I am a huge fan of the Football Manager (and before that, the Championship Manager) series. Like other people around the world, i’ve waited the 14th of November, 2008 so i can play the brand new Football Manager 2009! I’ve decided to buy this one since i don’t play many games in a year and therefore could afford it.

When i discovered that it was available to buy and download via Steam, i thought of trying it (i don’t like dvd-cases anyway). There, i found out that the price (i can’t recall the exact amount right now) was the same as the dvd-edition.. So, i decided to wait a few hours and think about it.

While i was visiting some FM forums to read the first impressions about the new game, i read the same thing a lot of times: a lot of users couldn’t activate the game, therefore couldn’t play it! It wasn’t a coincidence that when the game appeared in the ..dark part of the web, the activation servers (with fewer users trying to activate simultaneously) worked again!

After this, i downloaded and played it! It is very good by the way! I waited long enough to buy it in a more affordable price, and when the amazon’s £17.96 considered fine, i did!

The funny part of the story is that when my original dvd arrived, neither mine nor anyone’s else dvd drive managed to read it, so i just installed my downloaded version using my new activation code..

It is too hard to sell a game from Steam for a normal price (for example £15) and save me (and possibly others) from all this trouble?

no comments | belongs to: games | posted on February, 2009

Yesterday, i picked up the task of bringing back to life an old laptop, a HP Compaq Presario 2500 series. Unfortunately, when i tried to boot from the Windows XP disk so i can format it and then install the OS, i found out that the laptop’s DVD drive was…dead!

I didn’t had a replacement for it, so my first thought was to copy everything in a USB stick and just boot from it and complete the process. But it wasn’t as easy as i thought it would be! Of course my first attempt (just copy everything to the USB stick) was a failure (i wasn’t expected anything more). Afterwards, when i googled the issue, i found a lot of different ways to accomplish the task. After spending some hours trying a lot of them, komku’s solution actually worked and the old laptop resurrected!

no comments | belongs to: software | posted on January, 2009

Recently, i’ve spent some time to start learning Adobe’s Illustrator. This is my “implementation” of Vectortuts’s Creating an Environmentally Friendly Green Type Treatment tutorial.

1 comment | belongs to: other's tutorials | posted on January, 2009