Archive for March, 2007

I decided to play a little bit of Lego Star Wars II tonight.   It’s a cute game, essentially a “platformer” with very prettily rendered 2.5d graphics.  That one sentence summary is doing the game a disservice- it’s quite large and reasonably faithfully reproduces the stories from the original three Star Wars movies, albeit with a humourous/comical twist. 

It is important to note that the primary target audience for this game is little kids, 10 years old or thereabouts.  I’d read about it and thought it would be a fun diversion now and then, so I bought it.  But here is the part where the wheels come off the truck: I’ve had to resort to a cheat / walkthrough (warning- spoilers at that link) in order to finish several of the levels.

I consider myself a moderately competent gamer- I’ve never claimed to be “elite”, but I do okay.  It is humbling to be reduced to “cheating” in order to figure out how to finish a level of…a kid’s game.  And not just one level- I’ve gone back to the above-linked walkthrough now three times.  Each time, I cleared out what I could see of the level and then spent another thirty to sixty minutes trying to figure out how to get further before “giving up”.

It is perhaps somewhat telling that I generally don’t have to resort to walkthroughs in order to finish a “big kids” game.  Halflife 2?  No problem.  Doom 3?  Easy stuff.  Gears of War?  I needed help with the very final battle with RAAM, but nothing else.  I am not too proud to resort to a Google search if I get stuck for more than an hour or so, but usually I can muddle my way through.

Yet a game designed for 10 year olds has stumped me repeatedly during the first few hours I’ve played it.   Worse yet, when I read the walkthrough I usually go “d’oh, why didn’t I see that?”.  You often have to use the abilities of the different characters in your party at a given point in time in a certain sequence (E.G.: R2D2 can hover a bit, Yoda is strong in the force, some characters are required to open certain doors, etc.).  The puzzles aren’t mind bending by any stretch, but for whatever reason I’m missing obvious things like spots where the afore-mentioned ability of R2D2 to hover can be used to get to a tricky spot. 

Of course, a lot of the time I’m getting hung up on things like not thinking to shoot flowers and wildlife on Dagobah in order to complete Yoda’s quests.  Who’d have thought destroying plantlife would make me One with the Force?

Our cat, Rommel, has had a rather checkered past when it comes to his own health.  He entered our house as a basically healthy twelve week old kitten nearly twelve years ago.  Within a few months he had fractured his kneecap (resulting in six weeks in a cast), and within a year he’d had several abscesses, various stitches added and removed, and numerous x-rays.  In more recent years he’s developed a growth in his mouth called a stomatitis, for which he has had several surgeries, regular steroidal treatments, special hypoallergenic food, and periodic doses of anti-biotics.

Irene noticed a couple of weeks ago that he seemed to be losing weight rapidly, and the stomatitis had re-blossomed.  Having a big sore in your mouth, scale wise about the equivalent of having a thumb stuck between your teeth, probably doesn’t have a positive effect on a cat’s appetite.  But when the vet checked him out we found he’d lost nearly two pounds in three months.  Blood tests showed the cause…Rommel is now diabetic.

Steroid treatments can, apparently, induce diabetes, possibly pushing a borderline cat over the threshold.  Rommel may possibly go into “remission” at some point in the future, but for now we are starting him on twice-daily insulin injections.  If he tolerates the regular injections well it’s not a big deal: but if it becomes terribly stressful for him and us…well, there has to be some kind of measure of quality of life.  I’m optimistic, based on how he handled the shot at the vet, that Rommel will deal with the process well.

I was really hoping that Rommel’s health would settle down, but he seems prone to all sorts of challenges.  I love the guy…despite or perhaps because of his prickly personality. 

Janet and Gord, friends of Irene and myself from Edmonton (they actually introduced us) came out here last week.  Unlike ordinary houseguests, though, they came to look after us: they fed us, cleaned up, and kept Irene entertained.

