Nerd on a plane

AT&T U-Verse Television

2012-02-05T20:06:00.003-07:00

As part of my recent relocation to Silicon Valley I ended up getting AT&T U-verse for my TV provider (and phone, but not internet). I've got HD, the DVR and their new wireless receiver. When I was looking online I didn't see all that much commentary so I figured I would write up my thoughts for anyone else who is searching.

The HD picture seems decent, but not fantastic. You can clearly see an improvement over the SD images, particularly on a nice television. Flesh tones look more realistic and there is a lot more detail. It is also nice to have the image fit the screen on a modern LCD television. I don't have Direct TV or Comcast to make fair comparisons to. If you look at the picture quality on a blu-ray there is still a huge difference in the quality of the image. There seems to be minor compression artifacts, but nothing serious.

The DVR is a key part of any television these days, since the only thing worse than watching bad TV is having to alter your schedule so that you can be home to watch the bad TV. The AT&T U-verse system can record up to 4 things at once, which is pretty cool. The down side is that the system isn't very responsive or user friendly. They could do a lot just by surfacing their information about a show being 'first run', but they are hampered by what I assume is poor performance from the hardware. Scrolling is slow and feels very laggy, and I've seen some serious artifacting during playback on occasion. The good news is that the system has been stable for the past month, no crashes and it seems to pretty much do what is asked of it.

The wireless receiver is another story. I got it because I wanted to try it, and because it greatly simplified getting TV run to my office. I don't watch too much TV, so I'm not furious, but the total distance is about 15 feet (through a wall) and I've never had less than the full number of reception bars displayed on the unit. In any given hour-long show, the player will drop the connection at least once. When this happens you need to go select your show again and continue watching from where it dropped. This isn't a huge deal, since you will probably have the remote nearby to skip commercials, but it clearly isn't how this should work.

Overall, all of the products work generally as expected, but none of them provide a really stellar level of quality. HD is better than non-HD, the DVR records stuff and the wireless receiver even works ok. But there is a lot of room for improvement across the board.

If I start over at some point, I'll strong consider the Direct TV / Tivo combination. Or cutting the cord and just downloading the content I want in HD.

Book Review: Scholar, by LE Modesitt jr

2012-01-17T07:51:00.004-07:00

Between a relative lack of long flights by myself and getting moved into a new country I haven't been spending much time reading lately, but I just managed to finish _Scholar_.

It is set in the same world as his previous Imager books, but in a new country and with a completely new cast. I'm not even sure how the timeline works out, but it is very helpful to have read the other books in the series in order to understand how the world works. The key thing is the magic system, which involves 'imaging'. Essentially, an imager is able to alter reality, subject to significant constraints, by imagining a change. The best thing about Modesitt as an author is his world building skills. He builds complicated, but internally consistent worlds and lets his characters explore them as he walks them through the story.

Two things stand out in this book as being different from most of what he has written. The first is the magic system, which he has already described in so much detail in previous books. He pretty much expects you to understand it and doesn't dwell on how it works or what the constraints are. Which is fine this far into a series. However, this character is completely independent of any sort of support structure (something key to learning Imaging in the other books), and yet he invents high end skills from scratch. Also, one of the downsides of Imaging is that you can potentially do it in your sleep and kill the people around you.... and he just ignores that part entirely. The fear people have of Imagers is alluded too repeatedly, but at the end it is almost brushed away.

This book also seems to be an attempt at being a mystery. Except that once the mystery gets underway (hundreds of pages into the book) it starts out by pointing at a guy and saying, he seems like a bad person but there is no proof. And it ends by saying, well, yeah, the proof was pretty circumstantial, but I took radical action based on it and received a reward. Oh, and everyone now pretty much knows the main character is an Imager now, so that might cause some problems.

Several times Quaeryt's murder of random people (who, admittedly, probably needed it) is overlooked or generally ignored. But when the person can kill you by imagining your heart on the table next to you, I suppose the investigation generally ends up stopping before you get to the whole 'confrontation' part.

There is another book in this specific story-line coming, and I'm a bit concerned. Following in his previous tradition, a character with this level of power will now cruise around the surrounding area, bend people to his will, and more or less win... thus ending the story-line. He will probably feel bad about it, and suffer a lot of headaches, but the last book for each character frequently feels like a victory lap.

Game Review: Skyrim on the PS3

2012-01-07T22:22:00.006-07:00

Since I'm still waiting on my PC to arrive and I decided to buy the PS3 version of Skyrim to get a feel for the console version as well as to kill countless hours of my time.

First, the version differences. To be fair, my gaming PC is reasonably high end, or unreasonably as the case may be. But the difference is most obvious in load times. I didn't actually know it had them until I played on the PS3, where it can take 30 seconds or more to go into or out of a building or zone. That is a pretty nasty shock after you've gotten used to 'mostly instant'.

In terms of graphics, it isn't that far off. I'd say the PC looks better, but it isn't a game-changer. And the controls are really well suited to the console and I certainly don't feel like I would enjoy the game more with a mouse. I'm also pretty happy with it as a 'lean back' experience in front of a big TV instead of having my nose pressed up against my monitor.

The PC is probably still the better choice if you can, just because you'll have access to game mods, and possibly better content in the future. But if your PC is a bit long in the tooth, grab this thing on a console.

Now, back to my re-visit of the game. I'm currently level 18, which is about what I was when I 'won' on the PC. I've done things dramatically different and I'm shocked at how different the game can be played. On the PC I was mostly doing destruction magic and whatever else I needed to survive, and aside from the Mage college, I pretty much went through the main quest.

In my PS3 game I'm playing as a Cat with a fondness for archery and sneaking. I have yet to even be named as Dovakin since I stopped pursuing the main quest after the first big dragon fight (I wanted to earn my house). After that I joined the companions, became a were-wolf and got 2 runes for the dragon-breath shout. And then I've just been kind of wandering around. I've come across a few daedric things and cities I hadn't ever bothered to visit before. Same follower though, which is something I need to fix.

As an archer of some skill (level 59.. and really eager to hit 60) when I aim at people I can zoom in and slow time, which is a game changer, and all of my leveling have focused on stamina so I can do this for a very long time. When someone does close in on me, they get a dragon fire shout to the face. And if things go badly and I can't figure out how to solve a fight, I go beast-form and that usually resolves things. The experience of playing is remarkably different. So here we can see the two keys parts of an RPG being displayed.

First, your fighting style matters... and while you may make it through any way you want, you will do best if you pick one style and get great at it, then have some fallback ideas. Secondly, the content in this game appears to be nearly endless. Well written quests of wide variety keep finding me and distracting me from whatever else I was doing.

I'm pretty sure Skyrim will be in the running for game of the year 2012 as well.

Game of the Year post. Top 3 games of 2011

2011-12-28T20:00:00.001-07:00

Top 3 Games of the Year.

#3. Saint's Row the third. Drove the wife crazy, but its a super gamey game.
#2 Deus Ex. Cyberpunk action role-playing done right. Shame about the DLC.
#1 Skyrim. Played on PC until I moved... and while I wait for my computer to arrive, I just ordered it for PS3. Yikes. The most epic role playing environment ever on a PC/console. I'm super excited about what 2012 holds for patches and DLC.

Honorable Mentions:
Bastion.. which I new game+'d.. and played through a second time without interruption. That never happens.
Portal 2.. so good it got me to go finish Portal.
Space Pirates and Zombies. Didn't finish because it has some late game balance issues, but lots of fun along the way.
Warhammer Space Marine. Because they made a remarkably awesome 3rd person action game out of Warhammer. Shockingly not bad at all.

Excuses:
Assassins's Creed Revelations. Just started.. its apparently Brotherhood, but again. Not sure how I feel about that yet.
Uncharted 3. Played 20 minutes and my wife asked me when the game started. But not in a good way. I intend to get back to it.
Gears of War 3. Um, its on a shelf somewhere around here.

Biggest Disappointments:
Dragons Age 2. How did you mess this up?
Crysis 2, Bulletstorm, Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3 and Rage.. with MW3 being at least the best of them. But nothing innovative to be found in shooters this year.

Review: Tomtom 2535TM GPS

2011-12-25T16:46:00.005-07:00

As part of relocating back to the US I've had the opportunity to purchase rather a lot of toys in a short period of time. One of the items that I knew I'd need, was a good GPS, and I actually had this one waiting for me so that I could use it in the rental car before I even purchase a real car for myself.

I've used Hertz Neverlost in the past and it was such a terrible pile of misery that I swore I'd buy something decent. I tried and tried to convince myself that I needed the top of the line Garmin, but in the end the reviews for everything turned out to be pretty average, so I saved a few hundred dollars and bought this Tomtom that seemed to have the features I wanted.

I wanted a nice screen, with good touch controls, spoken street names, voice recognition and traffic data. So far my wife and I have been using this for about two weeks and we've been exceedingly happy.

Good news:
The maps seem pretty good and the GPS lock-on time is fantastic. The screen is easy to read in day mode and in night-mode and it has done a pretty good job of getting us around town and finding places we didn't know existed (it found a Barnes and Nobles that Google maps seems to want to ignore.. and lots of places for us to eat). The traffic only covers some roads, but it has identified the 101 as a traffic disaster with some accuracy.

News:
Lots of things about it are only average however. The street names are frequently a combination of all of the things you might call a freeway, making it take so long to say the name that it doesn't tell you to exit in time. It also uses the phrase 'keep left' to indicate that you shouldn't exit, rather than as a valid recommendation. And the voice recognition is... a bit iffy. Even with my nice midwest diction it frequently gets confused with anything more complicated than 'navigate home'.

Bad News:
It optimizes to the point of making you turn many many more times than any sane driver would want. It also doesn't believe in u-turns, which are legal in this city... making for some more complex routes than are necessary.

And the really bad news came when I tried to update the firmware on the device and the map. The software from tomtom is dreadful, and it actually deleted the maps off of the unit and refused to put new ones on for a day. Based upon reading the forums, this isn't an uncommon behavior. The solution is to keep trying until it works. Magically a day later mine finally decided it was ok to upload the new maps. In the future I'll only put new maps on it when I'm not planning on going anywhere for a week or 2, just in case it goes insane again. This was a pretty terrible new-user experience.

Summary. Not having a good GPS would have driven us crazy, so I'm really glad we got something, and this seems like a reasonable choice to have made. If I buy another car in the near future I'll get a GPS to go in it, and another one of these seems likely. I think the hardware is fine, so it is certainly possible that software updates would turn this into a really great device.

Game Review: Saint's Row The Third - PS3

2011-12-22T18:04:00.003-07:00

Thanks to the guys on the Bombcast I felt that I had to give this one a try. I played some of the first two Saint's Row games, but I wasn't ever really hooked by them. They always felt like a cheap knock-off of GTA that was trying too hard to be funny. However, the Third time is the charm and they hit this one out of the park.

It is an open world game that looks a lot like Grand Theft Auto. You can steal cars and drive around listening to radio stations and running people over, and the world is full of all kinds of little activities to do. Ok, now forget that part and play through the story missions.

There where a few places where the checkpointing wasn't great, and a few of the missions are less than fantastic, but this is the most over the top awesomely fun sandbox game made to date. It starts off absolutely crazy and more than a bit self referential... and then it spirals out of control. The missions make a certain kind of sense within the game world, and it all holds together from start to finish.

I don't have any screen shots since it was on the PS3, but it looked very good for the type of game it was. Shooting controls and driving controls are both tight enough to not cause problems. And the game has a slick level of absurdity that pulls everything together. I don't want to spoil any of it, because the game deserves to surprise you. And if you ever played a GTA game and occasionally would just go drive around the city to see what happens, this might be the game for you. If you ever used the cheat codes to get a rocket launcher in GTA and fire it into a crowd you need to go buy this game right now and make sure nobody is expecting anything from you for the next 20 hours.

Some phrases that highlight how great this thing gets: Burt Reynolds, Tigers in Convertibles, Arena fighting with a chainsaw, Mars. There. Playa gotta go play that.

Game Review: Skyrim PC (aka game of the year 2011)

2011-11-26T11:12:00.001-07:00

Assuming I get time between now and early next year I'll write more about my thoughts around what the best games are this year. But to cut to the chase, it is Skyrim. Even before the first major patch...

This is a first person role playing game, where you get cast out into the world with a vague idea of what to do and you can set off to explore. You will come across dozens or hundreds of side quests that you can tackle or you can sort out the primary quest and follow that. The game does very little to prioritize the major quest over the side quests (some of which are very extensive) and lets you go at your own pace. The skill system is relatively straight forward and you improve at the things that you use. A system of 'perks' lets you focus on specific areas to get major benefits.

Enemies level up more or less at the same time you do, so the game doesn't lose its challenge (caveats below). And the amount of variety that can be found everywhere within the game is astounding. Although the climate is generally harsh and cold, every dungeon or area of the map has its own unique character and offers something to surprise you at every turn. And it is unfailingly beautiful.

I've recently finished the major quests and then I couldn't wait to go wander around and just explore the world on my own, now that I've finished saving it... people are appreciative, but still going about their lives and needing help with this or that.

The technology isn't cutting edge but it is well suited to the task, and I'm sure the first patch will clear up thousands of bugs, but honestly the game is in great shape and was ready to go on day 1.

Hints: Don't be a pure mage, buy a horse, don't craft your own armor, don't tease giants, explore everything.

Go play this game, and in about 40 hours, come back and and join me in the story telling and nit picking.

I played as a mostly pure destruction mage, and I don't actually recommend it as a career path. Your power goes up only as you get new spells, and to get new spells you need to skill up in destruction and then have money to buy them. Money wasn't a big deal, but since you only skill up magic by fighting it is fairly difficult to get better at Destruction (you run out of mana or die, etc..). I made it, but I did have to pull out my dragon-slaying blade a few times.

Also, I did some experiments after completing the main quest and I leveled up very quickly by working on secondary skills like enchanting and metal work, and I bulked up some non-combat alternation and illusion magic. Then the next time I walked into a dungeon I got absolutely destroyed. The moral of the story seems to be that you should put 'most' of your effort into combat focused skills. Not necessarily exclusively, but if you fall too far behind the curve you can be in deep trouble. I'm not trying to experiment with light armor and 1-handed weapons and I'm essentially unable to kill stuff that gives me any experience. Ooops. Also, enchanting is neat, but making your own weapons seems to be largely a waste since enemies drop incredibly good loot.

In terms of quests, the main quest was fine, but I felt that it really missed some key points at the end. The final battles weren't even close to the most challenging, and the temple near the end was a horribly wasted opportunity. On the other hand, the mage's guild quest line was fantastic and makes me want to try to join the theives guild and anyone else who will take me.

Game Review: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - PC

2011-11-10T08:24:00.003-07:00

I've been eagerly awaiting this game, even more so after Battlefield 3 came out two weeks ago.

Modern Warfare is the best selling first-person shooter franchise, and really has set the standard for how these games should be made. And they made another Modern Warfare game. If you stripped off the branding it would still be very recognizable as a sequel to either the first or second game.

The single player is a 4.5 hour action movie that will have you hanging on every moment and which you will be totally unable to describe to someone an hour after it finishes. There is no room for you, the gamer, to make meaningful choices, everything is linear and in service to the 'plot' which is basically that there are explosions that need to happen and it is your job to be standing in the right place to see them.

One amazing set piece after another, and no real attempt to get you to feel a connection with the characters. But they are really amazing set pieces. Towers fall, buildings explode while you run through them... very few helicopters survive, and you get to swim, fly, boat and drive in all kinds of environments. If you've said that what you want is a super tight, high quality, short game for $60.. they've got your number. Everything about the game is polished and incredible to look at. I'd say that the graphics exceed those of BF3 in all of the ways that count.

The gameplay works the same in all Call of Duty (the larger brand for Modern Warfare) games. You will advance aggressively in the face of danger. This sets off scripted triggers and moves the game forward. Otherwise you face infinite waves of attackers. So.. shoot, shoot, run forward. Repeat. Your tactical choices are limited and aggressive behavior is almost always rewarded.

But there's more. MW3 also has a multi-player component. I've now played about 3 hours of it and I'm level 18 and I've got a kill death ratio of .6 (less than 1 is embarrassing, btw). And even though I clearly suck at it, it is a ton of fun. The starter classes have good weapons, and you feel like you are constantly leveling up something (both you and every weapon have progressions), so it is 'dinging' like mad to tell you how much better things are getting. The maps are good, the match making is... less horribly broken than expected... and it all feels really fun.

So, the single player is better than BF3 technically, and the plots are both totally hopeless. I actually found the story/plot of MW3 to be significantly less annoying. And for multi-player, while a hard core gamer will enjoy bf3, even then will have to suffer for hours to have a chance. In MW3 you can walk in, start shooting and have fun.

Highly recommended, best of its genre.

(This review brought to you in a timely manner thanks to a sinus cold that has kept me home from work and given me insomnia.)

Computer Hang. Asus P8Z68-V Pro / i7-2600k

2011-11-05T10:50:00.003-07:00

Starting a few weeks ago I've had a series of computer problems.

First, Rage had terrible performance, and then eventually would fail to load textures, resulting in the weird behavior documented in my Rage review. This was a combination of things around the game, and it was mostly resolved by:
1) fixes to Rage
2) 3 preview versions of the ATI drivers then a final version
3) stopping playing the game.

Then I played Battlefield 3. And while it mostly worked smoothly, it did corrupt the video horribly at one point, and that made me concerned that maybe I had a bigger problem.

So, I checked the Asus website and found that I was actually behind on a number of things. So, I updated firmware (eventually getting to 0902). There was a day or two of confusion where they posted a beta version with a newer date and lower number, but they eventually got their website fixed. And while I was at it I upgraded the other drivers I hadn't worried about in a few months.

The next morning my machine was frozen. This is really unusual since the computer has run just fine since I built it. Then it would freeze randomly, with a mean time to fail of around 3 hours.... and it didn't seem to care what I was doing (under load vs idle). And it was a hard freeze... screen kept displaying, but the only way to provoke a response was to hit reset.

A week of this was getting extremely annoying. I flipped the bios on my video card to the backup.. *hang*. I under-clocked the video card.. *hang*. I swapped the ram around *hang*.. and I upgraded any other software that seemed likely.. *hang*.

And I realized at one point the other major change to the system. By flashing the BIOS the system had reset to defaults that where different from what I'd been using. So I went in and turned off everything I didn't need. *hang*. Clocked everything to be super conservative. *hang*. At this point I was fearing that I'd need to start swapping out expensive chunks of hardware or migrate back to an older system. I'd even eliminated the OS and memtestx86 wasn't hanging, but it was getting screen corruption after about the same amount of time*.

The linger difference, which seems fixed as of 12 hours of uptime.... was that I wasn't overclocking. Now, overclocking an i7-2600 chip is silly, since nothing actually needs the speed, but I'd done it since day 1 just for the sake of doing it. After clocking the system up by 30% it has been solid. Since overclocking is normally the cause of instability, this wasn't exactly expected behavior.

I'm not sure this is the weirdest 'fix' I've ever had for a depressed computer, but it is pretty close. Apparently my system is only happy when it is embarrassingly fast. I've also noticed that the voltage levels on the system are much closer to spec after the overclocking, so in the future if things get weird, I'll probably have a serious look at the power supply, followed by the motherboard.

*Given the difference in complexity, screen corruption on memtestx86 is probably about the kind of failure that would cause a complete system hang in windows.

Game Review: Space Pirates and Zombies (SPAZ)

2011-11-05T04:22:00.004-07:00

Space Pirates and Zombies is a top-down space shooter where you upgrade your technology and ships over time, complete basic missions and eventually your job is to save the universe. Another way of saying it, is that SPAZ is Star Control II 2 (the sequel to Star Control II), in spirit anyway.

I should admit that I've played 37 hours and gotten 76% of the achievements, according to Steam, and I'm actually kind of stuck near the end. On the other hand, I've had a ton of fun getting this far, so I'm entirely happy with the ~$15 I spent on it.

The core gameplay is that you control a ship, and you may have up to 3 AI controlled ships flying with you, and you go take on various missions and fight various folks. Along the way you try to learn new technologies to make your ships better, and learn how to make better ships. Eventually you go from being a Space Pirate to realizing just how bad the Zombie problem is getting. Then you take on the Zombies full time.

This is not a deep game. It is a pretty, but simple game, and it is a heck of a lot of alien-shooting fun.

Game Review: Rock of Ages

2011-11-05T04:02:00.002-07:00

Back into the past few months of games for review.

Rock Of Ages came out on steam and appeared to be too insane to pass up. It turns out that first impressions are frequently accurate.

There are two games that you are playing, at the same time, against the computer. One of the games is a 'Tower Defense' game, where you try to setup different items to block your opponents travel through a somewhat constrained maze. You get a decent variety of units to use for this by the end of the game, with my favorite being a large mammoth with a castle tower on its back. You also get huge fans, catapults, cows, and barrels of explosives. All of this stuff is designed to knock your foe from his chosen path, or at the very least slow him down.

The second part of the game is controlling a rock that is rolling through a somewhat constrained maze. In that maze your opponent is placing cows, catapults, towers and barrels of explosives in order to slow you down or damage you. The goal is for you to get through the path as quickly as possible, and with as little damage as possible done to your large rolling rock... and then ram into a big castle door at the end.

Obviously these two things play out at the same time, and when you are rolling the rock you aren't building your defenses. The first person to destroy the castle door and squish the guy inside wins.

The art style looks like it was done by Monty Python after taking even more drugs than normal... which is obviously a large part of the games appeal.

