Ambassador

My wife has this strange Danish Y011 standard(!) power cord for her new HP laptop. However, there is no suitable socket in the apartment (that's why I thought standard cable isn't really standard in Denmark, eh?). We've gone to a mall last month and bought a smart(!) group sockets that closes circuit (that is, turns power on) on remaining 4 sockets when the first one (master) consumes some power. This is made for TVs; when you turn your TV off, it won't consume power in stand-by mode so it turns off other 4 sockets as well and you save some energy (it claims so). This thing stopped working because laptops apparently don't consume enough power and that thing keeps closing and opening the circuit and... at the end, socket died. Oh well, after tragic loss (demise?) of this smart socket, I decided to buy her a dumber socket, that just doesn't pretend to do something more than delivering power to a group of Y011 sockets.

While doing so, I have stopped by the "GameStop" and asked them whether they have Y011 sockets. Nope, so I walked down towards other shops and.. couldn't find it in an electronics shop, but in a supermarket! Wow, interesting. Among 4-5 kinds of electrical stuff they sell, they have socket!

Right after buying this socket from the supermarket, I stopped by Fona and bought this Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 game (I don't know why I did it). Of course, I stopped by GameStop again and, by pure luck, I saw this "Advanced Controller for PC with vibration and 12 buttons". And I think we'll talk more about this controller more in detail...

The Game
I've done something I wasn't supposed to do, I'm sorry, but I did... I have installed the game on my work laptop. The plays quite good and has really good render quality, it's fluent and gameplay is ... (we're coming to that shortly). The game has a "Story" mode/section where you play in series, but actually it has no story line (sorry Ubisoft)! Ultimately, it's shooting bad terrorists and saving hostages. I liked the game and played long hours with it when we've lost Internet connection.

The controller
It took 4 hours to get controller (gamepad) working properly with the game. By proper I mean like 80+% overall, compared to an original Microsoft Xbox 360 controller for Windows. First off, I had to enter my pad's vendor and device IDs into a configuration file. Then, I had to understand what is X, Y, Z and other axis (5 in total, I guess). Plus, 12 buttons... Anyway, I've got it working properly, although its assignments aren't exactly in original Xbox controller layout but who cares - it isn't an Xbox controller after all. The only thing I am missing now is vibration. I've made a lot of searching and hacking and I think I will be discussing these separately. My current cheap-and-seemingly-functioning controller has 2 vibration motors on each side. DirectInput doesn't provide separate vibration and I am currently disassembling controller's control panel applet to figure out how their test dialog achieves this.

Back to game
Its AI is successful (seems like better than previous Tom Clancy's games I've played), except if difficulty is at easiest (CASUAL, game says). In this case, terrorists may act like total blind (but not dumb). If you shoot or open fire, they react but they hardly see/hear you coming in this mode. But they may get aggressive and attack pretty wisely.

Visual effects are good (IMO realistic than Prototype). Sound is also good but... auditory perception... it fooled me few times. I hear somebody saying something from my back but it actually appears on my front-right.

If you like mostly-shooting-less-tactics-terrorist-hunt titles, this is a good choice with nice graphics and good AI.

If you are interested in painless solution for a gamepad for your PC, well, I don't think even Microsoft's own Xbox controllers work just out of the box with games; you may need some tweaks. So, gamepads on PCs don't seem like wise choice IMO.