I’m not a very good nurse, so I think Irene really appreciated having Janet and Gord looking after her instead.  They distracted her from her post-surgery thoughts, cheered her up, and generally got her spirits up.  And as a side bonus, I didn’t have to prepare any meals for the entire time they were here.  I say “prepare” rather than “cook”, since I don’t actually cook- everything I feed Irene and myself goes from freezer to microwave to plate.  Gord actually *cooked*, creating food from raw ingredients and so forth.

In any case, they’ve been gone now for a few days, and I think both Irene and I miss their presence.  Thanks, Gord and Janet!

I mentioned previously that I’ve acquired an XBox 360. I’ve been having a blast with it, and I plan on putting together a little overview of my experiences to date. But for now I’ll talk briefly about one game in particular, Gears of War.

Gears of War is one of the run-away success stories on the XBox 360. Over 4 million copies have been sold so far, and everyone seems to think it’s fantastic. So what is all the fuss about? GoW is not a revolutionary game: at its core, it’s a first person shooter of the oldest traditions. It has a shallow “aliens invade Earth/bad-ass commando type with a big gun saves the day” story, tons of action, vast arrays of monsters to fight, and plenty of weapons to play with. But it isn’t all the same….

The biggest differences in terms of game play versus GoW and, say, Quake or Doom, can be summed up in two different catch phrases: “run and gun” versus “drop and pop”. Run and gun is what you do in Quake or Doom: run around, rocket jump, bunny hop, and generally behave like you are jumped up on crack or something in an effort to avoid being hit by your opponent. Drop and pop is what you do in Gears of War: dive behind cover, pop up and shoot, then jump/dive to the next bit of cover. You can also poke around corners and blind fire your weapon if you want to maximize your use of cover. It’s different, and personally I prefer this approach.

The remainder of what makes Gears of War stand out can be be boiled down to production quality. The sound, the textures, and the graphical details are first rate. The control scheme is easy to learn but tough to master, with an innovative “action reload” mechanic that makes putting bullets in your gun interesting in itself. I liked my “squad” of computer-controlled buddies: often, they were actually helpful and required essentially zero handholding. Similarly, monster AI seemed first-rate, although a couple of glitches now and then, with monsters getting “stuck” or the like, marred the perfection.

In summary, I’d rate Gears of War as between an 8.5 and 9 out of 10 on the “Kelly” scale. The biggest frustration in the entire game, and what (for me) probably reduced my overall happiness the most, was the very end scene. Killing that final monster took me a couple dozen tries and several hours…not as much fun as frustration. Since talking about the final battle would be a spoiler, I’ll hedge things a bit by forcing you to click a link if you don’t mind spoiling the ending. If you want to know how I finally got past the last monster, see this strategy video.

Some folks might have noticed my posting of a Youtube “video” (actually, it’s mostly an “audio”, but that’s being picky) here a couple of days ago.  The really observant probably noted that it didn’t work the first 68 times I tried to publish it.  I thought I’d share a little about what I discovered in that process. 

The normal “embed” code from Youtube itself doesn’t seem to work, at least not with IE7.  It looks like this:

<object width=”425″ height=”350″>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Hjhi_FHxY8k”></param>
<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param>
</object>

I did some poking around and found this thread of comments on the topic, which basically resolves that the underlying problem is that the Youtube embed code is improperly formed.  Within that thread is an alternate set of code that does work…it looks like this:

<object width=”425″ height=”350″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Hjhi_FHxY8k”><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Hjhi_FHxY8k” /><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent” /></object>

Interestingly, it appears that Wordpress likes to mess up the embed code even when it *is* correct.  I’d get it working, then edit the post and it would “break” the above code, removing some of the parameters.  Or at least that’s what it seemed to be doing. 

I finally got the post to work by turning off the rich editor in WordPress and using the second set of code above.  Hurray for persistance!

