F@#k You, Nvidia. Redux

Way back in the old-timey days of 2007, when senators were looking for airport glory holes, the iPhone was pre-fanboy, and China was just poisoning us with lead instead of economic policy₁, this blog was making its first crawl out of the primordial goo.  One of my earliest posts was a juvenile rant directed toward 3D-graphic hardware and software company Nvidia.  Well, it seems a tiger don't change its stripes, and four years later, Nvidia is back to their old tricks of shoving undesired bloat down its customer's throats.

I'll try to keep this brief and to-the-point.  There's no real reason to pad out a rant like this, and most of it would just be excessive fucking cursing anyways.  Basically, with its most recent iterations of ForceWare (Nvidia's drivers for its GeForce series of video cards), Nvidia has seen fit to include HD audio drivers as part of the standard installation.  These would allow you to use the HDMI-out on your video card for audio as well as video output.  Not a terrible feature, in theory.  In practice, it's completely nonsensical.  I realize there are some people out there who want such a feature, but the vast majority of PC gamers are using a dedicated sound card or onboard sound on their computers.  Using the HDMI instead would, afaik, require you hook your computer up to an HD audio receiver, which would then presumably go to some surround sound system.  This would go well with using an HD tv as your monitor.  Because, you know, every PC gamer likes to sit on their living room floor when they play.

Even despite the current impracticality of the feature, it wouldn't be so bad — that is, if it didn't cause your computer to BSOD₂ all the goddamned time.  That's right: due to one of those really difficult-to-isolate driver conflicts, the installation of this superfluous HD audio driver causes computers to say "fuck you," often as soon as you log in to Windows (since the "log in sound" plays).  Other times it will crash when you are watching a video, or sometimes when you are just twiddling your thumbs and admiring your desktop wallpaper.  Basically just whenever the hell it feels like it.

Lest you think this is just some problem isolated to my own PC configuration, go ahead and Google "gtx470 hd audio bsod."  There are message boards full of other angry, ranting nerds.

The worst part about this?  The solution would be incredibly simple: just include it as an option to un-check during the driver installation process.  Nvidia already do this with their 3D Vision drivers (which are useless unless you have a special monitor & glasses).  Yet for some reason, they have forced you to install these HD audio drivers for the entire past year of driver releases.  There are some complex workarounds and processes you can go through to try and fix this problem, as outlined on those aforementioned nerd forums.  I've tried a couple, and the thing still rears its ugly head (plus you have to repeat the painful fix process every time you update the driver).  Thankfully, it never seems to occur during actual gameplay, but it still happens with enough frequency that it is murderous-rage-inducing.

Come on Nvidia.  Seriously.  Fix this bullshit.

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1. For some reason, I originally wrote this section for 1997, saying "Way back in the old-timey days of 1997, when scientists were busy cloning sheep, Heaven's Gate was spiking the punch, and boxers were eating each-others appendages..." Man, 1997 was such a cooler year than 2007.  Oh yeah, China has been screwing us with economics since before 2007, but saying it this way was funnier.

2. BSOD = Black screen of death (formerly, blue screen of death). Basically a system crash where your monitor goes black and you are forced to restart your computer.

Hydrophobia: Prophecy - This game sucks

Just to give a little background, Hydrophobia is an indie game developed by Dark Energy Digital, purportedly sporting some amazing water effects and physics and Uncharted-like gameplay. It's set in a floating city where (of course) everything goes to hell and you have to escape/find out what's going on.

I saw some trailers and it piqued my interest, but unfortunately like a lot of interesting indie games these days, it was originally exclusively on XBLA.  Recently, it came to Steam.  Even more recently (yesterday), it went on sale... for $3.   Normally it's only $12, so still not very expensive.  It was on my "hmm...maybe" list, so for $3 I figured "why not," and bought it.

