutorials updates

958 118 2

I'll admit it - I am a former pirate.

Back in high school and college, I traded MP3's with friends. We burned each other copies of games. I was not a stranger to the occasional DVD copy. And I ran an illegal OS with illegal software for years.

Much has changed since those days, however. When I fire up my computer today, I'm pleased to see a completely legal copy of Windows XP appear on the screen. Every piece of software and every game I run on my machine has been paid for. And even though a few remnants of my freebooter past resurface now and then in my MP3 collection, the vast majority of the music I listen to was purchased from iTunes, Amazon, or ripped from a CD I bought.

It makes me feel good. But now, I seem to find myself on the opposite side of the fence from many of my fellow internet users.

Recently, the crew behind The Pirate Bay website was put on trial and subsequently convicted of "assisting in making copyright content available," with a total of $3,620,000 in fines, and each member of the team facing a one-year prison sentence. It's hard to say whether or not the verdict was just. On the one hand, The Pirate Bay is brazenly obvious about the purpose of its site. The pirate theme has been taken on in name and symbol, it organizes torrent files by media type (music, movies, programs, etc.), and a cursory search of the site will reveal that the vast majority of the content being traded among users is not legal. But on the other hand, The Pirate Bay doesn't explicitly host any of the files in question; they merely house the torrent files users download to find peers in their BitTorrent client. So, it could be argued that it is the site's users who are in performing the illegal activity, and not the site itself (dubbed the "King Kong defense").

I happened to read this news on Digg, and many people there disagreed with the verdict. What disturbed me though, was that the majority of these people didn't care about the legal intricacies or implications of the matter. They seemed only to think that piracy should be legal, and that it was in the best interest of everyone to continue pirating movies and music in protest.

Here's a few excerpts from the comments section of the submission I read:

Let's all stop going to the cinema for one year!

Truly a sad day...I'm gonna watch a torrented movie now :'(

95% of teenagers generation uses file sharing; they will be the ones in a few years who can vote and be in power.
The majority of people in power at the moment have more than likely never truely used the Internet; for them it's just about profits.

Stopping bullshit.
If you release an album of music, have all the songs good. There is no point in having an album with one good song and the other 50 tracks full of useless songs for padding.
Same with copy-paste Hollywood blockbusters and Video Games.
A real torrent user with pay for anything that is worth of value. Half-Life 2, Super Mario Galaxy, The Dark Knight, these were barely affected by piracy because they were...you know...actually GOOD so people bought them.
So basically, the MPAA and the RIAA are pissed because they will have to get the Entertainment Industry to work harder and actually make a majority good content, which is the exact opposite of their business plan of "take a dump in a bag and net one billion dollars."

And that is exactly the problem with the RIAA MPAA and this witch hunt. All they are trying to do is protect their ability to get money for producing steaming piles of bullshit! Period.

Surely I couldn't be the only person who reads comments like this and just shakes his head in disgust.

First of all, just because something isn't good by your count, doesn't mean that you are entitled to take it for free. In fact, I personally don't understand why you would go to the trouble of taking it for free if it's not good to begin with. But one of the best things about MP3 stores like Amazon is that you can almost always buy individual songs and leave the rest of the album behind, if you so choose. Under most circumstances, that'll only set you back a buck, too.

And if that's not good enough for you, then look at piracy figures for games like World of Goo or Demigod. Both games have gotten good reviews, and both were released without anti-piracy measures in place. At last count, World of Goo had an estimated piracy rate of 90%, while Demigod, after only being out for a week, had hit about 85%. I'm no fan of heavy-handed copy protection measures, but if you think that good content doesn't get pirated, you might just be an idiot.

Secondly, I find it absurd that some people think that music, movies, and art in general should be a free service provided to everyone else. Yes, many artists (myself included) produce work purely for others to see and share with each other. But we also ought to be able to make money from our work, and if the legal system doesn't help protect us, then what incentive do we have to do work? If your passion is carpentry, should I expect you to build me a house pro bono just because you like doing it?

But let's take this idea to the extreme for a moment - imagine that the judicial system has decided that music, movies, and other artistic works should be free for the public to copy and share. Essentially intellectual property, patents, copyrights, etc. would be no more.

Creative work would be pointless, because anyone would be able to take anything you made and reproduce it without consequence. By an ironic twist of fate, large companies, being in the best position to market and sell media, would benefit the most from this arrangement; they would be able to take any idea they spotted among independents and replicate, package, and sell it without giving a cent to the original creator. Where is the logic in that?