I’ve posted before before about the fact that I can’t play Second Life since I upgraded to Vista. I was pretty certain that the problem related to the ATI video drivers. ATI added OpenGL support in the 7.1 release of the drivers and updated that support in the 7.2 release, but Second Life still doesn’t work.  I haven’t been logging into SL recently: I decided to cut back and focus more on other things, but I would like to be able to log in once in a while…and the lack of support for Vista and ATI has been a major inhibitor.

Linden Lab has announced that the problem has been isolated, and that ATI will be correcting the defect in the next (7.3) release of their drivers. Apparently this update is expected by the end of March/beginning of April.  I’ll believe it when I see it, but I’m optimistic: I’ll post here on my blog once the drivers are released and I’ve tested them.

I work in cubicle-land (when I’m not working from home), so I can find a lot to laugh about in the following song…

I sit here in the…nude

I have a somewhat mixed history with regards to console games.  Looking back in history, I believe the first console I had was some kind of pong-type thing…back in the days before console games had cartridges, so about 1977…30 years ago.  Yowsa, I’m old!  The first console I had that I have a clear memory of was a Colecovision: I had Donkey Kong, plus some kind of adventure game where your “character” was a little ball with a bow going through a 2D maze.  After that I went through a succession of Sega systems, culminating in a Sega Genesis “portable”.  That was about when online PC games started showing up (1996), which somewhat coincidentally was the last time I played a console game for about a decade.

A bit over a year ago my interest was piqued by a game on the XBox.  The price had dropped due to the then-future release of the XBox 360, and so I bought a console.   I enjoyed it, but after about three months I pretty much stopped playing games on the machine.  I discovered one main problem with this: the same TV I wanted to use for gaming was primarily used by Irene for watching TV.   I tried sneaking in a bit of playing time when Irene was out of the house, but ultimate it didn’t work out.

I decided a couple of months ago that I’d like to build myself a dedicated station for playing console games.  I’m talking here about XBox/Playstation/etc type games, and by “station” I mean deskspace, display, speakers and so forth.  I re-organized my office a few weeks ago to create the space for it, and I’ve been buying the components to assemble it during the past week.  Here is what it looks like now:

The monitor and speaker system are sort of a bit “super-sized”.  The display is a 32″ HDTV LCD set, which has HDMI and composite HDTV inputs.  I initially planned on getting a 26″ display, but…the prices kept coming down.  Instead of saving money, I bought a bigger display.  Does this surprise you?  I didn’t think so. 

The speakers…well, that’s entirely my fault.  I bought a nice little set of speakers, Logitech X-340 “5.1″ speakers.  Unfortunately, they weren’t really surround sound speakers unless you were hooking them up to a PC: connected to a console, they were stereo speakers with “fake” surround using what Logitechcalls “matrix mode”.   This just wouldn’t do, since the XBox 360 supports true 5.1 surround sound using optical audio connectors.  I took the X-340 set back to Best Buy and came home with a set of Z-5500 speakers that *do* support optical audio connections and full 5.1 surround.  The sub-woofer in this set is about the size of a small refrigerator…or at least three cats.  Perhaps a bit of overkill?  Nah…

For the curious, I’ve added my XBox 360 gamer tag to the right navigation of my blog here.  You can see what I’ve been playing recently, and how many achievement points (whatever those are) I have.

We had a bit of an adventure last night, or more accurately very early this morning.  At around 1:00 am, Irene went to get up and her surgical wound started to drain…a lot.  It took half a dozen large paper towels and a big (2′ x 1′) surgical gauze mat to sort of stem the tide of mostly-clear blood tinged fluid, during which time I called the district health nurse.  Irene started shaking and feeling faint, which isn’t too terribly surprising under the circumstances.

After talking to me on the phone, the health nurse told me to call 911.  I ran around the house, grabbing as many cats as I could and closing them in a room so that they would be out of the way.  Five minutes later, we had a fire engine with emergency response at the house, and a few minutes after that we had an ambulance.  Irene was trapped in the bathroom with four big burly men and her pants down, while I talked to a fifth guy outside the bathroom giving him her particulars.  After the fact it’s sort of funny, but at the time it was far from it. 

