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The thoughts, opinions, happenings, and just plain ramblings of a seemingly boring person.

More Gaming, Steam Updates

As mentioned recently, i've spent a fair bit of time playing BC2. I'm really enjoying it, and we've even gone to the trouble of setting up a TeamSpeak server in order to get around the buggy in game audio.

Although i've been critical of the whole ranking and weapon-unlock multiplayer progression previously, i actually don't mind it now in BC2 now that i've gotten out of the bottom ranks.

In addition to BC2, i've spent a fair time of time gaming on the PC recently. I've bought Episodes from Liberty City which is the standalone expansion to GTA4, and added to that is the debut of Season 3 of Sam & Max and the new Left 4 Dead 2 campaign, neither of which which I haven't gotten around to yet.

It's all made a very good start of the year gaming-wise, and I haven't even gotten everything I was planning to: I haven't got Supreme Commander 2 mainly because of objections I have to how they've 'dumbed-down' the gameplay (i'll probably pick it up as a bargain-bin/import when everything else settles down).

The other big gaming news is the release of the Steam 2010 UI Update. This is the first big interface change that i've experienced since I started using Steam a few years ago, and honestly i think they've really screwed the pooch here.

The rendering of text is generally a big issue in the program, with their use of DirectWrite looking absolutely shocking on my system. I'm currently forced to run the exe with a switch that disables DirectWrite. The other main grip is the size of the text. It doesn't seem to respect any Windows-set DPI settings, so all the text seems really tiny. Again, i've manually edited a CSS file that the program use to bump up the size of the text.

Finally is something that is really out of any basic user-interface-101 course. They've got a light grey text colour on a darker grey background. The first rule of good UI is pretty much to have a decent contrast between text colour and background colour, and for me the Steam implementation is on the other side of the fence of acceptable contrast.

Here's hoping they fixed these pretty obvious issues, and really, these are the sort of things that should have been knocked out in the beta that's been running for the past few months.

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