Ah, good old dungeon crawling. Where would entire genres of computer games (roguelikes, RPGs, MUDs, and MMOs, to name a few) be without the pen 'n paper staple that rose from the roots of Chainmail and an intrepid GM hurriedly scribbling corridors and rooms on a simple piece of paper?
I've been thinking deeply about dungeons and my relationship with them and other such tightly-bound small group content (fer example, task forces) ever since finishing Rift's first dungeon on the Defiant side, The Iron Tomb.
Or colloquially in WoWspeak, IT. As an aside, I have no idea where this habit of giving all dungeons acronyms came from, and it rather annoys me. Perhaps it speaks to my lack of familiarity with them as a whole, but I can't tell BD from BC or BRD or what-have-you. Perhaps I am subconsciously picking up on the separation, the speaker is purposefully (if unconsciously) using the jargon as a means of in-group out-group speak, the teammates they want are the folk who know what they're talking about. Objectively, this isn't limited to WoW's dungeons, CoH's TFs/SFs are also full of katie/ITF/LGTF gobblespeak. And the entire genre of MMOs has strange jargon and abbreviations like mob, tank, dps and so on.
Anyhow, back to the Iron Tombs. I finally manned up in beta #5 and took the leap into the dungeon, but it took some doing. For all the reduction in group starting effort that the system of public, open groups have created while doing overworld quest and rift content, it is still old-school LFG spamming and tell sending for dungeon crawling. I assure you, this was a tremendous mental hurdle to cross. And I certainly didn't form my own group but waited for an opportunity to arise.
Making things more difficult for me (in my brain, anyhow) were two things.
1) Lack of a proper role to 'fit' into a team.
My solo build for Rift is an interesting hybrid, a melee cleric who can tank a bit, heal a bit, and dps a bit. Try telling that to team leaders who may be WoW-trained or at least focused on having more pure-specs, even if their pure healer is a mage and they are ok with a cleric being pure dps. To take a City of Heroes analogy, my character is built more like a villain, a hybrid, or more accurately a peacebringer - with one toggle on, I become kinda tanky, with another toggle on, I can scrap a bit and heal around me. Personally, I think I fill into teams well as a kind of offtank/offheal/utility/dps with more readiness to step into a tank position. But again, try explaining that to teams.
2) Not knowing the dungeon.
I've always found this a bit of a catch-22. You don't know it until you've run it once, or twice, or a few times. But everyone expects every run to go without a hitch or else it's a fail, and often, if you're the tank, you're labeled as the failtank, or the failhealer, or whatever, failPUG. Everyone's dream seems to be to be taken around by at least one or two people who know what's going on, and are preferably tank/heals so that the bulk of the work is on them.
Anyhow, despite my readiness to tank (as in survive and hopefully, hold aggro, though I actually hadn't -tested- any of my new Rift skills in relation to 5-man teams), not knowing the dungeon kind of puts a crimp in me knowing how to set a pace and where to freaking go and what the trouble spots are.
Caught in a paradox that just wasn't going to give way, I decided to spoil my surprise and go watch a youtube video of Iron Tomb. Fortunately, I found a rather entertaining one, Jesse Plays! - Rift Iron Tomb Dungeon Part 1.
It occurred to me that I might actually sate my curiosity of what the inside of the dungeon looked like...without having to set a single foot in it at all. Especially since this was like a Let's Play video, going through practically everything.
A couple things created some inspiration. The guy tanking was a cleric. Yeah, he looked like a Justicar, a similar spec as to myself. He didn't seem to be getting hurt that bad, albeit he was about 6+ levels over the dungeon. And in certain places, he wasn't tanking that well either, and a rogue had to step into spots and so on, but hey, nobody died until they ran into a gimmick of spawning too many mobs for them to handle. I watched Part 1 and Part 2, and generally it didn't look that horrific, though I was still not very confident of my own ability to withstand the bosses.
Long story short, I went through Iron Tombs twice. The first time, I offered because the group had been begging away in chat for a tank for about half an hour, so I figured they would have to be pretty desperate already. Ironically, though the guy accepted me into the team, he still wanted a tank, and after some questions, suggested I switch over to my cabalist soul to do dps or something. Hell no, it's beta, I was going to test my tankiness. His warrior tank finally joined, at about level 18 or 19, whereas I was 22 so I figured it would be an interesting test all the same.
Turns out, whatever soul the warrior specced into, it was pretty aggro-ific and he took his tank-y duties very seriously, stealing practically all aggro, and his health was yo-yoing up and down like anything. Fortunately for him, there was someone else who was dedicated to healing him, and I found another niche by switching off my tank/increased threat/more hp/lowered dps toggle and putting on the lowered threat/increase heal toggle. Mostly I did it to increase my dps, but I also noticed that the justicar spec had skills that healed in a low constant stream as I melee hit things, and my druid/sent heals provided short term burst heals when his health was really yo-yoing badly. There was one time when he died (my bad, I wasn't paying enough attention to save him with a burst heal), so I promptly toggled on tank toggle and tanked. Wasn't too bad. The dedicated healer switched to me and my health went down considerably less than the warrior's. Of course, I did happen to be about 3 levels higher than him and had about 800hp more, so not a terribly fair comparison. Anyhow, since he had done the dungeon before on other characters, we let him tank and yank us through it. After that, I spent some time mucking around in the cleared out instance to learn my way around and feel my way through a few gimmicks until I was fairly confident of the area.
Second time, I saw another group sitting around begging for a tank, and I sent a tell offering to tank as a lvl 23 justicar/druid spec. I'm not sure if they were ok with it, but I got the invite anyhow, and we were off and running. My aggro wasn't as great as the warrior's, but I held on to the main stuff fairly well. Some of the mobs in packs peeled off a bit, but there were pet tanks and cc and a rogue whom I suspect had a tank soul and wanted to offtank (or at least didn't want to or wasn't allowed to main tank). Besides one little hitch with two very hard hitting mobs in which we initially split up fine with me tanking one and the rogue tanking the other, and me getting greedy and aggro'ing the second one that the rogue had and promptly squishing as a result, the rest went by without a hitch and the bosses were all pretty do-able.
So yeah, Iron Tombs. Done. And done again. And I suspect I'm pretty much done with it as well.
How come? I dunno. Beyond the drive of -seeing- the place once or twice and trying it out to see if I can do it, I don't really have much motivation to continue. Yes, I could get greedy and hope for good loot drops, but end goal is not the issue here, I want to enjoy the journey. And the truth is, I don't really enjoy group work journeys.
That might be shading the truth a bit. I think I'd find dungeoneering fun if I had 5 friends to explore the place together. But a random group put together for the express purpose of going through it, I dunno. I'm not sure I like it. I can do it. It's a change from questing and rifting. But I don't really come out of a dungeon going WHOOOO, I gotta do it again, right now, yeah! Instead, I usually come out thinking, ok, time to crawl away in a corner and recharge my little introverted soul with some soloing now.
Yet, I like group work rifting. Especially now that public groups are working in Beta 5. It's absolutely easy to join a big massive raid group with one button press. We more or less coordinate our actions. And I've even done pulling and tanking of harder rifts by sheer virtue of not dying very quickly and knowing how to pull a mob I can survive at a distance the others don't follow. The moment I lock together with a mob, you can see the random opportunistic strangers crowd around to add damage and throw heals on me... Now that is a rush. And it's not that I want to be the only tank. There are some rift pulls in which I'm almost thinking/begging, when I pull these two, I HOPE someone in that big group of players knows to split the aggro and take the other one or I'm dead. Sure enough, they do. It's beauty in motion to see it in action, coordination in a large group with no one needing to yell instructions.
And I like solo dungeoneering. Or the idea of it anyhow. I've done solo instances for a challenge, and enjoyed placing my henchmen and heroes in different places in Guild Wars. I play roguelikes, and the whole idea of it is one dungeon after another. You set your own pace in a solo dungeon.
It's not that I think everyone in a group dungeon is no good. On the contrary, they may be even better than me, and I might be the weakest link (which is another kind of stress.) But the tension of teaming in a high stakes environment (and it's not even as high stakes as max level raiding or heroic dungeoneering) is always there somehow, and it makes it less fun than it could be. For me, anyhow.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
New Scoop on the Newstand
I was just browsing the magazines on a newstand tonight when an article from some unknown gamer magazine whose name I can no longer recall caught my eye.
L.A. Noire from Rockstar Games.
Besides it being a film noir, detective interactive type of game which always catches my eye, apparently the big thing about this game is the technology of motion capture being used for the faces, so that emotions are nuanced and supposedly play a role in interrogations and detecting of lies.
The first thing it reminds me of is Heavy Rain. Though since I've seen absolutely no gameplay of L.A. Noire yet, that remains to be seen.
It is Rockstar Games though, which is a pretty hefty brand label to put on it. GtA and its variants have been fairly immersive, and Red Dead Redemption is apparently good, though I haven't tried it yet.
