Things that suck about CoD Black Ops

Treyarch released last month Call of Duty: Black Ops, the latest in the much-hyped “Call of Duty” game lineup. Black Ops made headlines when, within 24 hours of going on sale, it managed to sell some 7 million copies in the US and the UK. However, all is not well in the land of Call of Duty, while this game has received rave reviews from a number of gaming sites, including Game Spot and Metacritic. But reviewers at Amazon seem to get it right, with a thus-far average rating of only 1.8/5 stars. The reasons? Many.

I’ve personally been a fan of the Call of Duty series for quite some time, as the games tend to be well-developed and well-written on both the technical and storyline aspects. But Black Ops falls far, far short of the mark and in many ways is a step back from what we’ve come to expect of its predecessors. On many different fronts, Black Ops fails to deliver — consistently failing to impress and, perhaps most disturbingly, almost as if it was intentionally made this way.

Continue reading

Auto-Generated DVD Info in Windows Media Center

Anyone that uses Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center to watch DVDs on his/her PC knows how boring and repetitive it can be to continuously have to use the “Search for DVD Info” feature to get WMP/WMC to download the name of the DVD, the name & length of each chapter, and the DVD Cover. It seems that Windows Media Center has a workaround for this that can make it automatically download that information for you.

There are two key ingredients in order to get this to work: First you need to patch your registry to automate the process, and then you need to get a XML file that ties the DVD’s hash to a key that can be used to retrieve the correct info.

The steps to accomplish the first part are highlighted on The Green Button, and are fairly straight-forward. Those directions also provide the steps you need to create each of the “identification files” for WMC. However, a better way exists.

Continue reading