Don't get me wrong here; I'm not siding with big business on this issue. I'm no proponent of the DRM schemes they've tried to use to protect their content, typically to the detriment of paying customers. But when I see the ridiculous sense of entitlement people have towards media, coupled with the outrageous piracy rates of games like World of Goo, I can't help but think that there must be some kind of "happy medium" between producers and consumers. And there is, by means of systems like Steam, which seem to be getting things mostly right so far. But we've got a long way to go. It's important to me that we arrive at that destination though, because I am an artist and a creative person, and I want my work to be protected, like everyone else.

For now, I'm just happy to report that despite my years aboard the massive vessel of media piracy, I'm no longer part of the problem.

And it feels good to be a landlubber.

culture demigod digg games internet movies music piracy rant world of goo

2503 117 39

The other day at work, I wanted to move around some of the items we have sitting on a table at the back of the room I work in. This included a monitor, a small printer, and a large flatbed scanner. The monitor and the printer were easy to move, but the scanner had run out of USB cord length, so I couldn't move it any farther away from the computer it was attached to. Thinking I had remembered seeing a USB extension cord floating around the office somewhere, I got out our box of random computer parts and started digging through it in hopes of finding something useful.

After only a minute or two, I came up victorious: one of our Macs had come with a USB extension cord for the keyboard that was about two feet long; perfect for moving the scanner. I put the box of junk away and dove under the table to add the extension cord to the mix of wires coming out of the back of the computer.

The male end of the extension plugged into the back of the computer alright, but then when I tried to attach the female end to the scanner's USB cable, I found that they wouldn't connect to each other.

I checked to make sure the connectors were the same size; they were. I flipped one end of the cable around, thinking I might have just made the mistake of trying to plug them in upside-down, but this didn't work either. Slightly frustrated, I pulled the cable out of the computer and brought it back into the light where I could examine it more closely.

And that's when I saw it. The female end of this otherwise normal USB cord had a small raised notch right down the center of one end.

This slight change to the connector does not exist for any functional reason – it was placed there solely to prevent the end user from using the cable for anything other than what Apple had intended it for. I unplugged the keyboard from my computer and checked the male end of its USB connector, and sure enough, there was the matching groove for the extension cord's notch.

What utter horse shit.

Forget, if you will, that Macs typically cost hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars more than their PC counterparts. Forget that none of my games will run in Mac OS. Forget that Macs have a somewhat limited library of software compared to Windows. Forget the throngs of imbeciles known as Mac fanboys. And, if possible, try to forget all those annoying and factually deficient Jason Long commercials.

This is why I will never get a Mac.

You'd think that a company who charges such a ridiculous premium for their computers would have the common courtesy to at least include a USB extension that follows industry standards and works with other devices, but no. After all is said and done, Apple sticks to its guns, follows the same path it always has, and makes a no-stop trip straight into proprietary hell. At this point, I'm honestly surprised that they haven't started releasing their keyboard/mouse with custom triangular USB plugs, to prevent people from using them on non-Apple computers.

This is the kind of bogus practice that will eventually hurt Apple's reputation with consumers, and they deserve every bit of criticism for it.

And don't even get me started on the new iPod Shuffle, which requires proprietary headphones to work.

apple hardware mac rant usb

865 120 63

Have you ever suffered from the so-called Tetris Effect?

If you've ever played Tetris for a prolonged amount of time, I bet you have. Don't worry, it's okay to admit it – you're in good company, as I am also a Tetris Effect survivor.

I actually found it quite funny that there's a name and an entry for the Tetris Effect (which is attributed to repetitive stress, whatever that is) on Wikipedia. I always thought it was just me who, after a long Tetris session, couldn't stop seeing the falling pieces and thinking about how to make good fits whenever I closed my eyes!

Anyway, I was recently going through some old stuff of mine up at my parents' house, and I came across an old watch I used to have as a kid – a Tetris game watch, to be more specific. It got me thinking about how much I love Tetris, so I thought it'd be interesting to reminisce a bit and figure out just how many different versions of Tetris I've played/acquired over the years. All in chronological order!

Tetris (NES)

One of the first games I ever played, Tetris on the NES served to kick off my life-long love for the game. I remember playing the game with my brother and dad, with each of us trying to out-do each other's high score. Much excitement occurred whenever one of us finished and we were treated to one of the rocket launch "congratulations" screens.