Release date is apparently sometime May this year, so it shouldn't be too long before the reviews pour out and we find out if it lives up to the hype.
L.A. Noire from Rockstar Games.
Besides it being a film noir, detective interactive type of game which always catches my eye, apparently the big thing about this game is the technology of motion capture being used for the faces, so that emotions are nuanced and supposedly play a role in interrogations and detecting of lies.
The first thing it reminds me of is Heavy Rain. Though since I've seen absolutely no gameplay of L.A. Noire yet, that remains to be seen.
It is Rockstar Games though, which is a pretty hefty brand label to put on it. GtA and its variants have been fairly immersive, and Red Dead Redemption is apparently good, though I haven't tried it yet.
Release date is apparently sometime May this year, so it shouldn't be too long before the reviews pour out and we find out if it lives up to the hype.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Pet Peeves #1
You Don't Have to Feel Guilty When You Say No.
In fact, it's a lot more annoying to me when you hem and haw and delay on giving me a straight answer. Means I waste a lot more time finding out what you mean, playing guessing games, or getting help from someone else, or seeking a solution in general, while waiting on you to decide or reply one way or the other.
Both ways are cool. I just need to know.
This post was brought to you by the same place that makes Scott Adams lots of money.
In fact, it's a lot more annoying to me when you hem and haw and delay on giving me a straight answer. Means I waste a lot more time finding out what you mean, playing guessing games, or getting help from someone else, or seeking a solution in general, while waiting on you to decide or reply one way or the other.
Both ways are cool. I just need to know.
This post was brought to you by the same place that makes Scott Adams lots of money.
The Three Monkeys
See no Evil, Speak no Evil, Hear no Evil...
It's like trying to communicate to a deaf mute. Except double as frustrating.
My brilliant plans to buy a new external hard disk and do a complete back up of my old old laptop Nimuhar were abruptly shot in the foot (once again) when I plugged in the disk, and lo and behold, it turns out that Win98 does not come in-built with USB drivers... and certainly not USB drivers from a modern day external hard disk.
Nor does said external hard disk, being a product of the modern Internet generation, have any in built drivers, having assumed that it would be communicating with such high borne O/Ses like Win XP, Win2000 and Windows 7. Win 98 drivers?! That would be so crass.
Now this would call for a desperate Internet download... except my ancient laptop is armed with a plug for a dial up modem. Wireless? Never heard of it. My ethernet card, which would have allowed me to jury rig a temporary cable connection directly from the modern, was unfortunately disposed of long ago. I vaguely recall thinking that the thick credit card sized connection that hooked up to a little mouse like tail connector was quite obsolete before chucking it. (Either that or it is buried somewhere in the recesses of a storeroom I can never find.) So that was out.
Looking about vainly, well, there was a CD ROM drive. I had blank CD-ROMs somewhere. Heck, I could sacrifice one for a good cause.
My new laptop, Daedalus, was on standby for scanning duty. So I did some Googling, found some promising USB drivers that -maybe- might work to help Nimuhar talk to USB drives. Downloaded said drivers. Inserted my DVD-R (yeah, no cheap CD-ROMs after all.) And then ran aground as Daedalus' DVD driver rattled most alarmingly. Try as I might, even though it showed a blank disk, it refused to copy or burn folders using Windows Explorer.
Boggled, I went over to my desktop Lycaeus. Maybe Daedalus' DVD drive was not so reliably functional. Same thing. Same problem. WHAT? *stares at DVD-R carefully* No, it was blank all right. What was the problem? Why couldn't I format the disk? Why couldn't I copy anything?
Google to the rescue.
It turns out that Windows XP does not come with in-built CD burning or DVD writing facility. You don't say? Egads. Who knew.
Fortunately, Lycaeus is armed with Cyberlink DVD's suite of tools, and I found a Burn CD program of some sort eventually. Finally. Success. The drivers burned over. Since it was only 700kb, it seemed a waste, so I burned another 17 MB of an unofficial Win98 SE patch along with it. Too bad the other 4.7 gigs went poof, just like that. Oh well. It would be worth it, right?
Jumping back to Nimuhar, I triumphantly inserted the freshly burned DVD, clicked the drive shut and... *rattle* *rattle* *groan* *death gasp*
Crap. About this time, I remember that the CD drive in Nimuhar had given problems a long time ago and ceased to function in a reliable manner many years back, possibly because the drive was sitting directly under the pressure of my right hand resting on the keyboard while MUDing ceaselessly for 4+ years.
I sat back on my haunches and looked in bafflement at the deaf-mute computer. Was there any way to get through to it? Perhaps my best bet would be to pluck out the hard disk after all.
Except I would still be facing connection problems trying to communicate with the hard disk. Hmm... There was one LAST possibility. Nimuhar had a floppy disk drive. (Thankfully, the 3.5 inch kind.) Daedalus obviously had no such connection - wireless and a DVD-RW was all it needed, thank you. But Lycaeus, whose casing (if not certain innards) are somewhat longer in the tooth, still bears a 3.5 floppy disk drive from the time I first learnt to put together my own computer under the tutelage of my dad.
(At the time, I asked him why the heck I needed one of those in my system. He mumbled something about maybe needing a boot disk if all else failed. I figured the CD ROM drive was just as viable a boot disk drive, but since it was probably my only chance to even see the innards of a floppy disk drive, let alone learn how to join one up to a motherboard and all, I didn't resist that hard.)
Some rummaging around in the ancient wreck of my dad's study yielded a 3.5 inch floppy. Praying it didn't have some manner of archaic virus, I stuck it into Lycaeus. Turns out it was unformatted. Or maybe so much time had gone by, all the magnetic signals on the disk had worn away into nothing. Reformatted it. Copied the eensy 700kb driver file over.
Ejected the floppy. Ran over to Nimuhar. Inserted it with a prayer. Some mild grinding later, the welcome exe extractable turned up on Windows Explorer! *gasps* Praise the Omnissiah! It's a miracle!
Ran it. It installed some drivers in a promising fashion. Rebooted. Loaded back up. I stuck in my new fangled USB 3.0 hard disk, murmuring techmarine prayer chants. Windows is building a driver database it said. Ooh, this was different from before! And as it reached 100%, it went FOUND a suitable driver.
Badabing. We were in business. The hard disk turned visible and I could copy shit from Nimuhar onto the hard disk.
And thus ends the tale of the Three Computer Monkeys. All's well that ends well, I hope.
It's like trying to communicate to a deaf mute. Except double as frustrating.
My brilliant plans to buy a new external hard disk and do a complete back up of my old old laptop Nimuhar were abruptly shot in the foot (once again) when I plugged in the disk, and lo and behold, it turns out that Win98 does not come in-built with USB drivers... and certainly not USB drivers from a modern day external hard disk.
Nor does said external hard disk, being a product of the modern Internet generation, have any in built drivers, having assumed that it would be communicating with such high borne O/Ses like Win XP, Win2000 and Windows 7. Win 98 drivers?! That would be so crass.
Now this would call for a desperate Internet download... except my ancient laptop is armed with a plug for a dial up modem. Wireless? Never heard of it. My ethernet card, which would have allowed me to jury rig a temporary cable connection directly from the modern, was unfortunately disposed of long ago. I vaguely recall thinking that the thick credit card sized connection that hooked up to a little mouse like tail connector was quite obsolete before chucking it. (Either that or it is buried somewhere in the recesses of a storeroom I can never find.) So that was out.
Looking about vainly, well, there was a CD ROM drive. I had blank CD-ROMs somewhere. Heck, I could sacrifice one for a good cause.
My new laptop, Daedalus, was on standby for scanning duty. So I did some Googling, found some promising USB drivers that -maybe- might work to help Nimuhar talk to USB drives. Downloaded said drivers. Inserted my DVD-R (yeah, no cheap CD-ROMs after all.) And then ran aground as Daedalus' DVD driver rattled most alarmingly. Try as I might, even though it showed a blank disk, it refused to copy or burn folders using Windows Explorer.
Boggled, I went over to my desktop Lycaeus. Maybe Daedalus' DVD drive was not so reliably functional. Same thing. Same problem. WHAT? *stares at DVD-R carefully* No, it was blank all right. What was the problem? Why couldn't I format the disk? Why couldn't I copy anything?
Google to the rescue.
It turns out that Windows XP does not come with in-built CD burning or DVD writing facility. You don't say? Egads. Who knew.
Fortunately, Lycaeus is armed with Cyberlink DVD's suite of tools, and I found a Burn CD program of some sort eventually. Finally. Success. The drivers burned over. Since it was only 700kb, it seemed a waste, so I burned another 17 MB of an unofficial Win98 SE patch along with it. Too bad the other 4.7 gigs went poof, just like that. Oh well. It would be worth it, right?
