The Axe 'n' Almo Blog Spot

Microsoft Win/Fail #2

2011-11-02T13:10:00.002-04:00

#2 in the continuing series.

Win: Windows 7 (remember I have not used Vista) now lets you move your taskbar entries around by dragging them.

Awesome! I used to have a habit of starting everything in the same order in the morning so that the buttons would always be in the same order, helping me locate them quickly. It was always annoying when one of the programs would crash or want to restart for an update since it would then move that item to the far right on the bar. Now I can just move them around.

Fail: It insists on keeping multiple windows from the same app attached to each other on the bar.

When I have two Visual Studio windows open, I like the top one (my bar is on the right) to be the Unreal project, and the bottom one to be the C# project. This is because when you alt-tab, the windows are not geographically located in the same place every time, as it seems to sort them by most-recent use. This way I can easily jump from another application to the correct project just by knowing which is the one on top.

For some reason, Windows changed the order of them when I broke for lunch for a game of Civilization V. To re-order them, I would have to quit the instance of the one I want on bottom and restart it.

Previous posts in this series:
http://theaxenalmo.blogspot.com/2011/05/microsoft-winfail-1.html

My weirdest CD

2011-07-28T21:21:00.005-04:00

Over the years, I have gotten into what I consider weirder and weirder music. I've always had some idea what the weirdest CD in my collection was. This post has a lot of links to music in it; I recommend headphones for most of it, or you'll miss what's going on.

First, back in about 1991, I had bought mostly stuff like Best of Blondie, a bunch (but not all yet) of the Moody Blues Albums, and other assorted rock. Always stuff that leaned toward atmospherics. My weirdest CD then was Yello - One Second. This is quite a good CD, and I still like to listen to it occasionally. It's electronic music, often with a latin vibe to it.

Around 1995, a friend of mine (Maynard!) sent me a tape of Orbital - Snivilization. I was not into Techno yet, and it took me quite a few listens to get into this. Maynard warned me about it; he said, "This will sound really repetitive. But the music is in a different place than you're used to finding it." So I gave it a chance. I listened to it, and wasn't impressed or repulsed. So I kept trying. Maybe on the 30th time through it, in the car (my wife's Accord, near the U of Iowa Dental Building), Science Friction caught my ear, and so began my deeper journey into electronic music.

Later, around 1997, it was The Orb - Orbvs Terrarvm. This is a sprawling epic of Ambient Techno with very strange textures and very slowly-changing soundscapes. I'm lucky to have found this; my wife found it in a record store on the listening stand (I think Orblivion had just been released), and bought it for me because she thought I'd like it. That's probably based on my liking of Enigma - MCMXC a.d..

During the coming years, I became aware that such a thing as "Zero-Beat Ambient" existed. I've always been interested in rhythm, having grown up on Henry Mancini music, so I assumed I would never like such a thing.

Then I came across Biosphere. I was browsing someone's shared iTunes directory at work (Acclaim Cheltenham), looking at genres. I saw something labelled "Dream." I wondered what that would sound like, and I loved it. I managed to get this file from him the day Acclaim shut down. Ordinarily I buy all my music to support the artists, but this one is unavailable. So I'm lucky I narfed the file.

I came to find out this was a remix of a track from an early masterpiece of Ambient Techno, 1991's Microgravity. Orbital (soon to become masters of the genre) was still recording on cassette tapes at the time. So I got a legit copy of Microgravity because it had been reissued. Reading up on the artist, I found out he is responsible for Substrata, one of the finest pure Ambient albums of the 90s. It is entirely beatless, with only the tiniest hints of percussion in one or two tracks.

On Microgravity was CloudWalker II, a beatless track. It's quite cool. This along with the very atmospheric vibe on the album convinced me that if anyone could make a beatless album I would like, it was Biosphere.

So I got Substrata, which promptly became the weirdest CD in my collection. Here's a sample.

So, I started hunting for other such music. My quest led me to SomaFM's Drone Zone, where they play quiet, droning music all day every day. Suddenly, this came on. Well, I guess suddenly isn't really the right word! Having already learned that the music can be in a place you're not looking for it, I was able to look past the almost featureless nature of this and appreciate the quality of the soundscape.

Waveform Transmission v1.0 - v1.9 is now the weirdest CD in my collection. While Substrata was beatless, it still had lots of rhythmic structure. v1.0 - v1.9 is just a series of soundscapes, almost (but not quite) entirely devoid of rhythmic detail. I've listened to this disc many, many times now, and I have come to like all of it (though some more than others) except v1.7, which is just a muffled recording of voices garbled in transmission. The liner notes mention paranormal activity and other odd things, so I suspect this is supposed to be a recording of the dead or some such.

The depth and width of the sounds on this disc are incredible. The murky darkness of its atmosphere appeal to me, as I've always liked music further from the light.

Around the time I found this, I had gotten into the 4-disc set of Gas (Nah und Fern) through Amazon's You-Might-Like-This service. Though Gas often uses beats, it's still pretty minimal.

All this has made me more sensitive to the texturing in more rhythmic music. This led me to get Monolake's heaviest album, Momentum. Here's a sample. My favorite on this disc is Reminiscence, but it's not as heavy, so I had to put in two links here.

There's no way to end this blog post since my trip through music is not yet finished, so I'll just sign off now.

Creationists and bug-zappers

2011-07-17T11:56:00.002-04:00

I wonder why creationists are drawn to Science like flies to bug-zappers. They're desperate to give their opinions legitimacy with a tool that is anathema to their goal. I'm talking specifically about organizations such as The Discovery Institute.

I think I'll start calling this "Science Envy". Science works because of its requirement that accepted results are reproducible. If the psychics, dowsers, creationists, or whatever could co-opt that power, they could make so much progress in spreading their ideas.

So you get quantum-mechanical babble in sales pitches for useless bracelets. "Clinical trials prove..." in ads for useless medicinal products. They want desperately to have that power Science confers: "This works, and we know it works because it has been verified by Science!"

But ultimately, they fail because of Science's built-in self-correction mechanism - the requirement that claims (even long-accepted claims) must stand up to continued subsequent testing. This means it cannot be used to promulgate just anything; only things that work on a long-term basis.

By "ultimately fail," I mean over the course of decades or centuries. The charlatans and deluded may get temporary traction in the course of a lifetime, but over time, repeated failures to duplicate a claim relegates that claim to history.

But what about the early Greeks who thought maybe the earth went around the Sun? It was centuries before that correct result came back. The point is, it did come back, because Science continually questions itself. When experimental results started to make the Geocentric theory look too complex compared to the Heliocentric model, people started looking at the Heliocentric one again. Earlier, we just didn't have the data to support the Heliocentric model.

This does raise the issue of how we tell which theories today are correct but unverifiable, and which are just wrong. The point is, it doesn't matter. Keep testing those theories, and it will all get sorted out. The sieve of reproducibility of results is what separates us from hundreds of thousands of crackpot ideas. Sure, we filter out some correct results that we will have to rediscover. But this is a small price to pay for avoiding all of the garbage, like homeopathy, dowsing, and faith healing.

So go ahead and envy our Science. Just don't be surprised when the very thing you are trying to use turns against your theories. Science is beholden to nobody.

Microsoft Win/Fail #1

2011-05-07T21:17:00.001-04:00

I might do a series of these. I will post two things Microsoft has done, one which is smart, one which is dumb. Just to prove I don't rag on everything they do.

Win: XBox 360 controllers show what player you are with a lit quarter-circle on the controller. These map to your screen's position in 4-player split-screen. Brilliant engineering. (really, no sarcasm - this is way smarter than the PS3's 4 lights in a row)

Fail: Windows 7 still allows you to resize a window by grabbing the top of the title bar. That's what I grab when I want to move a window, not resize it. Many of my grab/drags to move windows end up resizing them. Then I have to resize it where I wanted it, then re-attempt the move.

Silent Running almost 30 years later

2011-04-07T12:20:00.002-04:00

So last night we watched Silent Running. I hadn't seen it since the 80s, and Trena had never seen it. What I remembered about it was the forest domes, Bruce Dern, and feeling for the little robots.

It turns out that I only remembered these things because they are really the only particularly memorable things in the movie. Unfortunately, this film has not aged well. Its special effects were top-notch at the time (considering the budget of $1 million), which is unsurprising as the director was Douglas Trumbull (who did special effects for 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

The main problem with viewing this in today's context is the heavy-handed treatment of nature conservation. The Conservation Pledge even appears in it. Yes, that's my edit in Wikipedia linking it to Silent Running. Joan Baez sings two folksy songs in it about the trees and the children. The combination of her extreme vocal delivery with cheesy edit-sequences of the forest in space is just too much.

The script is weak as well, with too many appeals to the audience to take more interest in conservation.

I should say a few words about the film's good points. They set up Lowell (Bruce Dern) as a hippy type person who gets mad when the other guys drive over his flowers and talks to the robots in a friendly manner. But they also (briefly) develop the other side of his character, which is cunning. He's a poker shark, and uses his bluffing skills to fake out the commanders of the other nearby ships.

The portrayal of the robots was well-done, and made me feel sorry for them in their loneliness in space. They are actually played by people who were unfortunate enough to have lost both their legs, which meant they could fit in the costumes. As much as was possible, cutting-edge tech was used. A real robot is seen placing billiard balls in a diamond on a round table, though it is so slow I'd rather place them myself.

The final shot of the last forest in existence floating off into space with just the one robot to care for it (Lowell has nuked himself and the ship because he doesn't want to go back to Earth) would really be a great one, were it not for Joan Baez singing on top of it.

This film has been greatly influential. It's been cited as inspiration for both Wall-E and Moon. It also gets mentioned whenever someone makes a quiet and dignified sci-fi film. I respect it for what it did well, but it's just too dated to really enjoy it. Before anyone gets the wrong idea about how I feel about old movies, I loved "M" which was made in 1931.

Odds and ends

2011-02-20T10:45:00.002-05:00

I'm currently playing Die2Nite. It's a multiplayer co-op zombie survival game. It focuses around resource management and teamwork. Ultimately it is impossible to survive, and players can earn benefits for being the last one alive. So it forces you all to work together to make progress, but near the end when doom is inevitable, people start doing selfish things. Very interesting social dynamics.

Another game I just picked up is Gratuitous Space Battles. There is also a Mac version. It's really simple (and gratuitous). You choose ship hulls, add modules, place them in a fleet formation, give the captains orders, and hit "fight". After hitting the "fight" button, you have no further control. Here's a video what it looks like.

GSB allows playing against other people. Just set up a fleet, hit upload, and others can try fighting it. You get messages saying whether they succeed or fail.

Here's a plug for one of my own projects: "Crystal Shuffle" is an iPhone game I made. It's an old-school puzzle game, and is a lot of fun. I've gotten approval to continue and make another iPhone game. You can follow that development on Twitter by adding UbisoftAlmo to your follow list.

I recently got Hoard on PS3. It's a very nice action/RTS game where you are a dragon trying to amass treasure. It's a game of trade offs. If you burn the windmills and fields to get gold, their emitted gold carts are smaller. You can just take the carts, but then they don't get to cities to make them larger. Larger cities emit larger goods carts. You can just take the goods carts, but those also make other cities larger.

There are castles that emit royal carriages. Stealing their cargo (princesses) can yield a lot of money. Larger castles emit princesses worth more money. But they also make more powerful heroes you have to fight to keep the princesses.

Hoard supports online and offline multiplayer with up to four people. It's quite a lot of fun.

Well, I guess that's all for now.

BM2 Update

2011-01-22T18:27:00.001-05:00

It's been a long time since I've written about what's been going on in EVE. I'll back up to August.

Back then, things were going smoothly. Project 2 was using 3 dedicated POSs (Player Owned Stations) in our wormhole to run reactions on moon materials and sell the products at a pretty good markup. Billions of ISK (the ingame currency) were going through the reactions every two weeks, and large dividends were being paid to the investors on a regular basis.

We were in a solid alliance with nullsec access, and reasonable dues. Then we started having issues with that alliance. We decided to leave, as things generally fell apart with them. One of the leaders of that alliance got us into the alliance he joined. This was a pretty sweet deal. With the blessing of the Russians (the Russians are a serious power bloc in EVE), this new alliance had a nice spot in nullsec. We had to pay 350 million a month in rent, but it paid off. This gave BM2 access to three of the major parts of EVE: hisec trading, wormhole operations, and nullsec operations.

But, as usually happens, the alliance got upset with our laid-back play style, and decided we weren't paying enough rent. Nominally they wanted 20 million a month per member. But our corp has a lot of "alts" (secondary characters owned by players with "mains" in BM2), and a lot of casual players for whom this is too much to pay. The 350 mil per month we were willing to pay more than covered 20 mil per month for the people who used the nullsec space. So we left that alliance as well.

Right about then, a member in good standing who was acting as recruiter got mad, got involved with some mercs (not sure why they got involved) and decided to rip us off. This person (we'll call them Blend) was given the task of fuelling our POSs. They pretended not to get the notices about low fuel, and other members who did were taking care of it at the last minute. Their plan was to have the stations power down so they could steal everything. Fortunately, when Blend asked to have permission to remove fuel in order to "rebalance" the stations (a common practice), I said no. They would have then had the power to remove all the fuel and shut them down immediately.

So they settled for stealing everything they could access, which turned out to be a lot of expensive ships and some BPOs (Blueprint Originals). Total stolen probably totalled over 15 billion ISK. But BM2 is a classy organization, and we just muttered under our breath and moved on.

Also around this time, World of Warcraft released their Cataclysm expansion, which lured away some of our veterans for a while. So for the last six months, it has been another Dark Period for us. But we came through it. Some players from a few years ago have resurfaced, security has been tightened, but we still are casual and have a friendly atmosphere.

In light of all the trouble we've had over the years with alliances, I decided to form my own. So now we don't have to worry again about our alliance complaining about our play-style. The alliance will insist on tolerance of casual play, and that what happens in Real Life always comes first.

In the middle of all this, we had a few scares. Some scary looking pirates dropped by our wormhole and demanded two billion in cash. They threatened that if we didn't pay, a big alliance would sweep through and destroy everything we had in there. This would be a loss on the order of 20-30 billion. So we moved important assets out, shut down a lot of the useful POS modules, and equipped hardeners, which would make the stations really annoying to destroy. A really solid station can take a full day of pounding to destroy, if not more. Especially since we're in a wormhole and it's impossible to get capital ships inside. You would have to build them in there.

But some random corp set up a station in the hole. This worried us a lot, because if they intended to fight us, setting up a POS to build capital ships could be a first step. But they claimed that they only set up because they saw our stations set up for manufacturing and the combat sites all untouched. They said they figured we wouldn't mind. I might have believed them had they asked first before setting up. After a tense time, we found out they really were nice, and they have since joined our alliance.

Now things are running smoothly again. Project 2 has started paying dividends again, and there is chatter in the corp channel. Just before all this mess started, I was starting to wonder if maybe it was time to leave the game. But the leadership challenges presented during this time of turmoil reminded my why I have kept playing all these years.

Hereafter movie discussion (spoilers!)

2010-10-24T14:28:00.005-04:00

Hi!

I'm writing today about the movie Hereafter. I don't usually write about movies, but I feel it's important to write about this one. If you have yet to see it, you may wish to see the film first, as this article contains spoilers. You have been warned.

As an atheist and skeptic, the subject of this film is important to me. Some who don't believe in the same way that I don't may find this film disturbing. It shows a world that is almost exactly like ours, except that real psychics exist.

Matt Damon plays one such psychic, George, as a very quiet and kind individual. His ability is to communicate with the dead. He's had a business as a psychic, but these days are behind him. "A life about death is hardly a life at all."

The plot also involves a journalist who has a near death experience (Marie), and a young boy whose brother dies suddenly (Marcus).

During the first third of the film, we are only presented with paranormal experiences that are genuine. George does a psychic reading for someone (against his will), and Marie has a near death experience. But George's reading is very different from any you will see in real life. He asks yes/no questions, almost never receives a no, and gets very little information from the person he is reading. This is important because psychics often use a technique called "cold reading." It is very clear that the writers are showing that George is a real psychic by differentiating his performance from how "psychics" operate in the real world.

Marie visits someone who studies near-death experiences, and give her a rather lame argument for why she thinks an afterlife exists. Paraphrased: "After seeing so many people on the brink of death all over the world report the same experiences, I decided it must mean they weren't hallucinating." They're all people, and if there is something in our physiology that leads to these experiences, I would expect them to be similar.

I was concerned at this point that viewers would have to do their own research or have previous knowledge of the subject matter to understand how the film is operating at this point. But to my relief, Marcus seeks help from fake psychics, and their tactics were shown clearly. One medium he seeks starts by telling the audience that she's getting a "J". Marcus's dead brother's name is Jason, so he pipes up. She rattles off several common J names that are incorrect. He corrects her that it is Jason. The medium then asks if this person was close to him. He says yes. The medium suggests it's his father, and by now Marcus is disillusioned and stops giving her information. She gives him some useless platitude supposedly from his father and he goes away unhappy.

He tries several others who use various different techniques, but it is clear the Marcus that they are all charlatans. At this point, it's fairly easy to see that "psychics" in the real world are fakes, and that what is presented in the film is fiction.

We see George do a few more readings, and his deadpan style and lack of need for information from the target further show how we should expect a real psychic to operate. He's able to quickly, easily and, most importantly, correctly produce information about his targets.

Overall, the film is very enjoyable as the characters are interesting, the plot weaves together people from different continents very convincingly, and it has a quiet and deliberate pace to it. Clint Eastwood has become such an accomplished filmmaker that I find it sad there isn't really something after death. But we do what we can with what time we have, and that's enough.

Playstation Move Verdict

2010-10-02T16:51:00.002-04:00

So I finally got some decent playtime with Playstation Move. If you don't already know, it's Sony's answer to the Wii's wand-based motion control.

The short version is, get it. Even with just the pack-in game in the camera/wand/game bundle, it shows that Sony's idea of motion control has a lot more depth than Nintendo's.

We all know that very few Wii games that focused on the motion control had much depth. Many of my friends who were Nintendo fans couldn't wait to get the Wii. I had high hopes for Wii Sports Tennis, as I love Virtua Tennis. But it turned out to be so incredibly shallow, that only simple flick was necessary. Soon gather dust alongside their PS3s and 360s.

Now those same people are apprehensive about Move, because they don't want to get burned twice. I've spent about 2 hours with Move now (1 hr on Start the Party, and 1 hr with Sports Champions). I'm quite impressed with its responsiveness, ease of use, and quality of motion tracking. But I'm more impressed with the motions required to play the Move games well.

In Ping Pong, you have complete 3d control over the location of your paddle. This means you can angle to lob or hit low, spin the paddle as you hit to spin the ball, and it's up to you to get closer to the net when necessary. On Gold difficulty, there doesn't seem to be any magnet snapping the paddle to the ball, either.

When I lived near a course, I used to play real disc golf. I even shot under par at Sugar Bottom outside Iowa City. I was quite surprised at how lifelike the response of the frisbees was.

If you use two controllers with the sword fighting, one angles the shield, and the other angles the sword. I haven't tried that yet, but I expect it will be quite cool. Already just playing with one controller, I feel like I can learn to be skillful parrying and blocking attacks.

The minigames in Start the Party were quite enjoyable. These show the view through the camera as a background, and attach a computer-generated object to your hand. The effect is excellent, and you really get the feeling you're holding it. One game gives you a hand fan and has you generate wind currents to blow around parachuting dudes. You have the angle the fan perpendicular to the direction you wave it (as you would with a real fan) to get decent results.

Most importantly, when I play these games, I don't feel silly waving the controller around, even when playing Start the Party. The control is tight enough that I get involved in the game, and just play.

As a game programmer, I spent 3 months programming the Wii controller. It was so limiting (granted without Motion+), that I didn't feel like we could come up with much. It's not an accident that few Wii motion games have depth; the hardware just wasn't up to it. From my experience playing with Move, I don't think it is plagued by these problems. Sony has shown its commitment to genuine gaming using its device with the depth of controls available in some of the Sports Champions games. Now it is in the hands of the developers to come up with great titles that push this device even further.

I am looking forward to it.

A poem

2010-09-22T19:05:00.001-04:00

millions of leaves fall
yet none of us notices
our turn comes soon

EVE: The nullsec pullout

2010-07-13T20:47:00.002-04:00

Sorry for yet another EVE post, but interesting things are happening. I think I mentioned before that the alliance my corp is in started renting nullsec space from another big alliance.

As a group, we were paying big bucks for permission to stay in a secluded part of the lawless space under the wing of Gentleman's Club.

Well, they and their friends came under attack from Pandemic Legion and some of their associates. To keep it short, GC's friends didn't put up much of a fight, so they closed up shop and left. The others in our alliance also packed up and left, so we're pretty much alone out there. This all happened during a time when two of our experienced officers were offline for a few days, so I had to delay making a decision about what we should do.

Now that I've had proper input from everyone, I've decided we're pulling out as well. We stand to lose over 2 billion ISK in assets out there, and I think this conversation gets across the situation pretty well. If you get the sense that there's a large, vulnerable, valuable possession in a warzone, that's exactly the right sense.

Glossary:
POS = Player Owned Station. These eat fuel on an hourly basis. Without fuel, they shut down and become vulnerable.
DECA = the alliance we're in.
Orca, Obelisk = very expensive ships. Worth about 1.5 billion between them.

H3llHound > hey

Norjia Blacksteel > hi

H3llHound > so what are we gonna do with null now?

Norjia Blacksteel > i think since we
Norjia Blacksteel > we're alone out there, we should bug out
Norjia Blacksteel > i don't want to
Norjia Blacksteel > what do you think

H3llHound > i think it would be better to get out

Norjia Blacksteel > that's getting to be the consensus

H3llHound > although i would like to see this POS getting attacked :)

Norjia Blacksteel > ahhaha

H3llHound > like i said on the forums I will simply sit in here and online guns until I run out :)
H3llHound > i ahve started to get my stuff out already. many other have brought their ships away. right now the hangars are full with the ships the other corps left behind
H3llHound > i have also started to refine the ore we bought form our members. its only 75% refine but better than nothing

Norjia Blacksteel > yeah
Norjia Blacksteel > i can't decide what to do about the POS
Norjia Blacksteel > I'm tempted to leave it there and see what happens
Norjia Blacksteel > but that wouldn't fit with whatever Deca decides to do
Norjia Blacksteel > and it's not cheap

H3llHound > if we just leave the tower and guns its around 470M at old prices

Norjia Blacksteel > would we be able to keep it fueled?