Tetris (watch)

This was the watch I mentioned above. The playing field was smaller than standard, there was no color, and the buttons were hard to press fast enough for later levels, but this was still a fun toy to have for long road trips. My grandparents got one of these for both my brother and I, if I remember correctly.

Tetris (Game Boy)

I was late to arrive to the Game Boy scene (my first Game Boy was a clearance Game Boy Pocket), so I didn't play Tetris on a true handheld until much later than most fans of the game. I enjoyed this version nonetheless, as it introduced me to one of the best things ever: Game Boy during bathroom breaks.

Tetris Worlds (GBA)

When I picked up Tetris Worlds for a measly $20, I figured that even if the game was slightly bad, as long as it stuck to the roots of Tetris, it couldn't be that bad. It turned out I was half right – the game wasn't all bad, but it lacked a lot of things that I expected from a Tetris title, and it introduced "Easy Spin," which let you keep a piece alive as long as you continued to rotate it where it landed. This feature doesn't break Tetris entirely for me, but in Tetris Worlds, it was implemented in such a way that made it almost impossible to lose.

Tetris (iPod)

Upon hearing about Tetris making an appearance on my 5th generation iPod, I was excited, but controlling Tetris with a click wheel sounded incredibly difficult and stupid. Well guess what? It is.

Tetris DS (Nintendo DS)

This is probably my favorite version of Tetris thus far. It's got many different play modes, local and online multiplayer, global ranks, it saves your high scores, and it contains loads of sweet Nintendo-oriented stuff – all wrapped up to go as a DS cart. The one thing I don't like hate about Tetris DS is that the only people who play online seem to be grand masters at Tetris, so despite my being a pretty fast/decent player, playing online (and winning) is more often than not a slightly frustrating experience, unless I'm playing with friends.

Tetris (Cell Phone)

Chalk this one up to an impulse buy. Thanks to the tiny buttons on my LG Chocolate 2, it's only slightly more controllable than the iPod version I mentioned above, but it is handy to have when I'm out and about, and bored. I haven't played this much since I got Pictocross Mobile, however.

Tetris Splash (Xbox 360)

Though one could probably make the argument that Tetris Splash doesn't really push the envelope as far as new features is concerned, it's still a solid game, and I've had a few good hours with it. The fish/aquarium stuff is utterly useless, other than to provide a pretty backdrop for the main game, but with decent multiplayer and a few good single player modes, Tetris Splash isn't all bad. And hey, getting Xbox Achievements for playing one of my favorite games of all time doesn't hurt either.

Looking back on my list, I think my obsession with Tetris might go beyond the Tetris Effect, huh? To hell with mental illness! It's a fun game, and I'm going to continue playing it in every way possible!

Title image courtesy of tetris-gollum, Tetris watch image courtesy of Wonderland, Tetris DS image courtesy of GameZone

game boy game boy advance game watch gameage ipod mobile nes nintendo ds retro tetris xbox 360

1249 125 11

If you were asked to attribute a specific name to the shallow, and often ill-conceived articles that appear on game-oriented websites when real news is in a lull, what label would you give them? Would you merely call them 'filler'? Or would you go further and use more descriptive words like 'garbage,' or 'stupid,'?

In the case of GamesRadar's article, The Fugliest Games Ever Made, you'd likely use those words and a lot more, peppered with profanity, and probably with some vague threats of violence. This list of games is so inconclusive and arbitrary, it almost seems as if they were drawn from a hat. Here's the list of the "fugliest" games of all time, according to Justin Towell, the author:

Toejam & Earl: Panic on Funkotron
Nucleus
Streets of Rage 3
Earache: Extreme Metal Racing
Sabre Wulf
Sonic & Knuckles
Mirror's Edge
Sega Rally Championship
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing

I've only played four of the nine games on the list, but of those four, none of them deserve to be dubbed the ugliest game ever. And looking at the screenshots and commentary for the others, I get the feeling that the other five games are just as undeserving of that title as well.

First of all, I'd like to point out that style isn't a bad thing, and style certainly shouldn't be confused for poor design. Games like Toejam & Earl or Nucleus employed a unique style to make their game worlds memorable, and the designers should be congratulated for that, even if they weren't always a complete success. According to Towell however, we should look down upon these games; in his opinion, we should hold the style of all past games to modern standards:

"We didn't realise how garish this game is until we downloaded it off Virtual Console recently. Squiggly wiggles in scrolling backgrounds no longer say 'cool'."