The game only took about 3 hours to win at the normal level of difficult and it was a lot of fun, with my kid cheering along. The only major downside is when they do a 'boss fight'... I'm not sure you can lose the boss fights, but they can be fairly annoying as they require you do to relatively precisely timed moves with a rolling boulder, and they don't provide anything interesting to add to the game play.

At $10 or less, this game is a fun way to kill an afternoon.

Game Review: Deus Ex - Missing Link DLC

2011-10-31T13:13:00.002-07:00

I ended up enjoying Deus Ex enough that I wanted to try out their DLC, even though it was a bit highly priced at $15.

So, in the tradition of adventure games everywhere, you start off with all of your stuff missing, and your skills reset to zero. You then begin playing a very condensed version of the original game. However, as noted in the full game review, things get a lot better as you start to have the upgrades and equipment required to approach problems in your preferred manner.

Unfortunately, although they give you upgrades more quickly than in the main game, it is only a few hours long, and you never reach the same level of equipment or upgrades. So.. basically you suck and have to play it as kind of a low quality duct climbing simulator and shooter.

The story is ok, and they did a great job with some new art assets. But the upgraded is extremely short even after being expanded by a couple of long cut scenes and some un-necessary trips back and forth across the map.

I'd only recommend this if you absolutely need a few more hours of Deus Ex and you've completely everything the main game has to offer. It isn't bad, it just isn't as good as the game it is attached to.

Game Review: Battlefield 3 (PC)

2011-10-30T06:47:00.000-07:00

Proving that I'm doing these completely out of order, I just finished the single-player part of Battlefield 3, and I want to write about it now.

So, Battlefield 3 is part of a legacy of online shooters. The highlights of the past series have been destructible terrain, large open space with lots of people roaming around and shooting each other, and vehicles. Combine that with a desire to have sales numbers as good as Modern Warfare and they've followed the playbook very closely.

The plot is simple. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb, who apparently work for the US government have you locked in a room and they are interrogating you using the 'bad cop, stupid cop' routine. This provides you with a 'reason' to have flashback about various combat scenarios that happened in the prior couple of weeks, including flashbacks where you where other people. As a story telling device it is completely identical to last years best selling shooter. As part of these recollections you kill a lot of dudes in a couple of different environments, including some time spent in a plane and a tank.

The environments differ slightly, but not tremendously, and they have a lot of set-piece explosions and other very shiny events that take place. It never connects you emotionally with the characters and scene by scene you can tie it back to other games that have done the same thing. But it works well enough. If you discount the story as second class there are still a few other issues. The first is that it looks very open, but in a few place I walked outside the acceptable path and it threatened to end. Secondly, they use 'quick time events'. The QTE is a gameplay mechanic where they ask you to press a button to keep the movie(err, game) playing, but otherwise take away your control. In this case they are super simple, with one or 2 button presses in 30 seconds or more of 'action'. This game includes one scene in a boat house where you have to take the correct action, which isn't want they are telling you explicitly to do... and they don't pop up the correct option. Sigh... And they have the most embarrassing QTE of all times.

Back to the ridiculous the story... based on what I've learned from my years of playing games, not only does the US military consist almost entirely of Marines, we only have about 6 of them and they take part in absolutely every fight, regardless of location or the skills required. I suppose this makes sense given their advertising 'the few, the proud'. If I cleared an entire city of hostiles and took about 50 bullet hits, I sure as heck would want a few hours of sleep before getting on a plane to go shoot people somewhere else. These guys are seriously tough.

Ok, but the other key feature of the modern shooter is the graphics. RAGE was proud of its textures, but Battlefield runs an engine they call Frostbite 2, and they targeted the PC as the primary platform. Not only are the textures awesome, but they have built up a deeply detailed polygon model for everything. Every soldier looks fantastic, but so does most of the scenery, from office chairs to rocks on the side of the road. This is really a next-generation engine to be proud of, and it supports a pretty decent level of damage. So windows break, walls collapse if you shoot them enough and things go flying when you throw a grenade. Technically the game is amazing, and that technology serves this game extremely well.

The remaining downsides are that it is fairly short (maybe 5 hours) and that to play it on the PC you need to buy it from EA's new store, Origin. I'm a big fan of steam since it lets me consolidate my purchases, but this is my second Origin purchase. The store isn't very well done, and the client is kind of annoying since even if you just want to launch the single player game they drag you through a web-browser to show off the multi-player.

Summary: If you want a shooter today, this is really a very good one. In about 8 days Modern Warfare 3 comes out and that may change things.

Multiplayer. I'm not a big fan, but that is the real selling point of this game and MW3. BF3 focuses on bigger environments, lots of people on a map, vehicles, and comparatively slower and more strategic play.... and some dude with a sniper rifle a mile away shooting you each time you spawn. This is the marginally less hectic of the two games, and it does look very pretty.

EDIT: 11/5 I've spent a 3 hours and 11 minutes on the multiplayer, and I've come to the conclusion that I fundamentally dislike what they've done. The key problem is that as you play more you get weapon upgrades that fundamentally alter the experience and give you significant advantages. This means that players who suck (like myself) and have limited amounts of time are at a massive disadvantage that is getting worse for each day since the games release.. .and the relatively slow progression makes it impossible to catch up. Based on playing various Modern Warfare games I've always wanted the items you get from 'leveling up' but I've never felt as punished by not having them.

Game Review: Resistance 3 (PS3)

2011-10-30T01:33:00.003-06:00

I'm not a huge fan of shooters on consoles, but as a platform exclusive, if you want to play Resistance you are going to play it on a PS3. I'm not familiar with the earlier games, but apparently this one makes a pretty significant break in terms of tone and story. Aliens have come to take over earth, and they've pretty much won. You start off in a little underground camp and things look really bad. Over time you explore more of the world and eventually reach the big ending. Honestly, things look pretty bad for humanity the entire time.

So, the first thing you need to do is not be bothered by the depressing story, since even at the end it doesn't feel all that uplifting. Everything human made is warn down, and all of the people that you meet and help are generally insane or otherwise less than ideal specimens of humanity. But, get past that and what you have is a really great console shooter. The controls are good, the environments are highly varied and everything looks really great.

And the key to a good modern shooter is obviously the guns. Resistance does a good job of providing variety here from the very start, and because of somewhat limited ammunition you are motivated to rotate through them pretty regularly. You can shoot bullets that later explode, you can shoot through walls, freeze people, make people vomit and explode (wierd gun, but yes), and you can drop little balls of lightening that attack people for you. At one point you even pick up a very large hammer and can do melee attacks, although this typically isn't a good strategy.

The difficulty seemed pretty well balanced, and I recommend this if you've got a PS3 and an interest in shooters. It never captures the gravitas that it wants to have with the story, but that is probably a good thing, and it captures the shooting parts really well.

Game Review: Deus Ex Human Revolution (PC)

2011-10-29T02:14:00.003-06:00

Deus Ex is a a follow up to one of the first 'open world' 3D games where you could creatively solve problems, and they've done a good service to that classic.

The graphics are pretty good, and the golden hue ends up working our really well for them, and they whole cyberpunk setting is excellent. The core gameplay mechanic is that you can build up skills in a few different areas, and that those should drive how you approach the rest of the game. You can upgrade your ability to hack computers, being stealthy, move within the environment (jumping, falling, lifting stuff, resist poison gasses and electricity), and shooting dudes. The shooting dudes skills aren't that great, but you can upgrade your ability to haul around more ammo which is pretty key.

Then you use those skills to solve whatever problems you may encounter. Typically this involves crawling through the incredible number of air ducts in the world, hacking computers to get into doors and then shooting the people inside. Other players could have taken different tactics to reach the same general outcomes. It is even possible to play as a relative pacifist and leave most of your foes alive.

The story is reasonable and the levels are pretty interesting. The introduction to the game does it a great dis-service however. They start you out and put you in one of the more difficult combat environments very early on, and it highlights how broken the gunplay is. And, as with every hacking minigame ever made, this one isn't very good, and is pretty annoying until you have significantly upgraded your hacking skills.

There are a few plot issues where they expect you to do tasks that you may not be suited for. A particular favorite of mine was when I was requested to go incapacitate a few guys. Turns out I was strictly equipped and prepared to kill people. So it ended up going pretty poorly.

Another case was a location where you had warning about what was going to happen and you could use the environment to your advantage. This one was particularly obvious, but the world is full of opportunities.

My favorite scene was something I ended up catching on a youtube video later... I wish I'd thought of it at the time, because it is genius and highlights the best part of the game.

In summary, it is a very good game, if you are interested in a shooter that offers you flexibility to work within the environment this is the best I've played this year. Apparently you can also play it as a stealth game, but then I would have hated it. (I got 59% of the achievements... which is actually high for me, but I spent a lot of time on side missions and I searched every single bloody desk drawer in the game)

Game Review: RAGE

2011-10-27T12:58:00.003-06:00

I've been busy with work, and I've been playing games.. but I haven't been posting about any of it. So I'll kick of what should be a recap of the past few months of gaming with the one I just finished.

RAGE. From id Software, makers of Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake, and the best first person shooter engines in the world, and creators and then saviors of the high end graphics card industry time and again. This is not a good game.

I run a fairly high end machine with a good ATI graphics card. After one game patch and 3 version of the video drivers, it is still a mess. The first few updates had massive screen tearing, so bad that any movement at all made things very difficult to look at. The most recent patch has made it so that, after very hour or so the game will forget to load textures. So it looks like this

Instead of like this.

The total game takes about 12 hours, and it an adequate but not fantastic shooter, and a really floating driving game plays a part as well. It is not revolutionary in either of these aspects, although it is certainly serviceable. The plot is... from the makers of Quake. It is essentially a string of shooter missions, connected by simple driving sequences that can be mostly ignored except in a few cases where the game makes them mandatory just to remind you that they exist.

What really frustrates me is the focus on consoles as the primary platform and the edges of this technology that show off where it fails. First, they chose to focus on consoles because that is where the money is now, and they didn't pander to their audience of the past 20-some years. Ok. But they could have spent a few hours making the menus tailored to the PC.. notably that exiting the game is harder than it should be. This is ridiculous.

But the real killer here is the technology. The detail of the textures is absolutely amazing.. almost everything looks real, or super-real, particularly character models, but random chunks of rock and walls as well. And then you come across something that wasn't done well. Either it was a bad texture on a person's equipment, or blurry bolts thrown on the floor in the texture but without any kind of polygon surface to attach them to. So it looks like someone dropped a blurry photo of some bolts onto the floor. What hurts is the variation in quality, and the realistic art-style gives them nowhere to hide. They have reached for the stars and fallen sadly short.

It isn't terrible overall, and it was entertaining enough if you set your brain aside and try not to worry about the pacing or the plot. But it wasn't finished, and fails to live up to years of hype and the polish expected for iD. It will be on sale soon.... try it then if you are curious.

Game Review: Warhammer 40K Space Marine

2011-09-18T04:27:00.000-06:00

The Warhammer 40K universe started off as a table top gaming system many years ago, and has developed a deep fiction. On the computer game side of things it has been revitalized with two generations of real time strategy games that have been innovative and excellent.

Now they've taken their universe and tried to turn it into a 3rd person shooter. It is the opposite of covered based shooting because the Space Marines are entirely too insane to believe in taking cover. They shoot people, and advance into melee range, then they use chain swords, axes, and yes, warhammers, to smash people into bits. Well, sometimes people, but frequently Orks, and the occasional deamon.

You play as a Space Marine, a hulking, mostly indestructible warrior zealot in a big suit of Roman-themed armor. And you speaking like a Brit... They do a great job of describing the universe around you, and pretty much everyone is in character, with one exception. Instead of being the insane, fearless zealot that a Space Marine is supposed to be, you are kind of a nice guy. This is an interesting trade-off because it breaks with the fiction, but it makes it a lot easier to put up with the character you are playing.

The gameplay is pretty good, although the final fight is notably more difficult than anything leading up to it, and the save-game checkpoints don't help you there. With that exception the difficult curve on 'normal' is reasonable, and it is all about knowing when to hit your power boost. The easy way to identify 'when' is that you got killed last time and it is about to happen again... then hit the boost.

There isn't a ton of variety in the gameplay, but you do get a few weapons that provide tactical differences, and when they give you the jetpack for a few minutes you should enjoy that. It is a heck of a lot of fun.

But the real killer feature for this game is the setting. The attention to detail is absolutely amazing, and everything is epic in scale and scope. I like to think of it as gothic steampunk, although there is probably another way to describe the big mechanical stuff with skulls on it... Everything has a sense of weight, from the buildings to the guns, to watching your dude swing his hammer. They didn't do anything super innovative with this game, but they really nailed the basics. The single player is about 6 hours and a lot of fun. Highly recommended if you are a fan of the setting.

I played it on the PC, and it was fine, and the graphics excellent. Game controls probably work slightly better on a console.

And, I'm not sure if it was supposed to be an easter-egg or not, but a Battletech player who looks at that first picture would not see a Warhammer 40K Titan getting ready for war. They would see a Mech, and probably identify it as a Warhammer. Heh. It may be that I'm an easily amused and kind of old gamer. The scale doesn't match, but the general shape is a pretty good fit.

Book Review: Ghost in the Wires (autobio of Kevin Mitnick)

2011-09-17T12:51:00.000-06:00

Kevin Mitnick is a famous hacker, perhaps the most famous of the 'black hat' hackers. And this book tells an interesting story about how he came to be that way, some of the adventures he had along the way, and then finally the steps that lead to his redemption of a sort.

The technology is interesting, even more so since I know a bit about phone switches and the companies that run them, but I think that the book does a good job of keeping things moving and not drilling into the technology too deeply, while still providing enough context. But Kevin's gift isn't that he is technically great, it is that he is a social engineer. He works complex systems to get what he wants in the most efficient way, and that almost always results in defeating the people. His use of technology is almost secondary to his ability to convince people do to what he wants.

On the other hand, the book does a pretty good job of pointing out some of Kevin's flaws. He is unable to leave things alone, has terrible impulse control, and incredibly bad luck in his choice of friends for the most part. Because of these problems he kept challenging himself to do bigger and bigger hacks, even when it was almost assured that he would be caught.

And the final section is about his fights with the justice system, which doesn't seem to have been terribly concerned about following the law itself, and how that eventually sorted itself out.

Not only is it a story about how modern companies are poor about security, it is a great adventure story of gifted con-man who uses his knowledge of technology to bend the system to his will.

Game Review: Dragon Age 2 Legacy (pc)

2011-08-12T14:22:00.000-06:00

So, Dragon Age 2 was pretty, but seemed kind of inconsequential. The story line wasn't as epic, and it had all kinds of super repetitive dungeon design. Legacy is the first expansion pack and they've done a very nice job with it.

First, I bought DA2 on steam, but due to a little disagreement you cannot buy the game there anymore and you can't buy the DLC via Steam. Instead I had to go to the bioware store, buy their 'points', use the points to buy the DLC. Re-install DA2 via steam and let it patch, then download the expansions I got with my original purchase from bioware (otherwise my savegames couldn't load) and then download the new Legacy installer. Then restart everything one last time so that it worked.

Really guys. Why do you hate your customers? Why?

Ok, so after I got through that part of it the whole thing was pretty good. Good story that ties back into the lore of the Dragon Age world, and it had a ton of variety in the scenery that you wander through. It clocked in at maybe 4 hours, so the time seems reasonable for a $10 expansion and it didn't feel artificially stretched out.

The last fight was a bit funny, since it was the only place where the whole party got killed a few times, and when I succeeded I actually did it with my main character dead from almost the first instant. So, the final animations didn't make a lot of sense (my unconscious guy suddenly being the one who makes the killing blow...) but, whatever. I'm happy with it, so if you liked DA2 and want a little extra taste of it, they made a nice treat for you.

Game review: Bastion - XBLA

2011-07-30T11:01:00.000-06:00

I'm a regular listener to the podcast from www.giantbomb.com and they went gushing over the new game Bastion. They don't normally gush, but in this case they've been involved with the development of the game... so I was doubly concerned.

I needn't have feared for their editorial integrity. It is among the best XLBA games I've played.. right up with Shadow Complex and, um, well, probably nothing else. The game is $15 and plays for at least 3 or 4 hours I'd guess, then you can re-start it to finish upgrading items and just beating down the foes for fun.

It has an interesting visual style. A remarkable amount of variety, and a gimmick of having the world build under you while you walk. The whole thing is very smooth and works keep things interesting. There were only a few cases where the gameplay was obscured by the environment, and it wasn't bad enough to hinder progress.

And, the sound design really is shockingly good. Not something I normally pick up on, but here it stands out and adds a lot of value to the experience.

It even has a backstory, which is surprising because the game play is fairly straight forward as an action rpg (you can upgrade weapons and 'level'). The whole thing fits together with a nice variety of action in terms of foes and objectives. And while it never gets terribly hard or complex it is a fun romp, which is more than sufficient praise for a downloadable game.

I highly recommend dusting off your xbox and giving this a try.

Book: Dead Dwarves Don't Dance

2011-07-10T07:09:00.000-06:00

I just got back from a 2 week trip so I had some long plane rides to read on. Normally I'd also have 2 hours to kill each night but instead I spent it working. On the flight out I finished Revelation Space, and then started and finished Dead Dwarves Don't Dance. Don't think that means it is short, it is a perfectly reasonable length novel and was a $.99 purchase on Kindle.

The weird thing about this book is that it is set in a de-branded version of the Shadowrun universe as far as I can tell. And if you haven't read a bunch of Shadowrun fiction (or game manuals) it is likely to make a bit less sense. You can probably follow along and come up to speed, but the author doesn't go out of his way to explain a lot of things.

Otherwise, it is cyberpunk with a focus on the action not the 'cyber' part of things. The characters are generally interesting enough and the action is pretty good. I'd really recommend it to anyone who likes the genre, and it might even serve as a good starting off point if you have a high tolerance for not having the 'science' in your science fiction explained very deeply.

Accessorizing a PC

2011-06-19T08:27:00.000-06:00

I just had to register Windows, so I guess I've had a mostly functional new computer for a month now. I'm very happy with the performance and I've gotten a chance to spend some quality time playing games on it... however the newest releases haven't been everything I hoped for.

Duke Nukem Forever, apparently was released either 12 years late or a year early, and sucked. And the Witcher 2 hasn't hooked me. I've been playing some Call of Duty: Black Ops, which has taught me that having a better computer doesn't keep me from sucking at multiplayer... and I've been trying a few other games as the mood strikes me. Notably Just Cause 2, which looks awesome with all of the detailed turn up.

So, aside from the core bits of computer I also upgraded a few of the peripheral bits and I've been happy with my choices so far.

I got a Steelseries 6Gv2 keyboard from a friend at work. It is a bit clicky, with bouncy keys and a very heavy base. Nothing super fancy, but it has an American key layout (except for the |\ key, which seems slightly misplaced for a gaming keyboard). I'm not sure it is perfect, but it is in much better shape than my old Logitech beast or the wireless swiss keyboard I was using briefly.

The next toy was a R.A.T.7 mouse. A weird specialty item among mice that lets you pull various parts off and adjust them and replace them. Basically a transformer mouse.. and as my son pointed out, it looks like I took it halfway apart, with exposed wheels and gears and stuff. It does the things a mouse should, and has a large surface to rest my pinkie on... I old a mouse a bit funny with my first 2 fingers on the buttons, instead of first and third finger... so this is a great feature. My old sidewinder was having some issues with gliding smoothly, so this has gone nicely.

And the latest toy was a new set of headphones. I got a nice pair from Audio-technica before I moved here, but the years haven't been kind and the coating on the pads is flaking off and making a mess. So, I picked up a pair of Sennheiser PC 360 head phones... a combination of high quality headphones that also have a microphone in case I ever actually want to talk to someone while I'm gaming. I'm still breaking them in, but I can kind of see where people use phrases like 'soundstage' and other nonsense to describe them. Basically they sound very nice and don't make your ears too hot. They do leak some sound, but also give you a chance to hear the kid sneaking up, so that is a fair trade.

Dell Inspiron 15R (for the wife) model N5110

2011-06-18T08:24:00.000-06:00

Recently my wife's laptop decided that 2 years was enough time to spend doing light computing tasks and the occasional game of the Sims 3 and decided to head down the road to death. It did this by getting so warm that you couldn't type on it without pain... it had actually needed a pillow to protect your legs from the heat for most of its life, but this was getting out of control. So... my quest began to find her a new computer that had reasonable performance for surfing and games and that wouldn't run too hot. For various reasons a desktop/ipad combination wasn't viable... so it had to be a laptop.

I spent a lot of time searching for deals and reading reviews about horrible horrible laptops. The http://www.notebookreview.com site was one of the better ones, because it actually provided the information I cared about. I wanted something cheap, cool, sufficiently fast and decently well built. I'm pretty sure none of the laptops actually meet this requirement.

In the end, the Dell 15R N5110 with the core i3-2310m processor is what won out. The key things here are that the model number of the processor has 4 digits, which means it is of the newer "sandy bridge" generation, but at the low end (i3)but still adequate in terms of performance. The other big selling feature is that it had a decent video chip built in (AMD 6470m). This let it be fast enough and have enough graphical power to play the Sims 3, and maybe whatever comes out in the next year or so. And to do it with a trickle of power so that the laptop has decent battery life and doesn't cause any burning. For 700chf I'm pretty happy with the tradeoffs that we made.