Jumping back to Nimuhar, I triumphantly inserted the freshly burned DVD, clicked the drive shut and... *rattle* *rattle* *groan* *death gasp*
Crap. About this time, I remember that the CD drive in Nimuhar had given problems a long time ago and ceased to function in a reliable manner many years back, possibly because the drive was sitting directly under the pressure of my right hand resting on the keyboard while MUDing ceaselessly for 4+ years.
I sat back on my haunches and looked in bafflement at the deaf-mute computer. Was there any way to get through to it? Perhaps my best bet would be to pluck out the hard disk after all.
Except I would still be facing connection problems trying to communicate with the hard disk. Hmm... There was one LAST possibility. Nimuhar had a floppy disk drive. (Thankfully, the 3.5 inch kind.) Daedalus obviously had no such connection - wireless and a DVD-RW was all it needed, thank you. But Lycaeus, whose casing (if not certain innards) are somewhat longer in the tooth, still bears a 3.5 floppy disk drive from the time I first learnt to put together my own computer under the tutelage of my dad.
(At the time, I asked him why the heck I needed one of those in my system. He mumbled something about maybe needing a boot disk if all else failed. I figured the CD ROM drive was just as viable a boot disk drive, but since it was probably my only chance to even see the innards of a floppy disk drive, let alone learn how to join one up to a motherboard and all, I didn't resist that hard.)
Some rummaging around in the ancient wreck of my dad's study yielded a 3.5 inch floppy. Praying it didn't have some manner of archaic virus, I stuck it into Lycaeus. Turns out it was unformatted. Or maybe so much time had gone by, all the magnetic signals on the disk had worn away into nothing. Reformatted it. Copied the eensy 700kb driver file over.
Ejected the floppy. Ran over to Nimuhar. Inserted it with a prayer. Some mild grinding later, the welcome exe extractable turned up on Windows Explorer! *gasps* Praise the Omnissiah! It's a miracle!
Ran it. It installed some drivers in a promising fashion. Rebooted. Loaded back up. I stuck in my new fangled USB 3.0 hard disk, murmuring techmarine prayer chants. Windows is building a driver database it said. Ooh, this was different from before! And as it reached 100%, it went FOUND a suitable driver.
Badabing. We were in business. The hard disk turned visible and I could copy shit from Nimuhar onto the hard disk.
And thus ends the tale of the Three Computer Monkeys. All's well that ends well, I hope.
Monday, January 17, 2011
To Slice or Not to Slice
"Here's where the iPad has gotten me: I'm sitting with an old book in one hand and a utility knife in the other. My plan is to make the two meet, by cutting up the book and feeding the pages through a scanner.
The printed word has been shackled too long to paper, and I want to carry it around on my iPad tablet computer.
Cutting a book is hard, though. There's a mental block to overcome. After a lifetime of valuing books, I find it difficult to destroy one, even to preserve it in digital form particularly if it's a hardback.
The iPad, as a fantastic replacement for paper, deserves only half the blame for putting me in this position. The other half goes to the Fujitsu ScanSnap s1500."
I've cleared a sizeable amount of the "to sort" and "to scan" paper junk pile, but I've got two massively 1.5 inch thick college readers that are a minor obstacle in the face of my inexorable digitization of everything.
Why in the world would I be keeping overpriced college readers made from bookbound photocopied pages for so long a time?
Well, it was a class I liked, taught in a very unique style - we sat and drew plants over and over to learn their morphologies, by a TA I'd never forget - she was a biologist and an illustrator of the most beautiful natural history-type color pencil drawings, by an aging professor who was both retiring after this last class, and writing his magnum opus textbook, whose draft pages he passed to us in the form of college readers.
(I just Googled and realized the man died in 2007, and the textbook hasn't yet been published - Amazon has random dates of 2009 and 2011 up. Which makes the text pure gold in terms of memorabilia.)
The problem is that the readers are HEAVY. And CHUNKY. And only printed on one side, which is quite radically un-green for California, and must be part of some devious corporate conspiracy to drive poor college students further into debt.
Fortunately, since I have no attachment whatsoever to the structure of the reader, I'm perfectly willing to hack it apart in the name of saving space and preserving the memories digitally. Having the Scansnap around is one part of the 'ease-of-achieving' equation. The other half is how I'm going to remove the binding and loosen the pages for the ADF to eat it up.
Pros use a guillotine cutter. I don't think I have one. I don't think I want to invest in one unless I'm going to use it for tons and tons of books.
I -could- stop by a print shop and see if they have a cutter strong enough to slice the readers apart. I bet they do. I bet it wouldn't cost too much. But it would cost. And I'd have to heave the readers to a shop and back again, which puts a crimp in the easy-to-achieve aspect.
Some folks microwave manga books. Or steam them. Or iron them. Or hairdryer them. Basically, the idea is to melt the glue of the binder so that the pages loosen one by one. My readers are a LOT thicker than a manga book though.
Things I discounted: Saws, rotary blades or something funky called a bookbinding 'plough.' Some leave too much paper dust and could spoil the scanner, apparently. Others are just too elaborate and expensive. Some really enterprising fellows DIY'ed their own camera-based book scanner. A little too reliant on power-tools for me though.
I might end up just plodding away with a utility knife and a paper cutting mat if guillotines are too cost-prohibitive and the heat treatment didn't work.
There are some serious pros out there on the interweb though, my casual browsing found them deep in discussions on the forums, and I found pictures of spines neatly trimmed off like so many giant matchsticks. (Scroll all the way down.)
Which brings up the interesting point that some have made, and brings me back to the starting quote, "There's a mental block to overcome" in cutting up a book and destroying its physical form, in order for it to live (forever?) digitally.
I don't think I can do it to even a paperback. To a second copy of a paperback, maybe. But my stingy self would have to buy that second copy first.
Digitizing my paperback collection would be right out of the question. I value the dusty smell of paper a little too much.
There's a hoary shade of grey between the no-go of chopping up my precious paperbacks and the slice-and-dice-is-ok of my Odin Readers and already photocopied books though. Magazines.
For want of anything better to read besides the odd nonfiction and WH40K books, I recently picked up a habit of browsing the stands for stuff that caught my eye. Truth be told, I would be quite happy to read these in digital format. But once I get the bound stuff into my grubby hands, it still seems like sacriledge if I were to slice the pages apart, scan them in and then get rid of the pristine glossy sheets.
There are a couple of mags that I wouldn't mind getting rid of. PCgamer among them. (It was an attempt to see if it was worth anything. Besides the pretty pictures on shiny pages, RSS feeds get me news a little faster.) I entertain the thought of taking these out on a one way trip and leaving them somewhere for someone else to pick up. I suppose those are worth a try at hacking apart, though the perceived value of a book seems to disintegrate once it stops being bound.
Such a curious phenomenon.
Paper is paper. Pages are pages. Loose sheets are loose sheets. Gather them all up, and suddenly, you have the Inviolate BOOK.
I suppose it's like the whole "one doesn't cut money" mental block.
Right Tool for the Right Job
Our long awaited (like three years in the making) salary revision finally took place this month. While it turns out that last year's promotion knocked off most of the earlier disparity (which means the upward adjustment was comparatively minute), it provided a convenient excuse to invest in a tool that I wasn't quite sure would see maximum use for the buck, but was something I wanted to push myself into tackling a long avoided chore.
The Fujitsu Scansnap 1500 is a colossal $729.
That's about the same price as my Canon MP780 all-in-one printer that I bought about 4+ years ago. While the big monster brick does guzzle ink, it has printed tons of cardstock models for my papercraft hobby, colored signs and other such side affairs for work, the fax function has been put to use for both parents and myself during those rare times when you need to fax documents or receive faxes, and yes, it has a flatbed scanner/ADF which has scanned quite a couple objects, including computer game boxes, and served as a slightly slower photocopier from time to time.
I had thought that by investing in such a workhorse, I would not need to buy separate machines for all those functions.
Well, I did resist the temptation for a long time, but the march of technology is inexorable. The truth is that there is a design flaw in the Canon MP780. The ADF on top of the flatbed scanner is HEAVY. This means that scanning involves a fair bit of weight-lifting effort prying up the cover, placing the item in question on the scanner, lowering the ADF-laden cover down carefully in order not to break it with a careless drop, leaning back over to the computer to find the correct program and hit the scan button or hitting the default scan button on the printer, waiting for the scan to take place over a moderate amount of time, using the mouse to highlight the part of the image that isn't background, selecting the correct options and format to save the file (usually a jpg) into a folder somewhere... and then repeating it all again for another item.
I assume the ADF would be able to handle multiple pages decently, but I've never really seriously tested it. One has all sorts of odd shaped pieces of paper that would be a pain to pry out of the printer should a paper jam take place. This leeriness has proved a severe impediment to any attempt at cleaning and organising my room, since the last go around yielding a small pile of stacked paper (say 3 inches high) placed next to the printer labeled "To Scan" that has unfortunately remained there until one year later (always around Chinese New Year time, hmm...)