H3llHound > and we still have to figure how to get the orca and obelisk out
H3llHound > right now i have enough fuel to keep it going for another month

Norjia Blacksteel > shit this is a tough game
Norjia Blacksteel > WoW just doesn't hold a candle to this
Norjia Blacksteel > losing 500 mil won't hurt us badly

H3llHound > yeah, on the other hand it would like to see our Wh presence to grow again

Norjia Blacksteel > suppose we stay and it works out
Norjia Blacksteel > what happens with Deca?

H3llHound > what do you mean?

Norjia Blacksteel > well, deca vacated
Norjia Blacksteel > if we're still there, and some other guys come in and we rent
Norjia Blacksteel > does deca come back?
Norjia Blacksteel > do we split off?

H3llHound > i dont think DECA will come back anytime soon. Some didnt really make alot here
H3llHound > I also have other corps in DECA that would be interested in colonising a C5/6 with us
H3llHound > renting for just alone is gonne expensive and we need to be in an alliance for it

Norjia Blacksteel > yeah

BM2 is four years old

2010-06-10T19:32:00.002-04:00

Today, my corporation in EVE Online turned four. Honestly, I never thought we'd make it this far.

After an unpleasant wardec early on, almost everyone left except for me, Sachiko Tsukuru and George Fox. The three of us soldiered on while I plowed through the noise of the bots in the recruitment channel looking for new members. We weren't well-enough established to attract anyone through the recruitment forum.

My long-term strategy was slow-growth through the accumulation of good people. With people coming and going, that took a long time.

But we pulled through, and now we have several thriving businesses. We have many space stations running various functions. We have presence in hisec, nullsec and wormhole space. We have roughly 35 active members, and that is continuing to increase.

But most important of all, we have a tight team spirit, and many people say they call it "home." I'm very proud of what we've accomplished. I've always worried about the fact that I don't play a whole lot compared to some of our members. But one pilot recently said publicly that even though I'm not on a whole lot, it's due to my leadership that we've made it where we are today.

Sure, EVE is just a game. But the people are real, and that makes it worth it.

Potential Mac OS X Mouse Acceleration Solution

2010-05-29T18:09:00.003-04:00

So... in a previous post, I discussed more about the ongoing Mac OS X mouse acceleration problem. Most notably that the OS does not have a means of turning this feature off.

I just found this:

It appears Razer has made a mouse driver for one of their mice that allows us to turn off acceleration! It's called the DeathAdder, and here's a link to it that works at the time of writing.

I know that USB Overdrive and MouseFix allow us to do that, but USB Overdrive's speed is too low, and MouseFix gets broken as soon as you adjust the mouse speed.

It's still not as good as if Apple were to let us choose how to use our mice in the first place. But I personally find Apple's mice poor for gaming, and I always buy an after-market mouse anyway. I also need a replacement for my Logitech MX Revolution. I really like it, but it's too heavy and is bothering my wrist.

Anyway, if I get one of these, I'll post a review after I try it out.

EVE Online: BM2 Update

2010-05-21T19:09:00.007-04:00

Some readers have said they have more fun reading my EVE posts than playing it. So here's an update on what my corp is up to.

Recently, we started BM2 Project 2. I called for an investment from our members. They could buy shares in the project for 500,000 ISK each (which is a reasonable price for anyone who has been in the game for more then 2-3 months). We issued 14,000 shares, so the initial capital investment was 7 billion ISK. We limited the investments per member to 250 million ISK for each round, with each round lasting about 4 days to give everyone a chance.

The 7 billion came in very quickly, as I have developed a lot of trust among the membership. As a side note, the shares were issued from a separate holding company. The problem is that if a member has 5% of the shares in a company, they can call a vote to replace the CEO. So I'm not ever going to issue shares in BM2 so that I'm guaranteed to remain CEO. It also makes accounting easier.

With the capital, we bought 3 POSs (Player-Owned Stations), and set them up to "run reactions." This just converts raw materials into secondary materials. As you need a POS in nullsec (lawless space where anyone can shoot at anything without legal repercussion) to run reactions, the profit margin is pretty decent.So one trusted member is responsible for fueling the POSs and keeping them stocked on materials, and I help sell the results and do the accounting. Each month, 10% of the profits go to us two for running the project, and the rest is paid back as dividends on the purchased shares. Several billion ISK worth of materials goes through the project each month, and profits are just starting to come in.

We have also colonized Wormhole space. In a recent expansion, CCP added randomly-located bits of null-sec space which are only connected to "known space" (or k-space) by wormholes. These are also randomly located, and can only be found by scanning. Once you find one, you can enter it, and you end up in hidden solar system that has no security. Below is a view from the X-Large Ship Assembly Array at the POS:

The tricky thing is that 24 hours after a wormhole is used, it disappears and moves to some other random location in the galaxy. So if you enter a wormhole from one solar system, then 24 hours later the exit from the hidden system will have moved so that you would come out somewhere else. Wormholes also disappear after a certain amount of mass has passed through them, which makes it quite hard to get a large fleet into a wormhole.

A while back a few of our members decided to colonize a wormhole by installing a POS there, despite my warning that I thought it was a bad idea. I was really wrong about that one. Once they were established there, they started mining very high-value ores and doing Sleeper Missions, which are PvE missions against a new type of AI that is generally smarter and more dangerous. The corp started paying for the fuel to run the POS out there, and now takes a share of what goes on in the hole.

We had a security issue with some ships being stolen, so we installed a smaller insecure POS and locked down security on the larger one. Fuel runs us about 250 million per month, but we earn quite a bit more than that on our 10% share of operations there.

Our alliance has just made a very good rental deal for some nullsec space. So we've now put up a POS out in the Scalding Pass region. We're starting to get organized there as well. I've made the trip out there, and have installed jump clones so I can pop back easily at any time. Here is the route I took from our HQ to get there:

One more thing: I am now a Capital Ship pilot. We built a Thanatos carrier in our wormhole space. We have quite a few assets there now, and we need to protect them from people who might want to kick us out to have the hole as their own. We will be building several capital ships there, and will slowly develop a bit of a capital fleet to protect our interests. I had never actually seen one of these, since Capitals can only be uses in low- and null-sec space. Here's a pic of me in a Thanatos for the first time:

The funny thing is that in this picture, the carrier has no modules or fighters equipped; I would be capable of dealing exactly zero damage were I to get in a fight with it. At this time I was just moving it from where it was built to where it will be parked. This ship cost roughly a billion ISK, and so I need to be very careful with it. Especially since I didn't pay for it.

That's all for now.

EVE is such a good game

2010-05-08T12:12:00.002-04:00

What sets EVE apart from other MMOs I've tried is the strength of its social structures. I'm the CEO of a corporation, which is a group of pilots who work together. There are security measures in place so that new members don't have access to many assets, others have access to more, and still others have access to a lot of assets.

Previously, we had a Director, who has almost as much power as the CEO, and can access anything the corp owns and can give members access to things as well. This director was known to me in Real Life, so I assumed I could trust him with all this power. It turns out I could. He no longer plays a lot, so he is no longer Director.

Over the last four years of running my corp, the operation has grown considerably. We used to be a small safe-space mining corp. Now we have highsec operations, several stations in a wormhole, and we are beginning operations with our alliance in lawless nullsec space. We also are running a 7 billion credit investment project which is now paying dividends to shareholders.

The time has come to appoint a Director (two, actually) that I do not know in Real Life. One has been with the corp for a year, the other for two separate periods of time adding up to about 19 months. Over time, these people have proven that they can be trusted with large assets. It's true that some of EVE's bigger scams were over a year in the making. But our operation isn't big enough to warrant that kind of infiltration, so I don't expect that is going to happen to us yet.

I had to consider whether the membership would trust these people, and if I was leaving someone else out who might be better suited to the position. It's a decision that took me a few weeks of occasional contemplation to arrive at.

Here is the letter I wrote to the corp as a whole informing everyone of the promotions. I think it illustrates the depth and complexity of the relationships between players in this game. Sure, mining and running missions in the game is ultimately not that much fun. But the bonds that form between players, co-operational or adversarial , are real; these are what make the game worth playing.

Directors
From: Norjia Blacksteel
Sent: 2010.05.08 16:11
To: Blacksteel Mining and Manufacturing

Hello,

After long consideration, I have appointed two Directors: Sachiko and Roarke. They can do anything I can, except appoint more Directors. I have done this because the corp has grown beyond the small empire-mining corp it once was, and our command structure needs to grow.

The corp remains a semi-dictatorship with important decisions and policy decided by me, but you can ask the Directors for help with issues only I could handle previously.

This is a big step for me, since one of BM2's founding principles was that there would never be a Director that I didn't know in real life. But since I'm the only person I know who has really stuck with the game (with the exception of Mejiityr, who currently doesn't play enough to take the role), I've had to let that idea go.

It's also hard for me as my role in the corp will shift further away from daily operational duties to directional decision making, accounting and diplomacy. But ultimately this is necessary because BM2 is successful, and that's pretty cool.

I still remember the guy in chat before I founded the corp who said, "Why does every noob who comes into this game think they can run a corp?" I wonder where he is now.

So congratulations are in order for Sachiko and Roarke, and to everyone who has made this move necessary by contributing to BM2's continued success.

Norjia

Infected Mushroom - First post

2010-03-29T20:50:00.003-04:00

So I've recently been getting into Infected Mushroom. My first introduction was their most excellent album from 2001, B.P. Empire. It's rather ornate Psychedelic Trance. In the words of Ben (who introduced me to it), "I keep waiting for it to get boring, but it doesn't."

For those of you who don't know, Psychedelic Trance is a type of dance music that can be extremely repetitive. It typically sounds like the first track on B.P. Empire (which you can find at the link above) at 5:08. Thud Woomp Thud Woomp Thud Woomp Thud Woomp. But this album has so much variety and depth to it that it's never dull.

I'm moving past that disc now (though not forgetting it!), and have bought The Gathering (1999), IM the Supervisor (2004) and Vicious Delicious (2007). I haven't digested all of these, but so far, I'm leaning toward the earlier stuff. I can see that after BP they have begun to veer into rock territory with songs and lyrics. They're very good at filling in around these structures with Psy Trance garnish, but ultimately it doesn't interest me as much. It seems to be making a big difference in their popularity, so I'm just hoping that eventually they'll do a return-to-roots album in a similar vein to BP.

I'm reminded of the worst Doors song I'm aware of, Touch Me. The Doors are generally an improvisational-sounding band, with basic structures set up that they embellish. Since there are only four of them, they're able to riff off each other and their music can have a very interesting jam-session style to it.

In Touch Me, it seemed some producer thought it would be commercially smart if they were to do a song with orchestral backing. The structure set up for the orchestra is so tight, it leaves The Doors no room for their trademark improv. You can hear them trying: the drummer trying to add as many possible notes to the rhythm and the keyboard's unusual trouble coming up with interesting notes to add to the orchestra. But it falls flat. The song ultimately has no energy despite sounding like it should.

I see IM's rock tracks like this. The rock structures are unforgiving and narrow, and it leaves them with little room for their Psy Trance. It comes off sounding stiff. Maybe I'll grow to like it; it's possible I was just expecting something different after BP. We'll see, and I'll post more about it as I get further through their catalog.

Tap Tap Revenge3 iPhone: Avoid this.

2010-03-21T11:09:00.000-04:00

So I got this. Seems ok, plays well enough. There are some ads, but it's a free app, so I don't mind. There is a free track each week, and I can buy more songs if I want. Everything is ok.

One day, I turn on my iPod, and I get an alert from Tap Tap telling me there is some offer. I hadn't even started the application! Imagine if you 20 apps on you iPod that do that. You could be bombarded with alerts when you turn on your iPod.

Honestly, I can't believe Apple allows this on their device. If you value your right to use your iPod and not have apps doing things when they're not even running, don't use this app.

The New Alice in Wonderland

2010-03-13T11:04:00.002-05:00

I went to see this, expecting nothing groundbreaking or as dark as I would like because it was by Disney. They haven't done anything with teeth for quite some time (I'm not counting Bolt since that was effectively a Pixar film). Last I can remember is the fiery lust scene in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. That was old school kind of stuff where if you see it as a 5-year-old, you think nothing of it. Then when you see it when you're an adult, you say, "Wow! I hadn't noticed that..."

I at least hoped the visuals would be incredible. Some were; the Red Queen's Castle was pretty cool. But I found myself really bored with the film, and halfway through I figured out why.

It hit me when Alice was rewarded for returning a favor to someone that had hurt her in the past. Wonderland made sense. Gone were the insanity and chaos of the animated Disney film of 1951 (which I quite like). What I really had hoped for, dimly in the back of my mind, was to be transported to a world of beautifully-rendered utter nonsense.

Another thing that was missing was the trademark wit of the book. Some of this was present in the 1951 film, but it was entirely missing here.

That is not to say the film is without some merits. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter's performances were excellent as usual, as was much of the costume design.

All of this is a real shame, because I think Alice In Wonderland is a story that could really benefit from modern visual technologies.

Some cool games

2010-02-28T19:36:00.003-05:00

Just posting to list some cool games I've found recently, in order from cheap to not-so-cheap.

DoodleJump: iPhone game for $1. Cute graphics, instantly accessible gameplay. Very fun. Just title left and right to get the dude to land on the platforms to keep jumping higher. You lose if you hit the bottom of the screen without landing on a platform first.

dotdotdot: iPhone game for $2. Very nice graphic presentation, challenging, fun, short. These are good things to have in an iPhone game. Just tilt the phone left and right to line up the ball with the slot so it can go down to the next layer. But each successive layer has a different center point, and may or may not be reversed.

Orbital: iPhone (version I'm playing) is $2. Good graphics, very clever design. Launch balls into the playfield from the bottom; when they stop, they grow until they touch something. Balls have a 3 on them. Each time you hit an existing ball with your shot, the number goes down. At zero, it pops and you get a point. If the ball bounces back to where you shoot from, you lose.

Greed Corp: PSN/XBox Live game for $10. Nicely presented turn-based strategy game. Its core element is greed and decay. It's fundamentally about capturing all the territory on the map. But the Harvesters that give you $2 per hex they touch also destroy those hexes and ultimately. themselves. If you try to preserve land to have room to maneuver, your opponents will destroy their own for money and come steal yours. It's 1-4 player, and supports both local and network play.

Mushroom Wars: PS3 game for $10. This is mainly a simple single-player RTS. It's cute and fun. There is a 2-player offline version which is fun, but there are only 6 maps. This game has some of the best graphic design I've seen in a video game. My wife, who is a graphic designer, says it's like a breath of fresh air in the jungle of video game graphics. But she likes stuff like Rez and Eufloria, so that's hardly surprising. She's right though. :)

Heavy Rain: PS3 game for $60. I'm not generally someone who likes narrative games. I find the narrative gets in the way of the gameplay. A notable exception is God Of War, which is very gameplay heavy and just happens to have excellent cut-scenes. Heavy Rain is a narrative game with very sparse Dragon's Lair-style gameplay where the focus of the game is the narrative. I don't feel the narrative gets in the way of the gameplay in this game because the narrative is the gameplay. I'm not very far in yet, but so far I've enjoyed it a lot.

Well, that's all for now.

Tom Clancy's HAWX

2010-01-23T14:13:00.002-05:00

So... I just played HAWX. For about 5 minutes.

It's a jet-fighter game. When you turn sideways, you don't lose altitude or start to change heading. If you know anything about flight physics, you know how wrong this is. If you know anything about game design, you know how boring it is.

When you invert camera controls, push down to look up (I like), and push left to look right (I hate). You need seperate invert axis settings for X and Y!

Unplayable. No fun. Avoid this.

Tetris and the nature of online gaming

2009-12-26T05:35:00.002-05:00

So, I just happened across TetrisFriends.com. I've been climbing the ranks in Sprint 5, Battle 2P and Battle 6P. It's been fun having human opponents to play Tetris against.

But when I lost my first Sprint game, it occurred to me that the experience I had might have been easily generated by an AI. There's very little interaction in the game, as there's no chat and what really matters is how fast you go.

All an AI would have to do would be to slowly increase its speed until I lose, then adjust it up and down to give me good challenges and some wins to keep me coming back. I know it's not all that simple. The people at the site can list their names and join friends lists and such.

But given the simplicity of Tetris (which is one of its main strengths), there really isn't much room for individual strategies. Seeing different tactics used against you is one of the cool things about playing other games against people.

Also, TetrisFriends seems to be rather successful, so there's a large pool of people to play against, which makes sure the difficulty curve is very smooth. While this is in principle a good thing, it makes your opponents rather faceless at the same time.

But then it occurred to me: aren't all online games like this? Except for chatting, which AIs can't replicate yet, couldn't most online game experiences be replicated with AIs?

Well, not really. It depends on the complexity of the game. When you play something like Quake 3, and there's a bot in there, it's really obvious. But Q3 is a 10-year-old game; perhaps with better AI it could work. But then there's the issue of teamwork. Getting in a squad in Killzone 2 and working together with the others yields some very interesting teamwork dynamics. This sort of thing is still beyond the reach of current AI techniques, at least with the limited hardware available to home console games.

But in the future, perhaps AI will advance far enough to give a really good approximation of human behavior in games. What then? There is also the wider question of what happens when AI can replace an even greater range of human behavior? I can imagine people needing to interact with each other less and less, and humanity disappearing through disconnection into a new world of computer sentience. Or maybe the same technology will just better enable people to share their imaginations with each other. We can only speculate at this point.

My apologies for this post turning into a ramble. But that just proves this was written by a person.

Or does it?

Impressions of Bayonetta

2009-12-06T09:37:00.004-05:00

I played the Bayonetta demo yesterday for about 15 minutes. I'll just give a quick impression, since I haven't seen enough to do a full commentary.

The game looks and feels very much like Devil May Cry. Not surprising, as some of the DMC people are behind the game. This may or may not be a good thing, depending on whether or not you like DMC.

The combat feels solid, and the control of the character is well-done. There's a DMC-style boss-heavy mix of things to fight. The dodge function works very well, so you can really do some impressive things. Coupled with Witch Time, which slows time if you do a last-millisecond dodge, you can do some very impressive things.

The graphics are good enough, with decent effects and a passable frame rate. On my PS3, it was running 60 FPS most of the time, but occasionally dropped to 30.

I find it interesting that they chose to give her glasses, but they look cool.

That's as much as I can say in favor of it. Unfortunately, some of the things that bugged me will probably prevent me from playing it further.

For a game that centers on its main character and her looks and style, Bayonetta is not characterized very well. But I don't generally like the characters in action games aimed a the Japanese male 17-24 market. DMC's characters were just as silly in my opinion.

I really dislike having to listen to vocal J-Pop every time I start fighting something. This ruins the atmosphere for me.

The following isn't a game breaker for me, but it is an important feature of the game. It is very consciously mixing sex and violence together. Sure, these things have always gone together, but this game is pretty shameless about it. The title of the demo is "Bayonetta: First Climax," which I thought was just going to be a title. It turns out that many of the verses (scenes are called verses) of the game finish with a boss battle which ends with a hud element telling you to hit two buttons for "Climax."

When you do this, Bayonetta turns her hair into some kind of gigantic tentacle with a dragon's mouth on the end which eats the boss. Somehow when this happens, she ends up nude. Like her clothes are part of her hair... in a magic way... or something. This part, is almost a game-breaker for me because it's just so silly. Also, I get this unpleasant vision of 15-year-old boys viciously bashing away at enemies to get to the Climax to get another shot of Bayonetta nude.

Bayonetta is a very competently made game, even if it is derivative. But it's so hopelessly juvenile that I can't bring myself to play it as a 40-year-old male with a more mature idea of what is sexy.

How to listen to Ambient music

2009-10-12T20:17:00.002-04:00

Hi!

I'm going to write about a strange type of music called Ambient. It's a little difficult to talk about specific elements in the music without resorting to some odd language, so be warned. Ambient is a form of electronic music that has almost no drums in it. I approached this genre with hesitance, as I generally like interesting rhythms in the music I listen to. But I found that there can be a lot of depth and structure in this form, but it took me a while to come to terms with it.

The fundamental issue is that you have to know where to look for the music. In pop, there is music in the melody and how the accompaniment interacts with it. In rap, there is music in the interactions between the rhythms of the lyrics and the rhythms of the music. In Ambient, the music can be hidden in the interactions between the textures of the sounds.

Here's a link to a 2-minute excerpt of a track called Chukhung from Biosphere's brilliant 1996 album called Substrata. It's a landmark in the genre, and I highly recommend it to anyone wishing to begin an exploration of Ambient. Give the excerpt a listen now, then come back and continue reading. Your best bet is to listen in headphones. (I'm really hoping Mr. Jenssen and his publisher will consider this a fair use of the material, should they come across this post.)

This album was in fact my first experience with Ambient music. I had heard the artist's earlier work (the excellent Microgravity from 1991), which did include a lot of drum work as it was in the Ambient Techno genre. But a few tracks had no drums, and they were very good. So I figured it was worth seeing what he did on a full album without drums (well, there's a very light bit of drumming in Uva-Ursi, but that's the only exception).

When I first listened to Chukhung, I heard the repeating "poong" that starts at 0:06, the "boo-ner-eem" that starts at 0:52, and the guitar that starts at 1:37. I thought they were interesting-sounding textures, and that was as far as it went. But after listening many more times, I came to hear a lot more elements.

The "poong" actually changes pitch with each hit, rising and falling quite slowly. Accompanying it is a bass sound that pans left and right a bit. The "poong" also has a very long echo on it, which doesn't actually end in time for the next "poong."

The echo of the "doo-ner-nim" is accompanied by an almost-metallic scraping sound, a dissonant mid-range chord, and slightly lower-frequency chord. These sounds change subtly in stereo positioning from hit to hit. The guitar also pans around alot, and has a lot of ambient echo on it throughout the soundspace.