It took about 2 weeks to get delivered and then I got to get it from the box and turn it into something workable... which was more annoying than necessary and I'll detail the process here in case it helps someone in the future.
Software to remove:
- Bing Bar
- ebay software (possibly just links.. but you can uninstall it)
- McAfee Security Center (junk... later I install the better replacement)
- Skype + Skype toolbar (again.. I consider it mostly junk and the wife uses the Google version)
- Silverlight (Bah.. its like flash but the exploits are slightly less widely known. Gone)
- The 'games' icon on the desktop... because it is low res and looks ugly and provides no value.

Software to install:
- Microsoft Security Essentials (this is the better anti-virus choice)
- Chrome Beta
- Steam (so the wife can install her copy of sims 3)
- Open office (Because the school insists on sending word documents from time to time)
- Picassa (for photos)
- Ati software update... because the software that came on the laptop didn't actually work right when you turned on a game.

The only other hassle/bug was that the first thing the laptop wants you to do is create a recovery image. Basically they are too cheap to send you a DVD to install windows on your laptop if it breaks... so you need to do a backup first thing. However, when you insert a blank disk the crappy demo software from Roxio goes insane and really wants to do things that interrupt making the backup. As usual, I wonder if anyone at Dell ever actually turned one of these things on and tried to use it.

So, minor hassle aside, thing thing seems to work really really well. I hope it makes it more than 2 years.

Game Review: Vanquish - PS3

2011-06-10T11:53:00.000-06:00

I got this for a great price and the reviews made it sound like a lot of fun, but as I read deeper I saw hints of challenge, something that would try the mettle of a dedicated gamer.

Not feeling dedicated, I played the game on Easy and had an absolute blast. You are some kind of soldier / test pilot for a robot suit developed by DARPA and sent in to help the army when things go badly. Now, I'm a bit sad that it is a little suit, barely larger than you... and you are super mobile. Since I'm a huge fan of Mech games which are basically the opposite. But it works great for this game. There are a good variety of weapons that have cool transformation animations and level up over the course of the game.

The enemies are forgettable for the most part, and consistently make sure that the soft spots in their armor glow yellow. But the story works well enough, the environment is awesome, and although they do take control away from you for frequent cut scenes they where impressive enough that I was fine with that. It is a bit disappointing when you realize how much cooler your guys fights during cut scenes than when you are controlling him, but I probably need to get over that particular fault since it is so common in games these days.

Anyway, if you get it cheap, it is a heck of a lot of fun for 4 or 5 hours.

PSN Outage and Welcome Back and Sony E3.

2011-06-05T04:41:00.000-06:00

I've mentioned before how much I like the PS3 hardware. It isn't fair to compare it against a pre-slim Xbox, but they did a really good job. And I like the controller.. it just feels better in the hand.

In terms of technical prowess I don't have a strong preference.. the PS3 has the lead but it probably doesn't impact things. What did impact things was having Sony hacked so badly it took them over a month to get things working again. I'm exceedingly happy that I signed up using a pre-paid card and that they don't (shouldn't at least) have any credit card information from me. Even though I've had the system for a few months now, I've spent $0 of the dollars I put on it. So in terms of giving Sony a free loan, I guess they are the ones laughing at me.

Now that things are back I'm using my my 'welcome back' credits. The two high profile games they are offering are Little Big Planet and Infamous. I own and I've played plenty of LBP and own the sequel so that isn't too exciting. Infamous was fun until I hit a game-breaking bug and I haven't gotten back to it.. but since I own it that isn't really a problem. So I'm buying up the less high profile stuff. Wipeout HD, a arcade-racing game that has been pretty fun so far, and I'm watching Super Stardust HD download now (what appears to be an arcade-like 2 stick shooter).

What amazes me, aside from the frequent timeouts and other problems with the store, is that they didn't patch the original install versions of the game. Really.. you know people are going to download a TON of copies of these 4 games... and yet all of them require significant post-install patching. Nobody thought to distribute patched builds the first time?

Also, I suspect everything is running much higher load than normal as people try to get their free stuff or just get back to playing with their systems, but a 70% error rate is ridiculous. The guys working on the security and infrastructure stuff should have been able to work in parallel with a team assigned to 'buy a crapload of new computers'. It wasn't rocket science that things would be busy when you came back... also, with E3 coming tomorrow they should expect both attacks and traffic from paying customers. Both of which can be improved by throwing hardware at the problem.

Anyway, I have high hopes for Sony and their upcoming press conference. They have admitted to a PS4 but without a timeline, and they've got the NGP (next generation portable playstation) which will be a disaster. I hope they can pull a rabbit out of their hat. Ideally a PS4 in 2012 shaped rabbit.

Instead I expect they will announce some PS3 exclusive games and try to sound up-beat about the NGP.

Game Review: Portal

2011-06-04T06:03:00.000-06:00

Although I recently finished Portal 2, I decided to install the original onto the newly built machine.

It turns out I'd played about 75% of the way through it a few times before but never actually gotten to the interesting twist. So, with my kid watching I finally went through and won the thing. It makes Portal 2 make a lot more sense...

The game is good, no doubt about that. The writing and the idea are outstanding. The implementation of the first one clearly identifies the changes that made Portal 2 so great. The most notable difference is that in the first Portal there are a few tricks that really rely on reflexes, and if you make a mistake in a tricky 5 minute sequence you have to go back.

Portal 2 was much more console friendly in not requiring precision or timing and letting you think your way out of most problems. I'm sure I would have hated the first one on a console...

Anyway, very very good game, but the idea was better than the execution.

New Computer, Benchmarks and comparison

2011-06-02T01:35:00.000-06:00

Last night, before joining a 5 hour video conference to launch a product (yay!) I got the new bios installed and the SSD caching working to my satisfaction.

This morning I've cleaned up the desk a little bit and migrated the new computer to its rightful position as the primary machine in my office. I also moved over a new keyboard mouse to round out the transition (Steelseries 6Gv3 and RAT 7).

It was really exciting to turn off the old one and hear the fans wind down for the first time in ages. I'll have that box around for a while in case something goes wrong, but unplugged and sitting in shame in the corner.

The new box runs completely silent under normal load, and even when stressed by benchmarks or games it is barely a whisper. That alone was worth the upgrade. To be fair, I did tone the overclock down a bit as the CPU fan kicks up when it runs at 4.6Ghz and it started to run pretty warm, so I turned it down to 4.4Ghz (the chip is 3.4Ghz by default). The only difference in the video card is that it is the same hardware, flashed to the 6970 firmware.

But, lets take a look at the same benchmarks run on the prior version and compare.

Passmark 7.0 64 bit, build 1022.
Passmark Rating is 3729.5 (2.5X the old score.. Moore's law is awesome)
CPU 11549.7 (4X higher, and it does it with less power and heat)
2D 686 (almost doubled despite being exactly the same video card)
3D 3721 (only a 30% improvement... but still the same card)
mem 3034 (50% improvement)
Disk 1883 read 454, write 52, random 15.7
(2.4X as a somposite. Read is 4X faster due to SSD cache, write is actually slower because it depends on writing to both the ssd and the HD in order to complete, and random is 3.5X higher because some of the time it hits the cache)

The disk improvement is actually more subtle that benchmarks are going to pick up. Basically the first time you read in a file a copy is placed on the SSD at the same time. The next time you read the file it goes from the SSD which is ~5X as fast and doesn't have any moving parts or seek time. The file stays there until you use up the space on the SSD and then it starts throwing away the oldest stuff. Since this is a 60G SSD that will take a while. But the benefit is in load times for stuff you use frequently.

And the prime95 scores are similarly improved.
Compare your results to other computers at http://www.mersenne.org/report_benchmarks
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz
CPU speed: 4360.30 MHz, 4 hyperthreaded cores
CPU features: Prefetch, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE4, AVX
L1 cache size: 32 KB
L2 cache size: 256 KB, L3 cache size: 8 MB
L1 cache line size: 64 bytes
L2 cache line size: 64 bytes
TLBS: 64
Prime95 64-bit version 26.6, RdtscTiming=1
Best time for 768K FFT length: 5.768 ms., avg: 5.808 ms.
Best time for 8192K FFT length: 73.869 ms., avg: 74.015 ms.

It does the work in about 60% of the time. Of some note, it can basically work on 8 things at once, compared to 2 on the old system.

Overall I'm very happy with the upgrade from a performance standpoint, and I'm absolutely delighted about the silence. Now I'm going to go prove that it didn't make me even slightly better at call of duty.

Asus P8Z68-V Pro and SSD caching

2011-06-01T09:11:00.003-06:00

One of the Z68 features I was looking forward too was the use of SSD as a level of cache on top of the much larger hard drive. Intel has a specific model of SSD coming out but seems to be taking their time, so I got a deal on an OCZ Agility 3 drive with pretty awesome performance and 60G of space, and I decided to use that for my cache drive.

I'd updated to the latest motherboard bios (401) and downloaded the newest Intel drivers 10.5.0.1026. So when I got home with my new toy I plugged it in, followed the fairly simple directions with the Intel software and rebooted. And... there was no bootable disk found.

Instead you get to enter the Intel raid controller and get a message "The cache device associated with the accelerated disk/volume is not present". You can force remove it and then the system boots, so that was good. When it boots you can use the intel software to clean up and try again.. and fail.. and repeat.

So, back to Asus to see what was wrong. Didn't find any hints of this problem and they had removed the bios and the intel drivers from their website. They also don't seem to ship their newest version of the ASUS software kit with working addresses to go get new bios... I searched around and finally found a build of the bios that matches the intel drivers and was able to get everything to work. Testing comes later.

Bugs I found.
- Asus. Do not silently take down broken software. Post a note for users.
- Asus. Put your files where people (and your own software) can find them. For others: ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/asus/mb/LGA1155/P8Z68-V_PRO/ is the right place to look. For this specific problem you want version 501, if you go look today. Hopefully they will keep fixing stuff and publish a new one.

- Intel. If you need matching versions of raid bios and drivers, check in the drivers.
- Intel. Fail in the place where you can display useful information, not on the next boot.
- Intel. Display the damn version number of your software...

Intel, you've got something neat here. Please keep working on it. Show me how effectively the cache is working, let me provide hints of directories to ignore and ones to prefer. The default should be 'good', but only power users are going to want the first few generations of this, so please, help us out a little.

EDIT:
- Asus has partially fixed their website and made the new firmware available 6/2/2011.

Fixing chrome to work in English.. in a non-English country

2011-05-29T13:25:00.003-06:00

So, chrome is awesome. Fast and secure... but the omnibar makes some assumptions about you that may not be correct.

If you would like it to always get the language right for you when you search, do this.
1) right click on the omnibar (the thing with the URL in it, or your query..)
2) setup a new default search engine in the second box. name it google and set the location as google.com
3) in the 3rd column paste: http://www.google.com/search?&hl=en&q=%s
and you can replace the 'en' with the language code of your choice.

Computer upgrades... the case against.

2011-05-29T04:42:00.003-06:00

I'm two weeks of admittedly part-time work into the process of upgrading my computer. And so far it poses a lot of arguments in favor of the alternatives to actually building and operating a modern desktop computer.

The Gaming Console. For a few hundred dollars, you buy one, bring it home, and plug in all of the cables. It will probably need to update firmware immediately, and then once every few months (unless it is a PS3 and sony keeps getting hacked). Beyond that, it will pretty much work. New games may not always be good, but they will generally start, or auto-download any necessary patches. Easy to use and it can play games. (Wii, Xbox 360, PS3)

The Chromebook. I'm really excited to see these get released, because you bring one home, and then you surf the internet. When you reboot it, it comes up running the newest version of the operating system. Easy to use, and it can surf the internet. (coming soon...)

My new Windows box. In this case, the cost is more than buying all 4 previous items... but the desired outcome is to surf the internet and play games on it. Assembly went remarkably smoothly except for the early-life failure of the hard drive. The process since then might look somewhat different from the earlier products. This is the high level over-view of 2 weeks and 1 game.
* Configure the bios correctly (non-default settings required.. hard-drives set to raid)
* Install windows 7
* Patch windows 7
* Install ASUS motherboard software (then reboot.. a lot)
* Install chrome
* Install ATI video card drivers 11.5
* Install anti-virus
* Install the Witcher 2
* Update Intel SATA drivers
* Burn new motherboard bios
* Ooops, go reconfigure the bios to the previous settings
* Burn new video card firmware to hack it to a 6970 ($100 difference in card price.. but all it takes is a firmware change to make the 'cheap' one turn into the expensive one)
* Install the Witcher 2 patch, no, not that one, the one specific for buying it from gog.com that isn't as easy to find.
* Install ATI video drivers hotfix 11.5b
* Play game

Weekly maintenance in the future:
* auto-patch windows and reboot, auto-patch virus scanner
Monthly maintenance in the future:
* video card updates, game updates, motherboard bios updates (next few months at least), driver updates for motherboard... And not only can these take 20 minutes to do, but you have to go track them down on random websites.

Lets not even talk about iTunes.. I'm kind of dreading that migration.

Computers... you better love them. Or you'll hate them.

Computer upgrade.. iTunes and housekeeping

2011-05-26T13:03:00.003-06:00

So, I'm still migrating things over to the new machine, and I took a brief vacation in the middle... so it is slow going.

I'm also procrastinating while I wait for two things. First, I need to figure out the SSD solution that I want to go with. Because this may be destructive I'd like to get some of that testing out of the way while I still have another working computer.

Secondly, the first game I'm really excited to play through on the new machine is The Witcher 2. Which has bugs in the game and the ATI drivers for high end cards. Both problems are still waiting on patches and the current experience is pretty bad.

So, I've got time to sort out other problems. Most notably, that iTunes sucks.

My adventure with iTunes started just over a year ago. After my Zune ticked me off for the last time, and I lusted after the iPad... I went on a binge. My family now has 2 generations of nano, 2 generations of ipad and a shuffle. So I like their hardware and mobile products.

The windows client is crap however. The 'feature' that I don't want to bring with me is duplicated mp3 files. For some reason it will occasionally duplicate the files I have, creating additional ones with " 1" append to them. In a few cases it has zealously backed up my files and gotten to " 7" which is just lovely. And in the UI it shows 8 copies of that file, all apparently identical, except for the one that points to a file that doesn't exist... you can add that one to a playlist and it doesn't complain, but it doesn't sync either.

Ok, can you do anything within iTunes to fix this? I don't think so.. although if you get lucky it will make another copy for you.

Because it is a bad idea to download random code from the internet and this was a simple problem I decided to just steal some python code. I started with what this guy had: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/551777-accurately-find-duplicate-files/ and then hacked on it to sort the way I wanted, run some counters, delete the files I needed... and because IDLE (my python GUI) didn't want command line arguments and I was lazy... I hard coded my choices.

Floating on the internets, here is what I ended up with. Do not use this if you don't understand enough python to understand it, make fun of me, and change it to meet your specific needs. It will not work in this state.


#!/usr/bin/env python

#

# find-duplicates

# by Keith Gaughan 

#

# Finds an lists any duplicate files in the given directories.

#

# Copyright (c) Keith Gaughan, 2008.

# All Rights Reserved.

#

# Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without

# modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

#

#  1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright

#     notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

#

#  2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright

#     notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the

#     documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

#

# THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY

# EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED

# WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE

# DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY

# DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES

# (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;

# LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND

# ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT

# (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF

# THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

#

# This license is subject to the laws and courts of the Republic of Ireland.

#

# Note that nerdonaplane.blogspot.com hacked this poor thing up for his

# own needs and made it notably less safe.

# Use with caution, it will delete your stuff.



from __future__ import with_statement

import sys

import os

import hashlib

import getopt

import filecmp





USAGE = "Usage: %s [-h] [-m] *"





class crc:

    """

    Wraps up zlib.crc32 to make it suitable for use as a faster but less

    accurate alternative to the hashlib.* classes.

    """

    def __init__(self, initial=None):

        self.crc = 0

        if initial is not None:

            self.update(initial)

    def update(self, block):

        import zlib

        self.crc = zlib.crc32(block, self.crc)

    def hexdigest(self):

        return "%X" % self.crc

    def digest(self):

        # Er...

        return self.crc





def all_files(*tops):

    """Lists all files in the given directories."""

    for top in tops:

        for dirname, _, filenames in os.walk(top):

            for f in filenames:

                path = os.path.join(dirname, f)

                if os.path.isfile(path):

                    yield path





def digest(file, method=hashlib.md5):

    with open(file) as f:

        h = method(f.read()).digest()

    return h





def true_duplicates(files):

    """

    Compare the given files, breaking them down into groups with identical

    content.

    """

    while len(files) > 1:

        next_set = []

        this_set = []

        master = files[0]

        this_set.append(master)

        for other in files[1:]:

            if filecmp.cmp(master, other, False):

                this_set.append(other)

            else:

                next_set.append(other)

        if len(this_set) > 1:

            yield this_set

        files = next_set





def group_by(groups, grouper, min_size=1):

    """Breaks each of the groups into smaller subgroups."""

    for group in groups:

        subgroups = {}

        for item in group:

            g = grouper(item)

            if not subgroups.has_key(g):

                subgroups[g] = []

            subgroups[g].append(item)

        for g in subgroups.itervalues():

            if len(g) >= min_size:

                yield g





def usage(message=None):

    global USAGE

    fh = sys.stdout

    exit_code = 0

    if message:

        fh = sys.stderr

        exit_code = 2

        print >>fh, str(message)

    name = os.path.basename(sys.argv[0])

    print >>fh, USAGE % (name,)

    sys.exit(exit_code)





def main():

#    try:

#        opts, paths = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], "hm:")

#    except getopt.GetoptError, err:

#        usage(err)

    paths = ["g:\Music"]

    

    method = crc

    gone = 0

    warnings = 0

    kept = 0



    if len(paths) == 0:

        paths = ["."]



    first = True

    groups = [all_files(*paths)]

    for grouper in [os.path.getsize, lambda file: digest(file, method)]:

        groups = group_by(groups, grouper, 2)

    for group in groups:

        for files in sorted(true_duplicates(group)):

            if first:

                first = False

            else:

                print

            files.reverse()

            first = 0

            for f in files:

                test_f = f[:]

                if first == 0:

                    print 'keep   ' + str(f)

                    first = 1

                    kept = kept + 1

                    continue

                if str(test_f[:-4][-1]).isdigit():

                    print 'delete ' + str(f)

                    gone = gone + 1

                    os.remove(f)

                else:

                    print '*** something went safe here: ' + str(f)

                    warnings = warnings + 1



    print 'kept ' + str(kept)

    print 'gone ' + str(gone)

    print 'argh ' + str(warnings)



if __name__ == "__main__":

    main()

Computer Upgrading Time - hardware

2011-05-19T10:52:00.001-06:00

I timed the upgrade around a few things, most notably the release of Intel's new Z68 chipset, to take advantage of the well-reviewed Sandy Bridge processors. And I've spent no small amount of time poking around hardware review sights and the local computer stores.

I'll go on briefly about what I got, and what things I learned from installing them. It has also been a few generations since I built a computer, so a few bits of technology really stand out for me.

Asus P8 Z68-V Pro motherboard. This seems like a reasonable board. It had solid reviews, wasn't crazily expensive and had a few nifty extras I'll probably never actually use, particularly the on-board video out and on-board bluetooth. When I installed it the only thing that was particularly annoying is the placement of the SATA ports. If you have a full-length video card you may need to run those cables when the video card isn't installed. Also, I have to say that the new bios is simply wonderful. And the overclocking on this thing was a dream. You install the software, click the button.. and it runs FAST.

Intel i7-2600k. This is the top of the line Sandy Bridge processor, with an unlocked clock. At the stock speeds it is fast, and after hitting the overclock button in the motherboard software it jumped up to 4.6Ghz, which was a nice gain. I bought the one with the air cooler for a few dollars more but didn't install it.

One of my splurge items was the Corsair H60 watercooler. It is a sealed unit and nearly as easy to install as a typical air cooling system. It leaves a nice open spot in the case and hopefully it will not collect as much dust and grime as my last cooler. It also helped contribute to the nice overclock on the processor, and it runs very very quite.

I didn't realize how much I splurged on the power supply until it arrived. The Seasonic X-760 comes in a velvet bag... it feels heavy like a quality product, and at low load (<190 watts) it doesn't bother to even turn on a fan. That should be most of the time when it isn't actually playing games. It also comes with tons of modular cables, including an EU power cable... so I had to go to the store and pick up a quality grounded Swiss power cable. They could also improve the labels on the cables to make it a bit easier to choose which one you want.

Corsair made two more appearances on the shopping list. 2 4 gig sticks of memory, and a new case. The new case wasn't strictly necessary, but wow, I'm really impressed by the Graphite 600T. It is a tiny bit shorter than my past cases, but notably wider, giving you easy and roomy access to route cables behind the motherboard and mount the CPU cooling system after the motherboard is installed. The fans are huge and quiet, and the drive mounting system is really awesome. Tool-ness, and seems to dampen out any rattle the drives might experience. It also has got great air-flow. The insertion force to get the power supply in was a bit higher than expected, but worked great once I figured out the trick. The only real downside is the white glow from the fans... but I'll learn to live with it.

The hard-drive is, for now, a Western Digital 2TB "black" drive. The first one died with a SMART failure after 24 hours, but has since been replaced by the retailer (digitec) with minimal hassle. It is fast, but I'm waiting on Intel to release their "311" SSD drive to let me set up a caching system, which is one of the key features of this new z68 chipset. If they don't hurry I may buy something else instead, but I'm holding out hope for another week or 2.

