BF2142 - In China :)

So I got my new system setup this last month here in Nanjing after my laptop died. Q6600, P5KC, 2gig ram, Galaxy (never heard of this brand until now) 8800 GTS320, stuffs, and a BenQ FP241VW monitor. With all this new gear I needed a game to play, so I hit the local "legit" retail stores.

Now I say "legit" with quotes since some of the stuff really is, but alot of it isn't, so long as its under a glass case and priced crazily compared to other standards (10RMB per disc). 85% of the games are Asian solo-rpgs that look identical pretty much. But they do have some of the newer games, hence why I picked up BF2142. The nice thing is that most EA games are available here legitimately, holographs and such, along with valid CD-KEYS, Plus it all cost about $10 (69RMB so it looks like the same sticker price, but conversion means its WAY cheaper).

Got home, installed it, changed the registry so that it would English instead of Chinese and away I go.

Now the really nice thing about gaming online in China is that unless your playing CS, the communities are very small compared to the US. There are only 10 EA servers in China Mainland (2 in Hong Kong, a few in Taiwan) along with 2-3 clan servers that are up every so often. So you get to play with the same people all the time and get to know the different clans and stuff. Also, EA licenses distribution out through CCENC (no idea what it stands for) and they have forums for all the games which I am talking on with the other players now, google translate and their sometimes okay english leads to funny misunderstandings at times.

Now when I log in, I get invites into squads super quick and can even give basic directions and such. Though now that they all know I'm from America they all want my dog tag, I've had an entire squad rush me with knifes out once they saw my tag over my head. Good times and its nice to know that in this crazy world, nerds are still just nerds and want to have fun. I'm even going to try and organize some mini-lan here at the swanky game cafe downtown if I can.

What city are you in?

I would also be interested in what the cost to build your computer was in RMB? I never got a chance to get to a PC parts store - but I did visit a lot of stores that had the "Cannon" logo above them... they seem to be everywhere...

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= V e c t o r =

| LAN Events run: 50+ 500 Person Events | LAN Events attended 100+ | Sanity remaining: 0 |

Gaming Rig: | Intel 3960X | Intel X79SI | SLI GTX680 | 32GB Crucial Smart Tracer | 256GB x2 512GB SSD Raid | 9TB Storage |

I'm in Nanjing, about the same size as Portland, but with anywhere from 8-11million people (no exact numbers unfortunantly).

Price for my computer came out to 10800RMB, Basically the prices start at an equivalent of $1 = 7.5RMB, but then they have a sales tax here of 17-20%, which really really sucks. My monitor cost me 7600RMB which is about $300 more then you would need in the states, but thats since I was probably one of the first people to even get one in China and they had to ship it from the factory to the store and such, so $100 of that overcharge is shipping related. Next on the list is a decent office chair, keyboard/mouse (using some no-name ones that came with the computer the school loaned me), and a 360 wired controller for any games that use control pads.

Buildings with the Canon logo and such can be either a Canon only dealer, or part of the mega malls they have where each little store is about the size of a McD's toilet, so you'll have like 100 stores in the space we would think of maybe 10 in the US. I got my computer from the small stores cause they are more competative, but I had to goto a large BenQ place to get my monitor since they had enough rep to actually get me the monitor in 3 days, the smaller stores were all 2-weeks to a month, if they even knew what it was.

Oh, funny story about the computer, the guys at the store wanted to put it together since they never got to play with such a powerful machine before, so they gave me a three year warrenty on all parts if they put it together for me, no extra charge, sweet deal Smile