The goggles! They do nothing!

They woke him up

So, deciding I want to finally beat Half-life 2, and play Episodes 1 and 2, I borrowed my friend's steam account to play them. So yeah installed Half-life 2, played it no problems. Then came Episode 1.

It installed and loaded up fine, but then when I went to start a new game - it occurred. First the game crashed back to desktop, but I noticed I had a program pop-up that had just come up, so I figured that was the problem. Turned off that program and restarted up half-life 2. Then it loaded without sound!

Starting to get annoyed I exited out and rebooted the computer. The 3rd time I loaded the game it loaded up a bunch of graphical glitches such as the opening text being scrambled, and then it would crashed with this error - Engine Error "Internal Driver error in IDirect3DDevice9::Present()"

Apparently I wasn't the only person with this problem. It would appear ATI cards don't play nice with the game, and I just spent the 2 hours or so messing around with possible solutions to get the game to work, and none of them worked.

I finally gave up, I really don't think there's a way to get this game to work on my PC. So I'm asking does anything worthwhile happen in the game? Because for some odd reason Half-life 2: Episode 2 works, and I'm probably just going to end up skipping Episode 1 if I can't get it to work.

You're probably wondering why I'm making a blog post on how awesome toothpaste is. I mean all it does really is help prevent you from getting teeth that are like that of a English fellow, har har just kidding?... or am I?

Anyways there's one other functionality to toothpaste other than keeping your teeth in working order, which I will get too after I tell the story of the my Rainbow Six Vegas game.

So Rainbow Six: Vegas, a tactical first-person-shooter on the xbox, pc, and PS3, and probably one of the better shooters out there. Actually it's probably my favorite shooter on the xbox360 thus far. I got it over a year ago, and after a few months of play disaster struck and my xbox 'ate' the disc. Those unfamiliar with a problem that usually affects launch model xbox 360s, but has gone unnoticed because of the RRoD problems just watch this video - http://dwl.xbox-scene.com/video/Xbox-360-Scratch-Disks3.wmv.

Yeah something like that happened to my Rainbow Six Vegas disc, but not as bad. I also didn't moved the system. It just sort of randomly happened.

So I figured it was useless to try and fix the disc using those disc fixing kits you can buy, and I couldn't return the game because it was a Christmas gift, and the person who bought lost the receipt. Anyways I just sort of put the game and it's box and forgot about it - never actually throwing it away. I guess you can probably start to put together at this point why I'm saying toothpaste is awesome.

So last night a bunch of my friends were playing Rainbow Six Vegas, and I was instantly reminded of that stupid scratched disc - and then a thought occurred to me that did not occur a year go: using google to see if there was anyway to fix damaged CDs for free basically. After some searching I found out the best stuff is apparently Brasso, but since my house didn't have any brasso I kept searching until I found something quite interesting: use normal toothpaste.

I sort of took a double take - "toothpaste? Surely you jest Internet," but I figured "what the hell?" so I spent nearly 3 hours rubbing the scratched area of the disc with toothpaste and then washing it off. I put the disc down to try and went to bed because it was like 3am at that time and I was tired.

The next morning, this morning actually, I woke up and put my disc in - surely toothpaste wouldn't work, right? I put the disc in and my xbox started loading it. The screen went black for like a minute, an awfully long loading time for booting a disc up or getting a disc-read error, so I figured the xbox is just struggling to load it. Then it happens the music plays, and the opening trailer starts to play - I stat there staring at my TV screen for a couple of minutes. Even then I was completely convinced it was fixed enough to be playable, after all I had discs in the past that could be loaded up tot he loading screen and still not work, so I decided to load the first level - and it worked.

So there we go, Toothpaste can remove huge scratches from your damaged DVDs and CDs. How awesome is that?