The complexity in this music is not in the notes, as they would look quite simple on sheet music. The structure is all tied up in the textures of the sounds, and how these textures work with each other to create a soundscape.

In the full track 7.5 minute track, these elements change volume relative to each other, disappear and reappear, and one other element is brought in. The result is a subtly shifting soundscape that never bores me. Since my first experience with headphones when I was a kid, I've always loved what music can do with the soundstage in your head. Good Ambient artists really make this most of this, so it is best listened to in headphones. Much of the subtlety is lost if you aren't getting the effects of stereo placement of the sounds.

If you're interested in delving into his music, I recommend starting with Microgravity, then going on to Cirque, Substrata, then Shen Zhou. All of his main albums are excellent, but these give a good idea of the range of what he does. You can find his work at biosphere.no. It's not for everyone, but if you can get into it, it's a very special place in the world.

O. Noir - Blind dining in Montreal

2009-07-19T11:14:00.002-04:00

Hi!

We've lived in Montreal for over 4 years now, and we've been curious about a restaurant called O. Noir. The waitstaff are blind or partially-sighted, and you eat in the dark. We decided to go try it finally on last Friday.

I always figured it would be in semi-darkness, where you might be able to see after your eyes adjusted. But no, it was completely pitch-black. The moment the light first disappeared and the noise crashed in on me, I almost had to leave as it kicked off my claustrophobia. I got past that, and survived the rest of the evening.

Well, I can't say I recommend going. The concept is something that I think is interesting. We were forced to do everything without sight, which meant re-learning how to eat and interact with other people. I found that part very interesting. The food was decent, though not brilliant.

But the place seems to cater to a tourist audience, and many of the other people treated it as a gag. The same thing happened there as you get on internet forums: give people anonymity, and they act like morons. A group next to us were shouting and howling and generally being a nuisance. I sincerely doubt these people would act that way anywhere they might be recognized.

Combine peoples' behavior with the acoustics of the room, and it became too loud to hear myself think. So I found that the combination of not being able to see, and not being able to hear anything above the din was stifling.

The service wasn't great, as they do a seat-everyone-at-once style banquet thing. So we felt trapped at our table as the waiter didn't come by except to bring food. Trena never got a knife despite asking for one twice. I understand that you can't expect perfect service when it's completely dark. But it could have been better. Given they were charging $40 per person (+drinks and tax), I found it odd that their strategy was to cram as many people into the space as possible. I suppose that makes an amount of sense given people can't see they're crammed in, but it certainly was apparent from the noise.

Overall, I think if they catered to a different audience and improved the acoustics of the room, they'd have something really special.

EVE: Strengths and Weaknesses

2009-07-15T20:27:00.001-04:00

At the risk of posting too much about EVE, I decided I was tired of typing this. So now I can just point people to this post. :)

--------------------------

EVE's weaknesses:

Poorly documented (being worked on).
Interface bugs (though these are slowly being cleaned up).
Tech II Blueprint Originals (I'd have to do some explaining on this one).

EVE's strengths:
Not sharded; all players are in the same world.
Robust player-driven economy and political system.
Expansions are always free, and there are two major ones per year.

Things you may or may not like, depending on your preferences:
Steep learning curve.
Skills train offline with real time.
PvP can happen anywhere, though they REALLY have to want you to go after you in high-security space.
Death incurs loss of equipment (not skills, if clone is kept up-to-date).
Classless: choose any skill to train, provided you have the pre-reqs and the cash.
You can train for years and still not top out the skill system.

For me, the game's inherent harshness makes it rewarding since you have to earn your way through the game; it doesn't give you anything.

One thing that worries new players is that if skills train with time, you can't ever catch up with the veterans in skill. They mitigate that by making the training time for levels exponential. Skills top out at level 5. Training times for a skill might be

L1: 15 minutes
L2: 2 hours
L3: 15 hours
L4: 2 days
L5: 30 days

It doesn't really take very long to get a lot of L4 skills, and skills usually add % bonuses. So you get get within 80% effectiveness on many things quite quickly.

EVE-Online: The Covetor BPO, The End of the Line

2009-07-11T11:14:00.004-04:00

So, sadly, it's time to write the last chapter about the Covetor BPO. I wrote earlier that it paid off. That was because the invention percent on the first run was above average. Now that I have run it long enough to get the correct invention rate, it turns out not to pay very well. Apparently, due to the existence of Hulk BPOs that can make Hulks without the cost of invention, they can undercut us inventors and still make a load more money. CCP needs to do something about the old Tech II BPO situation, in my opinion.

We put 4.6 billion ISK through it in a combined operation of selling Covetors, Hulks, and Covetor BPCs. Net sales were 2.5 billion. Net profit was 230 million. Not a very good margin, considering the amount of effort it was compared to manufacturing and selling battlecruisers.

We make about 2 million each selling Myrmidon battlecruisers, and we can sell about 15 a week with very little hassle. Simultaneously I can run other battlecruiser BPOs and earn similar amounts of money, and since I can sell the various types one jump from where I make them, it's better business.

So, I sold the BPO:

We are now sitting on 3 billion in cash, and are looking for new adventures.

Starcraft II comment

2009-07-05T19:25:00.002-04:00

Allegedly, Starcraft II will have "nonlinear levels." From an interview with a Blizzard dude:

"He says the missions aren't linear, so if you can't beat one, you can say 'I'm going to go [get] myself something powerful and come back here and make this one suffer'."

I have never, ever liked this kind of gameplay. Give me properly balanced levels, or skill settings. Don't make me wonder if I should go play some other level to make this one possible.

Grrr.

A word about the old Star Trek show

2009-06-24T13:05:00.002-04:00

I ran across an interesting opinion on a forum I read. Here's the quote, since you need to register to see that part of the forum:

Originally Posted by alfaniner:

One thing I've discovered, when channel surfing if I come across TNG or Enterprise, it usually takes quite some time to figure out which episode it is, and invariably I'm not that inclined to keep watching. But for TOS, I can usually tell within a few seconds, and no matter where I come in am tempted to watch the rest of the episode.

I don't intend to start a flame war about which Trek is best, since there are things in all of them that appeal to one person or another. But I've always thought that TNG felt sterile, and this quote gives a good account of its affect on me.

BM2 is 3 years old.

2009-06-09T22:08:00.002-04:00

It's been three years since I founded BM2. Lots of things have happened since then.

We've had at least 4 different mining directors, at least 3 recruitment officers, 4 wardecs, and a lot of mining.

If I weren't CEO of a corp, I'm sure I would have quit EVE long ago. I signed up specifically to run one. I said that in the noob corp channel, and someone said, "Why is it every noob thinks she can run a corp?"

As such, it's been a long, hard struggle to get where we are because I've never been in another corp, and have no idea how other people run them.

But none of it would be possible if it weren't for the members and their hard work. Running a virtual corporation has been rewarding because of two main reasons:

a) I risk no real capital.
b) The leadership challenges are real.

As such, I'll probably continue doing this for a while longer.

Mac OS X and Mouse Acceleration

2009-05-19T19:50:00.003-04:00

In a previous blog post, I discussed Mac OS X and its horrible mouse acceleration and the fact that there is no easy way to turn it off. Since then, that post has been either the most popular page on my blog, or the second most popular. I won't mention which post is currently the most popular for fear of Google directing people to this post for that subject.

Since writing my original post about the mouse problem, I have written to Apple several times through their OS X Product Feedback link. Some of my friends have written to them, as well. These are always calm discussions about why we want to turn off mouse acceleration, and why we don't think it's a huge change to the OS to put in a checkbox to enable or disable it.

If you don't know, mouse acceleration means that the distance the pointer on the screen moves is related to both how far and how fast you move the mouse. For example, the pointer might move one inch on the screen for one inch of mouse movement if it takes you one second to move it, but it could then move four inches if it takes you half a second to move the mouse one inch.

Recently, I decided to try another tactic: the online petition. Here is the link to it:

http://www.petitiononline.com/MacMAcc/petition.html

You can find some more discussion about the topic at the JREF Forum. This forum has a very high signal to noise ratio, and I recommend it as a place to discuss almost anything you might be interested in.

So, I humbly ask you to sign the petition if you think Apple should allow its users to choose easily whether or not they want mouse acceleration. Also, pass on the address to anyone else you know who might think this is a good idea.

Street Fighter IV

2009-03-11T22:59:00.003-04:00

I don't like it. I've played for about two hours, and I really don't like it. I want to like it. But I'm afraid I can't.

I'm not here to say it's a bad game. It's very nicely done in many respects (sound being a notable exception). But it certainly is not a game that appeals to me.

Remove the Ultra and Super attacks, and it's decent. Except for all the ranged attacks. I was playing online against Gouken, and he was throwing fireballs at multiple angles. It's as if a rogue Ken player was let loose on the game design. Partway through the round, I left the game to write this, and I doubt I will ever go back.

I played Street Fighter II Champion Edition a lot, and I loved it. I played Chun Li, as she had no ranged attacks and I could focus on a defensive finesse-based style. After that, I moved on to Tekken, as it didn't have all the silly ranged attacks and power-bars that SF was developing.

Maybe I've been in Tekken too long to go back to SF. But with Tekken 6's rage and item moves, I may not advance beyond Tekken 5, either. I wonder if Virtua Fighter will follow the trend.

What I like about 1-vs.-1 fighting games is careful timing and subtle move interactions. When there are too many moves that are unblockable, deal damage through a block, or remove 3/4 of your health bar, it focuses too much on offense and getting the big hit in.

In Tekken 3-5, I've played Lei Wulong enough to learn almost his entire move list. When I have battles with other well-trained players, we get very complex strings of dancing moves, blocks, counter moves and throws. In SF 4, I get the feeling people are just letting me hit them so they can power up for the Ultra move. Or they take Sagat and throw hundreds of fireballs until I get close enough for the uppercut. It doesn't feel either balanced or fun to me. It's probably because I prefer to play these games defensively, and SF 4 is clearly not designed for that. Maybe I just haven't figured out how. In any case, I don't feel the desire to wade through the over-aggressive punishment to learn. I'm an EVE player, so I can take punishment if I think I'll be rewarded in the long run. But I don't relish the idea of becoming good at landing Chun Li's Ultra Combo.

2008 Video Game of the Year

2009-02-06T21:08:00.009-05:00

There's a game I've been playing on my PS3 that I think is the best game to come out all year. Here's a list of games from 2008 I've played that are strong titles; which do you think I've picked?

GTA IV
Soul Calibur IV
Rock Band 2
Spore
Little Big Planet

These are all good games (well, maybe except for one). Some were expensive to produce, some highly polished, some innovative, and some are sequels. I picked...

Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars. This is a $10 ($15 when I got it) download from the PSN for PS3. It's an ostensibly simple game, with just cars, a ball, and two goals. What makes it great is that all you can do is bump the ball by running into it; you have no weapons. Thus control of your car is everything. It can double-jump, rotate in the air (around two axes, no less), and it has a rocket mounted on the back that can be used for speed or to fly.

The computer gives absolutely no assistance in hitting the ball the right direction - so it's entirely up to the player to make sure that the collision between the ball and the car gives the desired result. With no assistance, early on it's a victory every time you hit the ball and it goes even remotely in the direction you want. As you incrementally improve, there's always a sense of accomplishment. Since the game includes the awesome feature of being able to upload videos of your games to youtube, I'll show you one of the first goals that I scored from mid-air. To get an idea of what is possible, check out this goal scored by one of the developers.

The single-player experience is solid. There are minigames that teach specific skills, like goal-tending and brake-sliding. You can also play against bots in an escalating series of matches. They're surprisingly good at the game, and are fun to play with while you're learning. If you can get through all the minigames (25 of them) and most of the tournament matches, you have learned enough to start playing online.

The online games are quite good. I usually find there are enough players around to get a game within 5 minutes. It's possible to play networked with several people split-screen, which is a nice way to get new people into it. It also keeps extensive stats on each player.

One great feature that more games need to use is that of profiles. I don't mean using the PS3 accounts to hold separate profiles. I mean keeping profiles for each person who plays the game on your system under one PS3 account. Some people like inverted-y on their cameras, other people don't. On this game, you can create a profile that you select when you play and it remembers your control preference settings. If only Tekken had this feature; I play with a non-standard set of shoulder-button binds. This causes endless trouble when playing in a group of friends who all have different button binds.

It's clear to me that this game was made by a small group of developers who made it because they loved playing it. When the company (the one behind Onslaught mode in UT 2004) had a night where they fielded teams of 2 against the internet community, they won 47 games to 14. If you saw Adam's amazing goal in the above youtube link, you can see just how much practice he's put into the game.

Fortunately, enough people bought it to keep the online portion alive, and give the developers enough incentive to add a map in the first patch. The community seems to be slowly growing, as it's the kind of game you can play for months (or longer) without getting bored since you can always refine your technique a little bit more. This game is like a combination of soccer and Quake 3 (if you don't know, Q3 has one of the longest learning curves in history).

If you haven't played or seen SARPBC, you owe it to yourself to try the demo. I can't promise you'll like it, but at least give it a chance. I can't think of a better way to spend $10 on a video game.

If you'd like to see more videos, here are some of me playing. They're just highlights, so don't be afraid to click.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ygoFth9sPA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSMy-jY486o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7UoxdU87-A

EVE-Online: The Covetor BPO, Part 4

2008-11-30T21:36:00.003-05:00

So, if you've been reading the chronicles of my EVE corp's endeavors with a Covetor BPO, this is the third installment. Here are links to the other three.

Well, it's paid off. It looks like after costs (not including the original BPO purchase), with selling 6 Hulks, 5 Covetors, and 20 Covetor BPCs, we'll have made about 95 million ISK. Here's a pic of the corp wallet with some of our first Hulk sales. Those big, fat, green numbers with 8 digits make it all worth while.

It's taken around two months for all of this, so at this rate, it will take about 2 years to pay off the Covetor BPO. This fits in with EVE's reported economic velocity of roughly 10x real life where house mortgages take from 20 to 30 years to pay off. I'm sure I can make more time-efficient use of the BPO in the future; I was going slowly to make sure I didn't go too fast and make a mistake somewhere.

I can see that the invention system is designed to be complex enough to put some players off doing it. In a game where skills train with real time, all players will eventually have all skills. In the case of combat, you still need experience and practice to play well. But with manufacturing, you just follow the recipes. So in an effort to keep the markets from being flooded with products on the high end, they've made the process so complex that fewer players are willing to navigate its twistiness.

Given the profit margin I appear to be making with the Hulk invention process compared to standard Tech I battleship manufacturing, it appears to have worked. Part of that is that more skills are necessary for the Hulk process, but I can't help thinking the convoluted nature of the whole thing and the random element in the BPC invention have made a difference.

EVE-Online: The Covetor BPO, Part 3

2008-11-15T21:21:00.008-05:00

So, if you've been reading the chronicles of my EVE corp's endeavors with a Covetor BPO, this is the third installment. Here are links to the other two.

We've now invested 2.8 billion in the Covetor BPO. The main goal is to manufacture Hulk mining ships. A convoluted process called Invention is how EVE makes production of such Tech II items difficult. You can skip the next paragraph if you don't need to know just how complicated it is.

First, you take a BPC (blueprint copy) of the base ship you're inventing with. Hulks come from Covetors, so you start with a Covetor BPC. Copying the BPO costs money and time. Then you use a ship data interface (costs on the order of 50 million ISK), a number of appropriate datacores, and the BPC into the Invention process to make Hulk BPCs. However, there's only a chance you will get one. If you're curious, here's a site with a calculator that helps you figure out what your chances are. If your BPC is a max-run BPC (Covetor max-run BPCs allow 10 Covetors to be made), you can put in a decryptor to help the process (these run between 5 and 20 million ISK). These variously affect the chance of invention, the material efficiency level of the resulting BPC, and how many runs the result is good for.

Once you have your Tech II BPC, you then put in one of the base ships (in our case a Covetor) plus some construction components, and you finally get your finished product!

It's extremely difficult to completely vertically integrate the whole process. The various components of the invention process come from R+D agents and various types of hidden combat instances that must be probed for. Some of the construction components are made from materials that must be synthesized in PoSs (Player Owned Stations) from moon materials.

It's clear to me this whole system was designed to generate two things: highly fluctuating costs to make a large barrier to entry, and to require very large numbers of people to work together (either as a team or through the market) to make Tech II items. My chance of getting Hulk BPCs with the process was 24%. The first seven attempts gave me nothing, and cost on the order of 120 million ISK. Two of the last three gave a result, so I'm now manufacturing 6 Hulks. When they sell, it will pull in around half a billion ISK gross. I'm keeping a careful spreadsheet of this whole Covetor BPO business; it's too complicated for me to be sure it's earning money without keeping careful tabs on costs. Here's a pic of the spreadsheet, and a picture of the corp wallet after I bought all the parts needed to make the Hulks.

People and their loud music

2008-10-18T10:14:00.002-04:00

Just a quick rant. I don't know why people think they have the right to blast their stereos at night in an apartment complex. Usually, when I ask nicely, people do turn it down. But last night, I had no luck. The guy just acted like I must be brain dead to think he'd turn down his music. Some people do need sleep. I don't know about him.

On a related note, how about those people with their headphones so loud you can hear it all the way across the length of a subway car? Aren't they deaf? Well, maybe they are and that's why they play it so loud.

I'm writing this because it's the next day and someone else is blaring their music. Maybe I sound like a curmudgeon (great word). But I have so many neighbors who do this that there's almost always at least one of them doing it, so it's never quiet. Sometimes it's even people two floors away.

In an older complex with thin wood floors, I'd sort of expect this. But this building was completed in 2005, and has rather thick walls and heavy concrete floors. I often hear one of our neighbor's music through his door, but I hear nothing once I get into our apartment.

We have a powerful stereo, too. But in over three years, we've only gotten one noise complaint. That was when I had it pretty loud, and was playing DDR at about midnight. I had just forgotten it was late.

Maybe I should put Ministry's Psalm 69 on, put it on repeat, crank the volume, and leave for a few days.

Veloce - headroom

2008-10-05T12:21:00.004-04:00

I've long been a fan of Perfume Tree (Tide's Out, Feeler), and the subsequent incarnation of the band, Veloce (Veloce, headroom). Their music is available from iTunes at high resoluton without DRM; check them out. Following is my review of their latest effort, headoom.

headroom by Veloce

Veloce is what became of Perfume Tree. Perfume Tree was already headed toward minimalist electronica with tracks like "Flooded," and Veloce has continued in that direction. As headroom is missing Jane Tilley's distinctive vocals, it feels like a side project from one of the other members. This is not meant as a criticism, rather just as an observation.

headroom is a collection of minimalist soundscapes. Just a quick check through the samples available on iTunes will show that by "minimal" I don't necessarily mean sparse (at least as far as music in this genre goes). Most of the eight tracks have fairly complex rhythms; what makes them minimal is how slowly they change over time.

The whole album has a mysteriously distant quality about it; as such, it's a rather meditative experience. It's an experience whose quality isn't immediately apparent; it took me about 10 listens to come to grips with it. I recommend this album for the committed minimalist electronica listener. Veloce's self-titled album is probably a better starting point for those unfamiliar with the band's work, but headroom is certainly a worthwhile listen.

Sarah Palin learned from the George W Bush school of pronunciation

2008-10-02T21:57:00.003-04:00

A quick note for Sarah Palin:

It's ih-rak, not eye-rak.
It's ih-ran, not eye-ran.
It's nook-lee-ar, not nook-you-lar.

I know pronunciation is not the most imporant thing in a political debate. But it's much easier to take someone seriously when they don't sound like a hick.

Wipeout HD

2008-09-25T22:27:00.003-04:00

Today is a good day to own a PS3. Wipeout HD has finally been released, and it is awesome. The motion controls are solid, the graphics are solid, the soundtrack is solid, the game modes are solid, the online play is solid...

It's been since 1999 that a Playstation console (excluding PSP) has had a good version of Wipeout, which was Wipeout 3. W3 is still eminently playable, as it was a benchmark for its time. The problem was the Wipeout Fusion on the PS2 failed for several reasons. It had its good points, such as zone mode and generally good graphics in-game. But on the whole, it just failed to satisfy.

Anyway, that's all water under the bridge now. After two successful versions of Wipeout on the PSP, Studio Liverpool has returned to the big console in a big way.

At $22, it's very hard to get better value than you get with this game. I could easily have forked $60 for a Bluray disc of this game and I'd still be happy. Actually, I think I'd prefer that to permanently taking up 1 GB of space on the PS3's hard drive.

I'm going to go race some more now.

Soul Calibur IV online

2008-09-25T16:16:00.004-04:00

While the game journalists were all clamoring because Virtua Fighter 5 didn't have online, I was saying that a game where you can jab your opponent in 1/10 of a second wouldn't work online.

Soul Calibur IV has online play, and it's dodgy at best. If you think about it, with talk time (ping) between clients being at least 40 milliseconds, and often higher, fast moves are already half-way to hitting you before you even see they're coming. When the ping is higher, it's unplayable.

One of my opponents saw the game was lagging, and so would get as far from me as possible, then start to run at me. After tackling me, they'd do it again. Starting a move to hit a running target while accounting for an unspecified lag-time before your move will start is difficult at best. So while their strategy would never, ever work in a local match, it was very difficult to beat online with lag.

Today, I noticed my opponent seemed to be starting the round before me. So I watched very carefully, and sure enough: he was able to start a move at the beginning of the round at least a half-second before I could. If both players deal with identical lag, then at least the situation affects both players equally. In this case, it was very unfair to me.

This is a case of the general public demanding a bad feature be put into a game largely because they're unaware of the technical constraints of online gaming. Games like Soul Calibur and Tekken are heavily dependent on split-second timing, and are therefore very intolerant of lag problems.

Many game types work just fine online; in the case of racing games, your opponent's positions can be extrapolated from last-known positions since a car is unable to change its momentum that much from frame to frame.

But we all know that if Tekken 6 doesn't have online play, and DOA 5 does, that DOA 5 would have a significant sales advantage. So Namco has to put online play into Tekken 6, even though they are probably aware that Tekken just isn't Tekken when played online.

