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Company of Heroes PC game review

Company of Heroes is a WW2 real time strategy game that was released in September 2006 and its standalone expansion Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts was released in September 2007. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but if you are a gamer then you must play this game before you pick anything else up. I bought the original after it was released and just finished playing the expansion. The fact that I finished it is a big plus considering I’ve been struggling through Half-Life 2 which is suppose to be totally awesome.

What’s so great about it? The level of detail. Bombs and artillery leave craters infantry can use for cover. Buildings take damage and realistically collapse. Armored vehicles have weak rear armor that make flanking a required strategy. Infantry get pinned down by raking machine gun fire. Units attack in their line of sight making unit placement key. All these little details calculate into the strategy used to accomplish each mission.

The single player campaigns are well worth a play through on Normal difficulty which puts up a pretty good challenge without being frustrating. At higher difficulties you’ve got too be really good to keep up with the computer.

Highly recommended if you are a PC gamer of any sort.

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Computer upgrades

If you’ve never opened up a computer case in your life then you can pretty much just ignore this post.

I had been running an old WD 250gb SATA HD and an even older Seagate 200gb IDE HD and was starting to run out of room. WD and Seagate both recently came out with new 640gb drives containing two 320gb platters and I picked up the WD drive from Newegg. The higher density means these drives really move and the quick comparison I did with my old WD shows the new one to be almost twice as fast. Reads come in at 110MB/s and the old drive would average out at about 60MB/s. So far Windows seem a lot snappier with the new drive. One thing that surprised me was the old WD was idling 10°C higher than the new drive so it’s even cooler on top of being faster.

I also replaced my burner with a Samsung SATA drive, finally eliminating IDE from my computer. This let me really clean up my cabling. My old Thermaltake PSU that has served me well for the past 4 years only had 2 SATA power connectors so I replaced it with a new Corsair 450w PSU I had picked up on eBay from a seller who didn’t know what he had ($70 PSU for about $25, nice). I also put in an Audigy 2 ZS sound card I got from Creative on clearance for $20. Great card, less noise than the onboard and the mic input seems to handle my headset mic better.

All in all a pretty good upgrade. Brings my specs up to the following:

  • Antec P180 case
  • Corsair 450w PSU
  • 2GB OCZ Reaper memory
  • Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L mobo
  • Intel Dual Core E2180
  • ATI Radeon 3870
  • WD 640gb and 250gb SATA hard drives
  • Audigy 2 ZS
  • Samsung SATA Burner
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WordPress plugin popularity

If you subscribe to my comments feed you probably see all the comments related to my plugins. Over the past 2  years I’ve had a thousand comments and probably at least another thousand emails exchanged with WordPress users. I must have found a pretty good niche with my ordering plugins considering My Page order hit the second page in the list of Popular plugins on the WordPress Extend site. There’s about 2000 plugins on the site and I’m coming in at around #19. That’s pretty sweet.

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Better Google Reader Firefox Extension

Lifehacker has been publishing a Better Gmail Extension which does some nifty things like adding attachment icons and hiding various things. Just saw today that there is now a similar extension for Google Reader. Not as many features as the Gmail extension, but there are a couple I find pretty useful. “Auto Add to Reader” bypasses the iGoogle or Reader option screen when subscribing to feeds and the “Preview Item” opens up the actual webpage in an iframe inside Google Reader either automatically or by clicking a button. That’s pretty nifty since it makes it easier to open a blog post and post a comment right there without having to juggle tabs or windows. The last thing I really liked is displaying favicons inside the list of subscriptions much like regular bookmarks.

Better GReader

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Shared Google Reader Items Revisited

After trying one method of bringing my shared Google Reader items into WordPress I’m not exactly thrilled with the results. Rather than creating a single post per shared item I think I’d be happier with rolling a week’s worth of items into a single “roundup” post. The things I share aren’t really meant to spark discussion, they’re just good reads I want to share.

What I really want to be able to do is create a post with a list of links to the items that have been shared since my last update (much like Kurtis does occasionally with random links). Problem is I can’t find a plugin that does this so it looks like I’ll be putting my noob PHP skills to use to create another plugin. Naming it is going to be the hardest part, “Feed Link Extractor” or “Feed Link Aggregator” or something.