Lastly, I installed the Asus / AMD HD 6950 video card I bought a few months ago for my old machine. It was always my intent to move it forward into the shiny new box, and it is right at home in this system. I'll probably hack the firmware to turn it into a 6970 just because its trivial... and might give a tiny performance boost.

Lastly came windows 7... dead hard drive... windows 7 again.. and the slow process of turning this box of shiny parts into a working and gaming computer. As far as the hardware goes, I've still got a wishlist, but the core stuff is done. A new monitor? That SSD? The keyboard my boss loaned me... or maybe some new headphones. Hard to tell.

Computer upgrading time - software

2011-05-14T10:33:00.002-06:00

I like to spend some time to figure out what software I want to bring along with me to the new machine, prior to having it sitting on my desk. The idea is to try not to load it down with junk I won't actually want... which doesn't last terribly long, but it is the equivalent of that 'new computer smell'.

If you read this and have alternative suggestions or other ideas, let me know.

Software.
Operating system:
Windows 7, SP1 and a boatload of patches.

Drivers:
AMD video drivers: http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/radeon_win7-64.aspx
Rosewill N180UBE usb-wifi: http://www.rosewill.com/products/d_1721/productDetail.htm
Board drivers: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/P8Z68V_PRO/#download
Microsoft Intellimouse: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/d/sidewinder-mouse

benchmarks and burnin:
Passmark benchmarks http://www.passmark.com/download/pt_download.htm
Prime 95 http://www.mersenne.org/

Basics:
Microsoft Security Essentials virus scanner: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security_essentials/default.aspx
Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome
Firefox: http://www.getfirefox.com
Picasa: http://www.google.com/picasa
Notepad ++: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
itunes (sigh): http://www.apple.com/itunes/
VLC: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Steam: http://www.steampowered.com
[bejewled 3, warhammer 2 retribution, Civ V, CODBlOps, TF2 out of the 111 enabled on my account]

Games:
minecraft
steam: [bejewled 3, warhammer 2 retribution, Civ V, CODBlOps, TF2]
games in progress that won't come back: drakensang 2, arcania gothic 4, deathspank

Other possibilities?
- Free MMOs? Dungeons and Dragons online, LOTR, and Champions Online... except that I almost never play them.
- I've got games on Impulse game, the EA store and Direct2Drive. I may re-install Drakensang 2 via D2D if the Witcher 2 doesn't keep me entertained.
- OpenOffice. Which forces the issue of installing Java... and I very rarely need it.

Computer upgrading time. part 1

2011-05-13T22:48:00.003-06:00

There comes a time, every so often, when it is time to get a new computer.

This one was purchased in 2008, and I think I knew at the time that I was moving to Switzerland, so I splurged a little bit and got something nice. It was an Intel E8500, with an ATI 4870 video card and all the normal bits and pieces. About 2 years ago it got a shiny new power supply after the magic smoke leaked out of the old one. As I recall, I've had to replace the fan for the bottom part of the enclosure and the 120mm fan in the back. And, fairly recently the video card got updated, but that will be coming along to the new machine.

I've done a few things with hard drives over the years, but 3 seems to be about as many as this case can hold without getting serious heat problems. If you look in the picture you may notice that I had to pull out the other disk enclosure because of the length of the video card.

There was a time when I would never go past 2 years without a serious refresh of the hardware, and I think it is amazing that a mid-range machine has survived for 3 years and is still actually in pretty good shape.

Why need a new one?
- Windows has corrupted the CD ROM drivers, so a re-install is needed to fix that. I've spent a few hour troubleshooting it, and replaced the hardware.
- I've got one hard-drive about to die, so I have to dig around in there anyway.
- The box is a noisey and extremely attractive to dust. The CPU fan has been recently cleaned, but when seen with the camera flash it still looks filthy.
- This year is hopefully the year of the PC game. Witcher 2 up shortly, and Battlefield 3 in the fall are the expected highlights.
- Intel seems to have their current generation of chips and motherboards sorted out nicely.
- I can.

The changes in the past few years have been pretty amazing. AMD has completely fallen apart and Quad core is now 'normal'. SSDs are available in reasonable sizes for unreasonable but not completely absurd amounts of money. And, of all things, most people now have lower resolution monitors. And, windows 7 came out and didn't suck. Many modern boards don't even have floppy drive connectors, so installing order operating systems is looking particularly unpleasant.

And I'll try to put this one back to some kind of reasonably productive use.

Some performance notes about the old computer (with shiny graphics card).
Using the windows performance system (embarrassing, I know).
Proc: 6.6. Ram: 6.8 Graphics: 7.8 Gaming: 7.8 Disk: 5.9
Considering that those scores are out of a maximum of 7.9.... its a pretty good video card.

http://www.passmark.com/download/pt_download.htm
64-bit, build 1022
Passmark Rating is 1488.4
cpu 2747.
2D 353
3D 2949
mem 1700
disk 778 read 107, write 103, seek 4.4

And using Prime95 64 bit, v266:
http://www.mersenne.org/report_benchmarks
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8500 @ 3.16GHz
CPU speed: 3166.36 MHz, 2 cores
CPU features: Prefetch, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE4
L1 cache size: 32 KB
L2 cache size: 6 MB
L1 cache line size: 64 bytes
L2 cache line size: 64 bytes
TLBS: 256
Prime95 64-bit version 26.6, RdtscTiming=1
Best time for 768K FFT length: 9.287 ms., avg: 9.456 ms.
Best time for 8192K FFT length: 117.938 ms., avg: 119.685 ms.
Timing FFTs using 2 threads.
Best time for 768K FFT length: 5.256 ms., avg: 6.009 ms.
Best time for 8192K FFT length: 74.378 ms., avg: 76.303 ms.
Best time for 61 bit trial factors: 3.052 ms.
Best time for 77 bit trial factors: 5.395 ms.

Game Review: Crysis 2

2011-05-08T12:43:00.002-06:00

This seems to be the time for me to complete the sequels to games where I never made it through the first one.

EA had a great sale on Crysis 2 on their own webstore, which was willing to get me to not only try the game, but also experiment with their store. Generally speaking, online game stores are a natural monopoly, and Steam is winning here, with a good product and generally prices and services. Having a publisher specific system, particularly one that didn't integrated terrifically well with their own game (CD codes? really?) seems a bit silly. They also have a history of problems with re-downloads of the game at a later time.

The second series of hassles can be blamed on the Crysis developers. To play online you need an account with them, however I created mine a very long time ago. Long enough that I don't seem to have a 'nickname' and so I cannot log in via the game, even though I can use their website. Bummer since I was interested in trying the multiplayer for a while. Oh well.

But, I bought it for the single player game. How was that? It was really really good. The story is passable, the engine and the art assets are great and it all holds together really well. The gimmick for this game is that you have a 'super suit' thats lets you be faster and stronger than anyone else. You can also have armor or be invisible. Towards the end of the game you can stay invisible longer and recharge more quickly between uses... so I spent the last few hours basically walking up behind people and shooting them. So that was fun.

It has a couple of quick-time events, and a tendency to knock you unconscious to drag you into cut scenes, but nothing seriously objectionable.

This is a AAA shooter and well worth the time and money even at full price. At $15 (I think) it was a steal. Good job guys.

Game Review: Portal 2 on PS3

2011-05-07T13:44:00.003-06:00

I was excited about Valve's offer of a copy of the PC version for people who purchase the PS3 copy. Unfortunately I was a little slow about getting the PS3 version shipped to me and Sony managed to get their network hacked so badly I couldn't log in. So, I ended up playing through the single player part of the game on the Playstation.

The good news is that it was still a fantastic game, done so well that I didn't even mind playing it with a game controller.

Embarrassingly, I never managed to finish the original Portal, always getting distracted before making it through the final couple of puzzles. I'm now strongly tempted to go back and see if my newly honed Portal 2 skills are good enough to let me coast through it.

For people who haven't played it, the gimmick is that you are given a gun that can open a blue portal and an orange portal and you can step between the portals. Momentum is conserved, and you can send other stuff through the portals as well... and you use this to solve a series of scenarios, and for part of the story more open-world-ish puzzles. There are frustrating parts where you have to figure out the right way to think about things, but at the end of the day all of them are solvable by thinking it through (very rarely do reflexes matter).

And, underlying it is a story with a series of amusing twists that make the whole thing a pleasure to explore.

Very highly recommended.

Book review: Mistborn: The Final Empire

2011-05-07T13:40:00.002-06:00

I'm apparently about 4 years late to this series, but Brandon Sanderson put together a great tale. It is sweeping and epic in scope and comes to a good conclusion while also preparing the start of a series that I'm looking forward to reading.

He builds an interesting racial system, an interesting political system and an interesting magic system all while moving a plot along reasonably quickly and building up a good cast of characters. A few religious overtones indicate that Brandon is no stranger to Stranger in a Strange land, but overall I'm really happy with the series.

Highly recommended.

Game Review: Arcania Gothic 4

2011-04-17T02:17:00.002-06:00

A month or two ago, Steam was nice enough to have this game on Sale for $7.50 and I'd been very curious to try it out.

First off, the Gothic games are known for being pretty hard core, but Gothic 4 was designed to appeal to a much wider audience. The other thing the Gothic series is known for is being released unfinished and letting the fans spend the next couple of years patching it until it works. Mostly due to the work of the fans, Gothic 3 was very pretty and Gothic 4 really pushes the quality of the world to an exceptional level. Everything about the environment is absolutely lovely, from the beaches to the forests to the buildings it all looks great. The ambient effects are pretty decent although the weather changes about every 30 seconds and the waves go in and out at a speed that is disturbingly fast.

The character models on the other hand are weird, particularly the default guy in the world. For all the time they spend making the world look awesome it is strange that about half of the people in the world are identical. Voice work is also pretty damn bad... so if the world was empty I think the game would be a lot better.

Combat is fine, although admittedly I played as a mage who would shock people so they where stunned and then beat them repeatedly with a stick until they fell over. So I didn't play a terribly complicated role.

And the story is plain, at least as far as I got through it. Eventually Dragon Age 2 came out and stole my attention, but I got about 10 hours in and I think it is safe to say that nothing particularly surprising had happened.. and I had fetched a number of items for people and solved various small problems.

This is a middle quality game that would have been dramatically improved if they had just spend a little bit more time on the character models. On the other hand, it is stable and reasonably playable, which is a huge improvement over prior Gothic releases.

Book Review: Lady-protector

2011-04-10T13:30:00.003-06:00

I recently read Lady Protector: The Eight book in the Corean chronicles by L. E. Modesitt. I finished it what was basically one sitting, smeared across a very long day. Technically I used 4different chairs to get through the ~464 pages, two of those on planes.

I'm inclined to think that Leland (the L.) is phoning things in on this series at this point. The main character got her powers and her new job in the prior book, and in this one it is all about consolidating her power along political and magical dimensions. I don't think I'm ruining the book by saying that she accomplishes both, but what was surprising was the lack of either suspense or unexpected events along the way.

If you are a fan of these books, this one will be just like the others, and it makes for a good thing to read when you are busy flying a third of the way around the world. I'm pretty sure he wasn't trying to prove a point or teach any deep lessons, but it moves along quickly enough.

Game Review: Bulletstorm - PS3

2011-04-03T21:51:00.003-06:00

Bulletstorm has gotten a lot of reviews that all highlight the unique value that it provides to the genre of first person shooters.

It uncovers a deep vein of richness on the subject of 'dick' jokes and other profanity. It offers a 'skillshot' mechanic where they reward you for doing more and more bizarre things with guns to your foes, and at some point you are able to use a dinosaur as a weapon.

Beyond that, it is kind of a generic unreal engine shooter that is passable, but only has sporadic highlights. Difficulty isn't too bad until the very end, as I made it to Act 7 (basically the last big mission) and had to knock it form 'normal' to easy to deal with a room full of people. The problem was more one of aruging with the camera than skill... so I'll put that down as questionable level design

The game has the expected technical difficulties that some with the engine... all of the guys look similar, there is no jumping and texture pop-in is a serious problem.

If the idea of cutting edge profanity with a shooter for comic relief sounds good, then this is your kind of game.

Game Review: Little Big Planet 2 - PS3

2011-03-27T02:18:00.003-07:00

I bought a PS3 a little before Christmas and one of the titles I was really excited to play was Little Big Planet, and then once it was released, Little Big Planet 2.

They are both extremely similar. They are super cute, and they both use the 'story mode' not only to teach you how to play, but to show you how worlds can be put together. Then the game lives on by providing an extensive toolkit for people to develop their own levels and share them with the community.

On a gameplay note, the controls are a bit lose, and jumping is particularly floaty, so when you need to do something precise you probably need to do it over and over and over to get it right. In many cases you have a limited number of lives, so this can be cause you to re-play levels, which is pretty frustrating. Because of this, it isn't ideal as a kid only game unless you kid is willing to fail a lot. In both games there are also some non-obvious puzzles that you need to work out to figure out what you should do next.

Now that LBP2 exists, there is no reason to play the first one. LBP2 is dramatically prettier and much more complicated (in a good way). The story mode seemed to make more sense, albiet in a very trippy way... and most of the levels are better made both by being entertaining and demonstrating a ton of variety. There are a few hard spots, most notably the final level... and then there isn't much to tie up the story at the end beyond the obvious. However, what they want you to do is go play community levels.

I've only played a few, but a great pac man clone, a gauntlet-legends kind of game and one set in Star Wars (shockingly good) have gotten a quick try. Amazing stuff, and well worth playing.

The biggest bug is that other people can join your game, and although there is an option you can set that says 'I'd like to play alone and stop asking me' not only does it keep asking, but from time to time people will ask to join you game. Very weird.

Book: The Skinner by Neal Asher

2011-03-26T07:39:00.003-07:00

A number of friends at work suggested Neal Asher as one of the upcoming great authors of science fiction. This book clocked in at 430 pages, and although it was decent, it wasn't pulling me back to finish it as hard as I was expecting.

The story sets up an interesting universe, and focuses on a rather small corner of a small planet, but that planet has some interesting characteristics. Notably a virus that renders people incredibly strong and durable, and has lead to a lot of interesting adaptations in their society. This use of a fictional 'science' to be able to explore human nature is the highest art of science fiction. On the other hand, the story frequently slowed down and lost my interest, which is unfortunate.

I'll read another one at some point, but I'm disappointed not to be excited to immediately dive into the next book on the series.

Summary? Decent, almost brilliant, but in the end, not so great.

Book: The Wise Man's Fear: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day 2

2011-03-26T07:33:00.002-07:00

Patrick Rothfuss finally completed the second book in the series. I suppose he can be forgiven for taking a while to crank this one out since it weighs in just a little over a thousand pages. Fortunately I read the kindle version and didn't have to haul the thing around.

In keeping with the first book, it is the main character retelling the story of his youth. The entire book takes place over about roughly a year of the character's University studies, with about half of the time spent at school, and the second half consisting of his summer adventures. Things progress at a pretty slow pace, but each of the different adventures is well fleshed out and interesting.

I'm hopefully that book three shows up in the next year or two and that we all get to enjoy the entire story as the author intends it. I'm always scared with an author has such high ambitions and executes them so slowly, but even if this was the final book, it was at least a good adventure while it lasted.

Highly recommended.

Warhammer 40k - Dawn of War 2 - Retribution

2011-03-24T13:53:00.002-07:00

I've only played through one time, and I'm looking forward to a chance to do it again with a different faction.

This is a stand alone game, so you don't need the previous ones, however they are all well worth playing. I waited a long time because I wasn't sure I wanted to play another RTS, but the small squads, and the ability to upgrade the different units to better fit your play style is a real selling point. It also helps that things stay pretty simple and you can stay tightly focused on the action without having to spend a lot of time managing resources or other things that take you away from the battle.

The game also looks fantastic. You can zoom out and watch the battles unfold, or you can zoom in and look at the gore fly.

I played through as the Space Marines that have been the focus of the previous games, but you can go back and play as any of 6 factions, each with different story lines and radically different units to choose from.

I'd say anything in the series is highly recommended, but this one stands out as the best by a significant margin.

Review: Dragon Age 2 - PC

2011-03-24T13:33:00.002-07:00

So, I've just completed Dragon Age 2, and it is a dramatic shift from the previous game, particularly on the PC. They've consoled this thing up pretty seriously, which isn't all bad, but it is an interesting shift. Going back to Dragon Age, it was widely regarded as a throw-back to the hard-core RPG days with only some minor nods to console friendliness. Then they made console versions that simplified things and made it work for the controller friendly crowd.

This time they just went with a console friendly design, and it works, but it makes the game a lot more action oriented and a lot less complicated. Some of the highlights:

* Very limited inventory. Only your main character changes clothing. Everyone else is limited to rings/amulets/belts and weapons.

* Very mobile battles.

* It is fairly easy most of the time, although a couple of the battles are dramatically harder.

The story itself is pretty good, not nearly as sweeping in scope as the previous game, and much more tightly focused on the character. The scope is also much smaller as you are basically in a lot of locations around one town instead of wandering back and forth across an entire country. And the number of allies feels much smaller, particularly since I ended up with the same squad for essentially all of the game. It will be different depending on what choices you make, but in my case the only other character I could have swapped in was an elf who was doomed to do the wrong thing at ever opportunity.

I celebrated the release of DA2 with the purchase of a shiny new video card so that I could play in DX11 and enjoy the full splendor of the game. Unfortunately as of the 1.01 patch the DX 11 support is terrible. Things are great up until it decides to pause and jitter for no reason, skipping seconds of gameplay, and honestly it didn't look notably better. DX9 on the highest settings worked perfectly, and everything looked wonderful. The biggest objection I had was that the textures are really excellent, but the models aren't complex enough, so everything looks like a pretty but smooth image draped over shapeless models. Considering how much time you spend with your character in 'speech scenes'.. they should have put more time into this.

The world, on the other hand, is entirely awesome in every setting. This is only a slightly backhanded comment as they re-use environments pretty regularly. There is one cave, one building, etc, and you just enter them from different sides and they block off different parts. Even then you go back to each one of them several times so the world quickly feels very familiar.

The game is about 25 hours in length, and it really is an excellent role playing game. It stays balanced across the entirely play, and your choices make a dramatic impact on the story. Normally I'd say role playing games belong on the PC, but with the way they've done it I don't feel that is a real requirement on this one. I heartily recommend it on any platform.

Demo Review: Dragon Age 2

2011-02-26T12:51:00.003-07:00

I'm pretty excited about this game, since the first one was one of the best role playing games of recent memory. And since Drakensang 2 was ticking me off, I fired up the DA2 demo.

Considering that the last game came out just a little over a year ago, they've made a lot of changes. The art style has been revamped and they've changed over to the conversation system used in another one of their games. They have also pulled the PC version of the game a bit closer to the console versions of the past. Things feel much faster and more 'action' driven than they did in the last PC version. The skill system has been simplified and I suspect they've stream-lined more parts that didn't become apparent. I'm a bit saddened that things need to go this way, but Bioware is notoriously crummy at making inventory systems, so maybe this is the right choice.

The demo might not be representative, but they also seem to have done a lot more to drive the story through cut-scenes and frequently pulling action from the hands of the player. This could easily go badly, but bioware does deserve the benefit of the doubt here.

After playing a bit over an hour I'm really excited about where they are taking it, and I'm looking forward to getting back into their world for some adventure.

Review: Front Mission Evolved (PC)

2011-02-20T03:15:00.002-07:00

Steam sales are a weakness of mine. When they offer a game for $7.50 that I'm even slightly interested in buying...I buy it. In this case it was a 'giant robot' game and I'd actually thought about paying full price for it, but the reviews had been a bit iffy. Now, I've gotten to the last battle, and I think I've figured out enough about the game to write about it.. and to quit.

Firstly, this game is basically the game 'Shogo' only made about 12 years later. Check out the box art.

So, Front Mission Evolved (I'll call it FME in the future) has you playing the role of an engineer on giant robots who happens to be in a giant robot doing a tutorial when a war starts. You join the army, you meet a crazy woman, the woman drives the plot.. and you get into some boss battles. The highlight of the game is that you can customize your robot to different weapon loadouts and performance characteristics. This part is really pretty cool, although there are certainly places where different loadouts benefit you. And in a blatant bit of gamey-ness, if you die you can change your configuration and jump right back in. This is particularly handy since I like to have a long range gun for normal missions, but a short range option is almost always best for boss fights.

The cinematics are tolerable, but not up to current generation standards. Lots of low-and-behind-girl-girl's-butt camera angles.. and lots of cases where the mech (called a Wanzer in FME) isn't holding the right weapons.. but it tells the story and moves along. Do not expect any great acting.

Overall the graphics quality are certainly passable, but not fantastic. And I kind of hate the idea of a 3rd person mech game (because Mechwarrior 3 poisoned this forever..) but they did a decent job. In some cases the foliage or other buildings gets in the way of the camera, and I'm not sure how you are supposed to play as a melee fighting mech. But melee fighting seems pointless in addition to having camera issues, so I'm not sure that is worth complaining about.

When you are in the Mech, things work pretty good. Fights move along nicely and you blow lots of stuff up. But, for some reason, you get out of the robot a couple of times. Really? Why the hell would anyone do this. Call in some dudes without super robot suits and have them go get shot. Sheesh. When this happens the game seems a bit crashier (had 4 crashes in a row at the same place... ) and the game is basically a really low quality third person shooter in a market filled with great ones. Also, for some mysterious reason when you've got a 2 handed gun in your mech you can zoom with one button and shoot with the other, and the same is true when you have a machine gun on foot. But the buttons are reversed! Thats insane.