Maybe I'm all wrong, and it's just that Namco has implemented SCIV's online mode poorly. But I sincerely doubt it.

EVE-Online: The Covetor BPO, Part 2

2008-09-24T19:50:00.002-04:00

So, if you read this, you may want to know what eventually happened.

I happened across someone selling a fully researched Covetor BPO in high-sec, for 2.35 billion ISK. That means I pay them 350 million for researching it (which takes a month), and delivering it to high-sec for me.

Before accepting the contract, I had to be very careful to make sure the item I would get was what I thought it would be. There are a lot of contract-scammers who do things like post a Tech 1 variant of a ship (worth 900 million), but they put the Tech 2 variant (worth 4 billion) in the name of the contract. If you're not very careful, you get ripped-off. Over time, CCP (EVE's developer) has made the contracts clearer about what's in them, but apparently many people are still fooled.

I wasn't fooled. We got the BPO, and it's now happily turning out BPCs so BM2 can start to make and sell Hulks.

EVE-Online: The Covetor BPO, Part 1

2008-09-15T04:53:00.006-04:00

BM2 has almost enough money to buy the holy grail of mining-ship BPOs, the Covetor BPO.

First, an explanation. A BPO is a Blueprint Original. These represent the information you need to build ships. These are one of the few items generated in EVE by the NPC market. Hence, the one we're after has a fixed price at the NPC station it's sold from. In most cases, BPOs are sold in a variety of places, and usually in high-sec (where non-consensual PvP is punished by the police). As such, normally you find a nearby station that sells the BPO you want, and you go get it.

Another power associated with owning a BPO is the ability to do "invention." This takes a BPC (Blueprint Copy), some other materials, and attempts to create a Tech II variant BPC of the item the BPO is for. BPCs are just like BPOs, except they can only make a set number of their item, then they disappear. In our case, we'd want to make Hulk BPCs; Hulks are the best mining ships in the game, hence Hulk BPCs are sought-after items. Since this is the only way to make Hulks (unless you own a fabled Hulk BPO from before the introduction of invention), the Covetor BPO is a crucial element in the world of EVE.

Here's the ugly bit: You can only get the Covetor BPO from a small NPC mining firm (ORE, Outer Ring Excavations) which is about 15 jumps into null-sec (where there are no rules about PvP), and it costs 2 billion ISK. My corporation's assets total about 4 billion, so this is going to be a huge investment. The dilemma I face is because of this (click to enlarge):

This is the entire map of EVE, with each dot being a solar system. I have the colors representing players killed in the last 24 hours. You can see that about 5 or 6 spots stick out; the one nearest the bottom is on the path from our HQ to ORE. That system (PF-346) is the 0.0 entry point from high-sec. These gateway systems are heavily camped to make access to 0.0 more difficult. PF-346 is a particularly notorious one, which is probably because there is no buffer zone of low-sec between it and high-sec.

The risk then is that I'd pay roughly have my corp's assets for this BPO, then get destroyed while on my way back to high-sec. The risk is great enough that Covetor BPOs sold by players on the high-sec market usually go for 2.5 billion ISK, which is rather large mark-up.

So I have to decide among three options:

Sneak out to ORE myself in a Covert Ops ship (which can cloak still travel at normal speed) and try to sneak the BPO back.
Pay a friend to sneak out in a Covert Ops ship and bring it back.
Pay the market premium for delivery to high-sec.

Option 1 is dangerous since I'm not practiced in 0.0 PvP. I'd stand a decent chance of getting caught.

Option 2 is better, but it's still risky, and my friends may not want to take responsibility for half my corp's assets.

Option 3 is safest, but increases the cost of the BPO by 25%.

I'll post again once I have this whole issue figured out.

Virtools: Interface Design Error

2008-09-13T12:49:00.007-04:00

So I'm learning Virtools at work. It's a 3D engine that's supposed to be good for prototyping. I can't comment on that, since I'm still in the early stages of its steep learning curve. At least I have help from someone who used to work at the company that develops it!

Anyway, I found a serious error in its interface design. I opened a list in a panel, and it went further than the bottom of the panel. So a scrollbar appeared... on the left. That struck me immediately as odd; I couldn't remember having seen a scroll bar on the left before. Then as I tried to open and close a bunch of lists in quick succession, the problem became apparent.

So once you've opened the list by clicking the arrow (the red spot in the image), your mouse pointer is no longer on the arrow to close it! So now you have to move the pointer over a little if you want to close the list. Now imagine what you have to do to open and close 5 of these as fast as possible. If the scroll bar were on the right, where it belongs, there would be no problem.

It's these little things that make the difference between an irritating interface and a really nice one.

EVE-Online: Big trip into low-sec

2008-08-30T16:56:00.006-04:00

So if you've read my EVE posts, you know I'm really a carebear at heart. I like to build stuff and sell it. As such, I'm very inexperienced with PvP. Today, I started a long trip into low-sec to haul some stuff for a friend in our new alliance (AMC broke up under a severe wardec).

For those of you who don't know how to read the EVE star map, the colors show the security rating. Green/yellow are "safe," red/orange are not. Each straight line is a jump from one system to another. The green end of this path is where my corp's HQ is. The red end is the unsafe area where my friend's stuff needs to be delivered.

This is the biggest excursion into low-sec I've ever taken. The funny thing is, my hauler is a Viator, so I need to use containers inside its cargohold to fit more stuff in it. It's weird, but cargo containers in EVE use some odd technology to make them take up less space than they hold. The trade off is that you compartmentalize your cargohold. You can carry more stuff, but nothing can be larger than a certain size.

It turns out one thing I need to haul is a container. For obvious reasons, you can't put containers into containers. I can't fit it into the ship since I need the containers I usually use to fit everything else in. So I tried to open the container to see if I could just separate everything out. Turns out the container is empty. Good thing I had to check this, or I would have gone over 20 jumps in low-sec with part of my cargo missing!

Achievements and Trophies

2008-07-30T19:32:00.002-04:00

The PS3 has Trophies now, which are like XBox 360 Achievements. Things you can do in the game that are a challenge, and they show up to other users so they can see how good you are. In principle, it's a good idea.

In practice, however, I'm not so sure. I just spent 1.5 hours in Super Stardust HD trying to get the 15-tokens-in-one-boost trophy. I got 14 of them in one shot once, but never 15. The problem is that the developers need to find something in their game you can do to get a trophy which is both clear in its execution and challenging. But in this case, it's not challenging; it's just frustrating. Maybe I'm not good enough, but I'm a pretty decent Stardust player: I've completed the Arcade mode twice in one game, meaning I was able to survive it on Hard (the second playthrough).

If someone out there can consistently get 15 tokens in one boost, then I'm wrong. But it really seems to me that it requires luck; and going through attempt after attempt of doing the same thing waiting for that luck is dull. I have the same feeling about the get-15-bombs-in-bomber-mode trophy.

Maybe it's the design of these particular trophies. But I've heard about the Halo games where people get together and have 15 people stand on a grenade to get one player an achievement related to grenade frags. Clearly something is broken here.

The bottom line is, I'm just not sure trophies/achievements add to the fun of gaming.

The Happening

2008-07-06T17:05:00.002-04:00

So we went to see The Happening. After Lady in the Water, I was hoping Mr. Shyamalan would get back into form. But, apparently not. It's an improvement, but not by a whole lot.

I disliked the Science diatribes. I can't determine if Shyamalan or his characters have a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution.

But, there were many scenes that I liked. The general creepiness of what "happens," the curve of how it progresses, and some of the characters are interesting. Mark Wahlberg was well-cast. I get a feeling his scene with the plastic plant got him the role, or it was the bit of the script that brough Mark to mind. The Mrs. Jones stuff was really good.

I find that as the film fades in my memory, I remember the bits I liked, not the bits I didn't. I have a feeling Night thinks of Signs as a movie that deals with religion, and Happening as one the deals with Science. Unfortunately, it didn't handle the science at all well, whereas I liked the way Signs handled religion (that it could be interpreted either way).

So for me, in order of enjoyability:

Sixth Sense/Unbreakable
The Village
Signs
The Happening
Lady in the Water

With a rather large gap between TH and LitW.

If his next film disappoints, I'm giving up. I liked both Signs and The Village, so for me it's only 2 real klunkers since Unbreakable. And I gotta say, The Happening could have been much worse.

Control consistency, guys. Come on.

2008-05-18T22:35:00.003-04:00

So I'm playing Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. I have my Y-axis inverted, since I do everything with inverted Y. Yes, even third-person shooters. It's just what I'm used to. It's working fine up till now, as long as in the game's opinion all I'm doing is moving the camera. Suddenly, game puts me in a ship, and gives me a gun cursor, and I'm supposed to shoot down the enemies. Guess what! No Inverted-Y. So I can't aim for spit. Great.

I don't understand where developers get this idea that they can do the Invert-Y thing in a half-assed manner. This is Insomniac we're talking about here; they've sold millions upon millions of games. As an example of how it should be done, take Warhawk. It allows you to set Invert-Y separately for on foot, in tanks/jeeps, and in warhawks. Some people expect Invert-Y on a hawk since it's a plane, while still expecting non-inversion while on foot since they're just controlling a cursor and not a plane. Other people always Invert-Y if they're aiming something (like me).

Yes, it incurs menu design and programming overhead. But it is fundamental to a player's ability to control a game that they be able to Invert-Y as they are accustomed.

Echochrome Demo

2008-05-17T10:51:00.003-04:00

So I've been looking forward to Echochrome on the PS3. Though having seen the video of this interesting puzzle game, I thought, "This will either be really awesome, or just really irritating."

Well, I tried the demo. It's nice, but there's a serious issue. The way the game works is that you alter the layout of the playfield by changing the camera angle. One play mechanic is to hide holes in the paths behind posts, then the hold disappears so you can walk over it. But a hole can only be crossed if it is completely hidden. So if you're off by 1 pixel, you fall through the hole. THAT is not fun. So for me, the game in its present form falls on the side of irritating, though I wouldn't say really irritating.

So give the demo a try. If you like it, I suspect $10 for 56 levels is a good value.

Devil May Cry 4

2008-05-17T10:37:00.003-04:00

Right, I played DMC 1 through once. The upgrade/item system annoyed me then, and it annoys me now in DMC 4. Plus I find boss battles irritating. In DMC, these two issues combine to be REALLY annoying.

So I'm fighting this frog thing. Having some trouble. So I buy a green star (which regenerates health) to use during the battle. I still fail, despite having more time to try to beat the thing. Now, the price of the NEXT green star is higher, even though I gained no real benefit from the first one since I failed. Now I have to restart the entire level to reset the star price, since a higher star price just means more difficulty later. So this game gets harder if you're not good at it; that's really stupid. It also gives you more upgrade points when you play really well. I can understand that from a rewards perspective, except it makes the game easier for people who are already good at it! That's also really stupid.

DMC's system that allows the player to fall behind or get ahead of the difficulty curve makes no sense to me. Not that this kind of thing never works; I've seen that done right in Diablo II. When you got ahead of the curve, you'd go into areas designed for higher level characters, and you ended up always fighting things that were at your level of competence. With DMC's strict mission system, you can't rush forward to the tougher sections without continuing to earn more power.

I'm not sure how much further into this game I will go.

EVE-Online: First day of the war

2008-05-07T22:46:00.005-04:00

Not much to report since I was away during the battles, but we got some of them, they got some of us. Here's one of them:

I did get to do some scanning for bad guys earlier, there just wasn't any fighting at the time.

EVE-Online: Fallout from the Gniess op

2008-05-06T20:28:00.003-04:00

Right, the previous post talked about a load of Gniess I found. Well, turns out that the belt was in the system that's the HQ for Error666, a pirate corp.

After mining about 53 million ISK worth of Gniess, I logged off for a few hours for some RL art appreciation. I came back to find an alliance mail:

2008.05.04 19:05
The pirate corp error666 showed up in the gniess field, that Norjia found, in stealth bombers, took out a typhoon and a hulk. Recommend everyone avoid the spot now.

So, unfortunate members of the alliance have lost a 60 million ISK battleship and a 150 million ISK mining ship. We take our losses, and go about our business.

That was yesterday. Today, I log on to find this:

2008.05.06 16:28
Error666 has declared war on Apoapsis Multiversal Consortium.
After 24 hours fighting can legally occur between those involved.

So now we're at war again; it's been over a year, but still it's unpleasant for an industrial corp. So I'm in the freighter, hauling 5 Brutix battlecruisers back the HQ to sell. I didn't want to flood the market with 10 where I also put up 20 cruisers and some strip mining modules for sale. The war starts in 16 hours, so I still have time to get some industrial business going before the shooting starts.

At this point, we only have hearsay that smaktalk from one (or both) of the pilots destroyed in the gniess belt. Pirates take smaktalk very seriously in this game, for some odd reason. So if you're ever killed, DON'T bitch at your killer. I did once, but that's another story.

EVE-Online: Gniess going!

2008-05-03T21:23:00.005-04:00

Right, Exploration as a profession arrived in EVE with the Revelations patch a while back. It's a system that spawns useful sites in hidden places, and with a certain set of skills and equipment, you can find them.

I heard that you could find better rocks in hidden asteroid belts than are normally present at a given security level. But the way to find them is by using scan probes, which have a default scan time of 10 minutes. Now, this wouldn't be so bad, except the scan system takes many, many scans. First, you scan with a multispectral probe, which tells you with 100% accuracy if there's anything in a solar system to hunt for. We know that any site will be no more than 4 AU (astronomical unit = distance from earth to sun) from any planet or moon. The probes with the largest range (and weakest strength) have a range of 4 AU. So you plant these probes around the solar system, attempting to cover as much volume as possible, since you can't have a probe within the scan range of another. Then you scan with those. If you don't find anything, scan again. If you find something, it will have a reported accuracy. You warp to the blip and plant a the probe with the smallest range that still covers the deviation reported (there are probes with ranges of 4, 2, 1, and 0.5 AU, each one stronger than the last). Scan again. If you find nothing, scan again. Eventually, you scan with the 0.5 AU probe, and it tells you where the site is.

This could take upward of 25 scans for a weak signal. That's just not acceptable at 10 minutes per scan. So you have to train skills and get equipment to reduce the time. After almost 2 months of training, I had the time down to 240 seconds, which is much better than 600. But then I found out these site are not instances; anyone can find them. So if you find a nice roid belt out in low-sec, anyone else can still scan for you and come smak you. In fact, once you're there mining, I suspect it's easier for them to find you since they can scan for your ship instead of the roids. So I lost interest.

A few months later, a member of our alliance found a monstrous Gniess belt with 1.2 million cubic meters of ore. It was worth around 400 million ISK, which is a lot. It took 7-8 people 3 4-hour long ops to get it all. Then I hauled it in our freighter (2 trips) to a place where it could be refined without loss. Big team effort, lots of money, good fun. So I regained interest, as he left the alliance to head out to 0.0.

My first attempt to find something failed. Partially because I didn't have time to keep trying. Then I tried again today, with two rigs added to reduce my time further to 191 seconds. After 2 hours of scanning, I found another monstrous Gniess belt, which I am currently mining in another window. These site disappear after 72 hours of being entered, so we don't have much time. So I've called in the alliance, and any alliance member can come mine; I just ask a 5% contribution to my corp as a finder's fee.

Then I found out there's a probe launcher with a base time of 450 seconds instead of 600; so I bought one for 42 million ISK. For me, that's a small price to pay to save 55 seconds per scan, which might have saved me 20 minutes today. That will add up if I continue to do exploration; I could also sell it again if I decide to.

I find exploration irritating, but if the designers are going to make the sites special in some way, they have to be hard to find. And since EVE is not dexterity based, that means making it require patience and equipment. The nice part is that the magnitude of what you can find is beyond what a single player can deal with. Again, EVE's attraction comes down to the necessity of working in groups. There aren't more than 2 or 3 people in the whole alliance equipped to explore, so it's a nice feeling to be the one who found this site for everyone.

EVE Online: The visit to 0.0 space

2008-04-03T20:49:00.002-04:00

Well, after 22 months in the game, I've finally visited 0.0 space.

For those who don't know, EVE has security classifications for space, which range from 0.0 to 1.0. In 1.0, shooting at someone for no reason is very dangerous. In 0.0, there are no consequences that are not player-generated.

So I checked the star map, and saw that there were a lot of ship destructions and pod kills over the last hour at the 0.0 location I intended to go. So I snuck in using a Covert Ops ship; these can easily fit cloaking devices. So I warped in (rather nervously), turned on the cloak, and looked around. There were two pilots camping the gate, and the wrecks of about 10 of their victims. Another person's ship was destroyed while I was there. The two campers buzzed around a bit, and one took off to check another gate in the system.

I warped to the other gate in the system (named PF-346), since there are no stations there to dock at. One of the campers was there, buzzing around; I was cloaked again, so he couldn't see me. I used the gate to jump to FD-MLJ, and docked at one of the stations there.

Well, that was all I did in my first trip to 0.0. The next day, there was no gate camp at the entry point (PF-346), so I headed back to 0.7 space and got a cruiser to bring back in. Once there, I tooled around a bit with another member of the corp, and we toasted a few NPCs for some dough.

0.0 is an odd place. I'm used to seeing lots of other pilots around, since I tend to hang out in a busy area of the Gallente Federation. While we were shooting the NPCs, we saw about 4 other pilots come through the system. They were apparently just passing through, since they didn't come hunting for us. Using the Local chat channel, they could easily see that other people were in the system, just not where. That's not many people to see in a half hour.

Of course, the current estimate is that only 9% of all EVE players are in 0.0 at one time. This means a lot of empty space with a lot of resources is controlled by a relatively small group of players.

This is neither the end nor the maximal extent of BM2's presence in 0.0. More to come...

EVE Online: Manufacturing update

2008-03-22T15:07:00.002-04:00

Well, the manufacturing business has really improved since I last mentioned it. We're now building and selling two types of cruisers. We move about 20 of these every 3-4 days, with about 10% profit on them. At a sale price of around 4.25 million ISK a piece, that's a decent amount of incoming funds.

Our operation is about to get much larger though. We're purchasing a battleship blueprint original (BPO). One of these sells for around 65 million ISK; making these will require a lot more mineral gathering and capital investment per item. We can also make blueprint copies (BPC) of it to sell. Buying the BPO will cost us around 700 million ISK. Since it's cheaper to buy minerals and make your own battleship, some people will buy a BPC to make their own ships. The huge cost of a BPO makes selling these possible. Also, BPOs/BPCs have material efficiencies. A fresh BPO has a material waste factor of 10%. By researching the battleship BPO for a month and a half, that can be reduced to 1%. The one we're buying has already been researched to a 1% waste factor, so we won't have to deal with that.

EVE continues to be a very interesting game, even after being in it for almost two years. There's no equivalent of World of Warcraft's Level 70 cap, and the social structures are significantly more complex.

As an example, a friend of mine is in a corporation that pays 10 million ISK per person per month to have "blue" status with another alliance out in 0.0 space. What this means that is that they pay money to be listed to all members of the alliance in 0.0 as blue, which means "friend." In 0.0 there are no rules about who can shoot whom, so it's very important that you be listed as friends with the sovereign alliance where you are. Alliances can put up stations that assert sovereignty over an area. Large coalitions of alliances fight over these stations in a bid for access to the massive resources out in 0.0 space.

Currently, my corporation stays almost entirely in space with a security rating of 0.5 and above (high-sec). We're known as "carebears" in EVE parlance; we mine, manufacture and trade to earn money in the market, and almost never get involved in fights with other players. But we have fun, and that's what counts.

Two demos of useless games on PS3

2008-03-21T21:11:00.004-04:00

I'm amazed. I just downloaded the demos for Sega Superstars Tennis and Condemned 2: Bloodshot.

I expected SST to be Virtua Tennis with goofy characters and powers, kind of an extreme version. No such luck: it's a poorly designed game by Sumo Digital. The demo lets you play 1v1 against the CPU for about 3 minutes; one session was enough to convince me not to buy the game. Having to listen to poorly chosen vocal samples for each of 16 different Sega characters each time they win or lose a point is not my idea of a good time. Hitting the ball was very difficult. The computer aced me every shot like 8 times in a row. Unlike Virtua Tennis where just hitting the button will get at least some sort of hit, you have to position yourself in the right place and hit the button at the right time to hit the ball. In principle, this might not be a bad thing. Having to use some amount of skill just to hit the ball can be fun. But the ball doesn't seem to have a shadow! Judging the ball's position is nearly impossible. Maybe I'm missing something, but as a Virtua Tennis veteran, it's just not worth the effort.

The opening story segment of Condemned was rather poor. Poorly written dialog, character models that look like models with bad face textures instead of people, music mixed to loud with respect to the dialog... it was just very unappealing. I can forgive that if that game is fun though. So I go in to play, and... wow. Some of the tutorial text seems to trigger based on where you are; so some of it appeared and disappeared very quickly since I didn't notice it fast enough to stop moving and read it. A guy attacked me, and I tried to kick him a few times. I had no idea what was going on, and I died.

Now that would not necessarily be a problem. I just need to try again right? Well, this is a First Person game, and in these games there's a thing called FOV: Field of View. It refers to how much of an angle from the player's perspective is rendered onto the screen. When I play Quake 3, I have it set to 90 degrees. Any higher, and I get motion sickness. Some people play with it as high as 120 (or even more), while I know some people who can't have it higher than 80 without getting sick. This game is set to around 120. This means I can't play it without getting motion sickness. And with no option to change it, that means I won't be going any further into the game.

I guess I'll just stick with Rock Band, The Club, and my assortment of excellent PSN downloaded games.

Note: I've edited this post since I've learned that Condemned 2 is not a First Person Shooter. It IS however, First Person, and as such, my complaint about FOV stands.

VHEMT: Misguided idealist?

2008-03-15T23:35:00.003-04:00

VHEMT is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. I read about it first in a book called "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman. It's an interesting book the discusses what would happen if people vanished tomorrow. It covers things like what happens to our pets, our buildings, roads, nuclear power plants, etc. An interesting read; I recommend it.

Before I dis VHEMT, let me state for clarity that I do think there are too many people on the planet already, and that steps need to be taken to control population expansion.

