MODS

So Angry and I squared off in Jaykon Bacon: Source today at approximately 5:00pm PST, and boy, what a hectic hour and a half it was. We were neck-and-neck every step of the way, and we each had an opportunity to pull a win out from all the sneaking and sniping.

Round 1: Deathmatch
Winner: Angry

The first round was played in the eternally dark map hl2jks_svm_assault. Angry won this round, but not after getting spanked by me in the first 10 minutes. Once we figured out each other's tactics, though, the game's intensity increased and we were constantly at each other's throats. He'd snipe me, I'm obliterate him with my heavy machine gun, and he'd come back around with his insane-range-shot gun. He laid the final blow with a sniper from the opposite corner of the map.

Round 2: Deathmatch
Winner: Matt

The second round was played on the sunny-day map hl2jks_svm_aztec. This time around, Angry got the lead, but the real excitement was at the middle of the round. The map broke and started spawning us in the exact same area each time we died. Needless to say, we spent a good 5 minutes racking up seven or eight kills each. I laid the final twentieth blow with my trusty heavy machine gun, and it was off to round three!

Round 3: Snake V. Monkey
Winner: N/A

The last round was a game of Snake Versus Monkey. Basically, it was a game of keep-away with explosives and cardboard boxes. But these weren't your average boxes, no, these were cardboard boxes that made you invisible if you crouched under them. The goal of the game was for the snake to steal a pile of stuffed turtles. Don't ask me why, that's just how it works. Anyway, Angry admitted to being paranoid several times during this round, and I couldn't blame him: when your enemy can turn invisible and run faster than you, you have to be paranoid. Each role was well-balanced, though, with the Snake having a silenced pistol, flashbangs and the hide-box, and the Monkey armed with an SMG, sniper rifle, pistol, and several types of explosives. We were both convinced that this mode of play would be more fun with more Monkeys and Snakes, but we'll see where that goes :D

All in all, trash was talked on both sides, and in the end...I ultimately came out the winner, with my FIRST win yesterday ;)

Final Score: Matt 1 (1), Angry 1

[EDIT] Apparently, Angry has no sense of humor, so I modified the score to make him happy :P

Lesson of the day: NEVER try to squeeze extra performance out of your video card by flashing the card's ROM. I came across an article describing how I can unlock my ATI 9550 and essentially make it a 9600 Pro, whose design the 9550 is based off of.

So the flashing goes as easy as the instructions make it sound, but when I booted back into Windows and attempt to install new drivers for my "ATI 9600 Pro", after restart my resolution would not go any higher than 640x480 @ 4bit color.

Obviously, this was not good enough for me, so I proceeded to try three other video card drivers (ATI's default set and two soft-modded driver packages, one of which I [used] to use); as luck would have it, NONE of them showed an improvement in screen resolution after restart. Unfortunately, nothing changed when I flashed my video card's ROM back to normal.

So now, two hours later, I have an ATI card that works fine (just barely, but at a default resolution of 1024x768) when no drivers are installed, and works like crap with drivers installed. Thankfully, a former teacher of mine gave me his old BFG nVidia Geforce FX 5500 video card earlier last year, so I'm going to go ahead and install video drivers for that; I don't anticipate anything going wrong, but only time will tell.

God, I feel dumb =(