Now, as for the final battle... its cheesey as hell, and apparently most players have a hard time with it. I'm ok dropping it and getting on with my life, and I'm more than satisfied with the 6 hours of mech blasting happiness I've gained so far. I might be a little bit more ticked if I had put down $50.

Game Review: Uncharted 2 - PS3

2011-02-13T12:33:00.002-07:00

Wow, thats an epic animated movie with some little bits of game sprinkled about. This is considered one of the best games on the PS3, and it was one of the ones that made me interested in getting the system at all.

I just finished it and it was really a brilliant example of how you can tie video games to story telling in a way that the casual gamer can really appreciate. First of all, it is really amazingly pretty, with great camera work and good transitions between cinematic parts and the parts where you are in control of the action. This is very easy to do wrong, and yet it never once bothered me.

Secondly, the story is fun, with a manly hero and his two love interests that keep the action and dialog moving. It helps that this is one of the few games where your friends actually contribute something to the action. I actually saw them shoot and kill a few badguy. Not enough that they could have gone o the adventure without you, but they seem to at least by trying to help.

I played through on 'easy' since I mostly wanted to see the story, and that was about perfect. There are a few tricky sections that are maybe a bit longer than they should be, but it didn't get in the way. It is notably less frustrating than Little Big Planet... A few retries and a possible glance at a hint guide and the action stuff works out fine. (Jump between trucks? Really.. sigh.. ok, off I go. And so on.)

And it has puzzles. There are jumping and climbing puzzles (Tomb Raider / Assassin's creed style) and there are thinking puzzles, that typically have a clue book associated where you need to figure things out. None of it is terribly hard, and if you pause for a few minutes the game will actually try to give you hints.

Brilliantly controlled and animated I only ran into a couple instances of my character jumping the wrong way or having people get stuck in scenery. And the detail is unfailingly amazing. I'm really delighted that I played through this and it deserves to be called one of the best of the PS3.

The sad state of PC gaming monitors and video cards.

2011-02-13T07:04:00.002-07:00

I've been looking at display options lately, and there has been an interesting change on the monitor market since I last needed to buy something. About 4 years ago I purchased a pair of 24" 1920 x 1200 monitors, and one of them has finally started to die. They where cheap, with florescent backlights and they put out a lot of heat... but they look nice and they've served me well.

So what options exist now? It turns out you can buy a 24" monitor with a 1920 x 1080 "hd" panel for as low as about $200. For a little bit more they are nicely styled and seem to be really very nice. But somewhere in the past few years we misplaced about 10% of the pixels and decided that gamers should go wide-screen and chase the movie industry.

Ok, I liked those pixels, but the new screens are a lot thinner and it has allowed for some really cool industrial design and cut down dramatically on the heat and electricity usage. And if you want something nice you can go to a 27" panel with Dell or Apple and get back to a respectable 2560 x 1440. These are cose to $1000, and in the case of Apple you have to switched to display port as your only choise for inputs.

So what do video cards have to do with this, other than being the thing you plug into your monitor? Well, it turns out that very few review sites publish numbers on resolutions as low as your new 24" monitor, since it just isn't worth it. And keep in mind, that any framerate above 60fps is lost because they monitors are not capable of displaying it. Yeah, that 200fps you've got on quake isn't actually useful. Bummer, eh?

So, lets look at what it takes to press your performance higher than it matters on a normal monitor, with some adjustments for the face that few people measure against 1080 screens. Pulled detail from Anantech's review screens. I'm going to assume you want things to look as awesome a possible... so these are worst-case numbers.
Crysis Warhead: GTX 580 $500
Civ 5: (why would you care? Spend money on your cpu) GTX 560. $250
Battlefield BadCompany 2: Radeon 5850 $170
Mass Effect 2: GTX 460 $130
Modern Warfare 2: GTS 450 $90 (3dguru.com)

This poses an interesting problem for the future of gaming as far as the video card companies are concerned. If they want to continue selling the high margin cards in the $200+ price ranges one of three things needs to happen.
1) They need better resolution monitors at a decent price.
2) They need games to be less efficient or more absurd in their use of GPU power. There is a balance here because in an ideal world you want it to only run well on your high-end card, but to run better on your cards than your competitors cards at each price point. Thank god for competition.
3) They need to market to synthetic benchmarks instead of things people can actually see in their homes. (Really terrible models names can also be helpful here.)

Think about it when you buy your next video card. I sure am. But since I'm crazy, I'm trying to figure out how to get a better monitor so I can justify a more expensive video card...

Microsoft, I see what you did there...

2011-02-06T00:07:00.003-07:00

For a while I've had problems with the DVD drive on my main PC. Fortunately, due to the magic of Steam I haven't had to worry about it much. However, I recently purchased a game that actually came on physical media and so I figured I'd poke at it again.

Apparently Windows 7 is so complicated that rather than provide any instructions on how to fix things, you download a 'magical' executable and it goes and fixes everything for you. As a sysadmin from a prior life this kind of scares the hell out of me, but ok, I'll try it.

Whats better than a magical tool that fixes stuff for you? One that throws different errors, thats what.

Games of 2011. 3DS vs PSP2 vs ?

2011-01-27T09:35:00.004-07:00

The two biggest announcements in gaming for 2011 have just come out, one right after the other. Both are focused on mobile gaming that is incredibly more powerful than the current generation of dedicated hardware.

In one corner we have the Nintendo 3DS. The various Nintendo DS versions combine to be one of the best selling game devices of all times, and to follow up on it they've added 3D viewing that doesn't require glasses, cameras, lots of sensors and a nice screen and processor. There are a lot of questions left about how good the 3D actually is for prolonged periods of time, but it is an interesting gimmick and the release date is Q1.

And today Sony announced the PSP2, a follow up to the surprisingly unpopular PSP. It has fantastic processing power, cameras, sensors and a really really nice screen. And it comes out very late in the year.

Both of them keep their ties to the retail market by selling their software on cartridges, and although they are offering a lot of other feature, their biggest selling point is the dedicated controls and software focused on gamers, and the price points will be around $250 (PSP2 not yet announced). They are also both a bit chunky and not something you will easily tuck into your pocket.

So the kicker here, is that cell phones and tablets are increasing at an incredible rate. Dual core processors with good 3D acceleration will be common in several form-factors by the end of the year, making them very competitive with dedicated systems and a year later there won't even be a comparison. At the same time the user base is so much larger that developer are motivated to sell games at lower prices to larger audiences and to take advantage of electronic distribution. I suspect that android phones and the iphone5 are going to completely lay waste to the mobile gaming market.

I wish Sony and Nintendo the best of luck, and I hope that the early adopter enjoy their devices while they look back on purchasing the last dedicated gaming handhelds.

book Review: Gauntlgrym: Neverwinter, Book I

2011-01-22T22:53:00.002-07:00

RA Salvatore returns to the world where he makes his money.

Drizzt is back, but this book is the most fundamental change in Salvatore's part of the Forgotten Realms universe that I recall. Although there is a time gap that leaves him an 'out' to go back and revise history a little bit if people don't like where he is going, this was a surprising turn. When he finishes, you can tell that he is really ready to start exploring a very different world.

Along the way we meet the old friends, and we tie up a lot of loose ends from previous books. The action is excellent, as always, and I can't help but be amazed at how the magic of the world is treated. It is magic, yes, but he gives just the right tone to let you realize that it is also just the kind of thing that happens in this setting, and nothing particularly special.

Not a book you can describe in much detail without ruining the experience, but for anyone who recalls a the dark elf and his friends with a certain fondness, they shouldn't miss this one.

Resistance 2 (PS3)

2011-01-22T13:41:00.003-07:00

Wow, I guess this is the first game I've 'finished' on the PS3. It is also the only console FPS I've enjoyed enough to play all the way through to the end. I suppose that should count for something.

The controls are excellent, and the graphics are top notch. The story could use some help, but you don't play this genre with high hopes for an epic plot line.

It seems strange that after putting a handful of hours into this it feels a little bit hollow, but it held enough attraction to get me to come back for a few nights in a row and clear the path to the end. And I'm happy with that.

What amazes me, now that I think of it, is that I keep buying shooters on consoles... but it is good to see that it has finally paid off.

I'm a little curious about trophies on the PS3 and how they compare with Xbox Achievements. I ended up with 13 of 39, with a single silver and a single gold (for winning the game). So, it seems to be very similar in generosity to the xbox world.

Assassins Creed Brotherhood (xbox 360)

2011-01-20T11:34:00.004-07:00

So, one of the popular games of 2010 that I didn't get around to playing in time finally made it to the top of my stack. It definitely should have gotten there sooner.

So the story? It has 2. There is the over-story that I couldn't care less about. Fortunately it is less than an hour of the gameplay (as I did it, anyway) and not terribly offensive in a platform jumping sort of way.

But the Assassin part of things? Awesome.

So here is how you play it. Go do the plot missions, just one after the other, up until it unlocks the brotherhood stuff. Then you need to do one more so that you can collect some friendly assassins and send them out on jobs. Then just go wild exploring the world. I had an absolute blast with that part. Once you've finished fixing Rome you can go finish up the plot missions and end the game.

It seems that my new hobby is completing games with the lowest number of achievements possible. I don't go out of my way to collect stuff, and I don't play online multiplayer.. so I got through this one with a shockingly low score of 400/1000. But I had a really fun time.

What did they do wrong? It has some missions, notably the ones with Leonardo, that require you to figure out the 'puzzle' they hid in the timing of guards and placement of walls. Meh. And in a few cases they limit your options and remove your brotherhood or choice of weapons... that part felt really cheap. Particularly since by that late in the game you really should be enjoying your awesome brotherhood.

What did they do right? The thing looks bloody amazing. A bit annoying when it is dark, and it isn't without the occasional camera view of death, but 99% of the time it looks great and plays fantastic. And when you finish the game? They drop you back into the fun part to go goof around.

I played the first one on the PC and couldn't figure out why anyone would like it.. this game is one that any action/sandbox gamer can have a blast with. Not a challenge, but a really good time.

PS3 initial impressions

2011-01-02T09:00:00.003-07:00

Due to a kind wife and the Christmas excuse I'm now the owner of a PS3. I'm extremely late to having the 3rd console in my house, but I'd been wanting it for a while and I finally gave in and begged for it. I also picked up a collection of games while I was in the US and I'm looking forward to playing through the hits of the past few years.

For anyone still left on the fence, I wanted to post some impressions, and in the future I'll no doubt comment on specific games.

First off, why the heck did I wait? This is everything the hardware of the xbox should have been 3 or 4 years ago... totally silent. Apparently the xbox slim isn't bad, but I haven't got one of those to compare against. This thing is an amazing bit of silent black box hiding behind my monitor. Unlike the Microsoft chainsaw sitting (turned off) next to it.

Regions? Bah. Again this is what the sane xbox should have been, I bought the hardware in Switzerland and it can play games from the US, or Germany, or.. wherever. Whats better? It has the power converter built in, and according to what I've seen online it can run on any current. Wow, a game console that can move between countries with you. Awesome.

Ergonomics? The box is light and tiny, but who cares about the ergonomics of a box. The controller is very light, and so far has caused less hand pain than the xbox monster. On the other hand, I haven't had any really long gaming sessions, but I'm happy to hold out hope for this one.

Games? I'm mostly interested in the exclusives, and I picked Infamous for the first game. So far it is what Crackdown 2 should have been.. but I've broken the 6th mission and that is a bit frustrating. More to come.

Move? Ok, so I splurged and got the 'move' kit with the demo disk. I haven't got any full move titles, but based on the reviews I'm not missing anything. I didn't pay much extra for it, and so far it isn't worth having... but the tech is amusing and I'm holding out hope. Also, I'll never have room for a Kinect while I live in Switzerland, so this is what I get, apparently.

So far, I'm delighted, and I've even run a blu-ray disk through it... again, no region problems. It drives a little old 24" monitor like a champ and I'm looking forward to some other games spinning up in the near future. Happy 2011 to me.

Book Review: Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card

2010-12-28T08:45:00.003-07:00

OSC is back, writing books that don't involve his faith, and involve the abuse of children. I say this with the deepest appreciation and gratitude, because Ender's game is one of my all time favorites. The target audience for this is 'young adult', but it is nearly 700 pages long, so he is a bit optimistic, but I do hope the book gets a lot of readers.

It is a 'coming of age' story, of kids with super-powers, albeit ones of pretty limited use. And it has a few twists and turns, but not many. Probably the most interesting things is how OSC decides to deal with time-travel. You could probably shorten the book to something that looks like 'the way it should have ended' for lord of the rings. But its fun enough and a very quick read.

Book Review: Tom Clancy's Dead or Alive

2010-12-28T08:35:00.003-07:00

Tom Clancy's Dead or Alive, written by Grant Blackwood is an adequate book. It brings us back to everyone's favorite Clancy character, Jack Ryan. Jack lost his job as President of the US to a moron and it is up to him to set the country to rights. At the same time we bring in what we've learned from the rest of the Tom Clancy universe, and that is that small groups of people who kill terrorists are fun. So a new organization is setup, with the blessing of Jack, but without involving him, letting us follow people around the globe shooting bad people, or at least, people. And because Tom writes cold war books, not legal thrillers... these guys don't follow laws, they follow hunches and then use violence to solve their mysteries.

Because Jack Ryan is so beloved, we get to involve his son, Jack Ryan in the whole mess. In case you are wondering, Jack Ryan is just a younger version of Jack Ryan... so you can pick up the series at any point and it makes sense, right?

In imitating the Tom Clancy style we see frequent references to brand names of the devices that are being used. This was one of Tom's tricks for realism, but it seems to be half-hearted, or possibly the result of product placement in some cases. And when they talk about computers or cryptography, just pretend it is a fantasy book talking about magic and let it go.... do not try to learn anything from this book about math and science. Or, for that matter, politics, terrorism, or securing prisoners.

It wasn't a bad book, but it was clearly stretched out a bit to be an impressive $30 lump when printed out in hardback. I had the kindle edition (about the same price as the hard back, but it did migrate from a kindle 2 to a kindle 3 in the middle perfectly... kindle++ publishers--)

Basically, if you really wonder what is happening in the Tom Clancy branded universe and you've realized how terrible the spinoff series are... this is marginally less terrible and somewhat more likely. And if you want to know the ending? It ends the same as all of his other books.

My Game of the year 2010

2010-12-12T22:58:00.004-07:00

That last blog title wasn't any good at all. But I've got a few minutes to lay down my favorites early in the 'GOTY' season. And I think it starts with a brief summary of how I look at games. I play single player, and I've got a preference for role playing games and first person shooters. I don't care about the length of the game, so much as the experience... and I kind of hate the xbox controller.

I was going through my list and found that I've purchased / played 21 games this year that came out in 2010, and rather a pile of stuff that I got on sale but with 2009 release dates. I've been really good to the economy, particularly Steam, Amazon, and whatever shipping company brings my stuff in from the US.

This was a year that had incredible promise, and some games that just fell short of what could have been. Shooters where hit particularly hard, with Medal of Honor and Call of Duty:Blackops both failing at their single player game. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 may have actually been the best of them, but that wasn't saying much.

And for 'role playing' Fable 3 escaped from its developers and lacked the spark that made prior games fun, and Alpha Protocol took the stealthy way out of its publisher but died of bugs and poor polish instead of offering a new take on the genre.

But looking back I came up with a top 4 games that deserve particular mention as being the very best 2010 had to offer.

4. Fallout New Vegas. This wasn't as good as Fallout 3, and in reality, it was no less of an expansion pack than Dragon Age: Awakenings. But, it was still an epic of story telling in a game, and it provides a sense of an open world and a vast scope of things that you can go do. This is exactly what an open world RPG should be, filled with good writing and variety.

3. Civilization 5. A classic series, tuned to be a little more approachable and finally given a UI that doesn't look like a spreadsheet. I'm curious to see how it grows up with patches and how it benefits from faster computers over the next year or 2, but as with all prior Civilization games, this is a game of the year for the next couple of years and has more replay value than any other game out there... with the possible exception of #1.

2. Mass Effect 2. This is a role playing game, with some shooter elements, that goes the opposite of the direction Fallout takes. Instead of being open, it is a very tight closed world, and they use that to make the story dramatic and deep. You know you are following a relatively tight path, but it still seems like your choices have meaning. And by making it tight you get a very high level of polish and cinematic excellence. This is a movie that you become part of.

1. Minecraft. It is alpha software right now, written in java and the graphics don't compare with Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. The face that you can tell what language it is written in is kind of embarrassing, and technically it hasn't been released yet. It has effectively no plot, and the instructions are on a wiki page that isn't maintained by the developers. But it has the simple building blocks you need to make your own game and let your own creativity run wild. I'm pretty sure things will go horribly wrong and it will turn into huge disappointment in 2011, but there is the slightest hope that this will be a game for the ages, and for now it is a hell of a lot of fun.

Game of the year Awards 2010

2010-12-12T13:50:00.002-07:00

The Spike VGA awards just kicked off what should be a game of the year award by some publication every day from now until, well probably February. I'm a little concerned that I've played a large percentage of the games that they had under consideration.

For Game of the year they selected Red Dead Redemption. Which was a neat idea, but had some serious issues with dragging you through the plot in the one way they would accept. Not chosen was:

Call of Duty Black Ops: which wasn't good at all for single player.
Halo Reach: which as very full of Halo and I can't get more than an hour or 2 into it without being bored out of my mind.
Mass Effect 2: which was freaking brilliant.
God of War 2: which is ps3 only... sad me.

And for the Xbox 360 only:

Mass effect 2 : still awesome, and deserved the win for this category.
Alan Wake: sounded horrible so I didn't play it.
Fable 3: Which wasn't nearly as good as Fable 2... how do they keep getting worse?
Halo Reach: meh.

PC Games... .all 5 of these are winners!:

Starcraft 2: Ok, the single player was a blast. But you've got to be crazy to join the multiplayer mayhem.
Fallout New Vegas: More bugs than New York bedsheets... but a blast.
Mass Effect 2: Like the xbox version, except that you can aim.
Civilization 5: Shockingly good at what it is.. which is an awesome time-sink. In 2 years when I upgrade my computers this will be my favorite game again.

I'll probably write my own list soon, but for now I'm happy to see if anything surfaces that I missed the first time around. And if all goes well I'll pick them all up during the Christmas Steam Sale... I've already got a small pile of xbox 360 stuff waiting in my stocking.

Great London Storm of 2010

2010-12-05T08:33:00.004-07:00

This london trip has been really amazing. Not at all in a good way really.

Weeks ago, I booked my flight to london. Leave Wednesday in the

morning, just late enough that I should be able drop my kid off and

make it with plenty of time. I booked my return flight around 11 from

Heathrow so that there would be some hope of actually getting there.

Turns out that it can be really hard to get from Victoria to

Paddington and on to Heathrow early in the morning due to random

closures and whatever else.

So, the day came, and I was up around 6am to check on things and start

rushing through the morning. And BA canceled the outgoing flight.

Thanks guys.

Ok, the internets helped me out here, and easyjet was able to come up

with a flight that would get me into Luton airport bright and early,

and they had a better return trip that was earlier and out of Gatwick

so I got that too and canceled the BA return. This flight was

actually a bit earlier than the BA flight so I had to race more that

I'd like but I got in without any major excitement. Then I got there

and they delayed the flight a bit. All of that worked really nicely.

Oh, but it turns out that Luton is actually a 75 minute bus ride away

from civilization (aka Victoria station). I got in and got to walk

around London for a bit in the afternoon during the epic storm of

London 2010. There wasn't any snow on the ground, and it was

certainly chilly, but not bad. I even took a little walk to go look at the British Museum since I haven't been there in a decade or so.

Thursday morning there was a little bit of snow, probably an inch in

places within the city. Snow was still a bit of a problem, but at

some point Gatwick re-opened and it looked like the city was going to

figure their business out.

Fortunately I booked the nearby Park Plaza Victoria hotel, which has a

lot of problems, but an excellent location for what I needed.

Thursday and Friday went pretty much as expected with plenty of

quality time at the office. I didn't go do anything interesting on

Thursday night, but on Friday I ran off to some Mall out west and got

in a nice walk and a good dinner. Coming back I asked for a 3:50 am

wakeup call. That would give me just enough time to make the first

gatwick express from Victoria and I'd make my 6:30 am flight with no

sweat.

So, I didn't sleep well, and fortunately I was awake at 3 something in

the morning... never did get that wakeup call. Got ready, ran off to

the station, grabbed a really terrible filled croissant and ran to hop

on the Gatwick express. Which was closed. Ok, that isn't the end of

the world, but it puts a real crimp in my sure-fire way to catch my

flight. The people busily not running the train suggested that I take

the coach or a cab. Ok, bus ride to the airport it is. No, they

don't know where it actually is. Walked through the normal places to

get on a bus, and ended up talking to a bus driver who pointed me off

to the coach station. Front door closed, but if you walk around you

can find the tiny little waiting room where they start running busses

to Gatwick at 7. Not so good.

Back out into the rain. Yeah, it was raining the whole time, and

pretty cold. Anyway, found a taxi driver who gave me the price to get

to gatwick 120gbp.. and then said he wouldn't take me. By this time

it was getting iffy to make the flight anyway, so I gave up and went

to my office.

Fortunately people showing up at 5-something AM isn't nearly

surprising enough for the security folks so they let me in and I

camped in the office for a couple of hours. Watched some TV, surfed a

little, book another flight home... ok, and I'm upset that the massage

chair was broken and they've got a terrible pool table. I'm going to

file a complaint about the facilities. Anyway, 1:30 PM flight on

british airways (kind of like the one I canceled earlier) to get me

home.