My packrat-edness refuses to throw them away sight unseen without any record of their passing. But my digital self has a very comfortable compromise going - if they are digitized so that I can flip through them on a monitor and thus also easily backed up, the hardcopies themselves would be gladly offloaded.
The problem was in the digitization.
I ran into the Scansnap name while browsing through Uncluttering websites in a game attempt at procrastinating on really packing up. The big brother of the Scansnap series, the 1500, can scan 40 pages a minute. Duplex. At a push of a button. In color.
My jaw dropped. Waitaminute, back up... some mental arithmetic later... whoa, that's a page scanned every 1.5 seconds. On both sides. If I can hit 40 seconds a PAGE on my Canon all-in-one, I'd be on fire with speed already...
I'll fast forward through the days of deliberation, the agonization of whether I should spend extra money, the myriad research and reviews seeking justification and rationalization, and the phone calls attempting to even locate the scanner in Singapore. (I asked my Dad to check out the prices when he went to Sim Lim on another errand, and he reported back that they hadn't heard of "Scansnap" at all. Wtf?) I ended up calling the scanner dept of Fujitsu here and getting the name of a shop on the fifth floor of Sim Lim that carried it - that, and Challenger at Funan.
It took some patience to install the drivers before plugging it in - as warned by multiple stickers on the scanner to do so. (Guess it's not quite plug n' play.) But I have to say that once it was up and running, I don't regret a single cent.
It's a small black and silver thing, about the size of a hefty shoebox when folded up, and unfolds elegantly to support the pieces of paper you feed into it. Smoothly rolling plastic guides serve to hold papers of differing widths as they slide in and out. One simple blue button, which is also lit by an LED when it is powered, tells it to start scanning.
And by the gods, is it FAST.
It is also pretty damned smart for a scanner. The program it comes with automatically saves in PDF. It supposedly OCRs and makes it a searchable PDF too. If the paper is slightly tilted, it can compensate for that and retilt it. It detects the size of the stuff you feed in - no more manual selections to crop on screen. There's another program linked that can edit the PDFs should it have been rotated the wrong way and so on. It also allows organisation by keywords and folder structures, etc.
It makes scanning fun.
I've gone through piles of "to-be-scanned" paper faster than I ever imagined while watching TV and letting it feed into the scanner connected to my laptop.
(I do hope it will carry over and sync with relative ease when I eventually install the programs on my desktop PC though. Worse come to the worse, I can back up the pdfs, but manually sorting them would be ugly.)
Who knows, I might actually have a clean(er) room when CNY rolls around this year.
As part of my room cleaning weekend binge, I uncovered my old laptop. This was the sturdy workhorse that took me through college, and whose hard disk backup only exists on an external hard disk backup now. It was covered in dust, and out of morbid curiosity, I brushed it clean, plugged it in and turned it on to see if it would go.
The battery charging light came on (though it probably would go flat in seconds once disconnected). It gamely revved up.
Oooh, it's on, I thought. After all that dusty maltreatment, it's still alive.
Then, beep, went Nimuhar. (Yes, I named my laptop in those days.)
Uh oh. Sitting on the slightly dim screen, taunting me, was the CMOS password.
Shit.
Obviously in those days of cross-country airport flight and dorm rooms and roommates, my paranoia felt a CMOS password was justified, and why the hell should I write the password down when I type it in every day to access my laptop?
Except it's been 6+ years since I had any cause to type in said password. Amusingly, the passphrase I used came to mind. The problem was the numbers mixed into the passphrase. I couldn't remember the numbers, nor the position I chose to insert them into the passphrase. Crap.
Trying 9 different variations and locking myself out 3 times as a result, it was time to Google for help. It really wasn't that helpful. Apparently some manufacturers have a sekrit backdoor password, but Twinhead wasn't listed among the common manufacturers. Websites recommended to check your manual for help (I checked, it never covered this eventuality) or bring it in for maintenance support. There was something about maybe removing the CMOS battery or removing certain pieces of solder with precision in order to briefly remove a chip on the motherboard and replacing, in order to reset the BIOS.
Dayum. I really didn't count myself a hardware expert by any means so all this talk of chips and solder unnerved me.
Then there was another website that casually mentioned, well, the real info is actually in the notebook's hard disk. So nothing stops a determined person from bypassing the BIOS password altogether by removing the hard disk and plugging it into another computer.
Oooh. In truth, this was what I was after. I'd already satisfied my curiosity that the laptop was still functional. But I wasn't going to get rid of it until after I reformatted (or maybe simply removed) the hard disk with all my personal info.
Sitting down at the table with a box of screwdrivers, I tilted it up and down every which way looking for possible hard disk openings. It really was very heavy. My new laptop is wider and still a little lighter in comparison (though most would call it a brick still).
Nope, this was the CDrom drive. Nope, this was the memory compartment. (I opened it for fun to look at the memory. Unlabeled, so I dunno how much was in there.) Nope, this was probably the battery. There was a slit along the side that was probably the hard disk, but it looked very tightly set in, so I left that for later. One more compartment was intriguing the hell out of me.
It had one of those "if you remove this, you void your warranty" stickers sealing up the opening. Well, the year circled on the sticker was 1999. I figured the warranty was already void some time back.
If you aren't allowed to take your own ancient stuff apart for the sake of finding out how-stuff-works, whose should you use? What the heck. It was mine. I didn't have anything invested in it. If I spoiled it, it already had a destiny in the trash anyhow - it's so old I don't even think charities want it. So I sliced the sticker, and inserted a screwdriver tip to pry out the panel.
Behind it was some black chip labeled with some letters and numbers, and a very snug circular battery of the type you'd normally see in calculators and such.
Hmm...thought I. Could this be the CMOS battery the websites were talking about? Heck, what did I have to lose? I really couldn't remember my password. I already had a backup of the hard disk some time back (not complete, but presumably all the stuff I felt it was important to keep).
I gingerly pried it out. Counted off to five. And stuck it back in. Replaced everything. Flipped the laptop over. Plugged it back in. Turned it on.
Beep, went Nimuhar. CMOS error. Reset to default. Press F2 to access BIOS, press some other key to continue, blah blah blah.
Whoa. Reset to default? Was this it? Was it as simple as that? I checked the BIOS, and sure enough, both the user and supervisor passwords were clear and empty.
Nimmy was up and running. It took considerably longer to boot up, run into a bunch of outdated errors and reset daylight savings time, rebooted, checkdisked, etc while I marveled at the dim yellowness of the aged screen and the nostalgic reminders of permanently-etched sweat marks on the keyboard. This was the baby that saw me through the Realms of Despair, click-clacking away on its keys. It was running on Windows 98. Whoa. Talk about old. The entire hard disk was only about 6 gigabytes total. (Which gave me the idea to re-backup some point in the future before I decide if I can let it go.)
But I have to say, I'm a little bit taken aback and amazed all at once that it turned out so easy to bypass a BIOS password after all. No wonder laptop thieves and so on have no qualms or problems. So much for paranoia.
The only tool needed was a screwdriver, and a little ingenuity.
The Fujitsu Scansnap 1500 is a colossal $729.
That's about the same price as my Canon MP780 all-in-one printer that I bought about 4+ years ago. While the big monster brick does guzzle ink, it has printed tons of cardstock models for my papercraft hobby, colored signs and other such side affairs for work, the fax function has been put to use for both parents and myself during those rare times when you need to fax documents or receive faxes, and yes, it has a flatbed scanner/ADF which has scanned quite a couple objects, including computer game boxes, and served as a slightly slower photocopier from time to time.
I had thought that by investing in such a workhorse, I would not need to buy separate machines for all those functions.
Well, I did resist the temptation for a long time, but the march of technology is inexorable. The truth is that there is a design flaw in the Canon MP780. The ADF on top of the flatbed scanner is HEAVY. This means that scanning involves a fair bit of weight-lifting effort prying up the cover, placing the item in question on the scanner, lowering the ADF-laden cover down carefully in order not to break it with a careless drop, leaning back over to the computer to find the correct program and hit the scan button or hitting the default scan button on the printer, waiting for the scan to take place over a moderate amount of time, using the mouse to highlight the part of the image that isn't background, selecting the correct options and format to save the file (usually a jpg) into a folder somewhere... and then repeating it all again for another item.
I assume the ADF would be able to handle multiple pages decently, but I've never really seriously tested it. One has all sorts of odd shaped pieces of paper that would be a pain to pry out of the printer should a paper jam take place. This leeriness has proved a severe impediment to any attempt at cleaning and organising my room, since the last go around yielding a small pile of stacked paper (say 3 inches high) placed next to the printer labeled "To Scan" that has unfortunately remained there until one year later (always around Chinese New Year time, hmm...)