Of course, by the time the emergency folks arrived, the fluid flow had slowed significantly.  The firemen left, and the paramedics ran a few more checks.  One of the poor paramedics was badly allergic to cats…and he was in our house!  The poor guy was sneezing away, apologizing to us while I apologized to him for the cats.  The paramedics gave us the option of either waiting until later and going to a clinic for follow up, or going to emergency right away just to make sure.   We made our decision, and a few minutes later Irene was on her way to emergency in the ambulance, and I drove along behind with her book, care card, and water bottle, which she had asked for…but not grabbing a pair of pants for her, something both of us overlooked.  I thought of pants as I drove to emergency- strange how the most obvious things slip your mind.

We spent a fun two and a half hours in emergency before the doctor got to us…very nice guy, as all the folks at Langley Memorial seem to be.  He checked out the surgery site, said it looked basically fine, and said the drainage was a seroma.  In essence, blood plasma trapped in a pocket from the surgery site decided to leak out all at once.  The amount sort of surprised me, and definitely surprised Irene, but I guess it’s not uncommon.  The doctor prescribed some antibiotics to be on the safe side, and sent us home.

We were back at the house by 4:30 or so…I fed the cats so they wouldn’t wake us up right away, and we were in bed by about 5:00 am.  I fell asleep holding Irene’s hand, which was about all I could do throughout the “excitement”: thank goodness for all the health and emergency folks who knew more than I did about what to do.  Irene is fine now, in fact she was hungry when we got home from emergency and I had to feed her…okay, it was a tin of Ensure, but it was sort of foodish.  Both of us are sort of tired, but perfectly all right.

I believe in the importance of copyright.  I also firmly believe in “fair use”: that is, if I pay for the right to use your content, I have the right to use it for my own personal use on any platform I choose.  Thus I am totally against abusive DRM systems that (for example) prevent me from watching a movie on my computer, and later watching it on my TV.  

My position puts me in a bit of a sticky position when it comes to “file sharing” and peer to peer (p2p) software.  If a person has a collection of music they have digitized from properly licensed CDs for their own personal playback on their computer or portable music device, that’s cool.  If they then install some sort of file sharing program to make their music collection available for anyone to download…that’s not cool. 

But the music and video/movie industry is being incredibly stupid.  They don’t just want to stop folks from sharing files, they want to force people who buy a CD to pay again when they want to listen to that same music on their computer, and again to listen to that same music on their iPod, and again….  They also want to have legislation that would allow them to illegally search and seize your home/computer to “prove” you are violating their laws.  They want people to believe that file sharing is so important, such a huge crime, that wire taps, keyboard/data logging, and prison terms are the norm.

They spend tens of millions of dollars a year, lining the pockets of government officials all over the world.  And money talks: witness the recent report from the U.S. patent office / Commerce and Intellectual Property Office that tells us that file sharing turns children into criminals and provides classified information to terrorists. 

If you want to read the entire 80 page government report, go here (pdf file).  Technologically, installing a peer to peer file sharing program (as the report indicates) has risks for home users.  It is often not well understood by users that, when they download something using a p2p program, they usually immediately “open up” that file for download from *their* computer as well.  In a corporate / government environment, use of peer to peer file sharing programs should be controlled if not outright forbidden.  There is no place for uncontrolled Internet based peer to peer file sharing in the office (although arguably bittorrent is used for some important/necessary purposes, there are “safe” bittorrent clients available).  That much is true, and where I work, the traffic from common file share programs like Kazaa is blocked on the network.  

But some of the conclusions and/or emphasis within the document is outright ludicrous.   Don’t share files: think of the children!  Don’t share files: you are supporting terrorism if you do!!  Man, those RIAA / MPAA goons must have really put on a niiice party for Under Secretary Jon W. Dudas….