We're rapidly moving towards a time where most games are starting to look way too similar to each other, and the best GamesRadar can do is go back in time to trash past games that tried something a little off the beaten path? Forgive me, but that seems counter-intuitive.

Another thing I find particular offensive about this article is that it makes the mistake of equating the technical limitations of game platforms with bad graphics.

Streets of Rage 3 used a dot pattern to simulate transparency. The Sega Genesis didn't have the capability to do hardware transparency, so developers had to find ways around it. This was a common technique at the time.

Sega Rally Championship was a 3D racing game on the GameBoy Advance. The fact that Sega even got a 3D engine working on the GBA is so incredible that I think the low resolution of the rendering should be overlooked, at least in terms of "fugliness".

Sabre Wulf was created in 1984 for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the UK equivalent of the Commodore 64, by a two man team. The ZX was an 8-bit system running on a Z80 processor (a slower version of the one inside the original GameBoy), so naturally, the graphics it pushed weren't particularly amazing. They literally couldn't be.

Towell, speaking of Sabre Wulf:

"At the time of the game's release, the screen was so busy we couldn't work out what was going on.
Now, of course, that lushness has wilted somewhat, especially in the face of games like Tomb Raider Underworld, to the point where its colour palette now looks like someone ate a load of cheap confectionery and barfed it all back up in 259x192 resolution."

Apparently, Mr. Towell didn't go any farther than Wikipedia for his "research." Kinda makes you wonder if he's ever played Sabre Wulf, doesn't it?

Of course, there's nothing wrong with finding appreciation for the current graphical limitations of games by playing older games now and then, so long as you remember that most of those games could not have looked better than they did because the technology (and oftentimes the expertise) just wasn't there yet. Context matters!

But now, even as I've gotten past GamesRadar's complete ignorance of context, technology, and style, I find myself asking: why are Sonic & Knuckles and Mirror's Edge on this list? S&K's graphics were good for the time, and are in my opinion, still some of the best you can find in 2D platformers. Mirror's Edge isn't ugly at all. Does Justin Towell truly believe that one psychedelic background effect can ruin a game? If a handful of people get motion sickness from a game, does that make its graphics bad in any way?

"The screen's just a mess of colours and glowing white orbs. But wait… this is the bonus level after all! And it's horrible. Everything's pulsating like the lightshow you get from a migraine."

How am I supposed to take commentary like this seriously from a guy who, only a few paragraphs prior, lavished Geometry Wars with praise ("bonfire night explosions of colour and joy")?

Maybe I shouldn't expect so much from GamesRadar, but I can't help it; articles like this give me the feeling that they simply don't care what passes for content these days. Or perhaps this is merely the result of a lazy viewership who never questions the veracity of the articles it consumes. But how is it possible to publish an article like this, without harboring at least mild contempt for your site's viewers?

It's truly a shame when articles like this, which contain nothing but dopey opinions and half-baked zingers, make the rounds and generate ad revenue for sites like GamesRadar. I just hope this model of online content-sans-content doesn't become the norm, especially with many major news publications taking their magazines onto the internet and leaving print behind. There's enough garbage online as it is.

culture gameage gamesradar internet journalism lists rant

1365 109 15

Okay, so maybe they didn't really ruin my night — but they did make me quite angry.

I'm not really a huge TV guy. I only have one or two shows that I watch religiously. The Office (the American version) is one of the few shows I look forward to watching each week, and I reserve time every Thursday night to watch it.

This night was like any other night, except for two things. The first being that I missed the first few minutes of the show, because my girlfriend and I had gone out for dinner and barely made it back in time. The second being that after watching about two minutes of The Office and sitting through a commercial break, my Comcast cable stopped working.

My cable never blacks out when I'm going on my third hour of watching Lost re-runs or when I'm stuck in the hell of an endless array of Rachel Ray's 30-Minute Meals. But after waiting the whole week to watch one of the few shows I actually enjoy, I am instead treated to 40+ minutes of a black screen.

Thanks, ~~Comcast~~ ~~Comcass~~ Comcrap.

comcast rant the office tv

683 84 11

And I'm almost ashamed to admit it. My various Win XP installs have been virus free for about 7 years now, but now the streak has finally been broken. The strange thing is, I'm still not entirely sure how, or where, my computer got infected.

I've looked back on the events that have led up to this unfortunate incident, and I have pieced together what I think has happened, which I present to you below.