What precipitated this blog entry was the following opinion from Les Knight, founder of VHEMT; it's paraphrased by Weisman, but it still sounds very naive to me. VHEMT suggests we should all stop reproducing right now, and just let humanity die off. He's not a militant who wants more wars or famine or pestilence. But he thinks that voluntary lack of reproduction (or some ailment that blocks reproduction) would be akin to humanity dying in its sleep:

...Knight predicts that spiritual awakening would replace panic, because of a dawning realization that as human life drew toward a close, it was improving. There would be more than enough to eat, and resources would again be plentiful, including water. The seas would replenish. Because new housing wouldn't be necessary, so would forests and wetlands.

He is quoted as saying

"With no more resource conflicts, I doubt we'd be wasting each other's lives in combat."

and

"The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planet as close as possible to the Garden of Eden."

First, the voluntary scenario just wouldn't happen. You'd have to convince the religious people of the world to give up their ideas about what they think God has planned for humanity.

Second, his assessment of what it might be like seems so unrealistic to me, I don't even know where to begin. I imagine a scenario more like that in Children of Men. I think resource conflicts would continue. People like to fight to take rather than to earn resources. Greed would not disappear, and you'd still have people trying to take more than their fair share.

Obviously, VHEMT are entitled to their opinions. But I think there are more productive and realistic ways to tackle the human population problem.

Rocketmen: Axis of Evil

2008-03-06T22:29:00.003-05:00

I just downloaded and tried this demo from the Playstation Network. There's also an XBox 360 version.

It's a video game taken from a board game. It was programmed with the Torque Game Engine, which is a very inexpensive development system from Garage Games. It's great that Torque is a full-featured game engine with a small price tag that has the ability to make games for the 360 and PS3. However, Rocketmen is not a game that makes "democratization of game development" (as we call it in the industry) encouraging.

It's a double-joystick shooter that has some extra elements like secondary weapons and a weapon customization system. It has a story that is present in a 3-d pseudo-comic book fashion. The basic idea for the game isn't the problem; it's the execution.

The voice acting is very amateurish; it sounds like someone got their friends into the studio. Perhaps it's more a fault of direction than acting, but either way it comes off very stiff. I started skipping the scenes after seeing about 5 of them as they were too stilted and interrupted the flow of the game too much.

The feel of the game itself rather poor, as well. It feels like a cheaply produced web-browser game. There doesn't seem to be a proper balance between the speed your character moves and the speed of your enemies' shots. The automatic camera/level advance system often leaves me unable to collect items my enemies have dropped.

After completing the two levels of the demo, I've seen enough. I don't recommend that anyone actually pay the $10 for the full version. As I write this, I feel it's a rather harsh judgement since I remember being a bedroom game developer. I feel justified though because my stuff may not have looked any more professional, but it was certainly a hell of a lot more fun.

Portal (Let Them Eat Cake)

2008-02-17T10:11:00.003-05:00

So I just borrowed The Orange Box from work to try Portal. I'm not terribly interested in Half Life 2, since story-driven single-player FPSs don't really interest me much. Team Fortress 2 is kind of cute, but I prefer Warhawk for online competition.

Portal is an FPS puzzle game based on the idea that you can put two interconnected holes on the walls so you can hop through one to come out the other. It implements this extremely well, as you can even see through the portal. So if you put them on either side of a corridor, you can look in and see yourself looking at yourself looking at yourself in a repeating image. Going through the portal doesn't change your momentum, so if you put one on the floor and the other on the ceiling above it, you can fall through what looks like an infinite tunnel.

Yes, Portal is short. I pegged the single-player campaign in about two-and-a-half hours. But, it has an extremely interesting play mechanic. I don't think the campaign needed to be longer, as it explored the portal mechanic rather well, and had very few frustrating moments. Also, the campaign was cleverly assembled with an interesting story and funny voicing from a neurotic computer.

One nitpick is that the deadzone on the move stick isn't big enough, so it was a little hard to do one puzzle that required not giving any movement input.

I haven't gone back to do the other modes you get for finishing the campaign, so I can't comment on their value. I can't say it's worth buying the Orange Box just for Portal, though I think it would have made a great $12 download title. As a Quake 3 player, I'd love to see the portal mechanic added to a competitive game with weapons.

Don't miss Portal. Find it on a platform you own (PS3, XBox 360 or PC) and play it.

Why I still hate Nintendo's design philosophy

2008-02-12T00:10:00.000-05:00

Since I saw someone skip entire levels on Super Mario Bros. just by knowing where a hole in the ceiling was, I've disliked one of Nintendo's central design philosophies. Knowledge trumps skill.

It's midnight, and I've just finished a session with the first Wii game I've really liked, which is Metroid Prime: Corruption. I like the control system; it's flexible and fun. BTW, I'm playing on Veteran, with the Lock/Free thing so I always have to aim. My save is at 5% progress into the game.

After doing another ball puzzle and shooting some stuff, I got stuck. There are these things it looks like I can grapple from, but scanning them tells me I don't have access yet. So I explore the level, which isn't horribly huge. I jump to everywhere I can find. It turns out that the only thing that looks like it will help is to pull some panels off a wall with the grapple. But that wall is too far up; I can't get there. I apparently had to do this before falling into a valley. So I'm completely stuck, and there are no clues in the valley section telling me I'm stuck. So I've spent a half hour exploring (and generally being bored and frustrated) only to find that what I have to do is no longer available.

Add to that the dearth of save points (since they also replenish your suit they have to be scarce), and you have a major frustration situation. I had to reset the game, and now I have to redo the first half hour of my session just to get back to where I was. And none of this is because I lack skill with the controls; it's because I was missing a piece of information.

I'm not sure I'll be able to play the game anymore since I'm sure this kind of thing will happen multiple times since it's been a general pattern with Nintendo games since the beginning. I know some people like this puzzle element in games, but games like God of War have them without making me angry.

If there's some little thing I've missed that fixes all this, then there's still a design flaw in the presentation somewhere.

Rock Band

2008-02-03T14:43:00.004-05:00

Got Rock Band Dec 22, 2007, with the first batch to hit Quebec. I had a preorder in since August, so I was at the top of the list at EB downtown Montreal.

The short version: Buy this as soon as you see one on the shelf, or order one and wait. No excuses like "I have no rhythm," or "I can't sing." It's just lots of fun for anyone.

The long version:

Harmonix has long been making the best music games in the business with Frequency, Amplitude, and Guitar Heroes 1 and 2. I don't mention Karaoke revolution since I haven't played it. Rock Band was the inevitable next step from Guitar Hero, though it was a rather risky project given the cost of peripherals. Combining the XBox 360 and PS3 versions, they've sold close to a million despite the game's greater-than $150 price tag, so it looks like it's paid off for them. People who have visited to play have almost unanimously said that sounds cheap given how much fun it is.

This is such a monstrous game in scope, I don't know where to start. So I'll start with the graphics. The gameplay graphics (note lines, power bars etc) are all rather understated, which is nice. They're clear, and easy to read; I think that's necessary given the amount of stuff on the screen when you play with four people. The band graphics are very well done; they run at around 24-30 frames per second, so they have a film like quality to them. The animations are good, and well timed (with a few notable exceptions) with the music. The character customization is excellent, too. Trena (the vocalist in our band, "Purple Sin") spends quite a lot of time at the Rock Shop buying clothes.

Next, let's talk about guitar and bass. If you've played or heard of Guitar Hero, playing guitar or bass on Rock Band is almost identical. The new controller is very nice, with the buttons being the entire width of the neck, so it feels much more natural to slide across them. There are 5 little buttons near the body of the guitar, which allows you to "finger tap" during solos without strumming. This feels pretty cool, though to a hardcore gamer like me it feels like cheating. Both Bass and Guitar can activate Star-- ahem, Overdrive at any time by tilting the controller. This is a nice ability, since the Drummer and Vocalist must wait until special places in the music to be able to activate their Overdrive. Since the bass player is often responsible for grounding and band with rhythm, he gets the "Bass Groove" ability. All other instruments top out their multiplier at 4x, but Bass Groove allows 6x. This means the bassist can score more points per note (though they often get fewer notes). But what's important is that this system penalizes them more than the other players for missing a note since it takes longer to get back to maximum multiplier. As in a real band, it pays to have a steady bassist.

The Vocalist sings with a microphone, and the game analyses the singer's pitch to see if they're on the right note. It does allow singing an octave higher or lower, which helps if you're singing a song originally performed by a member of opposite sex. The interface for this is very nice; the lyrics scroll by on the bottom, with wavy lines above which show the relative pitch to hit. While singing, an arrow shows up to tell the player if they're above or below the correct pitch. It's nice to get this visual feedback, which tells you if you're slightly above or below pitch even if you're close enough to score points for it. The pitch line is normally green, but nailing orange ones well gives you Overdrive power. This is activated by singing anything into the mic at certain times, indicated by an orange flowery background; which is lots of fun.

The drums are arguably Rock Band's centerpiece, as there's no equivalent experience in any other console game. You'd have to manage to find a DrumMania machine to find a similar experience anywhere, but Rock Band still has a much nicer interface (and better music, in my opinion) than DM. There are 4 pads which usually translate to snare, high-hat, tom/cymbal and crash cymbal. There's also a pedal for bass drum, which is what makes the playing the drums so challenging; you have to coordinate two arms and a foot. After earning enough energy, the drummer will occasionally see freestyle sections where he can play anything. Hitting any three notes in these sections is enough to enable a crash cymbal note at the end of it, which triggers Overdrive. These are called "fills," and developing good ones is fun. The pads are a bit loud when you hit them, so you'll want the stereo up loud to help hide them. There's also a lot of mods available from do-it-yourselfers who have found ways to muffle them, many of these methods don't void the warranty, either.

What makes this game such a great experience is playing with groups of 3 or 4. When any player fails, the rest of the band gets an amount of time to activate Overdrive to save them. The amount of time you get depends on how well the band was doing before the failure; so the audience is more tolerant if the 3 other members were kicking ass. This feature puts the "Band" into "Rock Band."

There are also some online modes, which are generally fun, and don't really require description. They lack a ranking system, so it's hard to get in with players of your own skill level. I usually have to go through 5 or more drum duel opponents before I can find one that I can have close battle with. My PS3 name is Almo2001; look for me if you'd like to try some drum battles.

Harmonix promised 3 new downloadable songs per week, and they've succeeded so far. Many of these are great songs that are fun to play; they're well worth the money.

Rock Band is quite simply the current pinnacle of music games. Don't miss this if you like music or games.

Recommended. 5 stars out of 5.

Is Warhawk really that good?

2007-09-10T20:58:00.001-04:00

Just got Warhawk a week ago. I've been playing it around 2 hours a day since then, so I have some impressions to post. I say impressions since this appears to be the deep kind of game I'll still be learning more about a year from now.

Game modes:

CTF - standard capture the flag
Zones - earn points for holding strategic points
Dogfight - only warhawks; air battle
Team deathmatch - kill your enemies for points
Deathmatch - kill everyone for points

There's nothing surprising or unusual here, but they're all nicely implemented. On TDM, you still can earn points for capturing nodes; this way you are rewarded for helping the team as well as killing your opponents. CTF has a timer on returning the flag, so just fragging the carrier then touching the flag isn't enough.

Graphics:

Average presentation on menus and stuff, nice solid in-game graphics. Some details were thought of, like if you hit a wall with the tank gun, it moves up to avoid penetrating the wall. Vehicle explosions launch a shower of pieces; it's cool when you peg a Hawk from the ground and the pieces rain down around you.

Sound:
Excellent sound design. Weapons and vehicles sound solid, and vehicle explosions thunder, and the subsequent raining pieces make a good clatter.

Gameplay:
Awesome, as usual. For those of you who don't know, Incognito used to be Singletrac in the PSOne days. They made Warhawk, JetMoto (1 and 2), and Twisted Metal (1, 2). Then they became Incognito Entertainment (or Incog for short) and made Twisted Metal: Black, War of the Monsters and Downhill Domination for PS2. All of these games had good to excellent presentations and awesome gameplay. As a side note, David Jaffe (the guy behind God of War and Calling All Cars) used to work for Incog, and is now forming a new studio with Scott Campbell, the head of Incog. So if any game on the PS3 has a hot pedigree, it's Warhawk.

Now the BIG BIG question: Does the motion control work? YES! Warhawk's use of Sony's motion sensing controllers is a huge success. Gliding around in a warhawk is lots of fun. You move the cursor with the left stick, bank/pitch with the tilt, and the right stick does extra pitch/bank (if you need it) and barrel rolls. You steer tanks and jeeps with the tilt. The right stick also aims with the tank at the same time as the tilt does the steering; this allows a lot of freedom to move and fire in different directions.

I'll write more later. This time, I think I really will. I know I've said that before and not gotten back to it, but I'll be playing Warhawk for quite some time.

If you have a PS3 and like competitive gaming, definitely get this.

A tale of two shooters (well, three)

2007-06-29T21:31:00.000-04:00

Well, I've got both double-joystick shooters for the PS3, and I thought it's about time for me to write another review.

I've had Blast Factor since I got my PS3 back in February. It's fairly simple: you're a small ship which you move with the left stick. The right stick shoots in the direction you push; this means you can move in any direction independently of which direction you're shooting. Each level consists of a series of short attack waves in a small hexagonal playfield. The triggers set off a bomb that pushes enemies away from you, and tilting the controller to the left or right sloshes the whole level (and hence your enemies) in that direction. You have as many bombs as you want, there's just a short cooldown period between uses. The levels are in a branching system where the player gets sent to easier levels if he dies or doesn't complete a level fast enough. Running along the harder path earns more points for fast-level-completion bonuses.

The double-joystick move/shoot control system is a relic from 1981's Robotron:2084, which is one of the finest games ever made (it is also notoriously difficult). The control system has been updated for analog sticks to allow shooting and moving in all directions; as Robotron only supported 8 directions. Since Geometry Wars re-introduced the idea, it has be showing up in other games. As the sequel, GW: Retro Evolved is an excellent title, the obvious question is whether Blast Factor is better than GW:RE. My answer is that they are different.

GW doesn't have a level structure, and just continuously spawns enemies. It has a smooth difficulty curve, with the level of chaos slowly increasing as you go. BF is a series of levels that average about 30 seconds each. Also, the levels are divided into waves; so the game really presents a series of sharp challenges. GW is flashier, but BF has much better sound design. I'd say the BF's sound presentation is one of the best I've seen. GW doesn't end, while BF ends after completing 56 levels. However, BF's challenge comes from its multiplier system. The game is divided into 7 specimens, each with 8 levels. When you complete a specimen, if you haven't died, you score the total points from the last 8 levels times the number of specimens you've survived. Also, the end-of-round bonuses are multiplied by the number of levels you've survived; hence the idea in BF is to complete the game without losing a life. If you've gotten the add-on pack, you can try to do this at +50% game speed and earn more points for doing so.

Also in the add-on pack are cooperative and competitive multiplayer. Both are fun and chaotic.

Featuring the same move/shoot system as BF and GW, Super Stardust HD is an excellent old-school shooter. It's fast and flashy, and lots of fun. Of the two, Blast Factor is definitely more sedate. With its atmospheric sounds and liquid effects, BF doesn't present the user with the amount of insanity found in SSHD. It's played on a sphere; the non-euclidean geometry of the playfield makes things interesting. Your bombs destroy everything on the visible side of the sphere. You also have a turbo, which makes you move at about 3x speed, destroying anything you touch. Interestingly, points tokens chain-multiply if you pick them up during a turbo. There are three weapons to use, and they can be powered up over the course of the game.

What really sets SSHD apart from other shooters is the massive amount of particle effects. Particle effects are when small objects are spawned that don't collide with each other. Since there is no collision, they don't take much processor time, and therefore allow masses of them to be spawned without impacting performance. Even just one shot hitting a rock spawns about 15-20 little sparks. With so much going on at once, it's amazing that the game never drops a frame (well, except when loading the boss on occasion).

Since nothing in the game is genuinely unpredictable, the player can still know what is going on even with the gigantic amounts of sparks and explosions obscuring half the playfield. With practice, this game becomes a Zen-like experience, just as games like Defender and Asteroids did.

SSHD also includes a cooperative multiplayer mode, which we haven't gotten used to yet due to the way it determines where to put the display. In single player, your ship is kept near the center of the screen while the playfield rotates. When both players are there, it waits to move the camera until both players are rather close to the edge of the screen. This seems odd to me, and is really my only real complaint about the game.

People like to ask me if Stardust is better than Blast Factor. Again, my answer is that they are different. SSHD doesn't have BF's vicious multiplier system, and is brighter in presentation. Its levels are longer, and it sustains a fevered pitch longer because it doesn't divide itself as clearly into waves. But to me, these things don't make it superior. Just because they share a previously-unusual control system, it doesn't mean that they are the same game. I'm prefectly happy having bought both games, because they fill different niches in my game collection. However, BF does get a small edge for having better multiplayer versions.

Blast Factor: 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Recommended.

Super Stardust HD: 4 out of 5 stars.
Recommended.

For me, Super Stardust picks up where 7800 Asteroids left off. The 7800 was a powerful little game system that came out around the same time as the Nintendo Entertainment System. The 7800 had excellent versions of both Asteroids and Robotron largely because it was capable of moving large numbers of sprites around without slowing down or flickering. The NES could not move as many sprites around, so the types of games on it were a lot different. Instead of lots of little enemies, you got a few large enemies; the problem in these games was to figure out how to defeat these enemies, rather than train yourself to survive the chaos of many small enemies. Since the NES because the most popular gaming system for a new generation of gamers, the former type of game became more common. The two most popular 16-bit systems (Genesis, Super Nintendo) continued this tradition. When the 3d-capable systems debuted (Playstation, N64), the hardware wasn't stout enough to handle large numbers of enemies in 3d, so the tradition continued. With the realism available on the PS2, Xbox and Dreamcast, the great amount of computer power usually went into cleaning up the graphics instead of increasing the number of moving objects. Now, the combination of much greater computer power in the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, with the digital distribution channels, these sorts of old-style arcade games have come back. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved showed that many people were willing to pay a small amount of money for a small game; now we're seeing a renaissance in the field.

When I play Super Stardust, it reminds me of a bygone era when good players drew crowds at the arcade because what they were capable of doing seemed so incredible. A good player plowing through the fifth planet of SSHD is an amazing sight to see; the chaos looks so overwhelming that it's surprising to see the player's ship emerge unscathed.

Super Rub A Dub

2007-05-20T04:00:00.000-04:00

I downloaded the Super Rub A Dub demo as soon as it was available, and I liked it. But I wasn't sure I wanted the full version or not. Well, after having about five people try the demo and like it, I decided I'd rather everyone could do more than just the five levels of the demo. So I got the full version. Good fun! It's cute, the controls are nice, and the internet ranking gives it some teeth. For $9 CAD, it's well worth it.

IGN's review of SRaD was WAY off the mark. IGN says it has the worst SIXAXIS support of any game they've seen? What about that baseball game where you move the controller to bat? That one's terrible, in my opinion; it's a completely gratuitous use of the motion-sensing. I like its controls better than Monkey Ball's, as you tilt the whole level around a point that is stationary, instead of just directing the character's acceleration as you do in MB. The motion-sensing feature feels very natural, and the varying sensitivity on the jumps is well-done.

Any review of this game needs to keep its price in mind, as it is clearly not a large game. But I'm pretty sure I'll get more fun from my $9 with Rub A Dub than I would for $70 with MotorStorm.

My only complaint about the game is that I'd like it to save a replay of all my best times.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars.
Recommended.

PS3: First Impressions

2007-03-07T22:12:00.000-05:00

I got a PS3 about 5 weeks ago, along with Resistance: Fall of Man, and Ridge Racer 7. Then I downloaded Blast Factor and the expansion pack. Impressions follow, in sort of a rambling way:

Resistance is an excellent FPS with good weapons, great draw distance, and a decently difficult campaign mode. I haven't attempted the Superhuman setting that unlocks when you finish the game once, but I'm sure it will be fun. The cooperative mode is good, and the online multiplayer is fun as well. Given the player's limited mobility, the online isn't the best FPS online experience I've had (due to having played a lot of UT and Quake on my Mac), but the team objective game modes are interesting. The fundamental problem is that console FPSs are difficult to control since there's no keyboard and mouse. Resistance has a good auto-aim that helps, but doesn't feel automatic. As Insomniac has had long practice with shooters from doing the Ratchet and Clank series, this isn't surprising. Resistance also uses the same weapon switch interface as R+C, which makes it easy to change weapons very quickly. On the whole, it's a good game, and a very respectable first outing for Insomniac on the PS3.

Blast Factor is a good arcade shooter. I recommend the upgrade pack, since the multiplayer and extra speed modes are easily worth $4. Ignore any reviews of this game that give it low marks. It's fun, has great sound design, good graphics, and is fun. It's fun, too. I think that's what games are supposed to be... And the purchase experience on PlayStation Store really is like this.

I haven't played as much RR7, having been busy with Blast Factor and Resistance. But it makes nice use of the tilt-sensing controllers. Online battles are fun, and the single-player mode seems to have a lot of play in it. Though I must say, I find it annoying that the game refuses to ever use the word "car;" they are always referred to as machines. This sounds very awkward at times.

Overall, I've had a good experience with the PS3. I still am mad about having no rumble in the controllers, but that may soon be rectified. And my friends like it too; some of them have already sold their Wiis in preparation for dropping the large dough for the PS3.

Burnout Dominator

2007-01-18T10:21:00.000-05:00

From IGN (full article):

"Indeed, Burnout Dominator feels more like Burnout 3: Takedown than the last release, Burnout Revenge. While the latter focused on destruction and pure vehicular carnage, Burnout Dominator goes back to the series' purer roots and simply has you career down the tracks while avoiding traffic at all costs. Takedowns and the accompanying Road Rage mode are still present, of course, but you can no longer take out the anonymous traffic and use it as a weapon.

One great thing that's made its return is Burnouts. The series' namesake, Burnouts were last seen in Burnout 2 and are accomplished by saving your boost until you're maxed out, and then expending all of the boost in a single use without crashing or letting off."