Still bloody early in the morning, but the office was getting boring

and I hate to miss yet another flight due to some bit of

transportation being broken along the way to the airport. Victoria to

Paddington worked out nicely and then grabbed the Heathrow express to

the airport. Got here at a few minutes after 10, and I'd had a chance

to grab a mc-meal along the way so I'm probably not going to pass out.

Not from hunger anyway. So, did you know that heathrow wants you to

be here 2 hours early like every other airport in the world, but for

short-haul flights they only let you check in luggage 90 minutes

before the takeoff time. Not boarding.. take-off. I'm guessing the

restaurants inside don't appreciate this, and as a person who likes to eat food cooked on the ground, I'm not really excited about this policy

either.

When the time for checking my baggage finally arrived and went surprisingly

smoothly. Got my boarding pass, checked my passport a few times and

ditched my bag. On my way into the security line I finally found a

trash can, which have become a very scarce thing in London these days. I got stopped at boarding pass control to have my backpack

swabbed. No problem.. Beep. What? Really? Yeah. They are very

sorry and everything but they need to call a supervisor. He showed up

in a few minutes and he had them re-swab my bag. The machine that

beeped was no dead, and the other machine couldn't detect anything.

So, it turns out I had barely crossed the threshold for whatever the

active ingredient in hand sanitizer is. Fortunately I don't actually

wash my hands, so I'm not a terrorist or anything. But, now that I've

tripped the alarm and had a supervisor called I get to go to the front

of the line. We cut through security, x-rayed my stuff and

metal-detected me.. all good so far. Funny, but the supervisor had a

lot more trouble getting through that part than me.

Then I got to go over into the little box in the corner of the

building and stand like an idiot for a minute. Now, I think it is

worth noting that out of shame about the number of deserts I had on

this trip, I did a few push-ups. Wow, apparently it helped, since

just 3 days of this and already some random guy wants to see my junk.

That little box? It is made by Rapiscan, and is a backscatter x-ray

machine. So yeah, they took naked pictures of me and then sent me on

my way.

I did get a chance to grab a bagle over by A1, for anyone familiar with LHR terminal 5, and it was decent. And then they eventually announced the location for my flight and I was able to board and go home. No on-flight excitement which was a nice relief and then we unloaded into the ever-efficient Zurich airport. Apparently multiple planes decided to land at around the same time, so immigration was packed full of people, and only had 5 lines open to handle passports. Normally this isn't a problem since the swiss are efficient, but one of those flights appears to have come from 'not-sure-we-want-you-istant' or Germany or something. It took almost 45 minutes to get through imigration, which is about 45 minutes longer than it ever has before. After that things really turned around. My bag was sitting on the carousel and I didn't get stopped by the customs people. It turns out I was smugging in about 30chf worth of candy and teddy bears, which is safely under the limit... but I got back to Zurich!

I'm really glad to be home.

Game Review: Fable 3 - xbox 360

2010-11-28T11:54:00.002-07:00

So, I've just finished Fable 3, probably with the lowest achievement score possible, a mere 380 out of 1000 which was kind of a tribute to not either reading the achievement list or 'grinding' quests for experience and money.

The game is basically split into two parts. The first part is in keeping with the traditional Fable model of being an easy role-playing game with a bit of a sense of humor where you wander around and get dragged through quests. You can get distracted by a number of things including starting one or more families, finding silver keys to open chests, opening wacky stone doors and buying property. The main plot line is actually fairly short, but there is an almost endless opportunity to get distracted running little quests around.

The second half of the game comes after you take over the kingdom where you fight to defend it against a foe I won't name. Its a pretty stupid foe anyway, and it leads you down a bit of a choose-your-own-poison game where you make a variety of choices with moral and monetary consequences.. then you have a big finale fight.. and get dropped back into the game.

What are the interesting parts about the implementation of the game? Its an xbox game, so it has some issues with texture loading, and it also has some really strange slow-down issues. Other than that and some issues with the dog being an idiot, the game does actually work. Combat is extremely shallow since there is very little penalty for dieing, and if you use magic the game doesn't require any skill at all. And, to help out particularly masochistic adventurers the only way to get to a map, select a quest, or change your equipment is to go into a special menu where you need to walk around and interact with items instead of using a menu. This crappy replacement for a menu system is a way to let inefficient design lengthen the game without providing any value.

All of the dreams of Fable being a living universe or making you even care about the story seems to have been throw out, in exchange you get a simple and bland game that doesn't offer much to recommend it.

Game review: Fallout 3 New Vegas - PC

2010-11-18T11:51:00.003-07:00

I've completed Fallout NV, which is basically an remake of 2008's Fallout 3, with a different story and setting and at least as many bugs, possibly more. The story is about as good as the first game, and the new setting has at least a little bit of color in it. Mostly the secret to why this game is wonderful is that I haven't been playing the old one for a little while and I kind of miss it.

If you liked the first game, buy this one, it is more of the same and about time to go back into that world. If you haven't played the first game, buy that one first as it is cheap and should be patched into a much more playable state.

That aside, how is it? Well, the engine for this game originally came from Oblivion (2006), so it should run on your computer. It is also notoriously ugly and buggy. Not only does stuff fall through the world from time to time, but people act strangely and for some reason the scripting engine is pretty frail. On the other hand, Bethesda hires people to make sure their worlds are absolutely full of fun stuff to go. Potentially dozens of hours of fun stuff. Stuff so fun you can put up with it being ugly and buggy.

I won the game last night (I'll rule Vegas now, thank you very much), and tonight I started back in to try to get a different ending. Unfortunately something is broken and I've hit a game stalling bug. I should be furious.. instead I'm writing a review saying you should buy this game, unless you work for Bethesda. In which case you should stop surfing the internet and patch you damn game.

This is a first person shooter and a role playing game, piled into one. There are lots of stats and they influence fighting and non-combat options. Your ability to aim the gun down the sights helps, but there are dice rolls going on as well. There is also a mode you can do to let the computer take over even more of the fighting for brief periods of time, called VATS. If this sounds at all interesting and you like a good story driven RPG, you'll love it.

Going on for pages about the bugs, annoying npc chatter, damnable radio, graphics, texture loading, lock picking minigame, unclimbable hills, broken pathfinding for companions, and other stuff really misses the point. Play this game. This steaming pile of software bugs may very well be the best game of the year for RPG fans (or maybe Mass Effect 2.. but that is very good company to keep).

For the record, I won it with 52% of the achievements according to steam. I had 100% skills in lock picking, speaking, and science. I was pretty good at all kinds of shooting, repairs and stealth. I think it worked out well.

Game Review: Call of Duty: Blackops

2010-11-12T12:50:00.002-07:00

This was the other big shooter of 2010, and the last big shooter of 2010. And, with any luck, the last big shooter until someone comes up with a better way to tell a story in a first person shooting game.

It is set around the time of Vietnam, although it jumps around a bit due to the story-telling model they use. Basically you spend the vast majority of the single player campaign being interrogated. I don't mean that your character does, but you, the player, spend about 5 hours with bright lights, repetitive meaningless questions and pain. You occasionally may experience glimpses of call of duty style gameplay, that sneaks in between long cut scenes that don't make any sense and try to trigger seizures.

The gameplay itself isn't bad, and it is very much derivative of the location trigger based scripted shooter that call of duty has been for a long time. When in doubt, charge closer to the enemies.. it is the only way to make them stop spawning. If you get lost, charge in a random direction until dead, then try again. Usually it is obvious, but I did break the game in 2 places where it basically just got confused, and a few times I was the confused one unable to figure out which balcony didn't lead to a fatal fall.

You only have control for a few minutes at a time (with a few longer exceptions) and then the game takes control away from you to do something 'cinematic' and annoying. Typically it involves you being beaten unconscious followed by a return to being interrogated.

Is it better than Medal of Honor? It might be, which is a very low bar to clear. I'd strongly recommend Modern Warfare 1, and possibly 2 as a replacement.

The post-credit roll 'game' is pretty funny, but otherwise the single player component of this game is grade B at best.

Game Review: Medal of Honor (2010)

2010-10-14T13:30:00.003-06:00

Ok, so I got it working and I played all the way through it. According to steam this took 5 hours, including some time spent with the dog and an extra 45 minutes to work around a bug, and since the electronic copy is $60, thats a bit short for a single player game. The multiplayer seems ok, but I really don't get into those things very often.

I should sandwich some problems between the good things, but really it isn't that balanced. The second mission took me about 10 tries to realize that it was broken and that I needed to start over. At one point I managed to fall through the world, which was pretty cool. The rest of the time a guy guarded the door until I either started over or stabbed him to death. Since he was my friend it made me restart after that happened. Turns out, you start out with 4 allies and if you misplace one at any time, you can't finish the level. And yet if this happens it will happily checkpoint and safe progress past the point of failing (you don't know until one specific scene). Sigh, had to start over from the beginning and be more careful about keeping track of my guys. Since they are normally immortal this is a bit weird. This was really the bug that drove me crazy, for the most part the rest of the game worked as intended.

Intended? What the hell is with taking control away from the player. The game frequently has something scripted it would like to show you and it will take away your control and drag you to the right place to see things. Frequently messing up your gun and being really frustrating. The other biggest design issue is that the place is littered with invisible walls that you cannot pass through. This kind of stuff is really terrible for breaking the immersion of the game. There doesn't appear to be any bullet penetration, although some things are destructible. Oh, and in most of these games you are limited on ammunition so you need to constantly rotate through enemy weapons and be flexible. In this game you can always ask your friends to reload you on ammo (even when they are yelling in the voice-over that they are out), so you are punished if you pick up another weapon. Your pistol even has explicitly unlimited ammo so you don't even need to bother to ask your buddies for bullets. And, the pistol can win most fights...it has a super fast reload animation and better stopping power than most of your other options.

Ok, so the game doesn't have a plot except that there is a zombie general who yells at a nice guy back in base and neither of them seems essential to what is going on. What is going on? You and a few friends are murdering your way across a mountain and that part works really pretty well. You switch perspectives frequently so it doesn't matter who is who... and you have a few strange missions where you spend time in a helicopter or riding an ATV. Guns feel good, it is generally pretty and there is a nice variety of missions. Thats really all you can say about it.

The last scene says 'this is not the end', and yet, it is. This isn't a game that will get materially better with patches. They killed this franchise, and it isn't going to get a Medal of Honor for the effort.

Final Score? 2/5

Oh, and despite a big pre-launch promotion effort, it doesn't have any steam support for achievements, or support for the EA achievement system used by bioware. Weird.

Instant review: Medal of Honor

2010-10-12T22:54:00.002-06:00

Wow, this one seems messed up by the numbers for the launch.

Downloaded via steam last night, since it apparently didn't decide to pre-download. Got up early this morning to play for a bit and it wanted to spend 30 minutes downloading a patch, that it also should have done for itself.

Launched the game, watched the intro movie and as soon as I was handed control my dude decided to rotate to his left at a rapid pace... no matter what else I did. So that isn't terribly playable.

Multiplayer fired up and asked for a key. Steam helpfully pre-populated it with half of the key... and if you need to get the rest it isn't available via shift-tab like expected, you have to go get it out of the single-player game options. Back in.. and match making failed and put me alone in a server. In this case, at least my controls worked so I got to walk around and shoot some pots. Awesome way to spend $60. Time to head to work. Mission not accomplished.

I'm a bit conflicted since I'd like to play my 4-6 hour single player game... but the reviews have been pretty damning about the quality and plot, combine that with the tech difficulties I've seen and this thing is already shaping up to be a real stinker. Fortunately Arcania/Gothic 4 is shipping in Europe now and is also apparently terrible. But there is hope, Fallout is on the horizon.

Rating so far? (Medal of Honor Via Steam) 0/5. Broken.

Game review: Demigod

2010-10-08T12:28:00.002-06:00

Impulse, the online game distribution system run by stardock recently decided to promote their Demigod game, and the low price finally got me to give it a try.

It is, in some sense a real time strategy game, but of what is probably the 'new school' of RTS design. This is a bit confusing since the newest and most popular game in the genre is Starcraft 2 which is extremely old-school. In this game you control a single character, who is a bit of a 'hero' or 'demigod'. The game plays out with a balanced force of puny little allies and foes that fight more or less to a standstill. What matters is the stronger demigods walking about and throwing their weight into the fight.

Not only are you a potent fighter in your own right, but you earn money you can either spend to buy equipment for yourself, or to upgrade the ground forces that grind constantly against your foes. You also level up yourself, generally by wiping out scads of little guys, and can improve your own skills. Once you get strong enough you drive over and destroy your enemies base.

Graphically the game is pretty bad. It is 18 months old, but that is no excuse for having a washed out and boring display. Everything else seems fine, but I haven't been terribly impressed. At $6 its worth goofing around with and exploring, but there are much better RTS games out in the world. See my previous mention of how much I loved Dawn of War 2, which has many of the same ideas, but surrounded by a story and quality graphics.

For people who say this is meant to be a multiplayer game.. I'm happy for them and I hope they enjoy it. If you play mostly alone... its average at best.

Minecraft

2010-10-06T14:02:00.001-06:00

There is a new game sweeping the internets, one that is only in 'Alpha' but that has already caught a pretty significant following. I was a bit late to send them my 10 euro, but send it I did, to www.minecraft.net.

What is this unfinished, and undenyably ugly game? What has made it catch on so quickly among such a fickle crowd? You build stuff with blocks. Thats it. Hideously ugly, shockingly unfriendly as a game, and almost entirely without provided documentation. An embarassingly simple tech tree, no useful save game system and a generated world with a plot that is "build stuff, hide from monster at night".

The mechanics of the game consist of mining. Basically hitting trees, animals or the ground until they give up their block shaped essense. You can combine these to form more complicated tools to use for hitting stuff with, or a few other simple items. And you can drop the stuff you mine and make it attach where you point it. For example, you can digg up a 'block' of sand and it pops into your inventory. Then you can stick it to something else. That is essentially that.

Yeah, its awesome and it preys on your block building needs. Your need to make your structure just a little bit cooler, and a little bit more yours. See below for the mountain I hollowed out, topped with a tower that reaches above the clouds. And down on the ground? Yes, a tribute to the pyramids, crowned with glass (you bake sand in a furnace...). And at the end, standing on my fortress walls, hoping the zombies decide to stay outside tonight.

Lookup up from outside my fortress walls, at my tower on the hill.

Looking out of the windows atop the tower to see my kingdom.

Foreground pyramid. That pink this is my 'hand'.

Can you see them? Those evil little suckers are waiting next to the tree to kill me.

Game Review: Civilization 5

2010-09-25T10:00:00.002-06:00

I'm pretty sure it isn't fair to review this game in the first 6 months after it comes out, but I'm going to try anyway. If you've ever played a civ game before and liked it, this game is for you. If you played and couldn't figure out what the heck was going on... this may be the version for you.

The glorious spreadsheet as a game UI is gone, replaced by a tooltip-riffic gloriously obvious interface to drag you through running a civilization that can stand the test of time. Only very rarely does the UI get cluttered and in the way, which is a dramatic change from the past. Everything is clearly explained and the advisors provide reasonably good advice to help out new players.

The graphics are also amazing, and the hex-grid works out nicely to have thing map smoothly onto a gorgeous set of tiles. And under that lovely exterior beats a heart of tech trees, diplomacy and war that will delight all but the most twitchy of gamers.

There are a few rough spots, most notably the performance. I've found that the 'thinking time' required for other players is pretty substantial, heading up towards 30 seconds between turns even on a reasonable map (and decent computer). Much like past civ games I expect this game to be reborn in 2 years when I drop a few thousand on a new gaming machine and everything occurs instantly.

Other complains are that the path-finding AI and the lack of unit stacking sometimes cause things to go haywire and there isn't any way to undo a move. Units that are auto-moving also tend to tick off people by walking through their territory, which isnt' very nice of them. These minor quibbles aside, the game is well worth purchasing.

And for people who are achievement driven, it has Steam achievements (all versions use steam, even the store bought DVD copy). I'm currently at 28 of 120... so presumably at least 28 of them are really easy to get.

Game Review: StarCraft 2 (single player)

2010-09-11T13:42:00.003-06:00

I just finished the single player campaign for Starcraft 2 and it was really good. Without the cinematics I'm pretty sure I would have given up much earlier, and I really don't have any desire to go back and try to get more achievement points, replay stuff to perfection or play it on harder than normal difficulty. But I'm really happy and the money for the game was well spent none the less.

This is a traditional real-time strategy game. Traditional in the sense that almost nothing has changed in the 12 years since the first one came out. You mine resources, you build bases and you construct units. At some point you grab a bunch of the units and charge head-long into a fight. Repeat as needed.

With excellent level design and some tricks they've managed to slightly increase the variety of missions, but only slightly. All that said, it is a fun game on its own merits, with good graphics and sound and a good enough AI that everything works.

Then they wrap a little bit of long-term stuff around it letting you make some technology choices so that you can feel your army improving between fights. But most importantly they work all of it into a really fun space opera. It is the plot between the missions in the game that makes it worth playing all the way to the end and really brings the experience together.

Great job guys. In a few years when part 2 comes out I may be ready to sign up for another round. And I'm really happy I gave in and bought this one.

In closing, for serious gamers only... here is the song they play at the end of the credits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUqG5gB8nbI

Book Review: The Lost Fleet: Dauntless

2010-09-05T06:38:00.002-06:00

Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet: Dauntless (book 1 of a series) was really good, and I knocked it back on my recent trip to the US. Perfect kindle conversion and great for reading on a plane.

Getting to a slightly deeper analysis, the idea is that Black Jack Geary is rescued by the Fleet after being stuck in a life pod for a hundred years. He was the first victim of an attack by evil people and the war has continued since that time, with him being venerated as a hero. Action ensues.

So, I've spoiled about 3 pages of the book so far, and since I'd like for people to read it, I'll stop with the direct spoilers. What I really liked was that Mr Campbell understands that one of the keys to good science fiction is to pick a 'magical' technologies to stir into the plot and then use it to show some interesting aspect of human nature. This he does brilliantly while keeping up a fast action pace.

What would happen if you fought a war of attrition with an evenly matched foe? It wouldn't be good for your institutional knowledge that is for sure. It probably wouldn't be good for your mortal high ground after a few generations either. So what if you could grab a person from the early part of the war, full of skill and tradition, and drop them into the degenerate times? Well, probably nothing. So to give him an advantage and give the story someplace to start our hero is just famous enough that people give him a chance.

Its an interesting tale. The second books is similarly good although seems to be setting up a technical trick for the third.

iTunes 10 installer failure. Cannot write config.msi

2010-09-05T06:31:00.003-06:00

The exact error is cannot write to e:\config.msi\random_junk. But searching for a few minutes makes me think I'm not the only person to have hit this problem. Yes, this assumes you run windows, because it would be very hard to have this problem on another operating system.

First, it could be file corruption, so I'd recommend finding a couple hours when you don't need your computer. Go to your c: drive (for normal people) and right click on the drive itself. Select properties, tab to 'tools' and select error-checking. Because this is your boot drive it won't happen until you reboot. Reboot.

Try again. If that fails we can try this with the actual fix. You need to open up your c: drive and notice that there is no directory called config.msi. Silly microsoft. Go to 'tools' on the file explorer, then select 'folder options'. From there switch to the 'view' tab, and the important thing to unselect is 'hide protected operating system files'. Then hit 'apply to folders' and 'apply'.

Now you should be able to see the c:\config.msi directory that gives us trouble. Right click on that and select properties. See the box that says read-only that is selected? Un-select that, apply... and install iTunes.

The bad news is that you've now got iTunes installed. The good news is that you apparently wanted that and now its done :)

Book Review: Imager's Intrigue

2010-08-23T11:35:00.002-06:00

I recently had a bit of a plane fight and knocked back a couple of books. One of which that I had been saving up for the trip was the Imager's Intrigue by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

This is the third in the series of the 'Imager's Portfolio'. The short summary is that the main character is an 'imager' basically a spell caster who can make things happen to reality by imagining them. As expected in a hero who has made it through three books, he is good looking, has a lovely wife, is the most powerful imager in the world and is generally brilliant.

So, what could challenge this pinacle of Imaging society? Apparently paperwork and chasing clues in order to unravel a complicated mystery. This mystery stretches across dozens of characters with strange names and eventually results in... everything being ok. I'm pretty sure this is the least impressive Modesitt book ever written, which doesn't mean it is terrible, but I do hope he gets back to writing adventure fiction instead of detective stories.

The character uses his power roughly one time per hundred pages, and spends the rest of the time trying to piece together clues that make even less sense to the reader than to him. And his family life almost forms a chorus, allowing the author to basically recite the same page of text for every 4 or 5 pages of new material. At one point the main character actually delegates the interesting bit of the story to someone else and it happens entirely 'off camera'. For the love of god man, that is just cruel. I hope that future books in this series, should there be any, have Rhennthyl shrugging off his mantle of respectability and authority and imaging up a whole can of whoop-ass on someone. If that isn't how the early reviews read... I'm done with this series.

Review: Split Second - xbox

2010-08-08T13:10:00.003-06:00

So, I just finished blasting through split second after playing it on and off over the past 2 weeks, and its pretty darn good.

The driving game market is really interesting right now. You've got Forza 3, which is really awesome at being a driving game. And you've got mario kart, and apparently blur and a few other racers that are power-up based and more focused on an arcade racer experience. Split/Second is closer to the second class, since most of the charm comes from blowing up the scenery and using it to knock your opponents off of the track.