My packrat-edness refuses to throw them away sight unseen without any record of their passing. But my digital self has a very comfortable compromise going - if they are digitized so that I can flip through them on a monitor and thus also easily backed up, the hardcopies themselves would be gladly offloaded.
The problem was in the digitization.
I ran into the Scansnap name while browsing through Uncluttering websites in a game attempt at procrastinating on really packing up. The big brother of the Scansnap series, the 1500, can scan 40 pages a minute. Duplex. At a push of a button. In color.
My jaw dropped. Waitaminute, back up... some mental arithmetic later... whoa, that's a page scanned every 1.5 seconds. On both sides. If I can hit 40 seconds a PAGE on my Canon all-in-one, I'd be on fire with speed already...
I'll fast forward through the days of deliberation, the agonization of whether I should spend extra money, the myriad research and reviews seeking justification and rationalization, and the phone calls attempting to even locate the scanner in Singapore. (I asked my Dad to check out the prices when he went to Sim Lim on another errand, and he reported back that they hadn't heard of "Scansnap" at all. Wtf?) I ended up calling the scanner dept of Fujitsu here and getting the name of a shop on the fifth floor of Sim Lim that carried it - that, and Challenger at Funan.
It took some patience to install the drivers before plugging it in - as warned by multiple stickers on the scanner to do so. (Guess it's not quite plug n' play.) But I have to say that once it was up and running, I don't regret a single cent.
It's a small black and silver thing, about the size of a hefty shoebox when folded up, and unfolds elegantly to support the pieces of paper you feed into it. Smoothly rolling plastic guides serve to hold papers of differing widths as they slide in and out. One simple blue button, which is also lit by an LED when it is powered, tells it to start scanning.
And by the gods, is it FAST.
It is also pretty damned smart for a scanner. The program it comes with automatically saves in PDF. It supposedly OCRs and makes it a searchable PDF too. If the paper is slightly tilted, it can compensate for that and retilt it. It detects the size of the stuff you feed in - no more manual selections to crop on screen. There's another program linked that can edit the PDFs should it have been rotated the wrong way and so on. It also allows organisation by keywords and folder structures, etc.
It makes scanning fun.
I've gone through piles of "to-be-scanned" paper faster than I ever imagined while watching TV and letting it feed into the scanner connected to my laptop.
(I do hope it will carry over and sync with relative ease when I eventually install the programs on my desktop PC though. Worse come to the worse, I can back up the pdfs, but manually sorting them would be ugly.)
Who knows, I might actually have a clean(er) room when CNY rolls around this year.
As part of my room cleaning weekend binge, I uncovered my old laptop. This was the sturdy workhorse that took me through college, and whose hard disk backup only exists on an external hard disk backup now. It was covered in dust, and out of morbid curiosity, I brushed it clean, plugged it in and turned it on to see if it would go.
The battery charging light came on (though it probably would go flat in seconds once disconnected). It gamely revved up.
Oooh, it's on, I thought. After all that dusty maltreatment, it's still alive.
Then, beep, went Nimuhar. (Yes, I named my laptop in those days.)
Uh oh. Sitting on the slightly dim screen, taunting me, was the CMOS password.
Shit.
Obviously in those days of cross-country airport flight and dorm rooms and roommates, my paranoia felt a CMOS password was justified, and why the hell should I write the password down when I type it in every day to access my laptop?
Except it's been 6+ years since I had any cause to type in said password. Amusingly, the passphrase I used came to mind. The problem was the numbers mixed into the passphrase. I couldn't remember the numbers, nor the position I chose to insert them into the passphrase. Crap.
Trying 9 different variations and locking myself out 3 times as a result, it was time to Google for help. It really wasn't that helpful. Apparently some manufacturers have a sekrit backdoor password, but Twinhead wasn't listed among the common manufacturers. Websites recommended to check your manual for help (I checked, it never covered this eventuality) or bring it in for maintenance support. There was something about maybe removing the CMOS battery or removing certain pieces of solder with precision in order to briefly remove a chip on the motherboard and replacing, in order to reset the BIOS.
Dayum. I really didn't count myself a hardware expert by any means so all this talk of chips and solder unnerved me.
Then there was another website that casually mentioned, well, the real info is actually in the notebook's hard disk. So nothing stops a determined person from bypassing the BIOS password altogether by removing the hard disk and plugging it into another computer.
Oooh. In truth, this was what I was after. I'd already satisfied my curiosity that the laptop was still functional. But I wasn't going to get rid of it until after I reformatted (or maybe simply removed) the hard disk with all my personal info.
Sitting down at the table with a box of screwdrivers, I tilted it up and down every which way looking for possible hard disk openings. It really was very heavy. My new laptop is wider and still a little lighter in comparison (though most would call it a brick still).
Nope, this was the CDrom drive. Nope, this was the memory compartment. (I opened it for fun to look at the memory. Unlabeled, so I dunno how much was in there.) Nope, this was probably the battery. There was a slit along the side that was probably the hard disk, but it looked very tightly set in, so I left that for later. One more compartment was intriguing the hell out of me.
It had one of those "if you remove this, you void your warranty" stickers sealing up the opening. Well, the year circled on the sticker was 1999. I figured the warranty was already void some time back.
If you aren't allowed to take your own ancient stuff apart for the sake of finding out how-stuff-works, whose should you use? What the heck. It was mine. I didn't have anything invested in it. If I spoiled it, it already had a destiny in the trash anyhow - it's so old I don't even think charities want it. So I sliced the sticker, and inserted a screwdriver tip to pry out the panel.
Behind it was some black chip labeled with some letters and numbers, and a very snug circular battery of the type you'd normally see in calculators and such.
Hmm...thought I. Could this be the CMOS battery the websites were talking about? Heck, what did I have to lose? I really couldn't remember my password. I already had a backup of the hard disk some time back (not complete, but presumably all the stuff I felt it was important to keep).
I gingerly pried it out. Counted off to five. And stuck it back in. Replaced everything. Flipped the laptop over. Plugged it back in. Turned it on.
Beep, went Nimuhar. CMOS error. Reset to default. Press F2 to access BIOS, press some other key to continue, blah blah blah.
Whoa. Reset to default? Was this it? Was it as simple as that? I checked the BIOS, and sure enough, both the user and supervisor passwords were clear and empty.
Nimmy was up and running. It took considerably longer to boot up, run into a bunch of outdated errors and reset daylight savings time, rebooted, checkdisked, etc while I marveled at the dim yellowness of the aged screen and the nostalgic reminders of permanently-etched sweat marks on the keyboard. This was the baby that saw me through the Realms of Despair, click-clacking away on its keys. It was running on Windows 98. Whoa. Talk about old. The entire hard disk was only about 6 gigabytes total. (Which gave me the idea to re-backup some point in the future before I decide if I can let it go.)
But I have to say, I'm a little bit taken aback and amazed all at once that it turned out so easy to bypass a BIOS password after all. No wonder laptop thieves and so on have no qualms or problems. So much for paranoia.
The only tool needed was a screwdriver, and a little ingenuity.
Steam Nation
At midnight tonight, I noticed that Steam reported some 3 million users online.
While this is near its daily peak, that's pretty hefty. Not quite in the league of WoW, but a lot closer than other MMOs, and similar to a good chunk of a global city's population.
While this is near its daily peak, that's pretty hefty. Not quite in the league of WoW, but a lot closer than other MMOs, and similar to a good chunk of a global city's population.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Gamerise Exercise
I think I may have finally found a solution to my perennial problem of not sticking with an exercise routine for long enough.
(I did try for several months at the whole martial arts samurai sword thing, which was decent, but I kept missing being able to go home at non-9-10pm hours and when work starting insisting I stay back longer past 6pm, it just provided a push in the wrong direction to quit.)
The whole schtick of going somewhere /special/ to exercise really killed it for me. First you had to change into special clothes. Then you spend significant time NOT at home. And maybe there are other people watching you, which is embarrassing and makes a fat dwarf like me feel muy awkward. And you repeat them all backwards before you finally are home and comfy again.
Not even the mini-gym downstairs in the condo would work. Mostly because for some twisted reason, there is no special member card that you can just beep yourself into the place. I mighta snuck in at night when I was ready to exercise if that was the case. Instead, it is kept locked tight with a physical key that the security guard holds. So if I want to use the gym, I first have to a) hunt down the guard, who may wander around the place doing his sporadic patrol to look busy, and b) he has to know every single time and instance I go exercise? Even late at night or whatever? *twitch* *privacy invaded* *slinks away to vegetate in front of the bright glare of the monitor instead*
And y'know, aerobic exercise or cycling on a stationary bike is kinda boring. Presumably if you do it with a group of people and an instructor and dance music, then no, but then you run into the OTHER PEOPLE aspect that is so off-putting. Nor do I want to get rammed down by the clumsy way Singaporeans drive if I really cycle. (And there's the going out and special clothes and equipment aspect.)