Well! It looks like someone over at Criterion knew I was right! I might be getting this. I'll post some thoughts about it once I've actually played it.

Guitar Hero III: Not Harmonix!

2007-01-17T14:40:00.000-05:00

Read this!

Apparently, Neversoft will be doing the next Guitar Hero game. What are Activision thinking? Red Octane did seriously kick ass making the GH controller. But Harmonix really made the game what it was with its smooth difficulty curve and properly-designed fret patterns.

Maybe I put too much stock in the developer part of the developer/publisher relationship. But... Harmonix make such good games! Amplitude and Guitar Hero were both incredible. Not that Neversoft is any slouch; I truly enjoyed Tony Hawk's 4 (only one I've played). I just really think that Harmonix are the right ones to do this.

EVE Online: The Manufacturing Business

2007-01-16T11:31:00.000-05:00

We've started to manufacture and sell Iteron III cargo ships. Even when purchasing the minerals at market price, we make a profit. Very cool! But when I started, there were no Iteron IIIs for sale in our home system. A week later, there are about 10 for sale that aren't mine, and it looks like I'm setting the price.

I can see that managing the manufacturing part of the business might end up taking some time. But that's fine, because I'd rather be running a business than grinding NPC missions.

Sometimes, I can even just buy a load of ammo at HQ then ship it 5 jumps for a 5-credit-per-unit profit. Heheheh.

Yet another Urban Reign update

2006-12-21T23:20:00.000-05:00

Well, I just played a couple of hour-long sessions of Urban Reign again. It's been a year an a few months since I got the game, and I am writing to describe how the game ages under heavy play.

Ben and I still played some Challenge Mode (Hard, Max) with our old standby characters, Shun Ying and Alex. We had lots of fun again. We are continually amazed with how satisfying it is to brawl against the computer. The AI is generally well-designed, and does a good job of making it feel like you're fighting a person instead of a program. Granted, it sometimes shows that it's a computer, like when Alex pulls off 5 consecutive shoulder-barges, then catches you in mid-air after a wall-bounce. But I can see that an extremely good human could learn to pull that off.

We played some 2v2 multiplayer, where each of us had an AI teammate. Again, lots of fun. Good, hardcore competition. We still see things happen that we haven't seen before.

We then tried playing Challenge Mode (Normal, Normal) with Nas-Tii and Ty. Playing this way is a huge challenge. We seldom get past level four or five out of ten with those guys, even though we play on the Normal setting with them. One of the problems is that Nas-Tii and Ty deal very little damage, yet the opponents still gain normal amounts of special power. So, I suppose, the long term challenge of UR is to complete Challenge mode with 1-star characters (like Nas-Tii and Ty) on Very Hard/Max mode. Eesh. I can't imagine how hard that would be... taking on Golem with Nas-Tii?!?

Verdict: UR is fun, and contains unbelievable amounts of replay value. As much as I want a sequel, the game is good enough for me to keep playing in the absence of one.

Rayman: Raving Rabbids

2006-12-21T23:16:00.000-05:00

Just played this Wii game for the first time today. I only played a few levels, so I just have a first impression to report.

It's cute, well-animated, fun, and easy. I liked what I played very much, but I don't think it would hold my attention for long due to the lack of challenge. But, it looks to me to be a great title for very casual gamers and kids. I recommend it, provided you're not looking to get trashed.

Programming Games for the Nintendo DS

2006-12-03T00:43:00.002-05:00

I'm a game programmer. I've worked on many platforms, and I've just started on the Nintendo DS. Just thought I'd jot down some notes about how working with it compares to dealing with Sony's PSP.

Starting our program on the PSP took quite a while in comparison with the DS. It felt like 3 or 4 minutes to start the PSP, while the DS takes around 5-10 seconds. Obviously, this makes a big difference in your ability to test changes to the code. There are several reasons for this, some of which were not due to the PSP itself. The PSP has 32 MB of RAM while the DS has 4, so just sending over the code and assets would take longer. Also, we were using the Unreal Engine on the PSP (which we ported ourselves from a PS2/PC/XBox version), which has specific requirements about how its assets are stored. The PSP connected to your computer via the network, so any communication goes over the corporate ethernet. This means that debug information, printfs, etc. all pass over the network. The DS connects directly via the USB port.

Another huge issue was making playable versions. Sony doesn't allow developers to burn UMD discs, so we were using DVDs; the development kits and test kits could read either UMD or DVD. We found out during beta that the performance of the DVDs in the kits was nothing like the UMDs; our load times were HORRIBLE. Fortunately we had a godly programmer who put in a new fast load system and got them down to a reasonable level. This kind of coding after beta is rather risky though. On the DS, you just stick a flash ROM card in the devkit, and tell it to burn. These burned cards even work on retail DS consoles. This makes it very easy to see how your game will perform in the wild. Boxes are also available that can burn 8 flash cards at a time, so it's easy to distribute multiple copies to your test team as well.

As far as computing power, there's no comparison. The PSP is a monster. We were running a fairly complete version of the Unreal Engine on it, and getting a decent framerate (about 15-20, which was fine for our game). I've written two minigames on the DS, and have run into hardware limitations already. For example, it only allows 64 sprites per screen, and only 32 per screen can rotate and/or scale. The video RAM allows 128 kB per screen of sprite graphics; depending on what you're doing, this may or may not be a severe limitation. For me, it was pretty tight on one of the games. But the DS is less expensive than the PSP, so I expect this sort of thing.

Overall, I've enjoyed my experience with the DS more. I wouldn't complain about working on the PSP again, since it's nice to have access to the power. But given the choice, I'd take DS development over PSP development any day.

Phil Harrison on the PS3 controllers

2006-10-27T21:48:00.000-04:00

Read this.

What a load of crap. "Six axis of input"? We'll forgive the journalist for the honest mistake of spelling "axes" wrong. And I can forgive Phil for referring to "six axes" of input, when he's probably referring to the degrees of freedom in a semi-incorrect way. These would be nitpicking his points just to make him look silly, which would be ad hominem attacks on Phil and the journalist. In a cynical way, I've already made the attacks just by mentioning it, except that I say here that I'm not making the attacks. Fundamentally, the two aforementioned issues are irrelevant to the main fact at hand:

Controllers without a rumble feature suck.

Even a perfectly forensic description of the new PS3 controllers could not rescue them from the fact that without rumble, they will suck. I wrote this letter directly to Sony shortly after reading the article:

I've had a Playstation since 1998, and I got my PS2 the week it came out. I'm an avid fan of Sony's work, such as Gran Turismo and God of War. I'm also a hardcore Mac gamer, where I play lots of Quake 3 and Warcraft III.

I have read what Phil Harrison has to say about the PS3 controllers not having rumble; and he's just wrong. While the motion sensing is a very cool feature, it's not worth losing the rumble for it. He said rumble is one-dimensional... it isn't. It's two-dimensional, since there are two seperate rumblers in a Dual Shock controller. Plus it's feedback directly to the user's sense of touch, which is now missing. Tekken, Soul Calibur II, God of War, Amplitude, and many others would not be the same without rumble. Rez wouldn't even have been possible without rumble, and that's one of the finest accomplishments in the art of video game design.

I will not buy a second PS3 controller until a version with rumble becomes available. If I find out the first version of Tekken on PS3 doesn't support rumble, I won't buy that either.

I'm not the only one who's annoyed. I know several other hardcore gamers that use lack of rumble as one more reason to get an XBox 360.

I'm also a 6-year industry veteran at Ubisoft who has worked on PS2, XBox, PSP, DS, PC, among other platforms. The current PS2 controllers are the finest home console controller ever created. Please don't mess them up by removing rumble.

Quake 4 Hovertank Section

2006-10-23T19:49:00.000-04:00

Well, I just did the first hovertank in Quake 4. Very nicely designed! You have a slow-firing powerful cannon, and a fast-firing weaker machine gun. Since it's a hovering vehicle, it drifts around a lot, so aiming involves compensating for its motion. When the bigger things shoot missiles at you, you're presented with several options. Try to shoot the missles fast enough to give you time to plug at the enemy, or try to dodge the missiles while plugging at the enemy. In practice, you end up doing some of both, having to decide when it will be most beneficial to switch. Either way, the fact that the terrain is uneven leads to other necessary adjustments in your aim. I just found the whole experience to be very involving due to all of the different elements of gameplay I had to worry about.

EVE Online: Idiot Ore Thief

2006-10-15T12:55:00.000-04:00

Lolotor2 just bit the dust. He was in an Iteron, and was warping in and stealing my ore then warping out. I was in a mining barge, with some drones hanging around. He did it many times before I noticed, since I was working on some php in another window. Then I saw him. He got away. Next time, I locked on, but told the drones to engage a rock (interface problem): forgot to move the current target cursor over to him. He got away after getting shot once or twice.

Now at this point, he knows I'm not a macro miner. Macro miners set up scripts to automatically mine for them, and they are usually afk. I hang around waiting for him to come back. I realize at this point that the aggression timer has started since I shot him. He's now got 15 minutes to shoot at me with no repurcussion from the police. I think, "Uh oh. Maybe I was just baited into shooting him, and he's gonna come back in a battleship or something!" So I debate with myself, wondering if I should run off. In the end, I decide not to.

Then he came back AGAIN, still in the Iteron! This time I locked and fired. His ship blew up. :D First ore thief I've caught.

Defcon - Hooray for independent developers!

2006-10-15T05:37:00.000-04:00

I've been playing Defcon for a few days now. This is an excellent game, which was produced on a small budget by a very small developer in the UK. It's a rather pure RTS, playable by 1 to 6 players over LAN or Internet. As soon as the spare, green vector model of the Earth appeared on menu, I felt I had been returned to the golden age of UK game development.

Not so long ago, games from the UK were well known for having clean iconic graphics and honed game designs. Prime examples are Wipeout 3, Walker, Shadow of the Beast (Amiga version) and Uridium. Three of these were published by Psygnosis, but they were all developed by different companies. I can think of a few examples from the PS2 era as well, such as BLACK and XG3, but these types of games seemed more common before the UK development scene started to run aground in recent years. An example of the problem is Burnout Revenge. Whereas Burnout 2 had the honed design of a classic British game, EA had taken over Criterion by then, and Burnout 3 and Burnout Revenge muddied the water. BLACK seemed to survive the transition, most of its development having been done before the takeover.

I personally like these old-style British games immensely, so I was excited to see if Defcon would live up to its menu screen; and it did, in a big way. The graphic style is consistent throughout, done in spare vector graphics. The interface is well done, with just a few rough edges in terms of usablilty here and there; little problems like when you go to mouse-scroll southeast, often you catch the Territories button for a frame or two. That lights up all the territories in their player's colors; that looks a little weird for just a frame. It took me a little while to figure out where the flashing was coming from. But these are small details, especially considering the overall quality of the game experience and the price of the game (10 GBP, 12.50 Euro, 17.50 USD).

The game design is well-focused. Even though it's an RTS, there are no production elements. A player's units are all given at the start, and placed during the first few minutes of the game. No new units become available. This means that victory depends upon tactics, rather than honing resource and production skills. I'm not dead-set against having to learn a clean build order in games like Starcraft and Warcraft III, but that aspect is by no means necessary for game to work well. There are 9 unit types, and these are identical for all factions. While having 4 unique sets of units (as in Warcraft III) is very cool, there is something to be said for keeping a game pure as well. The units are carefully thought out, and all serve a unique purpose.

Much thought has gone into making the game playable by people with a variety of tastes. There are lots of options for customizing the game. The victory conditions can be altered, players can choose their territories or have them selected at random all players may receive the same set of units, or they may be bought with a credit system, etc. Game speed is always important in an RTS, and this one has dealt with that issue in a clever manner. There are four game speeds: real-time, 5x, 10x, and 20x. The default setting allows each player to select a speed at anytime, and the game runs at the slowest selected speed. So when there isn't much going on, time whizzes by; then when a player needs to give a cluster of orders, they can slow down time until they're done. But to prevent a single player from forcing the game to a crawl the whole time, the server can be set to require 5x as the minimum speed. This is just a sampling of the options, but they illustrate the though that the designers have put into the game's design.

The sound is spare, but perfectly suited to the game. Bare, haunting music is mixed with quiet, minimal interface sounds. The loudest sounds are the klaxons, but even they sound muted, though sinister. The AI performs at an acceptable level. He's not great in a 1v1 fight, but in a 3-humans-vs-3-CPU game, he does quite well.

Now, about its subject matter: Global Thermonuclear War. I've seen this handled in several ways. The Nuclear War card game took a very comical approach, with silly drawings and a light-hearted rule book (the owner of the game always goes first). Computer War on the Atari 8-bit computers took an overbearing, insistent tone. The moment it starts, it blares overdramatic music at you; and the game is a tense, fraught experience.

Defcon, however, is extremely subdued and quiet. The most obtrusive sounds are the klaxons, one for when the defcon level changes, and one signaling a player's first nuclear launch. But as stated before, even these are subdued in comparison to Computer War's blaring buzzers. What they lack in volume, they make up for in creepiness. When Washington, DC gets hit, it's merely accompanied by plain white text, "Washington hit 3.1 Million Dead," and a muffled explosion. The graphic for the explosion is just a shaded white circle that gets smaller with time. Combined with the haunting background music, this game makes for a disquieting experience.

The point system is simple: score two points for each million you kill, and lose one point for each million of your own people that you fail to protect. Since the victory condition rewards death more than life, I often find myself entirely ignoring military targets and just focusing on nuking as many cities as I possibly can. During the final stages of the game, I peruse the map looking for a last few unprotected millions to destroy for another couple of points. While I do this, I feel a slight twinge of guilt. With hundreds of megatons of detonated nuclear warheads, the Earth ruined, and more than 50% of the world's urban populations decimated (I know, that's not a proper use of the word "decimated"), why am I trying to kill another few hundred thousand? Because I must win, and I must win by the largest margin possible. But in 95% of the games I've played, nobody truly won, except as narrowly defined by the game's rules. But considering the ensuing nuclear winter, nobody wins.

Rating 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Recommended.

Notes:
Available for PC. At time of writing, Mac and Linux versions are in the works.

Lumines 2 debacle

2006-10-12T12:26:00.000-04:00

Oh no! Lumines 2 has licensed music in it!

>:(

Lumines is a carefully crafted game where the sounds, music and graphics all go together. Now they have to bodge stuff onto Gwen Stefani music and video. Grr. That would be like Rez 2 with licensed music. I'll not be buying Lumines 2. Leave it to Disney (L2 is published by Buena Vista Games) to mess up something artistic like Lumines; and that game sold well, too.

I wonder if Mizuguchi (head of Q Entertainment, creator of Rez and Lumines) is happy about this. All I can say is that I hope he's just piling up some cash so he can finance Rez 2, regardless of whether or not it sells.

"The Incredibles" game on PS2

2006-09-05T19:48:00.000-04:00

Well, I rented this the other day because my 10-year-old niece and 5-year-old nephew were over, and all my games are a bit old for them. I didn't know it was Teen rated (just had my sister pick it up). I also didn't know about how many places there would be to get stuck. I assumed it would be a very smooth experience, since it's a movie game, and would be squarely aimed at everyone except hardcore gamers.

Well, Colette had some fun with it, but wanted to go back to playing Amplitude after about 15 minutes. Her problem was that it was too hard to aim Mr. Incredible's punches, so she got pummeled a lot.

Mom was interested in trying it, so I played it a bit to see what she could expect. After getting stuck in the first Elastigirl scene due to some trouble finding where to go next, then having a hard time with Dash's first level, I decided she'd be better off spending her time trying Guitar Hero.

I ran into some serious design flaws. The camera is an inverted X-axis camera, with no option to change it. I am resolutely a left-is-left camera person, and a down-is-up aim-and-camera person. Some of you call down-is-up inverted Y-axis, but Metroid Prime calls down-is-down the inverted system, and that game is correct about it. :P

I didn't like it that the Dash's first level said I had to get to school by 8:00 am, then didn't reset the timer every time I ran into a car. So I'd fail over and over by running into a car, then run out of time, and fail, then have the timer reset. But I continued where I left off. So what was the point of the time limit in the first place? The only challenge was to get to the end with an infinite amount of attempts and 5 checkpoints.

The first Elastigirl level as confusing in places due to the weirdness of the way the lockon system interacts with the camera system.

I didn't expect to personally like the game, since I expected a rather simple platform game with movie characters. But I would not recommend it even for casual gamers, since the design has too many rough edges; in the end, it just isn't fun.

Rating: 1.5 stars out of 5.
Not recommended.

EVE Online: The Sniper

2006-08-27T00:14:00.000-04:00

My corp went out last night for our first team mining run. Two battleships, a destroyer (i think) a cargo ship and 2 mining barges. We did well in 0.5 space (safeish). So we got adventurous and went to 0.4 space (not safe). We found a whole load of valuable ore, so we started mining. 2 minutes in, I saw a red flashing square, and Gant (battleship pilot) yelled "Get Out!!" I warped to a station and was fine, while I heard the other members chattering about the bad guy. The destroyer went down, and Cappie said to meet at the stargate the went back to 0.5. We met there and headed to the gate. On the way, the bad guy showed up again and fired large missiles at us from 150km (a long way) off. I lost the barge (10 million worth of equipment, 5 million repaid by insurance), and Mejiityr lost the Iteron II cargo ship which belonged to the corp. Cappie said he couldn't even get a lock on the guy. So Cappie and Gant are experimenting with different equipment to try to prevent getting smakked by a sniper like that again.

Disgaea - Hour of Darkness

2006-07-10T11:42:00.000-04:00

I've been playing quite a bit of Disgaea inbetween mining runs on EVE. Very nice game. I haven't really gotten far enough to give a full review, but I can say some things about it.

#1 -> Ignore Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. FFTA has one advantage: it's portable. Its xp systems are so abusable, and its combat so lacking in a need for tactics that it just isn't fun. Also, its interface does not deal with hundreds of items very well.

#2 -> Be prepared for a LONG game. I'm 20 hours in, and it doesn't look like I've gotten very far into it.

#3 -> It has an excellent sense of humor. Some enemies have an attack called "Stomp-O-Rama." The greatsword item has this tag line "Well, it's not really THAT great." There are exploding penguins called Prinnies, and they say "dood!" all the time.

#4 -> The combat system is flexible and leaves a lot of room for different tactics. Attacks can move either the attacker or the target (positioning is very important). Characters can lift and throw each other. Characters next to each other can learn skills from one another, and may also do assist attacks to help out. There is a system of bonus squares to stand on, and ways to change them.

#5 -> The item system is interesting. You can adventure inside items to increase their level and power. You also encounter "specialists" inside the item. After defeating specialists in combat, they can be moved to other items (with a cute little "pop" sound).

I hope the attack animations don't get too long. In Final Fantasy VII, I got very bored waiting through the same animations over and over once they exceeded about 10 seconds. First time I cast a spell the summoned Odin, I thought, "Wow that looks cool!" Then I thought, "Oh no. I have to sit through that every time I cast that spell." I never cast it again.

I'm late playing this, because until recently, the Region 1 version was rather hard to find. It's been reprinted now, so it is much easier to get. But when it was still rare, I saw 3 of them in a store for $20. I knew I wanted the game, but I didn't really have $20, and I wasn't aware of how rare the game was. I found out, went back next week, and they were gone.

Well, I guess that's enough about Disgaea for now. If you like tactical RPG games, this is definitely a good one.

Eve Online - First time podded

2006-06-25T15:48:00.000-04:00

So I'm mining in a Vexor out in 0.4 sec space, with 4 Infiltrator 1 drones, one 150mm railgun and 3 mining lasers. I'm grabbing some Jaspet, because I need nocxium.

Anyway, two pilots marked in yellow fly up, warp scramble me, destroy my cruiser in about 10 seconds, then demand 5 million ISK or they'll pod me.

Um... There are several problems with this proposition. I've just lost 5 million in equipment, and my clone costs 65k to replace. Now they want me to pay them 5 million to avoid replacing my cheap clone?!? Even if I DID want to avoid being podded, how do I know they won't kill me after I give them the money? I think given what I was doing out there (mining with cheap-ass drones for cover) that it was clear that I wasn't worth much. Had they demanded, say 500k BEFORE blowing up my cruiser, maybe they would have gotten something from me.

I dunno, some people just don't think things through. This reminds me of an excellent article by an economist about the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. This is an excellent read; I highly recommend it. They gained nothing for themselves, and cost me a lot. At least it's not the most irritating form of BHS, which is when people cost me a lot AND hurt themselves in the process. And if you're curious, their names are "wide" and "Spyre."

Heheh, and BHS is also the initials of the high school I went to.

Capcom Classics Collection PS2

2006-06-25T15:47:00.000-04:00

Just got the CCC, and was very excited to play 1942, 1943 and Commando again, with an actual stick instead of the lousy D-pads.

Well, guess what. The diagonals on the stick are so small (about 5 degrees) that it's very hard to get them to work in the heat of battle.

>:(

I'm so horribly disappointed. I either have to make my thumb hurt like hell using the Dpad, or fork out $80 for an X-Arcade stick.

What the hell were Digital Eclipse thinking? Did anyone even playtest these games with the analog stick? DE got it right on the Midway Collection with Gauntlet and Smash TV on it, so why not with this one?

My apologies for being another customer griping at the programmers and testers, but I program PSP games for Ubisoft, and feel (at least a little) justified.

;)

Fluke - Wobbler

2006-06-18T12:59:00.000-04:00

Wow. This is a track from a 1995 electronica album called OTO by Fluke. It's 8 minutes and 47 seconds.

Through the whole thing, there's a vung-vung-vung-vung-vung-vung-vung-vung on the eighth-note steps of the track; it sits on the same chord for the whole time, and never misses a beat. This bit modulates slowly, which gives a strange sort of impetus to the feel of the music.

On top, we get many layers of drums, synth, and different vocals. The combined excellence of all this is impossible to put into words. Which didn't stop this guy from trying:

"Oh, btw: Imagine you have five minutes left before your favourite music download service closes down, what song do you download? Wobbler, by Fluke."