Technically it isn't bad. It has some clipping issues and a little bit of texture pop-in, but it gives a fantastic sense of speed. This is one of the more adrenaline pounding games I've played in a very long time, so clearly their technology doesn't get in the way of their racing game. And the explosions and dust are really very good, more than enough to convince you that something is going very very wrong on the track.

There are only a few different settings for tracks, and within each one they try hard to keep some variety in terms of both what the traps are and how the road is going to turn, but the game suffers a bit for this. If they had a few more areas to race in and a couple more 'traps' setup I think the races would be a lot more enjoyable, but I made it through the 12-episode season (each episode has 5 races) including some re-plays in the middle and I was happy enough to keep going. So, by that standard I guess they hit is perfectly and kept me happy for just long enough to finish.

If you see this used or on-sale for a decent discount it is well worth picking up. One hint, to help you get through the middle section... points are points and it doesn't matter what episode you earn them in. If you are having trouble take your awesome mid or end-game cars and go back and get first place in a bunch of the races in the first few seasons. That will put you ahead of the game. Oh, and at some point I switched over to listening to music instead of the game, and that toned down some of the excitement, but I think it was a win overall.

Review: Gothic 3 Patch 1.74

2010-08-07T10:44:00.003-06:00

Gothic 3 is clearly deeply loved by its community. Or else it was hated with a fury that will burn for all of eternity. Either way when the developer completely dropped the ball on providing a decent game the players took it upon themselves to fix the poor thing. And I have to say, they appear to have polished it to a very high shine (ref: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI). But, deep inside, it is still disgusting. (I had some performance issues, but they have done a lot of work on the visuals.. it is very scenic, but the character models can be a bit wrecked)

I tried valiantly, including starting over at one point, and before I gave up I resorted to cheating wildly to see what could be salvaged. In the end, nothing. The story is good, and the world itself is really interesting. And after the dedicated twiddling of the community patchers they have the quests working really well. Considering the complexity of the system and that it is absurdly non-linear they've done an amazing job of getting things working this well.

The bad news is that it is so non-linear that parts of it are completely inexplicable. Should you free a town.. if you read the forums, no, not until the last minute. If you read the story, well duh, obviously you should. Then you will get beaten down brutally every time you try.

The beating down part is interesting. The combat is so subject to having one person or the other stunned, that there is no strategy other than to just wack the dude in front of you until they are stunned, then keep them that way. If you set the difficulty higher than 'easy' they can team up on you, which is bad. I tried to play as a wizard, and ... wizards suck. So you've got a ranged attack and its pretty good, but you'll run low on mana quickly and have to fall back on the sword. At the high levels you can get area attacks, but they all center on you and you will _always_ get interrupted trying to cast them. Big powerful mage isn't so cool when he's getting wacked to death with a rusted axe.

On its best days the combat isn't satisfying, and it doesn't have good days that often. But you'll have the opportunity to fight people so frequently that this is pretty much the end of the game and all the good quests in the world cannot save it. Oh, except for the parts where you fight near your allies and accidentally hit one... then you really need to restore the game.

As I posted a few days ago, there are some absolutely wonderful RPGs out in 2010.. this isn't one of them. I've got high hopes for Fallout 3 New Vegas and who knows.. Gothic 4 may break the trend and be the first actually playable Gothic name. One can hope.. but I sure wouldn't pre-order it.

Book Review: I'm a stranger here myself by Bill Bryson

2010-08-07T09:15:00.002-06:00

After the repeated urgings of my boss and something like 3 months of occasional reading I finished _I'm a Stranger Here Myself_ by Bill Bryson. It was suggested to me because I'm an American living in Europe. Now, I've got a few advantages over Bill, mostly that I was older when I left, and I haven't been in Europe for 20 years.. but I can see where he is going with this.

Now, let me be clear, Europe is full of crazy people, and they might even be more densely concentrated in Switzerland (where I live), but it has nothing on America. Bill does a good job of highlighting some of the real Americanisms that stand out, and even though they are newspaper columns that got compiled over 10 years ago, you can still see a lot of things are true. Free drink refills? Super sized meals? Door greeters that are sincerely happy for you and want you to have a nice day? Shopping on weekends or in the evenings? These are things that have not yet made their way over the Ocean, and they are things that an American considers to be their Right.

My wife gave me some grief over reading this book in bed since I kept giggling maniacally and otherwise making distracting choking and laughing noises. Its a fun and light read with very short bite-sized chapters. If you don't mind people wondering why you are laughing it is nearly a perfect travel-book.

I also bought it on the nook-store and read it on my ipad. They've made that store a real pain for people outside the US, but at the time Amazon didn't have it in Kindle format yet. They've since fixed that.

Review: Red Dead Redemption

2010-07-31T13:57:00.004-06:00

So, I recently finished playing Grand Theft Horse after a few fits and starts.

Red Dead Redemption is from the people who've brought us years of Grand Theft Auto games and headlines and it shares a lot of the same architecture, but it is set in the old west. Now, I played this all the way through to the end, which isn't something I've done with the prior GTA games, but I felt conflicted for much of the way.

The game comes off as a sandbox game at first, where you can explore and help or hurt people and just kind of play in the environment, but there actually isn't any benefit at all to doing this. Although I suppose there are some negative consequences to killing random people on the side of the road, which is new for Rockstar. It is notably less fun to have a revolver and a horse than a gun and a car, in that it takes a lot longer to get much of anything done, and travel gets downright annoying. The good news is that you can 'quick travel' pretty effectively with the exception of a couple of missions throughout the story and then an increasing number of them towards the end that requires a lot of very slow travel.

So if you skip the distractions and proceed with the story you'll see what is almost a great narrative. The problem is that it is almost perfectly linear. You don't have a choice except to eventually do all of the missions in the proscribed way. You can't shoot the idiots you want to shoot or change the outcome of the Mexican revolution to the one that you'd prefer. Instead you can decide who to help first... but in the end you have to do it their way. Which is weird, because it honestly doesn't matter much to the ending. They easily could have let you feel some control over your life for a bit longer. Part of the point of interactive fiction is that you are supposed to feel like it is paying attention to you.

At the end of the day its mostly about killing people, and there are a lot of characters that need it, and no, you really can't just take matters into your own sights (as it where) and solve things early.

The setting is dark and gritty, but in the end I think they failed the character and the story telling by making it so unremittingly dark. That isn't what I want from my games, and I'm sure their artistic integrity was at stake, but damn...

From a technical point of view, its got some serious issues with textures popping in, and the controls never feel tight like you'd expect in a shooter. I'd recommend setting the auto-aim and playing it for the story, since that is the best thing it has going for it. I'm also a bit miffed by the work they did to just expand the length of the game with the pointlessly long rides through the desert with people whining the whole way. A directors cut of this thing that is 50% shorter, missing about 2/3rd of the 'mandatory' missions, includes a choice in Mexico and gives you two ending... and its a game of the year. As it is? Buy it used, or go play something fun.

Top 11 PC RPGs to pass the Summer

2010-07-25T10:22:00.004-06:00

We are hitting a slow spell for computer role playing games so I dug into my Steam library to see what there was to choose from to pass the Summer. Since there are only two potentially interesting RPG's coming before the end of the year it is an impressive dry spell (Gothic 4 and Fallout New Vegas, and I've only really got hope for the second one).

The biggest problem is that we no longer have a pure 'RPG' experience available from very many publishers. We've got first person shooters, we've got top down clicking madness, and all sorts of wandering about. We've got variable levels of character progression and story... So what is there to choose from?

11. Gothic 3, community patch 1.74. It was unplayable when released and after years of work the community has turned it into a game that is still unplayable, but for fewer reasons. The story seems neat, the quests are ok, and it really is very pretty for being 4 years old. But combat is utterly broken, and most of the skills are defective by design.

10. Borderlands. This is a decent class based shooter with random equipment drops. It has some 'quests' but my problem here is that it isn't role playing, it is a class based shooter with an interesting graphical style. Good enough that I played it all the way through, but it felt hollow and the story never grabbed me in the slighest.

9. The Witcher, enhanced and patched edition. I had really high hopes for this and started it a second time to give it a fair shake. The story seems engaging but the combat is questionable and I got one too many quests in a row that required me to retrace my steps and I gave up. Its a pitty, but people who expand the play-time of their game by making you walk back and forth are not doing anyone a service.

8. Torchlight. It is 1996 that it hurts. You pick one of three classes, wander through dungeons and click on stuff until it dies and you hope for cool equipment to fall from your foes. It has some real innovations to the genre, but the genre just isn't interesting anymore and the story is a parody of having a story.

7. Alpha Protocol. Its a spy RPG! Story is decent, and you can solve most puzzles in a variety of different ways. The bad news is that it thinks it is a shooter but the shooting mechanics are completely defective and the boss fights are mostly broken. It does a really good job of taking your choices into account in driving things forward, but fails at actually being a game. Lack of post-release patches turns this from depressing to criminal.

6. Mount and Blade. Its got an expansion now that I haven't played, and the original is kind of ugly and doesn't have much story. And a lot of it doesn't even make sense... but it make it a ton of fun to storm a castle. Figure out how to time the swings to kill people from horse-back and go plow through crowds of foes on the open field. It only makes it this high in the ranking because, once you figure it out, its a heck of a lot of fun to play. Third person killing people from horseback isn't a genre yet, but these guys are working on it.

5. Risen. Now we head into the more traditional RPGs. You wash up on a beach and set out to save the world. Pick the path of skills you want to follow, your choices influence the world and by the end you get powerful and kill the bad guy. It has some rough spots, but overall its a lot of fun up until the final boss fight which appears to have been designed for a different game. None the less, well worth the play-through.

4. Drakensang. This is a real role playing game. You are some generic dude who will be molded to fit your needs. You'll meet up with allies with complementing skills, you'll find new equipment, learn new skills and fetch stuff for people too lazy to get it themselves. You'll only have a few really stupid quests and eventually save a reasonably interesting world. I'm hopeful that the expansion will get translated to English before I give up and learn enough German to play it.

3. Fallout 3. Basically the game of the year for 2008 and 2009 with all of its expansion packs. Lone wanderer who figures out his place and safes the world. First person, but skill assisted and you've got skills to help you decide how to work your way through adventures. Nearly endless world of fun stuff to explore and a good story. Find the mods to replace the music first thing, cheat infinite carrying capacity and plan on not seeing friends or family for a long time.

2. Mass Effect 2. It is a passable squad based, class based shooter. You've got allies, and you've got all kinds of skills to learn to go with one of a bunch of different 'classes' you can be. And you've got a space ship and aliens instead of a horse and orcs. And you've got an absolutely fantastic story to wander around within. Bioware has done a fantastic job of removing almost all of the questionable bits from the first game and creating an epic science fiction adventure.

1. Dragon Age. This is the game where bioware was just showboating. This is a hard core old school role playing game. Tactical and essentially turn based fighting and a party of adventurers. The world feels open, the story is great and the increasing power of your party feels really convincing. At the end you save the world, more or less. The only thing that falls apart is that the bioware/ea downloadable content system is retarded. Fortunately their big expansion pack 'Awakening' is almost as good as the original and actually works.

Review: Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising

2010-07-17T13:16:00.003-06:00

Since I bought them as a pack and I enjoyed the first campaign I just kept playing on to the second campaign. You can import your characters, but there are a few things to keep in mind. Even better if you think about them before the end of the first campaign. Don't trade all of your equipment for XP, and make sure you've got some backup equipment if you really like the terminator armor. It will be disabled in the new campaign for a while and you don't want to have to fall back on completely junk equipment.

The skills are also slightly different, so make sure that you take advantage of the first or second mission that lets you reassign all of your points. This ability to really focus your skill development is a huge advantage.

You will get one interesting new member for your squad, a spellcaster. I didn't use him at first, but he turned out to be a powerful ally and worth taking the place of one of my other squads. In this case Cyrus got himself retired to make room for my new mage-friend.

In the expansion there is a lot more voice work, but it didn't do all that much for me, and you can basically choose the order in which people talk on the planning screen. A very slightly change that doesn't offer much improvement in the system.

There is a new mission type where you drive tanks, but it struck me as silly, and there is a new corruption mechanic. In order to use some of the more awesome toys you'll pick up you need to be corrupted, and using those 'evil' items will make you more corrupt over time. You can also be corrupted or purified based on what you do during the missions. I played as extremely pure and it didn't seem to have any real impact on the game.

Overall it is still fun, and I'm very happy if this is the future of the real time strategy game. Starcraft 2 comes out shortly, and I have to say that I'm really looking forward to not playing it, but if they do another mission pack for this game? Sign me up.

review: Dawn of War 2

2010-07-11T00:26:00.002-06:00

As a result of a recent sale on Valve's Steam I came across a smoking price on Dawn of War 2 and its expansion, Chaos Rising. I'd tried the demo when it first came out and wasn't all that impressed but I hate to pass up a bargain.

This is a 'real time strategy' game, but the new trend is to have small tactical units instead of resource gathering and wave after wave of units. In the traditional games I almost always play the same strategy with trying to go up a 'tech tree' of some sorts, build a massive defensive army and hope that the computer slowly crashes against me and wears itself out. Once I've got piles of units I just drive over the map and win. Turns out this only works at low difficulty settings on most games and isn't that much fun to do over and over.

This new take on the genre gives you 4 squads that you can specialize in different styles of combat, basically melee, ranged fire, and heavy weapons fire that has a setup time. Then it is up to you to deploy them correctly, use cover and generally kick some orks around. As you progress through the game you can get items and equipment as well as focus the training of your groups so that they become better at the skills you need them to have. This makes you invested in the squads, which is a lot different than selecting 500 dudes and racing them to certain death. The visuals are good, and if you zoom in you can see all kinds of detail, although it is mostly unplayable if you aren't zoomed all the way out to see the whole battle.

The story is fine and it has a nice plotline to pull you along through the missions, and in 14 hours I made it through the campaign and had a really good time doing it. If you can get a good deal on this game I'd highly recommend it, but beware the pricing for the various bundles seems to be a little crazy.

ipad comic: Invincible Iron Man Annual (1-3 of 3)

2010-07-01T14:23:00.002-06:00

So, Marvel has just done something really amazing. They've taken a step towards not letting their comic book industry be crushed by piracy and technology. They have realized the existence of piracy in the digital era, realized what needs to be done to counter that and taken what can only be described as a step. There are a few things they needed to do to really head off the piracy of their content into a digital medium, offer a better product, at a reasonable price, without any stupid delays or other hang-up.

They've really almost done that.

Using the Marvel iPad app they've built (ok, licensed) a really wonderful comic reading experience. Its amazing. And today, for the first time ever they've decided to sell a comic book electronically on the same day it comes out on paper. This really is huge, since delaying release for months is ridiculous and just makes the pirated versions that much better. While not strictly time sensitive material, nobody likes to be reminded that they've been made to wait. And the price for this was $6, broken into $2 pieces. Now, the paper copy cost was $5, but I'll give them credit for not being stupid here. I'd like to launch at the same date and price, and this was an 'annual', with about 68 pages of content and no advertisements.

So what went wrong? Well, firstly the Marvel store insists it is from 2008, and if you view it in the series they get their numbering wrong, not realizing than an 'annual #1' isn't sorted along with the normal numbering. How did they get the year wrong, even ~24 hours after it first launched? No idea.

But why the hell would you make this potentially ground-breaking step, using the Iron Man name, and pick a fairly poor comic about a character not known to the people who've watched the movies? It is entirely about the Mandarin, a traditional foe of Tony Stark, but one not yet mentioned in the movies. This wonderful attempt to grab the attention and money of the casual audience and you squandered it.

I paid my $6, but please don't take it as a vote to overprice sub-par content in the future. Take it as a vote for day and date releases of your best content. I can't buy paper comics anymore, but I've got plenty of money. Lets work something out.

Travel Stuff 2010!

2010-06-19T08:26:00.002-06:00

I recently got back from a wonderful trip to Italy with my wife and wanted to comment on the things that make a train-trip better. No, you can't have my wife... but all the other stuff should be available with some effort.

The newest item was a pair of Thermarest Compressible Pillow smuggled into Switzerland by my mother. European pillows are spectacular in their diversity and ability to prevent sleep. These did a wonderful job to counter that.

The photos are courtesy of a Nikon D90 with a Tamron AF 18-270mm lens. It isn't a fantastic piece of glass, but it is super flexible doesn't get in the way of taking the shot you want. It also prevented me from carrying a second suitcase full of camera equipment. And I religiously used the Solmeta Geotagger N2 (with nightly charges) to geo-encode the 1003 photos I took.

Entertainment was provided by my new ipad (wifi only) and ipod nano, the his and hers kindles, my wife's zune, and my Nexus 1 (android phone). We kept entertained on the trains and for an hour every night as we let our feet recover enough to let us sleep. I'm particularly amused by the video recording and pedometer functionality of the nano, both features provided unexpected entertainment value.

Book Review: Player of Games by Iain M Banks

2010-06-16T14:20:00.004-06:00

On my recent trip to Italy I had some quality time on the train to read and knocked back a couple of books.

Based on recommendations from my co-workers I stocked up the Kindle and the iPad and the first one I tore through was _The Player of Games_. It has been a while since I've found really good, new, science fiction, and I've got no idea how I missed this guy. This book was fantastic.

It doesn't dwell on the technology, it focuses on the ideals of an interesting and different society, it focuses on an excellent main character, and it has a solid plot through the whole thing. The trappings of the future hang together well, and it uses those tools to explore interesting ideas and tell a story. And the story is really neat and thought provoking.

Will I summarize it? In this future society there is a man who prides himself on his ability to play games. He ends up going to play a very complex and deep game against another culture and pit his ways against theirs. Along the way there are games within games on both sides of the board, and eventually our game player gains some insight into everything that has been going on. Anything more would ruin it, but this is a book you should definitely go read.

I've got a few more things in my queue, but then I'll be back to visit Mr Banks and see what other stories he can come up with.

iPad Book stores

2010-06-06T07:01:00.002-06:00

I'm getting ready for a trip where I hope to get lots of reading done and I'm about to do a purchase, so I figured I'd see what my best choice was for iPad reading. I figured I would compare iBooks, Barnes and Noble (nookBooks?) and Amazon's Kindle store. I threw in a book I'd been unable to find recently on Amazon to see if anyone did better.

Heinlein's stranger in a strange land
Iain M Banks The player of games
Trudi Canavan The magician's guild
joe haldeman starbound
robert v s redick the ruling sea

And I came up with the following, rounding up from .99 prices.
BN: 7 / 10 / 8 / 12 / 20.05
Kindle: - / 10 / 8 / 12 / 13.37
iBook: 7 / 10 / 8 / 12 / -

So what we have is a lack of an obvious winner, but only at the margins. Only B&N had all of the books, but in one case they had it for a notably higher prices.

What about other requirements? B&N was actually the best search experience when I used the computer. I've used Amazon for years and yet I was happier with finding the book I wanted on the B&N website. iBooks is ipad only which is a bit of a pain, but it isn't terrible. And I haven't tried the Amazon ipad interface, but their website is apparently in the middle of the pack because sometimes it is hard to find the Kindle version of the book you are searching for.

Because I own an actual kindle I'll probably stick with the Amazon Kindle format for now, but I was impressed and now I kind of want to find a book only available on the BN or iBook stores. I'll read at least part of a book next week on the iPad to see how I compare my e-ink reader to the backlit iPad and I'm very curious which one I will want to emphasize in the future.

Review: alpha protocol

2010-06-05T13:17:00.003-06:00

I just finished this and I'm really conflicted about it. The story is pretty good and it is backed by a decent role playing character development system. The conversation system is excellent and setup so that you need to make choices in real time. Want to be professional? Flirty? Aggressive? Think fast.

And then there is the walking around and shooting part, which is a bunch of kinds of terrible. Textures pop in, the camera is downright evil, possibly drunk, and your aim only plays a limited factor in your ability to shoot people. And there are mini games. Lock picking which tests the sensitivity of your mouse. Alarm hacking that makes you follow lines on the screen. And, computer hacking at makes you look cross eyed at a bunch of changing numbers and do stuff with both hands at once. I freaking hated the mini games.

In the had put this in the mass effect engine fit would have been briliant.

I also liked that the final mission summary was completely wrong about what happened and driving into the sunset was the worst bit of the dialog. Way to end on a high point. This is a great game if they fix it.... But I can't imagine them doing enough.
Sigh.

Zune: Update player account info

2010-06-01T14:04:00.004-06:00

Bloody Zune. Just a few days ago I was standing in line at the Zurich Apple store waiting to buy my iPad.. listening to a podcast on my Zune and playing a tower defense game on my Nexus One. The iPad which led me to install, and then rapidly despise iTunes. And what should happen, but the Zune went insane.

For the second time in the past few months it decided to be unable to play ANY content. Not just protected stuff, but podcasts and purchased media. I knew something bad was about to happen because every time I plugged in the Zune and the Zune software launched it would prompt me to 'Update player account info', where you enter your password. Ok. No problem.

Sometimes it would work and go on with its life, other times it would fail until you hit cancel.. and then it would work. All the time it was signed in as me and generally behaved correctly. But after a week of this I was getting worried. Then this morning it gave up making noise right as I was headed to work.

Thankfully work is cool about this kind of stuff so I headed back into the house to fix it. Reformat and 'release' of the player by unassigning it from my account (this is hidden in the setting menus. Settings > Computers and Devices > [remove].

Then unplug it.. wait... plug it back in and you've got a brand new zune. Name it something different and then resync all of your stuff. In my case I've only got a few gigs of songs and podcasts so it got back in business in about 45 minutes.