Two nights ago, I was browsing the net with Google's Chrome. I had a few tabs open, and I was bouncing back and forth between them. In one of them I was working on downloading a file from a file-sharing site, kind of like RapidShare, but not quite as official (if you can call RapidShare "official" by any stretch). I had jumped through all the rings, skipping two ads and waiting 60 seconds for the download link to appear. Once the link was ready, I began downloading (it was a RAR file).

About 5 minutes later, while the RAR file was still downloading, I noticed that I had left the tab open with the file share site on it. With no reason to keep it open, I switched to it to close it, but as soon as I selected it, Chrome became unresponsive. Not wanting to cancel my downloading file, I let the program sit, hoping that whatever was slowing down that page would resolve itself. After a minute or two, the tab finally showed up, but the whole browser was acting slow and slightly unresponsive, so I closed out that tab and a few others that I wasn't using anymore.

I turned away from the computer for a second to look at something, but out of the corner of my eye I saw the screen change. I looked back at the display, and it took me a moment to realize that Chrome wasn't on the screen anymore - not in a window or on the taskbar. So I opened it back up, and began trying to restore the tabs I had open. About 30 seconds into this, all of my tabs (even those that had already loaded and stopped), switched to show the Chrome error page. A minute later Chrome disappeared from my screen again with no warning or error message. Opening the program again resulted in a similar outcome.

By this time, it had gotten pretty late, so I attributed this to Chrome's beta status, turned off the computer, and went to sleep.The next day I got home from work and fired up the computer again. I browsed around the web a little, got up to go eat dinner with my girlfriend, and later came back to the computer to play some games. I noticed that FireFox (my default browser) had opened a window in the background - an ad for some idiotic anti-virus program. I assumed I had overlooked it from using FireFox earlier in the evening, and closed it. A minute later it was back, and this time I was sure that I hadn't initiated it's arrival.

My troubles with Chrome the night before came back to me, and instantly, I suspected something might be wrong.A quick look through the computer's running processes yielded nothing. Everything that was supposed to be running was. I checked the startup folder in the Start Menu; still nothing.

Finally, I opened up msconfig to check and see if anything had been added to my list of boot items. Sure enough, there were four oddly named dll's there that I did not recognize. I unchecked their boxes so they wouldn't be run when my computer started, and immediately went hunting for information on the problem.

I found out that my computer was infected with a few pieces of malware, all of the same origin, and all of which had a nasty habit of renaming themselves and latching onto legitimate processes to run. I wasn't entirely sure if their only function was to show me anti-virus ads however, so I figured the best course of action would be to remove the infection and then re-install Windows, just to be safe.

I tried to start up AdAware, but after waiting a few seconds, a cryptic error message appeared on the screen about a server error, and the program refused to load. So, I looked up NOD32, an anti-virus program which I've heard about on "The Tech Guy" radio show, installed it, and ran it. 10 minutes later, after I'd watched the program cycle through all the known areas of the infection, the program reported that it had found nothing. Lame.

A quick Google search returned a few more promising pieces of software; upon further investigation, I decided to try out a program called Anti-Malware by Malware Bytes. This program zipped through my drive and found about 14 infected files and registry entries. I quarantined and deleted all of these, restarted, and ran the program again. The second search turned up nothing. I checked msconfig and my processes list for similar results. I made a mental note that I should purchase the full version of Anti-Malware when this was all over with, as a token of my thanks.

With that, the pre-re-install process began: check, backup, delete, and restore. I checked the software on my computer to make sure I had all the install files I needed and read up on how to properly save my email and saved games. I copied everything from my main hard drive to the (much larger) second hard drive. I uninstalled everything that pointed to files on the second drive, and then rebooted with my trusty Windows XP disc in the tray.

About 30 minutes later I found myself staring blankly at the rolling green hills of the default Windows XP wallpaper. I turned off the machine and went to sleep.

Now it's time for me to get all my programs, games, and files back in their rightful places – just what I wanted to do this weekend.

Thanks malware. Thanks a lot.

chrome firefox malware news pc rant software windows windows xp

1987 120 22

Martin Crownover

Suckurity

BlizzCon 2009 is Go!

Team Fortress 2 Update – Sniper… and Spy?

Fire With Particles Example/Tutorial, Site Updates

Swashbuckling Under Pressure

A Notch Below the Rest

To All the Tetrominoes I’ve Loved Before