EVE Online: The adventure begins

2006-06-14T10:29:00.000-04:00

Well, I started playing EVE about 3 weeks ago. Finally, a MMOG that's fun. Well, for me anyway. It's extremely slow-moving, but there's something about it that's awesome. I played World of Warcraft for about six months, but it didn't grab me like this. I liked it, and thought it was a well designed game. But EVE has sucked me in because its social structures seem to be more complete.

One nice thing is that it doesn't require LOADS of playtime to make progress. When you train a skill, it just costs some money to get the skill, then realtime to learn it. For example, it took me 2 days to learn Science IV. But you don't have to be logged on for your character to learn. You can choose Science IV, and log off for two days, come back, and it's learned. Several other activities work the same way, such as research, manufacturing and selling. You can earn more money by playing more often, but the skills are fundamentally limited by how long you've had your account. This means that if I play about 10 hours a week, I can have the same skills as someone who plays 40 hours a week.

I'm in it to mine, manufacture, and run a corporation. Blacksteel Mining and Manufacturing has 8 members now. Whenever they complete missions or get bounties, the corp gets a percentage. Eventually, BM2 will rent office space so we have a central place to put assets for members to access. We will have a set of communal blueprints our members can use to manufacture things wit. When our income is high enough, we'll be able to build our own space station, and stake our claim out in low-security space.

Currently, I pilot a small mining frigate. A fighter pilot from the corp will escort me to a medium-security asteroid belt (where better ore is found), and I gather minerals while they stop pirates from bothering me. I then go get a cargo ship to haul the ore back, I manufacture ammunition to sell to other players, then I give a cut to the fighter pilot and the corp fund.

Lots of fun organizing this. Well, I figure I will write more about EVE in the future, is it is incredibly deep. Just last week there was a financial scandal where a player ran a fake IPO for his corp and absconded with 25 billion credits. If I have any regular readers out there, don't worry: I still play other games, and will continue to post reviews.

Windows and the grain of sand in your shoe

2006-05-24T16:37:00.000-04:00

An old proverb states: "It's not the mountain you must climb, but the grain of sand in your shoe."

I've had it up to here with Windows. It works on a gross level, but it's the little irritations that add up over the course of a day that make me hate it. I'm a game programmer, so I spend 8 hours a day dealing with Windows before I can go home to my Mac. I've decided to compile a list (in no particular order) of annoying little things wrong with Windows. I will attempt to avoid personal preferences, like the issue about when you click a non-focused window, it uses that click to generate an event as well as to gain focus.

I have other larger complaints regarding MS's business practices and other things related to Windows. But these are the day-to-day problems that make me swear at it on an hourly basis. This list is not comprehensive, either.

* Gadgets are too close together. I can't say how many times I click minimize on a window instead of maximize, or close instead of maximize, etc. There should be more space between them.

* Copying and pasting a file in the same directory names it stupidly; "File.txt" becomes "Copy of File.txt". This alphabetizes all copied files to where files starting with "c" are. It should be "File copy.txt".

* Windows doesn't always remember window settings like size.

* Remote desktop will move the icons on the desktop you connect to, then not put them back when you disconnect.

* Remote desktop reveals the keyboard setting in the language bar, and doesn't re-hide it when you exit.

* Many settings are not where you expect them to be. I spend a lot of time hunting for things that I've found before because they're in odd places.

* The grabbable resize gadget in the lower right-hand corner is not consistent across windows. Sometimes it's really small (just the blue bar), other times it's large (includes the grippy looking thing). Other times it shows the grippy thing, but it doesn't work. I suppose I could understand this, except it's not even consistent across MS apps.

* Some files have an "Open With" item in their contextual menu, others don't. This should be consistent at the operating system level.

* Sometimes the clock in the system tray doesn't respond to the mouse being over it and won't show the date without a double-click to open the calendar.

* Using the "explore" item from a folder in the Start Menu opens a pseudo view to its contents. Changing the name of a folder there does not alter the name of the folder in the user settings directories. Example: I renamed "Games" to "MSGames" on a fresh install of XP. Then I tried to create a folder called "Games," but I was told it already existed.

* There's no option to make "Paste Unformatted Text" the default in MS apps. So every time I copy text from a webpage to place in a mail, I have to Paste Special->Paste Unformatted Text if I want it to go in as plain text instead of with colors and other stuff.

* When I drag a shortcut into the Start Menu, it lets me choose where in the list to drop it. Upon reopening the folder I put the shortcut in, I find it is at the bottom. I then have to move it to where I put it the first time. Why can't it just remember where I put it initially?

* Why is backspace a hotkey for "previous page" in Internet Explorer? Many times, I go to a web page and start typing in a text box before the page is done loading. The page finishes, and takes keyboard focus away from the text box. I make a typo right at that moment, and hit backspace. Bingo! I'm back at the previous page!

Depeche Mode in Montréal

2006-05-18T09:52:00.000-04:00

Excellent concert. Those guys still rock. The concert was a good blend of old and new, with a lot of stuff from SoFaD; this makes me happy because that's my favorite of their albums. Martin did a single guitar rendition of Judas, which was excellent. But I was really hoping to hear that track with the monster bass at the arena. The video presnetation was put together by a clever program that took live footage from the current performance and did strange effects with it to make it seem like it had been edited as in the opening sequence to the movie Se7en.

The opening act was okay. It was a blend of The Cure, Violent Femmes and Jane's Addiction. Pretty heavy on Cure influence.

It's nice living a 5 minute walk from the Centre Bell in Montréal, since we didn't have to find parking or get stuck in traffic after the concert. :)

Burnout Revenge

2006-05-15T11:41:00.000-04:00

Well, after bashing EA's destruction of the Burnout series based on what other people said about it, I thought I'd better make sure I'm well informed of the problems. So I've been playing some Burnout Revenge on the PS2.

First, let's talk about SPEED. BR has LOADS of this. The framerate is a smooth 60 FPS all the time, and you get that kind of tunnel vision where you only see about a 2 inch round area on the screen as you try to pick out oncoming obstacles before you get too close to avoid them. I haven't even gotten to the really fast cars yet. So if you can imagine one of those little "correct answer" sounds from a gameshow, BR gets a *dink* for speed.

How does the game look? Well, it looks awesome. It's hard to believe how far that old PS2 architecture has come in the hands of capable programmers. The levels are large, detailed, and occasionally beautiful; the mountain level has nice vistas and old stone bridges (that are easy to fall from). There are also some really nice visual effects, such as blur around the edges of the screen. Graphics: *dink*

Is the sound good? Hell yeah! You can hear things whooshing by while you're boosting, crash sound effects sound real, and the "game" effects (like when you get a Takedown) are solid. I wish I had surround sound for this. Sound: *dink*

How about the music? Well, it's mediocre; it's just standard EA licensed music. Why is it that almost every EA game has to have licensed music? I miss Burnout 2's game-exclusive dynamic music. What's worse, is EA have decided that SOME tracks MUST be heard. There's a menu where you can select whether each track is off, played during the menu or the game, or both. Some tracks may not be set to off. That's just wrong. I can see it: "Yeah, we can make it so a player can't disable your music. Just knock 50% off the license fee." Music: *brrrm*

Now for the real question: Is it fun? Yes, it's fun. Ramming the computer opponents (as opposed to traffic) into walls and off cliffs is fun. Crash mode is fun, even if the whole "aftertouch" thing is a bit contrived. Crashbreakers don't add a whole lot to crash mode, and I haven't progressed far enough in the game to use them in races, so the jury is still out on those.

But could it be better? I think so. I still prefer Burnout 2. I played BR for 2 hours straight, then went back to B2 just to prove it. It may not look AS good, but it still looks very good. A few tweaks to the game design have been made that really make BR less fun for me.

You can now ram same-direction small traffic for extra boost. Because of this, the road is a much less hazardous place to be speeding. It also takes out the need for strings of near misses. Those were really fun because you were encouraged to keep your string going. I'd cross 3 lanes of traffic to get to the far left oncoming lane just to get another near miss, and hope I didn't lose control in the process.

You can now press the boost button, let go, and use it again before refilling the meter. In B2, once you hit boost, you were usually committed to hold it until it ran out. Once it ran out, if you had done enough stunts, it would fill again. This was lots of fun, and encouraged the player to keep the boost button held until finally running out or crashing. Also, in BR, the best way to fill the boost meter is to score a Takedown; one of these fills the meter completely, and extends its size. This marginalizes the usefulness of oncoming, drift, near-misses and air with regard to filling the boost meter.

You can unlock a LOAD of stuff, but most of it is more challenges and more cares. More challenges isn't really an "unlock," it's just standard game progression. There are over 70 cars in it. That's just too many for a game like Burnout; it's great for Gran Turismo where the focus is on the subtle differences between cars and equipment. Mostly, the different cars just offer incremental upgrades. EA just seems to have this thing about having a lot of unlockable content, even if there isn't much point to it.

So to sum it up -
fun: *dink*
more fun than B2: *brrrm*

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5.

If I were to rate B2, I think it would come out around 4 or 4.5 stars. So BR is not as large a step backward as I had previously thought, but it's still not as good as it could be. I stand by my assertion that Burnout would have continued to be a brilliant series, if EA hadn't bought Criterion. As it stands, it is a merely a good series.

TransFormers: PS2

2006-05-15T10:58:00.000-04:00

Quick note about this game.

I played it on Hard for about 3 hours. Not bad! Better than I expected for a license title.

Problems:
It would have been fun, except the frame rate suffered badly during fights. There are some level design issues; it encourages you to hunt around the entire level looking for things. This might not be so bad, but the level design isn't great once you get off the main mission path. The upgrade system might leave you underpowered at higher levels if you fail to hunt down all the extra weapons.

Good things:
Combat is fun and fast. The upgrade system balances powerful weapons by allowing you to add which parts you want, but each part must go in a certain slot. So if you they give you two very powerful missile launchers, you can't equip both since they both go on the L2 button. The car form is so much faster than the robot form that you can use it during combat. It transforms quickly, so you can use it in difficult situations. I use it to run through a group of enemies to pick up energy packs. The menus look really slick.

Overall: Not a bad game. But not really good either.

Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5.

Game Politics: Re-Rating a Game

2006-05-08T10:12:00.000-04:00

I have to say something about this.

You're a developer. You make a game. It's rated Teen. Some unknown person on the net makes a mod for your game. The game is re-rated Mature. Suddenly, certain unnamed large retailers will be reticent to carry your title because of the M rating, regardless of how it got that rating.

So what if someone mods the game so it shows hideous nasty gory evilness that should never have even entered anyone's mind ever? Should it be universally taken off shelves or given the Adults Only rating (which would have similar effects)?

The rating given should only apply to the game as published. The GTA hot coffee issue was a little less clear, since the questionable content did exist on the original published media. Personally, I don't think it required a re-rating, since players had to explicitly hack the game to display it. But re-rating Oblivion for content entirely from a mod... that's just wrong.

But the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) agrees with me, at least in the Oblivion case. I guess the British have a better sense of where consumer responsibility begins and ends than the Americans do.

BLACK: First impressions

2006-04-30T21:57:00.000-04:00

Well, this PS2 game is quite good. People say it's too short, but I'm playing on Hard, and it's taken me 4 hours to do 8% of it. So I don't think that's going to be too short. :)

It is narrow in its focus, but it does what it does well. I go in, I shoot people, I try to survive, I have fun. The guns have a hefty feel to them. The levels are wide, but linear. I like that; I hate wondering where I have to go to keep playing the game.

When EA bought Criterion, I thought they'd ruin both Burnout and BLACK. They DID ruin Burnout. Burnout 3 sucked because of all the EA crap thrown in. Like tons of useless stuff to unlock, licensed music for the soundtrack, etc. Like Burnout 2 had adaptive music; when you were going faster, there was more bass, and an extra layer of drums. Can't do that with licensed music.

Well, they didn't ruin BLACK. It's a clean design, with clean presentation. Good stuff.

I'll have a full review once I've played it more.

beatmania: is it as bad as they say it is?

2006-04-13T10:32:00.000-04:00

For the uninitiated, beatmania is the first of the Konami "Bemani" brand games; DDR, Guitar Freaks, Pop 'n' Music and DrumMania are others in this series. In beatmania, you use a 7-key controller with a "turntable." It is billed as a DJ simulator. In-game, there are 8 lanes, and little dashes fall from the top of the screen to a red bar on the bottom. All you have to do is hit the correponding key or spin the turntable each time a dash hits the line. To merely clear a track, hitting the right key when the dashes are near the line is good enough. But the game rates your accuracy on each press, and it tallies the number of Perfect, Great, Good, Poor and Bad hits that you get. You will need a large percentage of Perfects to get the higher ratings of AA and AAA.

This game first hit arcades in Japan back in 1997, but we're finally getting it here in the US in 2006. In my opinion, Konami has waited this long to bring beatmania to the US because it is so difficult; Japanese audiences generally tolerate harder games. There have been over 10 versions, or "styles," released in Japan.

I've had more time with beatmania now, and I don't think it's as bad as the press would have you believe. I don't care if the menus are gaudy, if there aren't many game modes, or about many of the other complaints I've seen in the press. The controller has a very nice feel, and the game is fun.

The one thing they have right is that some of the music does suck in a major way. Some of them are badly off key, others are just horribly cheesy or have poor choice of instrumentation. Some of them appear to use plain MIDI instruments! Having said that, there are some tracks that are very good. But the music won't be to everyone's taste, since a lot of it is hardcore techno and Drum 'n' Bass. So if you find that you must like the music in a music game to like the game, then you will want to find out if there's enough here that you will like before shelling out for the game.

It is an extremely hard game. As such, it's something you won't enjoy unless you WANT to enjoy it, but practice and patience are truly rewarded. It's extremely satisfying to play through the harder levels once you can do it. After 3 weeks, I can handle level 3 tracks now, and I can do a few of the 4s. I've looked at the 10s, and... well, I dunno. They look impossible. Though I've seen videos of people doing the really hard ones. Just search video.google.com for "beatmania" and you'll be amazed at what these people can do. You can even play both sides of the game simultaneously: video.google.com

The more casual gamers I know that have tried it tend to like playing it, and are able to get the hang of it by staying on level 1 tracks. So even though it has a very long difficulty curve, it starts easy enough for most people.

The training mode is excellent, as it allows you to play any part of any track, and you can play it at 4/5, 3/5, 2/5, and 1/5 normal speed. This helped me learn the faster parts of "Snow" on Beginner.

The controller is well built, and has a nice feel while playing it. The keys are responsive, and the turntable is tight. Granted, real turntables aren't this sticky, but that keeps it from continuing to spin after you give input with it. I don't feel cheated by the $90 CAD price I paid for the game/controller bundle. The key pad even come out of the controller so it can be put in upside-down. This is to facilite playing double, or for people accustomed to the arcade version's right-handed scratching for player 2. The game also has an option to change on which side the scratch track is displayed on-screen. As I said before, the menus aren't much to look at (or listen to), but the important options are all there.

In the end, I recommend this title, but with hesitation. The music might entirely turn you off, but its style is well suited to the gameplay. Much effort is required to learn to play well, but effort is rewarded with fun. So if you're looking for a single game that can give you months of continuing challenges, this is a good one for you.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

beatmania

2006-04-03T13:32:00.000-04:00

Hey guys!

I ususally don't post about games until I've played them for long enough to form a strong opinion, but I have to say something about this game.

The reviews I've read at Gamespot and IGN really don't like it. They gave it a 5.6 and 6.0 respectively.

Yes, the game is not for everyone, as it is rather hardcore; but it is excellent. I've had it for 3 days, and I've really gotten into it. Having not played it before, the controller is new to me. There are also plenty of options to help less hardcore players get into it. For example there's a 5-button mode, training mode (where you can play the music slowly to learn the patterns), and the 1-star tracks are quite easy. Since I can't give a full review at this time, I'll just address some of the main complaints I've seen.

The music sucks:
Yes, the music isn't great. There are some good tracks if you're into Drum 'n' Bass, and some other odd forms of electronic music. There are couple pop tunes like FunkyTown and Celebration. But I find most of the music is fun to play.

The format (vertical scrolling blips) is out of date:
Perhaps it is, but it's very functional for a game with rhythms this complex. Remember, you've got 8 lanes of information to display (16 in multiplayer mode), and that information can become very complex in some places. Because of this, I don't think an Amplitude style treatment would suit the sheer number and density of notes.

The game has no rhythm:
That's silly. The rhythms may be more complex than the ones presented in DDR, but DDR is a dance game and tends to focus on the downbeat. In beatmania you sometimes have to play the Drum 'n' Bass "doot chat dibby-dibby doot chat" part, or the strange bassline patterns you get in DnB. It's like the reviewer had never heard electronic music with more than the standard four-on-the-floor beat.

I would tentatively give this game 3.5 or 4 stars out of 5, but I'll have a full review on it in a week or two. I hope. :)

Avant Noise

2006-03-27T17:16:00.000-05:00

Saw Biosphere at Mutek a while back, and I'm finally getting around to finishing writing this.

The show was excellent. It was low-key, often percussionless electronic music played loud with a large video backdrop by an artist. The art was... odd. It was a series of video clips taken on subways. But they were processed to show different time slices at different horizontal coordinates. So people sort of "stretched" through their walking. There were some other scenes, but I really want to talk about music right now.

Before Biosphere performed, there were two other artists performing: nAnalog, and Tiny Little Elements. nAnalog were the more interesting of the preceding two, because their visual presentation was more interesting. It was largely mechanical sounding noise modulated into more synth-sounding chord structures.

But TLE... Eesh. It was atonal, arhytmic, and VERY mechanical. The visual presentation was simple (which is often good) but looked unprofessional to my Game Programmer's eye. For example, it wasn't V-synced, so you could see tearing in the image as the computer redrew its frames. Diagonal lines that were to erase what was beneath them erased bounding rectangles around them, instead of just their shape. It looked cheap.

So without a good video presentation to occupy my mind, I was able to concentrate on the Avant Noise. Not sure if that's the correct term for it, but it sounds good. :) It just didn't appeal to me on any level. I think I'm pretty good at finding the music in compositions, even if I don't like them. Sometimes the music is buried very deeply in layers of droning synth, as in Biosphere's Shen Zhou. Music might be hidden in the interactions between repetitive layers, as in much of Orbital's work.

Try as I might, I could not penetrate the maze of bleeps, blips, and static. I tried hard, as when they were done, I felt tired from the effort. About 40 minutes in, a 4/4 house beat faded in. About 5 minutes later, they were done. The beat didn't match anything, it was just there. Later, I almost felt insulted. After inflicting seemingly structureless sound on me for 40 minutes, a beat just didn't mean anything.

As a funny epilogue, Biosphere came up next. The video hadn't started yet, and it was dark in the auditorium. From the speakers came 5-second long bass waves. They started with one very low note, and added layers of tones, then subtracted them. It was a very complex sound that was quite beautiful. After about 5 of these, I noticed that each wave was identical. After about 10 of them, they stopped. The video artist came on stage, then the show began. He was just testing the sound system! But Biosphere's sound test was a much more interesting listen than anything in the whole Tiny Little Elements show.

God of War

2006-03-27T16:05:00.000-05:00

I just finished God of War on Hard mode. I hadn't played it before, I just started on Hard because I'm the video game equivalent of a masochist. Other examples: I play Gradius V and Ikaruga without continuing. I started Amplitude on Brutal, and got all the way through Insane, include the last bonus track and the hidden extra bonus track. I played the Killing Gameshow on the Amiga. Heheheh.

Anyway, God of War is every bit as excellent as all the hype would have you believe. David Jaffe was the director for the game. He was also lead designer on Twisted Metal 1, 2, and Black. His talent for producing games in which gameplay comes first is legendary, and God of War is no exception. There are a lot of reviews that will explain how brilliant the graphics are, how great the sound is, and how much fun it is to play. I will instead concentrate on what I think are the little details that set this game apart from most others.

First and foremost, there is the gameplay. The game centers on its combat system; there is some platforming to do, but that part feels like a means to get from one combat area to the next. A good combat engine of this type must engage the player's brain to be interesting. If the player can just mash the attack button endlessly without thinking, it gets boring very quickly. GoW's combat is in the tradition of Streets of Rage II (All praise be to its name) from the Genesis. It has a simple combo system, whereby continually hitting square results in a string of different attacks. You can switch to triangle during a square sequence for a big hit. The brain engagement comes between the hits. While each move is being executed, the player needs to evaluate the enemies' new positions to determine if the next move in the combo should be done. The player can change the direction of the next attack, add in a heavy strike, or continue with the normal combo, or combinations of these. Normal mode requires less of this than Hard mode, which brings me to the next point.

This game has properly implemented difficulty settings. Normal mode was designed for the average gamer to play and enjoy, without running into frustrating points. This gives it mass appeal. I want more challenge from a game, so I chose Hard. It was often very punishing, but that was what I wanted. Once I finished Hard and tried God mode, I got what I expected. I tried about 10 times to complete the first battle, and failed. Part of that was because I was being greedy so I could get as many red orbs as possible. :)

GoW has an excellent story, and good characterizations. I can't say much without giving away important plot elements. Kratos' character develops through the cut-scenes, and is present in every move he does in combat. Very few video games have had characters whose stories I cared about. From the first few moments after starting the game for the first time, I wondered how Kratos' story would end.

There is no harvesting. In Devil May Cry, you could kill the same monsters over and over and over, and keep getting more red orbs for it. So anytime I got stuck in DMC, I had this nagging feeling that if I had spent more time being bored at the previous fight, I would have more orbs and more power, and might be able to get past the problem area. GoW only has one place that has infinitely spawning enemies, and they eventually stop giving you red orbs if you kill enough of them. There are many hidden chests with extra orbs, so you can get more for exploring. You can also decide whether to kill enemies in ways that get you more orbs. For example, there is an enemy type that you can kill with the minigame and get health from them. If you kill them normally, you get more red orbs. So squeezing more orbs out of the game is a matter of PLAYING the game the way it was meant to be played, not abusing it.

The Interface works well. This is a small point, but an important one that reduces frustration. If you fail a spot too many times, the game asks if you want to switch to Easy mode. This is a nice option for players who accidentally chose a level too hard for them but only find out late in the game; they can continue the game without having to start over and select Easy. Because of this, the game can save the difficulty into the save file, so you never have to check the options page to make sure you're still on the right setting. Also, when it asks if you want to switch to Easy, it defaults to "no." This means that if you're stuck at a difficult place and are mashing X to hurry up and try again, you won't accidentally switch to Easy.