Presumably, if the bike was in front of my home TV, that would be great. But my parents slammed their foot down on having one of those, under the rationale that there was no more room in the house, and I would probably get bored of it in under a week - which I don't think I would, with a regular TV program to watch, and I was offering to buy the thing with my money too - but yeah, despite ever-constant jabs about my size, they refuse to compromise on possible viable solutions. Go fucking figure. I learned the definition of consistent from the anti-example of certain people.
(Now that I have an iPad though, there is an increased viability of using the crappy bike in the gym downstairs, but there's still the whole privacy and lousy equipment and special clothes aspects which are a downer.)
I did think about using minimal space zero-equipment workout routines, such as the hacker's diet, prison-type exercises, flowfit, etc. And I did try for a couple days. Two problems. Lack of space and lack of discipline.
Seriously, there is no space in this house. Or in my room, which would be the best, most private place to attempt exercise without inviting constant snickers from my dad (which is also a downer) or endless comments/nagging/commentary from my mum (which goes without saying, passes beyond down-iness into the pits of Hell).
So I cannot lie down without serious discomfort and furniture shoving, which puts a crimp in crunches. Or lame attempts at it. I could do it on the bed, but that's kinda cheating. I lack a proper chair or bench at a certain height in order to do other kinds of exercises, and again, the bed has a certain give to it that is not the same as a hard flat surface.
And the fact of the matter is that I am significantly overweight for my height and some of the standard 'easy' exercises are significantly difficult or impossible, or I could do them, and not be sure that I was getting them down properly or break much of a sweat because I was taking it too easy, and after a while, all the obstacles get in the way and make the chance occurrence of 30 mins of exercise 3 times a week significantly less likely.
Crap willpower.
Or lousy plan. Whatever.
I needed something with much better design that I could maintain interest in. Enter Project Natal.
Or rather, the new rebranded Kinect. It so happened that during the last Christmas hols, we spotted that Starhub was busy giving away Microsoft Xbox 360s + Kinect for a broadband subscription at the same price we were already paying. Well. Well, well.
Counting on my fingers suggested that it has been about 2 years since we last scored the same type of deal with the Sony PS3 (I had to wait 1+ years for Heavy Rain - my main impetus to con my dad into getting his Blu-Ray player aka the PS3 - to come out.)
So we gleefully made the trip all the way down to the Computer Expo in the east end of Singapore, queued up in the colossal Starhub queues, re-contracted for another 24 months (our family can't live without broadband anyway) and took away a coupon for the Xbox 360 + Kinect to be claimed later on Dec 24 or thereabouts.
Hrmph. Oh well, can't argue with free. Long story short, we did get it in the end. During the expo though, I had spied something that looked a tide cheesy, but possibly fun.
A dancing game. Dance Central, they called it.
Yeah, yeah, it sounds sissy and girly and so not me. Secretly, I always thought Dance Dance Revolution looked kinda fun. It was just too public out in the arcades, and I never owned the proper consoles during that time. There has always been a kinda secret hope that maybe, maybe one of these things might actually teach me proper limb coordination and/or a sense of rhythm if I practiced hard enough. (Musical, rhythmic or kinesthetic intelligences have never been my forte. Win some, lose some, y'know.) At least enough not to look like a cuddly hamster or a confused penguin, and progress on to decently average.
I finally bought Dance Central today. And tried it. And I'm semi-optimistic about it.
It hits all the right notes. I get to do it at home. I can do it in my 'jammies. I don't look like I'm exercising, so no comments from the peanut gallery.
The game is designed to be very encouraging - you mirror a character that faces you and gives you comments and tips like an aerobics or dance instructor and praises you for good work and gives you a gentle pep talk if you suck. And if you really fail at learning the dance move, you can go in slow-motion, and you can do it OVER and OVER ten times or more, and the computer will never try to hide an eye-roll of uncomprehending impatience or sneak a glance at their watch. It will work with you one-on-one until you get it, give up for now or keel over from exhaustion or a heart attack
And yes, I did walk away sweaty after an hour (or was it two?) at it.
It helps that I have Achiever tendencies. (I came back from a course today that did a self-assessment, and my score for Loves Challenge was a 7.5 out of 10. Which is true enough. I think I used to be worse, but learned to moderate it just a teensy bit.)
Dance Central provides fantastic feedback via its scores. During practice mode, it will count how many moves you got right, and give you a percentile score at the end of it. During each move, you can see immediately if you were NICE at it, or FLAWLESS, or if you didn't get it, period. When you do it as an actual song, then your entire performance is scored with a numerical score and a rank of X out of 5 stars at the end of it, similar to music games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
In the vein of all games, as you master the easier levels, increased levels of difficulty open up to you. I managed the easiest song on easy passably enough, and unlocked medium. Medium was decidedly more challenging and took a while to learn. I wussed out on hard, and switched to another song a couple rows lower on the list, and nearly fainted on the "easy" mode. Backtracked hastily to songs nearer the top and presumably easier, managed another "easy" mode, and another. Attempted another medium, and didn't do so good...
...and decided to stop for the day there as I'd lost track of time, I was covered in sweat, and it wouldn't quite do to move from completely sedentary lifestyle to attempted dancing for 4-5 hours and falling over stone dead afterwards.
But yeah. I'd like to do it again. Tomorrow. Which is a lot more than I can say for any other form of exercise I've tried.
I'm hopeful. Let's take it one day at a time and go from there. Maybe some day way later in the future, I'd actually weigh myself and not feel a twinge of guilt, and/or dance in front of my colleagues at a dinner n' dance and not feel hopelessly self-conscious.
Since I'm not quite at the revealing self to public stage yet, here's a video of Ellen playing Dance Central instead.
(I did try for several months at the whole martial arts samurai sword thing, which was decent, but I kept missing being able to go home at non-9-10pm hours and when work starting insisting I stay back longer past 6pm, it just provided a push in the wrong direction to quit.)
The whole schtick of going somewhere /special/ to exercise really killed it for me. First you had to change into special clothes. Then you spend significant time NOT at home. And maybe there are other people watching you, which is embarrassing and makes a fat dwarf like me feel muy awkward. And you repeat them all backwards before you finally are home and comfy again.
Not even the mini-gym downstairs in the condo would work. Mostly because for some twisted reason, there is no special member card that you can just beep yourself into the place. I mighta snuck in at night when I was ready to exercise if that was the case. Instead, it is kept locked tight with a physical key that the security guard holds. So if I want to use the gym, I first have to a) hunt down the guard, who may wander around the place doing his sporadic patrol to look busy, and b) he has to know every single time and instance I go exercise? Even late at night or whatever? *twitch* *privacy invaded* *slinks away to vegetate in front of the bright glare of the monitor instead*
And y'know, aerobic exercise or cycling on a stationary bike is kinda boring. Presumably if you do it with a group of people and an instructor and dance music, then no, but then you run into the OTHER PEOPLE aspect that is so off-putting. Nor do I want to get rammed down by the clumsy way Singaporeans drive if I really cycle. (And there's the going out and special clothes and equipment aspect.)
Presumably, if the bike was in front of my home TV, that would be great. But my parents slammed their foot down on having one of those, under the rationale that there was no more room in the house, and I would probably get bored of it in under a week - which I don't think I would, with a regular TV program to watch, and I was offering to buy the thing with my money too - but yeah, despite ever-constant jabs about my size, they refuse to compromise on possible viable solutions. Go fucking figure. I learned the definition of consistent from the anti-example of certain people.
(Now that I have an iPad though, there is an increased viability of using the crappy bike in the gym downstairs, but there's still the whole privacy and lousy equipment and special clothes aspects which are a downer.)
I did think about using minimal space zero-equipment workout routines, such as the hacker's diet, prison-type exercises, flowfit, etc. And I did try for a couple days. Two problems. Lack of space and lack of discipline.
Seriously, there is no space in this house. Or in my room, which would be the best, most private place to attempt exercise without inviting constant snickers from my dad (which is also a downer) or endless comments/nagging/commentary from my mum (which goes without saying, passes beyond down-iness into the pits of Hell).
So I cannot lie down without serious discomfort and furniture shoving, which puts a crimp in crunches. Or lame attempts at it. I could do it on the bed, but that's kinda cheating. I lack a proper chair or bench at a certain height in order to do other kinds of exercises, and again, the bed has a certain give to it that is not the same as a hard flat surface.
And the fact of the matter is that I am significantly overweight for my height and some of the standard 'easy' exercises are significantly difficult or impossible, or I could do them, and not be sure that I was getting them down properly or break much of a sweat because I was taking it too easy, and after a while, all the obstacles get in the way and make the chance occurrence of 30 mins of exercise 3 times a week significantly less likely.
Crap willpower.
Or lousy plan. Whatever.
I needed something with much better design that I could maintain interest in. Enter Project Natal.
