additionally, blizzard released patches for all these games (1.12 for diablo ii, 1.15.2 for starcraft, 1.20e for warcraft iii) which let you play without a cd. this is an unprecedented move in the gaming industry. while most companies are trying harder to increase the drm on their games with disc verification, blizzard is removing discs from the picture entirely. i really hope more companies take this route because going into my disc case to find a disc for a game i want to play is a real pain.

head over to the blizzard store and register an account (if you don’t have one already). once you have verified your email address you can visit the games section under my account controls. from there you can enter your retail cd key for any blizzard games you own which are supported:

Which game keys can I attach to my Blizzard Account?
The following games are supported by the Games page at this time:

• StarCraft
• StarCraft Battlechest
• StarCraft Anthology
• Warcraft III
• Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne
• Warcraft Battlechest
• Diablo II
• Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
• Diablo II Battlechest

– Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.

each one you add will give you a banner that offers a download link:

from here you can download an executable file that, when launched, will begin downloading your game installer via bittorrent:

if you are having difficulty with the downloader, you can look for help at blizzard support.

once your download is complete you will have a full blown installer which contains all the data necessary to install the game without discs:

in addition, you will be given a new 26 digit product key that will be used to install the game. you can obtain this key by selecting the view game key link on the game banner as seen on your my game downloads page. thank you blizzard!

after installing diablo 2 and the lord of destruction expansion pack, i created a new battle.net account, made a sorceress character, and immediately looked for a rush (where a high level character completes quests for you allowing you to get rushed through the game rapidly). while playing i posed the question to my fellow diablo players; “who here is just getting back into diablo 2 after hearing about diablo 3?” everyone in the game replied “me!” the same could be said for players in nearly every game i joined.

fast forward from the announcement to now and i find myself with a level 87 sorceress and about five mule characters full of items, runes and gems. it’s great fun for a game that is 8 years old. have you just gotten back into diablo 2 after hearing about diablo 3? leave a comment and let us know.

all that being said, you can tell that i have a fondness for lara. to be honest, i rarely played any of the tomb raider games. i bought tomb raider legend but i have yet to play it. yet i still idolize her dominance in the gaming world and i am very glad to see that new games are still being created under the tomb raider franchise.

having recently completed tony hawk’s pro skater 3, i wanted to play around with the create-a-skater mode. after looking through the options, i figured i could assemble a skater with the likeness of lara croft.

if you want to try this out, see my configurations below. of course, you might not agree with all the settings i have chosen (such as the glasses) but this is a good place to start. please note that the color selections are somewhat wonky so you might not get the right color the first time through.

what do i have to reminisce about? i’m glad you asked! oddly enough, this particular memory i have is one that actually frustrates me at the same time as giving me warm and fuzzy feelings.

back in the day i was a huge lan party enthusiast. one particular lan party i planned to attend in phoenix, arizona had three separate tournaments, one of which was for thps3. i feverishly played the game as much as possible to prepare for the tournament.

after hours and hours of practice i was pumping out lip tricks, grinds, ollies, and manuals like nobody’s business. i felt very confident that i would be triumphant when the tournament came around. that day finally arrived and i carpooled up to phoenix with several of my friends for a weekend of total awesomeness.

after nearly a whole day of other tournament events (quake iii arena being the biggest at the event) it was finally time for the tournament. as it turns out, there were very few people interested in this tournament so i only had to compete against three other people. awesome i thought to myself. the winner would take home an autographed tony hawk skateboard and the thing was as good as mine. the level would be foundry for the sole reason that nobody had played the game on the system to unlock any other levels. i headed to the tournament area and immediately found a huge problem. the platform for this tournament was the microsoft xbox while i had been practicing on the pc version. after watching a few people play i realized that everything was essentially the same. well, almost everything.

i had never played an xbox. when my turn finally game around, i grabbed the controller. holy crap i said in an uneasy mumble. the thing was huge. insanely huge. this thing must have been designed by andré the giant.

at the time, i was using a microsoft sidewinder game pad 1.0 and felt very comfortable with it. it was a fantastic controller and even today still holds up pretty well. transitioning to the behemoth xbox controller at a time when i was already nervous made it that much more complicated to control.

i kept missing my grinds. i couldn’t complete any flip tricks without a major face plant to the concrete. lip tricks were impossible with the y button a mile away. the tournament gave each player three rounds and took the highest score of the three for the final score. my final tally? 37,000 points. 37,000 points. i couldn’t believe it. i had scored over ten times that in a single combo hundreds of times. the winner had a score of only 52,000 with change and i had to leave the tournament in defeat. it was clear that none of the other players had put in any where near the time i did to prepare for the tournament and yet they probably had played an xbox before which gave them a huge advantage over me.

to this day i despise the xbox controller with the heat of a thousand suns. but i still love tony hawk’s pro skater 3.

previously i was running a bfg nvidia geforce 6600 gt oc. it served me well through doom 3, half-life 2, and even portal, albeit with a lot of settings toned down to the minimum to run with playable framerates. then it was finally time to try out bioshock. ouch. with all the settings at their lowest possible values i was getting an unbearable 8 fps average.

after much whining and pleading i was able to convince my wife that an upgrade to the video card was needed. there was really only one clear winner at the time of my purchase–the nvidia geforce 8800 gt oc. i ordered the bfg geforce 8800gt oc and waited with eager anticipation for it to arrive. as soon as i got it i plugged it in and fired up bioshock. amazingly i was able to bump up all the display settings to their maximum values and still achieve very playable frame rates. it is astonishing what an upgrade to a four year old video card will do for you.

playing around with settings for the card stumbled me upon this section in the nvidia control panel:

this one setting puts to rest all the angst i had had for years regarding widescreen monitors. what this does (when set to “use NVIDIA scaling with fixed-aspect ratio”) is scale any fullscreen video application so that it maintains its intended aspect ratio. to put it another way, all the old video games that i play that do not have widescreen video support can now be played at their 4:3 aspect ratio without being stretched across my entire widescreen monitor and will instead be pillar boxed.

if you are an old school gamer that just can’t part ways with your old gigantic crt monitor you should really revisit the idea of playing new games in all their widescreen goodness while still having the flexibility to play old games at their native resolution. in fact, i think i might just go play some starcraft in its 640×480 resolution glory right now…