The things you unlock for completing the game are cool. You get God mode, Challenge of the Gods, several videos talking about the making of the game, more background on the characters, etc.

The game is rated "M," and rightly so. There is very graphic, brutal violence, and some female nudity. But neither feels gratuitous to me in GoW. This warrants an entire post, as I feel that violence in games is not an simple issue. In the case of GoW, the violence is an integral part of both the character and the story, so it seems well-placed.

Recommended: 5 stars out of 5
Definitely not for children.

Def Jam: Fight For New York

2006-03-03T15:37:00.000-05:00

Okay!

I've now put in about 5-6 hours with DJ:FFNY (PS2 version). I tried this game since several online reviews of Urban Reign say I should play this instead. The short version: I instantly didn't like it, but I gave it many hours to improve. It DID in fact improve. I had much more fun with the game during my closing hour or two, once I had learned how reversals and other complexities worked. But it still wasn't really fun.

The long version:
DJ:FFNY is a very stiff wrestling-based fight game. I say wrestling-based since most of the really damaging moves are grapples. I say stiff because the controls don't have the fluidity I have come to love in Namco fighting games.

Character animations during the fights are silly and clownlike. It seems odd to me that a game with an "M" rating and the important four-letter words in it would do this. The animations limit the game's ability to live up to its "hardcore" street image.

The health bar is weird: emptying your opponent's health bar does NOT knock him out. It is a two-tiered health bar: there's the max health, and the current health. Each hit knocks about half the inflicted damage off the max health. The only way to score a KO is to do a special move while your opponent is in the "danger" zone, which is about the last centimeter of the health bar. So you beat on your opponent until he's in danger, then try to get in a team grapple with the crowd, use a weapon, a signature move, or a Blazin' move. This just feels wrong to me, though I did get used to it.

Blazin' moves. Hmm, where to start. Over time, if you stay in a fight and don't run around, your momentum meter fills. When it's full you wiggle the right stick, and you go into Blazin' mode. Grapple your opponent, and hit the right stick in a direction to select one of 4 Blazin' moves. These are 15 second long choreographed attacks that cannot be stopped once started. Three things suck about Blazin' moves. When you first go into Blazin' mode, the whole fight stops for your dude to yell (unless you're playing multiplayer); it stops for about 3-4 seconds. Second, once you start the move, there's nothing for you to do but wait. Third, for them to have maximum impact for the player, controller rumble is almost exclusively reserved for these; the rest of the fight feels "light" due to the lack of rumble feedback in the controller.

Okay, I was starting to have a bit of fun with the game, when the 2v2 team fights showed up. Eesh. Once player A and C are in a grapple, players B and D cannot touch them. It feels more like 2 simultaneous 1v1 fights, where the people involved can switch periodically. There are none of the elegant teamwork mechanics that can be found in Urban Reign. Yes, there's a double-team grapple, but it's hard to execute, and just feels like another scripted animation.

After several of these 2v2 fights, I gave up on the game, as it just isn't fun. I feel there are rules governing the fight, which seems silly given it is supposed to be a no-holds-barred street fight.

Oh yeah. There's a load of licensed music, real rappers playing characters in a well-voiced but rather silly story, and other general EA Games features. None of that can save the game since the basic fighting engine is weak. The fighting is complex enough, it just isn't fun.

Not Recommended. 2 1/2 stars out of 5.

To the Guitar Hero Skeptics

2006-02-28T14:18:00.000-05:00

Many times I have told people that I'm going to get Guitar Hero, or it's awesome, or whatever. Often I get the response, "Why not just buy a real guitar?" This blog post is the result of the frustration I experience trying to answer that question.

According to Harmonix, the developer of the game, here's why:

"[Our] original goal was to allow non-musicians to experience the joy of playing music. ... Collectively, we believe that making music is one of the most exciting and satisfying experiences possible, but one that is denied to most people, given the time and commitment necessary to achieve proficiency on a musical instrument."

- From game developer magazine, Feb 2006, p. 24

In a few hours with Guitar Hero, you can sound like Jimi Hendrix. In a few hours with a real guitar, you can plink out about 5 different notes. Yes, there's no real substitute for learning to play a real instrument well. But if you want to casually enjoy the thrill of performing great music, then Guitar Hero is the thing.

OS X, Logitech, and Mouse Acceleration

2006-02-18T00:01:00.000-05:00

I hate mouse acceleration. It's a nice idea, but I consider it to make the pointer's behavior inconsistent. I expect the pointer to move the distance I move the mouse, regardless of the speed.

So, I turn it off on every computer I use. This was difficult in Windows XP, because it's call "Enhance Pointer Precision." Yeah, right. I played Quake 3 for 4 months with the acceleration on, and wondered why I couldn't learn to aim. I thought it was because I came from an Unreal Tournament background. But what really happened, is I changed computer when I changed from UT to Quake. The company I worked at, Gamesworks LTD was a UT joint, and ATD, the new place was a Quake joint. I didn't have acceleration for UT, but I did for Quake. Needless to say, learning to fire the railgun with acceleration on is a bitch, especially when you don't know it's on!!

Anyway, my railgun accuracy went up from 25% to 40% within about 2 weeks of turning it off.

So, my wife gets me the new Logitech MX 1000 Laser Wireless mouse for Christmas. Very nice mouse, great present. I feel a little teeny bit of lag from it being wireless, but it's only about 2-3 frames at 125 FPS on Quake 3. Still, it feels a little strange to me. :)

Finally, my old 400 MHz G4 Mac that got stolen was replaced recently with a shiny (and I do mean shiny) new Dual 2.0 GHz G5. Very nice machine. Since this post is about the mouse, I won't tell you how nice an experience unpacking a new Mac is. :)

Anyway, as I already knew, you can't turn off mouse acceleration in OS X. APPLE WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING?!?!? Anyway, I try SteerMouse. which works rather well, except that the speed settings near the low end (the upper end is too fast with acceleration off) are too far apart; and it causes problems with the MX1000! I wish Logitech's driver would allow me to turn off the accelertion.
>:(

So, I happen upon iMouseFix. This does the job very nicely. I can turn off mouse acceleration, and still use the Logitech drivers for the MX1000, AND it's free! :D

Now I'm happy again. Yeah, I like Macs, but I don't hesitate to mention the things that do truly suck about them.

And just as I finish writing this post, the mouse messes up again. It worked fine on my Windows 2000 machine... Grrr...
>:(

"Fight" Update

2006-01-25T22:58:00.000-05:00

We refer to Urban Reign affectionately as "Fight." This is of course because the game is a pure fighting experience, with very little else in it. I reviewed this game earlier, and would now like give you an update now that I've had more time with it.

I've now put in over 60 or 70 hours on multiplayer with Ben; we do both challenge mode and 2v2 fights where each of us has a computer partner. The 2v2 fights are absolutely vicious. He plays Alex and Jake, whom are both wrestlers with a lot of health. I play Shun Ying and Glen, so I have some agility and some power. Shun Ying takes a sledgehammer. >:) She can turn blue, for a period of time, which gives her automatic grapple-counters. Jake and Alex hate this, as their best moves are grabs. It even goes so far as to auto-counter counters that are grapples. Hehehe. But since Shun Ying's health is low, it doesn't take much for her to get knocked out.

We are still having a great time with this game. It just doesn't seem to get old or boring. It's very fast, exciting and brutal. After two weeks of Guitar Hero, it took a few games to warm up into it again.

When people at work see it, they say, "Didn't that get bad reviews?" They watch a bit, and decide they need to try it. Most people who have tried it like it.

After quite a bit of experience with the game, I stand by my initial assertion that the critics got it wrong. Unfortunately, it hasn't sold well in the US. I hope sales in Japan make up for this, so we can get a sequel. We refer to this unannounced hoped-for game as "More Fight." :)

Guitar Hero... (dare I say it) Rocks!

2006-01-24T15:45:00.000-05:00

I've had Guitar Hero for PS2 since Dec 6th now, when it was first available here in Quebec. I saw Guitar Freaks in the excellent movie "Lost in Translation". I said to myself, "If that ever hits the PS2, that's an automatic pre-order!" Then I saw one in the arcade, and got to play it (only once due to a CD Error). It was fun! Later still, I was checking the Harmonix site to see if they had announced another game yet, and there was Guitar Hero!

I was fortunate enough to pre-order GH a month before release, so I got one on the day it came out. Other people were less fortunate, as the game sold out everywhere within the first week. :)

There are many good reviews of GH online, so I will cover the important parts that I feel distinguish it without covering all the details of gameplay again.

The game is loads of fun. You use a plastic guitar controller to play the guitar part in real music. There are 5 buttons on the neck, a flip-switch for strumming, and a whammy bar for pitch bending. Colored circles scroll toward you on the screen. You hold the corresponding button (buttons for chords) then flip the strum bar when the note is on the target bar. If you get it right, the guitar part of the music turns on. When you mess up, you get a "plink" and the guitar part turns off. What's great is that in no-time (about 5 minutes) you're able to sound like real guitar gods.

Many of you out there may think you couldn't play it because you have no sense of music, or couldn't handle the controller, or whatever. This is most likely incorrect. Easy mode keeps the speed of the notes onscreen slow, and only requires the use of 3 buttons, and there are very few (if any) chords where you use more than one button at a time. The first track, "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," is very easy to pick up because of its simple rhythms. I've had several people who thought they couldn't handle it try that track. They inevitably miss the first couple notes. After about 30 seconds, they get the hang of it, and complete the song with no trouble. I've seen a few fail once, then complete it. I've only seen one person fail twice, but he was in a hurry to leave anyway.

Harmonix REALLY got the difficulty curve right. I jumped right in at Medium, and blew through it without failing once. But it taught me how to play, so I was ready for Hard. Other people (who haven't finshed Amplitude) have started on Easy, and felt ready for Medium after finishing it.

What makes the game truly great is the feeling you get of actually playing the music. Since there are 5 buttons, you can't keep your hand in the same place and hit the buttons easily. So you end up sliding your hand up and down the neck to hit different notes and chords, as on a real guitar.

Fans of Amplitude will wonder about the game's difficulty. Amplitude's higher levels were incredibly hard. Guitar Hero is much more forgiving, as it rates you a per-note basis, rather than on a per-phrase basis as in Amplitude. Because of this, just completing the songs successfully is much easier than in Amplitude. But on Expert mode, hitting 95% or more of the notes is VERY hard, particularly on the last 10 tracks. So it's easier to "complete" than Amplitude, but "mastering" the game will take a long time and a lot of practice. I would prefer if Expert were less forgiving (leave the other settings as they are), but I'm a hardcore bastard. :)

The song list is excellent. I'm not a fan of standard guitar rock, but the tracks they've chosen contain a wide variety of styles. The songs are all covers of the originals, but they are done very well.

The controller is well-made, and feels very comfortable. The buttons have rounded edges, so it's easy to slide your fingers along them.

The presentation is very nice, with a band shown playing the songs in an arena that responds to the quality of your performance. The guitarist even does very life-like fingering on the guitar, including "finger-wobble" on the strings to get vibrato.

Inevitably, this game needs to be compared to Guitar Freaks. Here's my comparison:

GF only has 3 buttons, and feels much more like a game because of this. Real guitar players slide their hand along the neck, and GF doesn't require this. GH's star-power mode adds a nice bit a strategy to it. The music in GF is 1:30 tracks that aren't necessarily guitar music; many of them are electronic or light J-pop songs. Because of this GF has a larger variety of music, but GH's music is more satisfying because the songs are complete 5 minute rock tracks. GH's graphics and presentation are far superior.

It's been said before, but I know people who intend to buy a PS2 now, just for this game! It's that good. A most excellent game; ignore its price and buy it.

Recommended. 5 stars out of 5.

Dance Dance Revolution

2005-11-23T17:46:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I'm a late comer to DDR. I played one game at a movie theater about two months ago, and I was hooked instantly. Of course, I love music games. But the problems of dealing with the momentum of your body make this one very interesting.

For those who have played it, or know what it is, skip this paragraph. The game just shows a stream of arrows pointing up, down, left, or right that scrolls upward. Each arrow type is in a lane, and at the top of the screen is a matching marker arrow that pulses with the beat. When an arrow hits the marker at the top, step on the matching arrow on the platform. Sometimes there are two arrows to hit at the same time, so you jump to hit both. Some arrows are green strips that mean you step when the top hits the marker, and keep your foot down until the strip disappears off the screen. You miss arrows, you lose energy. You hit them right on the beat, you gain energy. That's it!

I'm playing DRR Max 2 on the PS2 right now, having borrowed it from a friend. I'm working my way through the Standard mode, which is quite difficult. There are long streams of off-beat quarter notes, half-note triplets, and occasional strings of 8th note arrows. When the tempo is higher, strings of quarter-note jumps can be difficult as well. I've even seen a few 16th-pickup notes. But these are the easy levels... the highest levels of the game are insane.

I find that recently I have only bought fighting games and music games. This seems to be where you have to go to get a good challenge. The more cinematic games like Splinter Cell are designed to be finished in 15-30 hours of play. So much work goes into the production of the visuals and story that it would be silly to make it too hard to finish. I'd personally prefer it if Hardcore modes were included more often. Some games are more extreme in this regard, such as the King Kong game, which has about 8 hours of gameplay in it. (I do have a bias toward mentioning Ubisoft games since I work there.)

Interestingly, the DDR type games sell very well, despite requiring investment in dance pads. Often you read about people who don't play many games, but like DDR. A friend of mine bought a PS2 mainly so his wife could play DDR. (yes, that was before an XBox version came out.) What this means to me is that casual gamers WILL buy hard games, as long as they are fun, and overcoming the challenge seems worth the investment of time. One thing that makes DDR acceptable to the mass market is that the easy settings are very easy, making the game accessible to everyone.

A game designer once made a remark to me about difficulty settings in games: "What does that say to the player when they boot the game and have to select easy? The game should dynamically adjust itself invisibly to the player's ability." I must say that this approach works very well for some games.

An aside: In my opinion, this tactic is used too often to tune the game so the user can succeed; I'd use it to continually push the player slightly beyond what they are capable of.

But in the case of DDR, I think it works better to use difficulty settings because it allows the player to set a goal for themselves, and the fun is in achieving that goal. If the game were to dynamically adjust so you succeed, you'd notice the arrow pattern changing to be easier, and would steal the sense of accomplishment. If it were to dynamically adjust to make it slightly harder than you can handle, you'd feel the game was changing the goal as you tried to reach it. Both of these approaches can work in other games, but DDR is fundamentally based around succeeding at one track at a time. Once the player passes a track, the goal then becomes to improve the number of Perfect (exactly timed) steps they get on it. This type of goal system is not suited at all to dynamic difficulty.

All this could be construed as a theoretical argument, but the size of DDR-related game and controller sales speaks for itself. :)

Urban Reign

2005-10-16T17:52:00.000-04:00

Yes, that's right folks. The critics get it wrong again. Urban Reign for the PS2 is an excellent game that has gotten poor reviews.

First, I'll start by addressing the critics' main complaints. They say the story is poor. They say it's hard to deal with being beat up on by 3 guys at once. They say there isn't much variation in the single player missions. They're right about all these things. It would be nice if these weren't problems with the game, but they don't detract from what I consider the focus of it: fighting. I didn't buy this game for its story; I wanted to fight. It IS hard to deal with being hit by multiple guys, but it's not impossible.

What makes this game good is that it is a brawling game with complexity. Yes, you can just mash circle and throw a load of punches and do okay in the first few single player levels on Normal difficulty. But to be good at the game, you have to learn how to block and reverse moves. Yes, this is also reasonably simple: press square at the right time. The thing is, "the right time" depends on the attack they do. Simple punches have a wide time of opportunity to press square and dodge them. But some grabs also require a direction input matching the one that generated the grab. Getting punched while in the air, stunned or from behind requires more careful timing. But it is almost always possible to hit square at a certain point and avoid an attack.

There are neat tricks that can be done; for example, a guy was on the ground, and I kicked him into the air. My pal caught the guy, and prepared to execute a wrestling move. But the guy hit square and got out of it. Then I hit him with a sledgehammer. These kinds of moments a just loads of fun. Are we progressing through a story? No. Are we improving our characters? No. But we are having a great time playing.

The 2v2 fights work very well, due to some subtle game design. When playing against the computer, I can imagine taking out one of the opponents, then double teaming the last guy, and feeling it's a bit easy at this point, and not having much fun. But if the computer takes out one of you, they will mercilessly (on Hard at least) press the advantage and beat the holy living crap out of you. One will floor you, the other will get on top of you, punch you in the face repeatedly, while the other kicks you. The AI can be absolutely vicious. So, when you have to opportunity to reciprocate, you will do it with relish.

Because a lone fighter has difficulty beating a team of two, teamwork is of the utmost importance. In one fight, I was KOed, and we had taken off most of each opponent 's health, while my partner had over 1/2 his health left. In numerical terms, we were winning. But the advantage they had through teamwork meant they wrecked my partner. So it's important to spread the damage you take to make sure you have access to teamwork as long as possible.

Teamwork is encouraged in several ways. You can't hurt your friend. If you throw a weapon at your friend, he automatically catches it. If someone has grabbed your friend, you can grab them or hit them to stop it. If you are both close to an opponent, and one of you hits triangle, you can execute a double team grab move thing. Further, you can't be hit by anything during this super move.

The different characters feel very different from each other, and the different weapons feel different in different fighter's hands. Yes, there are repeats, like Characters A, X, and G will all wield the Sledgehammer in the same way, but there are enough differences to be interesting.

There are enough variations of the multiplayer and challenge fights to keep me interested for a long time. Ben, the main person I play this with, has played over 30 hours of it with me already, and we still love it. Namco has again proven that they know how to make fighting games.

If you want a good fighting game, get this.

Recommended. 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

What the Bleep Do We Know?

2005-09-10T16:04:00.000-04:00

Well, I just sat through this film. It had been recommended to me by many people, some with highly educated backgrounds.

I appreciate the movie's central message that you have more control over your life than you think, and I agree. But not to the extent the film claims, and not for the reasons it uses.

But...

I'm so tired of people abusing Quantum probability to say whatever drivel they want. When that dude says quantum begs the question "who makes the choice" when a probability comes out one way or the other, he's just flat wrong. This is simply anthropomorphizing (spelling?) a physical event. No "choice" is necessary. It just comes out one way or the another. The filmmakers are trying to create the universe in their own image. Also, editing a bunch of real physicists together with channelers and other weirdos just doesn't hold much weight with me.

They cite crackpot studies of thought processes altering the structure of water. They say the Carribeans couldn't see Columbus' ships when he arrived.

No cookie. A very nicely produced load of garbage with a very nice and important central message.

Avoid this movie.
Rating - 1 star out of 5.

Evolving language

2005-06-18T04:12:00.000-04:00

I was just thinking about language, the current trend for people to use apostrophe's to make plural's, and the nature of the study of physics.

I've been quite annoyed about the apostrophe problem, because I'm a bit of a grammar purist; I'm not entirely alone, either. I mean, I know language changes, and languages that cease to change are probably dead. But the apostrophe thing irritates me because it introduces yet another complication into English that just seems entirely unnecessary. And it's not like it makes it easier; you have to type an extra character to get it wrong.

Non-English speaker: So I add "s" to make plural.
English speaker: Yes.
Non-English speaker: And I use " 's " to make possessive.
English speaker: Yes.
Non-English speaker: But apostrophes also indicate contractions.
English speaker: Yes, you're really getting the hang of this.
Non-English speaker: And I use "s" on the end of a verb to make a form of the present tense.
English speaker: Yes, like in "he sees the dog." Very good.
Non-English speaker: So what's this I see on signs: "Dog's for sale" Does this mean "Dog is for sale" or "Dog owns for sale"?
English speaker: Well, some people use the apostrophe to indicate plural.
Non-English speaker: So the apostrophe now has three meanings, and which one it is can only be deduced from context.
English speaker: Yes.
Non-English speaker: So what about this. I saw this in a chat room: "He really need's to figure it out."
English speaker: Well, I guess there are four meanings. That's just a use that indicates that type of present tense.
Non-English speaker: So you have two ways to indicate plural and that form of present tense, and they look identical to possessive and contraction, and require a context check to figure out.
English speaker: Yes.

Wow. What a mess we've made of the " 's ." It's so pervasive, that I find myself typing it. But I'm picky, so I backspace and fix it. But I don't expect people who aren't that picky to spend the time to do that, so it's changing in the language. The purists rail, and the... relaxists say, "an unchanging language is dead. Just let it go."

Yesterday, it occurred to me while riding the Orange line Metro to work, that at some point, language must not have evolved far enough to have the words "grammar" or "verb." This struck me as being similar to life before evolving conscious thought. The language was probably complex, and able to communicate many things, but not describe itself. Before evolving the structures to describe its own structures, it still had structures. :)

So I'd say that the tools we use to describe language are, in a sense, separate from the language itself. They are only a means to describe how the language functions. Hence grammar rules don't define the language, they describe it. This is how physics works. The physical world does not "obey the laws of physics"; it is described by them. Sometimes physicists find that their "laws" are incorrect, and need to be adjusted. I would say that the "laws of grammar" must be the same.

The difference is that the ways in which the physical world behaves aren't actually changing with time. So we can just toss old physics "laws" and get new ones based on new observations. There's no one to blame, and it's not even a change in the world. Physicists just had it wrong before, and are making "progress" toward a better understanding of the universe.

What makes changes in language annoying is that language is something we've made ourselves. We should be able to make language adhere to the rules. So the final question is: Do we decide to bend language to our will, and force it to adhere to the rules we want? Or do we let it evolve, and continue to revise our description of the system by changing the "rules" of grammar?

Well, it looks like the German speaking peoples of the world are taking the first tack. In 1996, the German-speaking nations of the world (except Luxembourg) ratified a spelling reform to simplify their language. As I tend to be a purist, I applaud them. But I must say, in light of the preceding discussion, I no longer feel it is inherently wrong to just let language change and update the rule's accordingly.