Generally speaking, I feel like kind of an ass complaining about something so cheap.  However, the phrase "you get what you pay for" doesn't always apply to the realm of video games.  There are tons of marvelous games for very cheap, and plenty of complete stinkers for the standard $49.99/59.99.  Bearing that in mind, I feel I am fully within my rights to declare this game a piece of crap, which even for $3 was rather disappointing.

First of all, the graphical flare is greatly exaggerated.  I try to keep an open mind, but I'm seriously starting to believe that people who only play games on Xbox are amazed by anything that looks even slightly good.  Coming from a PC gaming background, this game does not impress.  I turned everything to full and it... it just looks bad.  Actually, it looks like there is something good underneath, but that somebody smeared Vaseline all over your monitor.  I'm going to attribute that effect to the overzealous depth-of-field blur and lens flare (aka things developers use to cover up the fact that their textures and polygon counts look like crap).

As for gameplay, it does kind of feel like a very cheap Uncharted knock-off.  It has the same general platforming and 3rd-person shooter aspects.  They just... don't work as smoothly or comfortably.  I can't really pinpoint any one thing, but the overall controls feel clunky and inconsistent.  The level design is pretty terrible.  A game that is this completely linear should not have you feeling lost and confused about where to go next.  The game provides you with the option to turn on an always-on objective indicator.  I like to keep those turned off for a more immersing experience usually, but I guess this is one of those games that actually really needs them.

To cap it off, the game has some really god awful voice acting.  Oh, and almost every time you turn a corner in a corridor, the game yanks control away from you for some stupid cutscene.  Having made these two complaints, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Deus Ex: Human Revolution.  I made similar complaints in my review of the beta of DX:HR on here, but now having played Hydrophobia, it really seems unfair.  Human Revolution is light years of quality ahead in those departments as compared to this game.  Okay, yes, DX:HR is a triple-A title with a massive budget from a major studio and a $50 price tag, so it probably should be exponentially better in production quality.  I suppose quality voice acting can be expensive and not something an indie game might be able to afford (which is why many of them don't bother with it!).  Still, it's just disgusting here.  I feel like I'm playing the original Resident Evil or something.

Let's take in to account some absolutely fantastic games I've also bought on the cheap during a Steam sale: Left 4 Dead ($7.49), The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition ($2.50), Trine ($5), Amnesia: The Dark Descent ($4.80).  Most of them even have great voice acting.  When factoring that in, Hydrophobia really just completely sucks.  So spend your few bucks on one of them instead.

fuck you nVidia

Why the fuck do you jackasses have to keep changing the control panel interface in subsequent driver releases?! WHY!?!!?!? What the fuck is wrong with you? Nobody anywhere likes the changes! They all want it to look and function the old way. Do you assholes ever look at your forums? They are full of people who don't like it.

I don't see the point of oversimplifying and making a restrictive interface. The only people who are going to be tinkering with it are the ones who are very knowledgeable about computers and probably built their own machines. So there is no goddamned point in having an interface like that. The only point would be if the layman was doing those things, which they aren't.

Here's why I'm so mad: I have a graphics card that came factory overclocked (don't buy XFX cards, they blow). Unfortunately, this causes mad issues with games (ie, my computer fucking crashes to restart). After a while, my friend let me in on a fix to this. You get this thing called CoolBits, and it adds information to your registry that lets you adjust the clock settings from the nVidia control panel. Except now that they've completely changed the control panel, guess what, I can't fucking do that anymore! So now, of course, the crashes have started again. I have to choose between having the latest drivers and living with constant crashes, or rolling back the driver and not having any crashes. I think I'm going to roll back the driver. Eat shit nVidia. Stop fucking with stuff that doesn't need to be fucked with!

ps: your stupid nTune app fucking sucks. It claims that it will let me change the clock speeds on the card. Well I guess you didn't bother to fucking update it with the new CP interface, because all it does is take me to the CP page for the 3D app settings. NOT WHAT I WANTED! It doesn't do ANYTHING!