Or rather, the new rebranded Kinect. It so happened that during the last Christmas hols, we spotted that Starhub was busy giving away Microsoft Xbox 360s + Kinect for a broadband subscription at the same price we were already paying. Well. Well, well.
Counting on my fingers suggested that it has been about 2 years since we last scored the same type of deal with the Sony PS3 (I had to wait 1+ years for Heavy Rain - my main impetus to con my dad into getting his Blu-Ray player aka the PS3 - to come out.)
So we gleefully made the trip all the way down to the Computer Expo in the east end of Singapore, queued up in the colossal Starhub queues, re-contracted for another 24 months (our family can't live without broadband anyway) and took away a coupon for the Xbox 360 + Kinect to be claimed later on Dec 24 or thereabouts.
Hrmph. Oh well, can't argue with free. Long story short, we did get it in the end. During the expo though, I had spied something that looked a tide cheesy, but possibly fun.
A dancing game. Dance Central, they called it.
Yeah, yeah, it sounds sissy and girly and so not me. Secretly, I always thought Dance Dance Revolution looked kinda fun. It was just too public out in the arcades, and I never owned the proper consoles during that time. There has always been a kinda secret hope that maybe, maybe one of these things might actually teach me proper limb coordination and/or a sense of rhythm if I practiced hard enough. (Musical, rhythmic or kinesthetic intelligences have never been my forte. Win some, lose some, y'know.) At least enough not to look like a cuddly hamster or a confused penguin, and progress on to decently average.
I finally bought Dance Central today. And tried it. And I'm semi-optimistic about it.
It hits all the right notes. I get to do it at home. I can do it in my 'jammies. I don't look like I'm exercising, so no comments from the peanut gallery.
The game is designed to be very encouraging - you mirror a character that faces you and gives you comments and tips like an aerobics or dance instructor and praises you for good work and gives you a gentle pep talk if you suck. And if you really fail at learning the dance move, you can go in slow-motion, and you can do it OVER and OVER ten times or more, and the computer will never try to hide an eye-roll of uncomprehending impatience or sneak a glance at their watch. It will work with you one-on-one until you get it, give up for now or keel over from exhaustion or a heart attack
And yes, I did walk away sweaty after an hour (or was it two?) at it.
It helps that I have Achiever tendencies. (I came back from a course today that did a self-assessment, and my score for Loves Challenge was a 7.5 out of 10. Which is true enough. I think I used to be worse, but learned to moderate it just a teensy bit.)
Dance Central provides fantastic feedback via its scores. During practice mode, it will count how many moves you got right, and give you a percentile score at the end of it. During each move, you can see immediately if you were NICE at it, or FLAWLESS, or if you didn't get it, period. When you do it as an actual song, then your entire performance is scored with a numerical score and a rank of X out of 5 stars at the end of it, similar to music games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
In the vein of all games, as you master the easier levels, increased levels of difficulty open up to you. I managed the easiest song on easy passably enough, and unlocked medium. Medium was decidedly more challenging and took a while to learn. I wussed out on hard, and switched to another song a couple rows lower on the list, and nearly fainted on the "easy" mode. Backtracked hastily to songs nearer the top and presumably easier, managed another "easy" mode, and another. Attempted another medium, and didn't do so good...
...and decided to stop for the day there as I'd lost track of time, I was covered in sweat, and it wouldn't quite do to move from completely sedentary lifestyle to attempted dancing for 4-5 hours and falling over stone dead afterwards.
But yeah. I'd like to do it again. Tomorrow. Which is a lot more than I can say for any other form of exercise I've tried.
I'm hopeful. Let's take it one day at a time and go from there. Maybe some day way later in the future, I'd actually weigh myself and not feel a twinge of guilt, and/or dance in front of my colleagues at a dinner n' dance and not feel hopelessly self-conscious.
Since I'm not quite at the revealing self to public stage yet, here's a video of Ellen playing Dance Central instead.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Let's get Serious II
Just when I was getting tired of the game...this appeared:
And there was a little twist to the whole FPS factor...
Finally, I sailed away to Part 2.
And there was a little twist to the whole FPS factor...
Finally, I sailed away to Part 2.
Following the Arrows
While indulging in the usual classic vein of time-wasting and seeking out people who agree with me over the Internet (funny how I read 'on the fence' and moderately negative Rift posts when I was still deciding, and now that I've decided to get sucked up into the swing of things, I have started perusing raving fanboy rift websites), I stumbled across an interesting article that could be generalized into a generic MMO discussion, even if it was originally about Rift.
The most relevant part I quote here:
Walk this way. It would swivel in distressing fashion if you veered away from the path, and pulse comfortingly if you were on the right track towards the quest object of its desire. With its unerring pinpoint precision, it would bring you to the spot of next quest completion and the next and the next...
The most relevant part I quote here:
The MMOs of old did not have these distractions, so the questions of "Where do I go?" and "What do I do?" were the only things in our minds. That's why we felt so free in those games, because they didn't exactly have the arrows to answer those questions for us.
I will let you in on a little secret though... those arrows are not the only answer.
Remember that, "Where do I go?" and "What do I do?" They're still there in our heads. You can ask yourself those questions like Pippi Longstocking does every morning and act on them.
While I honestly have no clue who Pippi Longstocking is, the rest of it is something I'd like to muse my way around.
Bhagpuss, one of the MMO blog frequent commenters, is an eccentric chap who will make no bones that he plays every MMO like his own personal meandering sandbox, willfully ignoring signposts to go off and do his own thing. He often expresses frustration as to why other people don't just go ahead and do that, instead of complaining bitterly that about themeparks and rails.
On the other hand, I can very well believe that lots of other people do not have that sort of determined inner focus to stay immersed in their own personal little immersion story, irrespective of whatever quirks of game design throw their way.
And then, there is my personal belief is that good game design sways the masses on the fence into playing a certain way as desired by the developers.
Otherwise, how could you produce different player behavior like Eve Online cut-throat competitiveness and Left 4 Dead enforced cooperation? It's certainly not just a product of self-selecting gamer choices (though it might play a role), but it also has to do with the ruleset of the game.
Here's an anecdote about arrows and marching ants. I played WoW pre-Cataclysm in a trial once. Or twice. Or thrice, before.
The first few times, I played with the vanilla WoW UI. This mostly consisted of reading quest text and hoping you were walking in the correct direction, and then a lot of pointless running around in circles and experimental slaying of differently named mobs and hoping you spied the correct shiny quest item. Kinda like LOTRO when they first began, except LOTRO was a little more verbose.
Somewhere mid-second or third try, they had started improving the questing interface somewhat, and at least deigned to include a popup tooltip that indicated whether you were on 0/9 of angry zehvras, and yes, these are the angry zehvras you're looking for, not furious zehvras or savage zehvras.
Then I got bored of the tedium and decided it was time for the next step in MUD/MMO evolution: cyborg'ing. I got my Curse-surfing on, and downloaded a ton of WoW add-ons. One of which was QuestHelper.
QuestHelper revolutionized questing in WoW. Especially in conjunction with Cartographer.
It took control of everything. It would re-order your quest tracker for you, pointing things out to do in terms of how near you were to the quest goal (in-game GPS!) and sort based on certain filters whether it was xp worthwhile yellows and orange quests or just miserable greens and greys.
It could set your route across zones for you - which flightmasters to use, which direction to go there and back again, and display it all in a glorious line of happy marching ants when you pressed M for map.
And by golly, there was THE ARROW.
This glorious instrument of compass-y doom would float above your avatar's head like an angelic halo, or you could shift it to the bottom of your screen near your hotbars if that was a better spot for it. It dangled the promise of customisation to your very specific preferences, but the truth is, one was often lazy to tweak the default settings. It was often easier to go with the flow and do what The Arrow wanted.
Walk this way. It would swivel in distressing fashion if you veered away from the path, and pulse comfortingly if you were on the right track towards the quest object of its desire. With its unerring pinpoint precision, it would bring you to the spot of next quest completion and the next and the next...
It played the WoW questing game so well, that ultimately I started feeling superfluous and decided not to continue with this pasttime of Follow the Arrow and There And Back Again and Right-Click on NPCs with Yellow Punctuation Over Their Head and Hit Accept.
Post-Cataclysm, to my distress, many of my add-ons had stopped working. Nothing like a dramatic world changing patch, and a few passing years to bore add-on makers to really throw a spanner in the works. I eventually found substitutes or updates for some I couldn't live with, such as Auctioneer and AtlasFu, but I could not find one for QuestHelper.
Not for the lack of trying either. Turns out the original developer stopped supporting it some time ago after tiring of WoW. And that the Shattering had fubared any semblance of a functional quest database for QuestHelper.