Best of luck Zune owners.. at least we don't have to use iTunes.

Edit: three days later and I have an ipod nano. Idiot Microsoft.

First weekend with an iPad.

2010-05-30T10:27:00.003-06:00

So, they've come to Zurich, and my pre-order wasn't going to be shipped for a week so I spent 90 minutes in line to have my hands on one as quickly as possible. I've done other things this weekend, but I think I've learned a few things and gotten off to a reasonable start.

I do like the thing, let me be clear about that up front. And I'm sure it will be great for its intended use as a personal travel computer and couch-surfing widget. Any benefits beyond that are just a bonus.

Firstly, iTunes in a pile of crap. I was pissed that I couldn't use the ipad until plugging it into a computer with iTunes (not a good idea at work). And when I got home it took a reboot and some fiddling around to get it recognized. It still randomly asks me for my iTunes password when it gets uncertain. Its slow and the UI is insane.. but what kills me is that it is anti-social. Despite a 'rating' system where people can provide feedback, you CAN'T SORT BY USER RATINGS. What? Also, no filtering for 'free' or by price on Apps. Frequently it isn't obvious if the app is ipad-friendly or not until you click through to look at it.

So, you are stuck with a bunch of 3rd party sites of highly variable quality to figure out what apps make sense to buy. I'm making a list, but comments here would be really welcome.

The browser. So, Safari is a second rate browser for javascript but it renders HTML juts fine. I've found the lack of Flash to be moderately annoying, but I can't act surprised, so I don't really hold that against them. On the other hand, page download and render speed isn't all that great.. and JavaScript is pretty horrible. But it is better than a phone, and passable with a little patience.

Photos are wonderful, and music is fine.. so we are left with APPS!

Since the browser is gimped you are left with Apps to provide the functionality. Let see what I've ended up with in the first few days. Keep in mind that I'm very cheap and I'll shop opportunistically based on sales or some kind of really compelling need.

Books: iBooks, Kindle, B&N eReader.. and 'CloudReaders'. CloudReaders is the interesting one as it does PDFs and cbz/cbr files so it serves an assortment of purposes. All of those are free and pretty much require you to go buy stuff to make them interesting.

Comics: I'm just experimenting here but the Marvel and ComiXology apps both are a good comics experience. What isn't good is that neither of them (particularly Marvel) have any current comics for sales. If they sold content a retail (maybe a slight discount?) within a week or 2 of the publication date.... I'd be spending a lot of money. As it is... I've spent nothing. I LOVE the reader and the experience, but they need to sell actual valuable content.

Games:
Theme Checkers HD ($.99). A nice looking checkers game with a computer AI to play against. It is dumb, but does move pieces on its own... my 5 year old juts beat it thoroughly.

SpaceStation Frontier $?. Pretty real-time strategy game / tower defense.. Good reviews and seems nice so far.

PinBall HD $3. A really slick pinball game with 3 tables. It could use more/better tables, but the physics and the display are great. I love pinball.

Solitaire City $6. The wife needed a freecell game and this one had the best reviews. So far she is happy, so I'm happy.

So what world shatteringly awesome apps did I miss out on? I don't mistake this thing for a productivity tool, its a toy, and I'm happy with that. And I think that once developers figure out what it is for its going to be a piece of magic. Read The Diamond Age to see what this thing will be like in a couple years.

Book Review: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

2010-05-27T12:52:00.002-06:00

Cory Doctorow has penned a really good science fiction that wasn't anything like I expected when I started it. It is set in a future where people's needs have been met by technology and they don't have a lot left to do with their time. To keep meaning in their life there is a concept of _wuffie_. Wuffie is a measure of status, the currency that is the only thing left that matters to people.

No surprise, but the story is set in Disney land of the relatively distant future, but it is revered with a particular fondness by society in general the main characters in particular. Technology isn't the focus of the story, but it makes for a believable backdrop and lets Cory focus on the social aspects he wants and to pick up a few things to comment on here and there.

What would be the things that make people appreciate you?
If you could restore yourself from a backup copy would you do it? What if it was old?
In a world of abundance, what still has value?

Lots of neat things get explored, and the book passes quickly. Not super deep, but a very interesting story about an interesting character and people in general.

Available for free, under the creative common license at : http://craphound.com/down/download.php

Book Review: Mission Earth Invader's Plan

2010-05-26T13:55:00.003-06:00

I recently decided to re-read a book from my youth. As I recall I read it around the time it came out, which considering that it was about 25 years ago makes me a little scared. I kind of hope I was at least a few years late starting the series, although I recall being caught up by the later books that came out towards the end of the 80s.

This is the epic Decology of L. Ron Hubbard, science fiction writer and purveyor of all kinds of other stories. The wikipedia article on him is interesting in how doubtful it is about most of the details around his life, and certainly the religion he founded doesn't do a lot to investigate and publish information accurate information.

All of that aside, how is the book? As science fiction goes, it is decent. It has a couple of reasonable characters, one of whom is a delusional idiot who is telling the tale. There is enough science fiction technology to clearly hold the setting together and even all these years later that part actually works remarkably well. It moves along and I certainly blew through the roughly 600 pages in a short time.

It has a few things to not recommend it, most importantly that it doesn't have much to say. Hubbard wasn't subtle and he didn't have too many comments to make on society (or he was too subtle for me). He makes a few comments but they are pretty blunt and he then gets on about his business of spinning the longest story he can. He died before he finished it, but apparently left sufficient notes for it to completely is 6000+ page run.

Probably the most impressive thing is that ~25 years later I still recalled the characters and major points of the plot. And having read it with a slightly sharper eye to detail I'd say that I didn't miss much all that time ago. Its a hollow but fun book, great for airplanes. I will caution readers to stop before the end of the series... or at least seriously consider skipping book 9.

Summary: Meh?

Robin Hood: Begins (2010 / crowe)

2010-05-24T09:46:00.003-06:00

So, he has a bow (briefly). And it does involve Locksley and England. But why have an origin story for Robin Hood? It seems like 'rebooting' the character is a little bit un-necessary, particularly if you aren't going to really set yourself up as a trilogy from the beginning.

He was a great archer right? He only made 3 shots, and the first one missed. The second one with with an improbably wet longbow at an extreme range, so I'm not sure that counts. So, his redeeming feature was feeling guilt after being handed a sword.

And storming the beach at Normandy? Did they get a good deal on some WW2 movie's boats and decide it was just too much of an opportunity to pass up? Perhaps they just bought stock footage.

And the movie was about getting the Magna Carta signed?

Anyway, if they re-edit the movie, and give Cate Blanchet some more makeup... I think the story has a lot of promise. The first good scene start 3 minutes from the end of the film, so I hope they've got a lot left on the editing room floor.

Zune: Not Enough Space

2010-05-02T06:51:00.003-06:00

"You've selected more content than will fit on ..."

"To review and update your selections, click Edit Sync Groups."

First make sure 'content from other computers isn't checked. I've never had content from other computers and mine got to 11+ gigs anyway, and on a 16 gig player that eats up enough space to mess things up.

If that doesn't fix the problem, the only choice is to reformat (settings > device > sync options > 'erase all content').

I'm happy to see that on version 3 of the software and years after first shipping, this bug still exists (hit it today) and that clicking on the number of credits remaining on your zune pass still almost always gives you a server error. They actually have the functionality to show you what your favorite songs are that you should spend your zune credits on... but it has worked once in 3 years. Its a brilliant feature, but if used correctly will make it so that you have no reason to have a subscription after you've bought all the music you like. So the incentive to fix it is probably limited.

My hypothesis is that the system doesn't handle deletes properly through the sync software, so if you have a lot of podcasts it will fill up with deleted material. But since Microsoft is hardly free and open with their code, figuring this would be more of a hassle than re-syncing everything every couple of months.

Why post this? Because clearly written blog posts with error messages in them are popular and helpful, at least that is what analytics tells me.

Review: Puzzle Chronicles

2010-04-30T13:10:00.003-06:00

I've made a couple of impulse purchases on Steam lately, something I should clearly learn to avoid. Anyway, I got a chance to download and play Puzzle Chronicles for an hour and that was plenty. Now, normally I'd let it go as a bad purchase (like Beat Hazard.. which was so bad I should probably write about it as well..) but this one got me right from the start and just kept getting worse.

First, it is ugly. I suppose any of the several art styles would be fine on their own, but combined it is a travesty. I take that back, the rotoscoped Conan that is your character would be ugly under any circumstances, but overlaying him onto a drawn background is criminal. But its the gameplay that matters you say? It gets compared to Puzzle Quest, so how bad could it be?

It is more Tetris than bejeweled, although played with falling stones that have all sorts of powerups. And the fall toward the right, innovative, huh? In the mini-game challenges they fall straight down, just to change things up. Anyway, during the normal game you try to get groups of the same color and then 'pop' then with the spikey colored balls that drop from time to time. It isn't even slightly engaging. But as you get more powers, clearly more than I played to gather, then more random things can happen as you collect enough of a single color. While you are doing this a fight is happening on the top of the screen but it isn't interesting and seems only loosely tied to what you are doing.

But the worst part? Aside from being ugly and not being fun? It is insulting in the tutorial and seems intent to continue on with that. See that building with the question mark on it? Let me draw you a golden path, slowly, and ask you to click on it. Ok, now I'll walk you slowly over to it. Ok? Now here is a popup with instructions on how to play the game using the keyboard. Click the mouse to advance past it (err, I was using the keyboard..Argh).

Spend your bewjewled money on Simplz Zoo.. my kid loves it, and you get to do crazy gem matching and look at cartoon animals.

Game Review: Master of Orion II (MOO2)

2010-04-24T07:44:00.004-06:00

Do you long for a day when computer games didn't hold your hand? When they came with a manual they expected you to read and understand? When the only time the game would cheat was to punish you? Do you dream of what may still be the best 4X game ever made? Where you can eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate all who oppose you? Masters of Orion 2 is that game, released in 1996, and now available in a modern technology friendly package from www.gog.com for $6 (comes with MOO as well).

All things considered, the VGA graphics have held up pretty well, and everything happens absolutely instantly, as opposed to the potentially long wait on the computer you would have experienced 14 years ago.

First, read the manual. The racial attributes you select and the tech tree are important, so understand them first. Then, be ready to re-start a few times when you are just barely into the game. Why? Because it doesn't set things up for you to succeed, it does it randomly. You may be stranded on a crummy planet out of reach of anything except for Orion and a Space Amoeba, both of which will eat your ships without much notice... When that happens, start over.

Then you can turtle and tech up, work on your diplomacy, or try to get some fighters out early and get a rush in on the computer. It is all up to you. Just be aware that your autobuilder may be out to kill you.. so don't trust it too much.

(After a few games this weekend... scored 1669, could have been slightly higher but I finished off the tech-tree instead of my opponents.)

review: Confessions of a public speaker

2010-04-23T22:31:00.002-06:00

I recently read _Confessions of a Public Speaker_ by Scott Berkun, mostly during our daytrip to Bern, and the Kindle version was a very good copy, even with a couple of pictures being contained in the text. Basically he writes about some of the experiences he's had while traveling around and doing public speaking, with an eye towards highlighting advice that will help you as a public speaker.

As he points out, it isn't necessarily a secret or magic. You need to have something to say and you need to practice it before you inflict it on large groups. The book is fairly short, extremely well written and moves along at a very nice pace. You'll find yourself laughing from time to time either at his discomfort or in sympathy for some of the things a speaker can suffer through.

Not only is it a fun read and good advice, but it would be nice to give copies of it to the audience, reminding them that it is their time too, and cooperating a little bit with the speaker would do wonders for their enjoyment.

Photo Out-takes

2010-04-18T08:44:00.000-06:00

Today we headed out to Bern and I got to play with the camera and put together my normal travel post over at weekendinswitzerland.blogspot.com. I got some that just don't fit in over there but that I wanted to share.

Ever play 'snake' with a train? It looks like this.

There is a large ammount of religion artwork that was not meant to be zoomed in quiet so close. it is a bit disturbing really.

Face-paw.

Filming of a commercial, I think. Notice how fast he is moving through the crowd of camera people and hangers on.

Backyardigans DRM

2010-04-17T10:25:00.003-06:00

My son is a huge fan of the Backyardigans, or at least he was and still watches it from time to time. So, in the latest shipment of goodies from America we got the two newest DVDs sent over. "Join the Adventure Club" and "Robot Repairman". Both have very good reviews on Amazon and I'm looking forward to watching more than the 2 shows we've seen so far.

The downside is that each disk is loaded with a veritable ton of previews for other shows, and then the no-piracy warnings and generally they make themselves a real hassle before getting around to showing the movie. So, I normally just rip them entirely onto my TV-computer's hard drive and watch them from there. No finger prints, no digging around for disks... and you can skip straight to the menu.

But these new disks are very protective of their content and the disks have a ton of errors (if this isn't DRM I'm very sorry, but they sent me two messed up disks with exactly the same errors). Technically, it isn't DRM, since there are no rights managed, it is copy protection by selling me a very carefully defective product (disk errors in the important files). Computers are not happy when they read DVDs with errors, so the ripping software eventually gives up and you don't get to have a usable image when it is all done. Ok, so I understand they want to prevent people from being able to use the content they purchased. I think they are idiots, but I see where they are going. So I put it in the DVD player and it grinded away for about a minute before even trying to get started. Then, halfway through watching the Dragon Delivery episode it started grinding and the movie began to studder and fragment. Now, that is really uncool guys.

This whole idea of reducing the value of your product by making it hard to use on my various media-playing devices is one things. But making it fail on the device it was intended for? Idiots.

For the record, it doesn't reduce piracy. There are still plenty of copies of the product on the internet. DRM reduces sales because the only people who get upset are the ones that just gave you $20, and there is never a better time to piss off a customer. I'm done buying anything else from NickJR/Nickelodeon.

Books Review: The Red Wolf Conspiracy

2010-04-04T10:54:00.004-06:00

I just got back from a fun little trip and had time to knock this book down in 2 days (its about 544 pages), so it moves along pretty quick and I'll probably read the sequel if I notice it when it comes out. So, its not bad, but not great. Want to know more?

Have you read The Lord of the Rings? How about Harry Potter? Good, ok, follow along with me.

A kid comes from a strange background and has a particularly good skill with languages, such that he can speak with just about anything. And he runs into some trusty friends. One who is brave and helpful, and another who is female, rich, and shockingly useful in all situations. Our hero, aside from being gifted with friends and languages is granted the gift of luck in such shocking quantities that it is really absurd.

Good characters are introduced, a world created, settings built and things are moving along fairly well until about 70% of the way into the book (its a kindle, no page numbers...) then author seems to decide it should be a trilogy. Things then go abruptly off of the rails and start over a couple of times.

I'm not sure why, but the hero who's main skill is luck isn't as appealing to me as the flawed but deeply committed heros of David Gemmell, for example. Obviously luck works better with a young subject since he can hardly draw on a deep well of practical experience, but at some point, yeegads, you need to have a reason behind why things are working out so well.

At the end of the book, it isn't much of a spoiler, but they all sit around in a circle and swear an oath to travel together to ~~Mordor and destroy a ring~~ the bad place and destroy the bad thing.

Book Review: The Clone Republic

2010-04-04T10:14:00.003-06:00

I've been reading this on and off for a while and then had a nice trip to finish it off.

The story is relatively mundane, but it moves along pretty well. Imagine a military where all of the officers are regular humans and all of the enlisted are clones. And the one thing everyone knows about clones is that they do not, can not, know that they are clones, otherwise it would just be a big mess. Thanks to some kind of special science they never pick up on the fact and they all assume that everyone else is a clone, but they are just a human enlisted person.

Our protagonist, raised in an orphanage knows he is not a clone, although he is an enlisted person in the Marines. Heh, funny... of course he is a clone, it stands to reason, but because he has a book written about him he is a very special clone. By the end of the book we learn that not only is he different and special in a mostly meaningless way, but he is just super lucky.

The books doesn't go to much effort to make a point. You could say that the politicians devalue the lives of the soldiers, and that maybe clones are people too, maybe... There are some decent fight scenes but it is largely predictable and without either a deeper meaning or interesting speculation about the impact of science it is hard to get behind the book.

If you need an airplane read and nothing else comes to mind? Pick it up. Otherwise, move along.

Solmeta N2 review

2010-04-04T07:06:00.002-06:00

Geotagging is pretty cool for a couple of reasons, and if you look back in this blog you'll see some of my previous attempts. Mostly it involved having to carry around my large crappy GPS and spend a lot of time waiting for it to lock and then doing post-processing work to merge the photos with the GPS track using various crummy software.Well, fiddle about no more, I purchased a GPS to work with my Nikon D90. Not the Nikon model, but a slightly cheaper one that has a few extra features.

First, the important feature is how well does it stamp you location on your photos? Below, the ones taken outside would let you figure out where i was when I took each picture. After I post this I'm hopeful that clicking through the pictures will take you to picasa and let you see the exact locations.For this core function, it worked good. Signal acquisition time was up to a couple of minutes for the first photo of the day, and then it was effectively instant, largely because I left it in the 'on' mode.The N2 has a battery, which is something the Nikon GPS doesn't offer, and this lets it stay active and constantly updating its location even when you are just walking around. Not a necessary feature, but it is supposed to last 10 hours, which is longer than I spend taking photos on a typical 2 day trip. It can either use its own batter or draw from the camera, but having a battery is nice.

Every time you take a picture, the camera immediately updates the exif information with your location. Other features? It has a compass, so it also stamps photos with the direction you are facing, although this is a sufficiently rare ability in camera GPSes that it isn't terribly useful. Yet. (I'll open a picasa bug, I think, and perhaps one to Panoramio).

The N90 kit for this GPS also came with a perfectly shaped USB-like cable for connecting to the camera. It is bend nicely and didn't get in the way at all. It also has a clip you can use to hold the GPS to your neck strap instead of leaving it on the camera which makes it easier to stuff in my bag. I then mounted it back onto the flash shoe when I was serious about taking pictures.

So far I'm extremely happy with the purchase. Obligatory shots below indicating how unlikely it is that I'd remember where I took each of the photos. Now I know where it was to within a meter or two and exactly what the time was. If you haven't seen what Google maps is doing with integrating GPS marked photos into their service you haven't really seen where the future of scenic photography is headed. This kind of camera/gps integration is how it starts.

Edit: You can't see the metadata here, but picasaweb does a really nice job of showing it.

Microsoft Game Room Review

2010-03-24T11:21:00.004-07:00

Now, its been out for only a few hours and unplayable for some of those, and in fact I played only the demo of a single game. Now, normally I don't post about a game unless I've completed it or at least played it until it clearly has no hope of improving.

Until more content is released, Game Room falls in the second category and since it cannot ever really be finished, nobody can give it an honest review anyhow.

I played the demo (first play is free, per game) of Asteroids Deluxe. This is likely the best game on offer since they are starting back in the early days of Arcades, Atari 2600 and Intellivision. The first consoles have not aged well, particularly not for anyone who has an xbox. And they managed to avoid licensing any other interesting arcade games.

Was it playable? Yes, emulation seems perfect, but remember, these games where designed to take your quarters from you. That is the goal of arcades.

But Microsoft has some tricky emulator writers and added the ability to rewind time. Hold the left trigger and the grains of sand suck back into the top of the hour glass and your bad tactics in the game get reversed. Its brilliant, and I imagine the technology behind it is crazy, saving the machine state in a way you can roll back is a tribute to how much more powerful the xbox is than arcade machines in the 80s. But here is the trick, you are not supposed to be able to reverse time in these games.

First thing I learned was obvious, but it made it clear just how little those games plan in advance. Random stuff is random at the very instant it happens, so if you rewind a frame before the UFO shoots... maybe it doesn't, or it shoots somewhere else. But more importantly, there is almost no risk because you can only die when you get bored of the game.

Really, think about that. Being able to use the rewind feature can let you play a game a single time, eventually hate it, and then give up and let yourself die. Its amazing really.

The good news is that it is a free download and you can go try it for yourself. Maybe they will release some better games and then I'll happily pour money into it. Capcom's Shadows over Mystra would be a nice start.

Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening. The Review

2010-03-22T12:04:00.003-07:00

So far Dragon Age is the best fantasy computer role playing game ever made, but they just cannot figure out how to sell it. First as a full game with a tiny bit of DLC available and that came with the 'Deluxe' edition. Then they sold a DLC expansion that was just a few hours long.

Now, 5 months after the first game comes an 'expansion pack', a half length game for nearly full price ($40) that uses the original system, tosses in a few art assets, movies and story and even lets you continue with your same character. And it is worth every penny for a chance to go run amok with your high level character.

Is it as good as the original? No, not really, but it is pretty close and you cannot feel cheated at the price just because the first one was so rich and lengthy. This is a great addition the series and an excellent rpg on its own.

I've played with my main character as a mage and generally kept a second spell caster with me and throughout the game, and we ran into no significant difficulties, having to reload only once due to a party wipe. The final fight was indeed hard, and we finished with just my archer standing. (Then I noticed that there where extra power-ups available just for that battle and I hadn't bothered to use them. Ooops.)

A rune crafting system is implemented and the power of potions and poisons is expanded, but none of it was worth the hassle. New classes are added but they are all available for unlock by purchase at stores (with the piles of money you get) and none of them stand out as particularly powerful or useful.

On the other hand, combat still works and the characters are generally pretty good. They also avoided the annoying 'fade' parts of the game, so that was very welcome.

If you long for a return to the realm of Dragon Age you've probably already picked this up. And it was a good choice.