Guardian: I have a mission for you!

My beloved Guardianites,

You are the only people I can think of resourceful and twisted enough to help me with this challenge. As many of you may have seen, I've been having issues with my gaming comp and it only seems to affect when I'm gaming, everything else works fine. I had a thread in the Tech forums so don't worry I'm not asking for that help here. But before any of you decide you want you ask me if I've done X or Y yet........yes. You name it we've done it, tested it, benchmarked it, swapped it, RMA'd it, etc.

So here is where the challenge comes in. The person who made the machine for me swears up and down it is a software issue (even though I've completely reformatted AND changed operating systems...drivers and settings have all been tweaked). He claims that it must be a CoH issue (this happened before i17 btw) and he wants me to try other games so he can prove that he was able to play games on the comp fine after his last series of tweaks. I had a CoD demo and Ghost REcon2 that came with the comp that he put on and claims will play fine. Both crashed...proving my point that it isn't just a CoH thing.....I think it's the mobo or processor, by the way.

Anyway, I'm looking for free or demo versions of games. Not flash games or arcade style 2D games. I need something that will tax a normal system and something with 3D graphics. Something involving modernish technology. But I want to pull from Guardians sense of humor and I would like games that are silly or ridiculous. Bottomline, I don't want to go to him and tell him that just Ghost Recon2 crashed the comp I want to tell him My Little Pony's Rough Riding Cowboy Game or Hello Kitty Ally Kitteh Wars made it crash as well. I.E. I want to rub his face in it a little.

So if anyone can think of a free or demo, downloadable, modern, 3D, silly, ridiculous and embarrassing game I'd love suggestions.

Thanks,

Mental

p.s. And no it's not RAM or vid card.....promise.

You can get PORTAL for free from STEAM for a few more days right now.

No Steam....for reasons too confusing for this thread. Thanks for the suggestion though, monkey daddy.

The first thing I thought about was the Humble Bundle, an offer to get a bunch of Indie games for a price of your choosing (not technically free, but I think you could go down to $0.01). Unfortunately it seems that offer ended last week.

You can still get the demo versions though, but most of the games are 2D.

Lugaru is 3D though, and it does seem to fit the silly-premise.

"The main character, Turner, is an anthropomorphic rebel bunny rabbit with impressive combat skills. In his quest to find those responsible for slaughtering his village, he uncovers a far-reaching conspiracy involving the corrupt leaders of the rabbit republic and the starving wolves from a nearby den. Turner takes it upon himself to fight against their plot and save his fellow rabbits from slavery."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWTxaAj5w-4

The graphics seem fairly simple, so it's possible that it's not taxing enough for your purposes. I'd guess that depends a lot on how it's written though (and if the frame-rate is capped or not).

Still... Bunnies...

Check out MMOHut. They have links to all kinds of MMOs there, from free to pay to free with micro-transaction, open and closed beta, fantasy, sports, fighting... just about everything.

I'm sure they have some silly things in there, too...

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Biggest Troll on the forums? I'll give you a hint:

activision has a buncha demos you can do from doom 3 to the bee movie!!

http://www.activision.com/index.html#downloads|en_US

I'm going to be annoying and post a tech suggestion.

If the games crash "after a while", it's often heat- and/or power-related.
In these cases, one thing to test for can be if anything changes when the game is artificially limited. If, for instance, a game should stop crashing when it's limited to only using a few % of your CPU/GPU, it's less likely that there's anything actually wrong with the game, and more likely that the game (when unlimited) simply makes some component fail due to heat/power usage. This can't entirely rule out heat/power issues, but sometimes it can help finding them.

Fortunately, in CoH we can use /maxfps to easily test this. Using "/maxfps <n>" prevents CoH from outputting more than n frames per second, reducing its CPU/GPU usage in the process, and thus also reducing power usage and heat generation (which also makes this useful if you want to reduce fan noise. Its sibling /maxinactivefps caps the framerate when CoH is not active, which is great if you tend to tab out of the game a lot, and don't want your fans to keep spinning at full speed when doing so). As an example, "/maxfps 10" limits the game to 10 frames per second, and "/maxfps 0" will turn off the limit.

If you want to try this, I'd suggest starting with something like /maxfps 12 (the game is still kinda playable at those framerates), and if needed work your way down (I'd also suggest turning off FSAA, Anisotropic Filtering and Physics (and any fancy new Ultra mode thingies), and maybe turn down World Quality a little).


If you suspect that it's a CPU issue, it might also be worth testing to disable Hyperthreading and/or Turbo Boost.
You could also limit what CPU cores CoH is allowed to use, in case the problem is with only one/some of the cores (you can do this from Task Manager by right-clicking CoH and changing CPU Affinity (the menu item may be called "Set Affinity...").

I appreciate the suggestions but like I said, not really a tech question thread. I Don't want to be accused of cross posting and we're resigned its definitely not most obvious issues.

Heat- nope. I have plenty....plenty of air pushing through the system, we have monitored heat and the crashes can come within seconds not after a bit of play. From the vid card side we swapped cards (even brands)....still crashed. Even RMA'd my vid card in case and have a brand new 285 in as we speak. We've also swapped out powersupplies. And as a general FYI this system is rather robust and played CoH for 6 months wonderfully (even multiple instances), so it's not something in the system that needs to be throttled down for performance reasons.

Like I said, most of the off the cuff suggestions have been covered multiple times. But thanks anyway.

This almost sounds like the problem I had with my previous computer. Without more details, I probably might be wrong, but it sounds like you might be having problems with the motherboard. Before it completely fizzled out, I would be crashing now and then. It turns out that the capacitors (sp?) were burning out. I'd get that check out, if that's the issue.

mental just making excuses not to play wif meh

btw..as a computer geek myself id say its your flux capacitor

My last computer had issues but it got solved with updated drivers to everything that required drivers but like you said you have already tried that.

As for trying games.. Maybe try Home of the Underdogs or some such abandonware site and prove to the guy that even ancient games crashes the computer.

//Jack

honestly your not missing anything on the game atm anyways so your kinda lucky its happening now rather then later. get that thing fixed before gr though!

until then bob and i are on red dead redemption if you got a ps3 .you can come play with us :P

*waves*

Hi Mental!

And back on topic.....Disney's Toontown Online is always offering free trials

try the Lego games. Pretty sure Star Wars, Indy and Batman all have downloadable Demos.

DnD online may be a good option.

It's graphic intensive, but free (well, you have to pay for extra goodies, but the basic game is free)

Be warned: There are NO cookies in the game.

I wanna say mother board.... what it sounds like to me its just a bit er um maybe on its last legs? or a defective board.... I was thinking full HD but I can't see you having a full one either

As far as MMOs go... here is a list of FREE ones

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...r_online_games

Hope you come back soon Mental!!

EDIT PS ........ Um could get you a free Trial of Aion maybe have to see how many req I have left... but its a pretty huge game......

You can give Wolfenstein Enemy Territory a shot. Free to play, fully fledged FPS, it should tax your system enough to demonstrate your problems. True it is an older game but a good FPS will eat up dead time by giving you more frames per second - which coincidentally is giving you more FPS.

http://www.splashdamage.com/node/57 for the download. And nooo, I gave up playing those games a long time ago so don't ask.