In retrospect, this was a rather silly and foolish quest, to go in search of an add-on that would optimize all the fun out of the journey, but I really didn't think about what I was doing until later. It was just an automatic compulsion to check all my prior add-ons and see if there were any updates. And I'm not even a regular WoW player with obsessive can't-live-without-certain add-on habits.
It turned out that I didn't need QuestHelper with Blizzard's revamped quest UI. A waypoint on the map, a tiny arrow I rarely looked at on my minimap radar, the tooltips and a little bit of searching and observation skills (which is the true fun of the journey - being encouraged to pay attention to one's surroundings) and I was doing Shattering streamlined quests in systematic fashion, meandering from quest hub to quest hub.
Surely I'm not the only one to fall afoul of this little over-convenience. A little google search for "QuestHelper arrow" will reveal the distress faced by some (many) when they find it GONE?! or MISSING? HELP!
(Now technically if you follow the link, you'd find that it really isn't a QuestHelper arrow, but was a function of Cartographer - also now defunct - and TomTom - which is a perfectly serviceable replacement for those who can't live without their happy green/red arrow.)
Still, one has to wonder why we humans do it. Why do we slavishly follow signposts and arrows that demand our attention?
The arrow points one way. But there are 359 other degrees of freedom in which we could have swiveled our avatar and walked. If only for a little while.
Except that we would be walking away from our goal. And why would we walk away from goals, it is inefficient!
But who said that was our goal to begin with? Well, it was in words that popped up to the right of our screen with a little counter and checkbox that beg to be fulfilled. And the NPC I clicked on gave me those words, and promised me a reward, so yeah, that's our goal! And the reward is sweet sweet eps (oh sorry, does everyone call them xp these days?) to fulfill our ultimate goal of hitting max level and becoming most powerful! (except the cake is a lie and you start at the bottom of a very long ladder whose rungs only appear on favorable casts of the die.)
I think part of the problem is that goal setting is hard.
Choosing goals for yourself in a sandbox all sound very well and good, but when players actually splash around in the sand for a while, getting dirt in their eyes and kicking sand into other people's eyes, and have finished making all the sand mounds and sandcastles they can imagine given the limitations of the type of sand they have and the boundaries of their imagination, they shortly end up looking about and going "Now what?"
Hell, even in real life, I don't think we've worked out goal setting as a species yet, judging by how many self-help articles are online and books are available in print.
People need prompts, guidelines, blueprints and plans and yes, even direct orders.
So it's kind of comforting to be told what to do and how to go and do it, and one tends to follow the arrow until the rare day that revelation hits and one realizes: Hey, I'm not really having fun doing this. And hey, I'm blindly and unquestioningly following orders given by a machine...which I ultimately installed and allowed dominion over me.
At which point, one ends up cast into the wide world wondering just what they really like or should want, veering away from arrows because they can... and guiltily, sneakily, going along with the arrow because not-thinking and checking off a bunch of errands is easier and gives a more satisfactory buzz than relentless self-analysis about how much fun they're having at any given point in time and what they should be doing next.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
This is Serious Business
Serious Sam HD, Encounter 1...
Wherein...
You shoot monsters...
...that are really weird and amusing and all unique
...and come in hordes and hordes
...with some weird weapons (giant cannon)
...in a beautiful background
...with an egyptian theme
...while listening to awesome game music
...where the unexpected happens sometimes
...and the game hero (Sam, aka you) make funny comments from time to time.
This is truly one of those golden standard games where shooters will be held to!
Go play it.
Wherein...
You shoot monsters...
...that are really weird and amusing and all unique
...and come in hordes and hordes
...with some weird weapons (giant cannon)
...in a beautiful background
...with an egyptian theme
...while listening to awesome game music
...where the unexpected happens sometimes
...and the game hero (Sam, aka you) make funny comments from time to time.
This is truly one of those golden standard games where shooters will be held to!
Go play it.
Worth the Price of Admission
Yep, it's time for another round of Postcards from Telara, with some commentary on how I spent RIFT beta #4.
Folks will tell you that RIFT is a quest-based grinder similar to all standard MMOs out there, on rails, yadda yadda. But y'know, it does support a little bit of wandering off the beaten path all the same.
At the time I remade my cleric using my pre-order account, there was some kind of server lag / general being twitchy going on. Quests were stalling and getting stuck and necessitating GM resets, mobs were not spawning quickly after being killed and even Rifts weren't closing properly or moving on to the next stage as supposed to. I'd manage to escape out of the tutorial into Freemarch, but the first linear quest chain had gotten stuck. Deciding not to queue with the rest of the lowbies, I headed out into the wilderness to hunt for rifts and kill some mobs. To my surprise, I ran into a quest-giver along the road, with a quest for me, directing me to the second quest hub Kelari Refuge. By picking that quest up, I was able to start the Kelari Refuge quest chains without needing to finish the first quest hub that was stuck. That was pretty elegant, I thought, and just a little bit sandbox-y.
Some time later, while wandering around, doing quests, closing Rifts, I spied a lonely pair of islands out to the northeast of shore. Well, hey, time to attempt breaking the game and swimming for some time way out there. It would probably be barren dirt, but it would be fun to go someplace no one went.
 | |
| I am in love with the ground textures. The dirt and soil, the grey rock, the grass, oh my. |
To my immense surprise, I found this statue. Reminiscient of the Argonath, and not even visible from my position on the shoreline until I swam up to the two lonely little islands and got closer. No mobs, no kitschy little achievement popup, but a warm rewarding Explorer buzz all the same. Very peaceful, no players at all wandered here while I was there. And the detail in the textures is unbelievable.
 |
| Here's the proper scale of the statue. Its feet, pretty much. Mainland behind me, and a wonderful water rift provides some interest in the background. |
The art team in RIFT is fantastic. Here's another one of those attention-to-detail set pieces. Out in the ocean, a quest to pick up some items from a sunken wreck. I come across some strange dirty bone-like projections in the water. Now one is normally focused on avoiding nasty threshjaw crocodiles and sharks, so what was underneath isn't too obvious when you're swimming as fast as you can away from the glaring red UI'ed threats.
 |
| Only the tip of the iceberg. |
That is, until you actually dive DOWN underwater and see the thing take up your entire monitor.
 |
| Bones of a Unnamed Leviathan |
Some comic relief now. The servers came down briefly because they were adding two new servers to cope with the crazy influx of mad new RIFTing beta players. While waiting for Wolfsbane to come up, I made a Guardian-side dwarf warrior on the new server to kill a little time. Deciding to go Champion to play with two-handed weapons, I was exceedingly tickled by the second tutorial newbie weapon, which was a claymore... likely bigger than the dwarf himself. When he held it at ease in one hand, it practically dragged the ground, but not quite (just a few inches off, because RIFT is polished that way and will not allow clipping to occur.)
 |
| Could he be compensating for something? |
 |
| Anybody can farm mobs. Question is, can you farm SEEDS! |
Back on the Defiant cleric side of things, this was an amusing side quest. Not quite up to the calibre of WoW's irreverent jibes, but a cute attempt on RIFT's part. We went FARMING, my faerie and me.
Click on the soil mound to plant a seed, click on my quest item to water the seed, wait a split second and see a little green sprout poke out of the soil. Wait 5-10 seconds longer, and the sprout grew up into a bigger plant, which could be clicked on to be harvested. Once, a rabbit came out of nowhere and ate the sprout, necessitating me to do another round of replanting. I dunno if I could have prevented it, I did try to meteor the rabbit, but it did its dirty work a little too fast.
This was the utter climatic highlight of beta #4 for me. So far, at any rate, haven't logged back in yet. Player numbers had apparently peaked to the point that one of these rare zone events could trigger (or the GM/devs triggered it to test it).
The big bad boss NPC honchos started roaring insults back and forth at each other, which every player in the zone could see, splashed in the centre of our screens, resulting in our Defiant side getting a call to arms against the Tidelord (water abyssal). There was also a bunch of Death rifts around the place too.
Up popped a quest tracking counter for the Big Zone Event quest, and players started spontaneously milling, dropping all thought of continuing their boring FedEx quests, looking for rift trouble.
 |
| Death rift. It was amusing to note that people gather on the edges, scared of aggroing the elites en masse until sturdy enough tanks or heals or healtanks or tankpets showed up in enough number to dissipate aggro. |
 |
| Somehow, when you get to groups of this size, the aggro just naturally breaks up enough into handle-able amounts. This is admittedly overkill. Normally 6-8 are more than enough for a rift. |
 |
| A Death invasion x 2, or 3. The forces create 'footholds' - ground objects that can be destroyed. Invasion forces of 4-5 mobs also spawn from these footholds (I think.) |
 |
| Nothing like quest trackers to egg players on into rabidly chasing anything that looked like it could maybe be an abyssal. |
 |
| The travelling Zerg forms spontaneously. After the gathered group has cleared everything in its vicinity, it starts playing follow the leader. (Which are the level 20+ guys on mounts who probably have a better idea of where they are going than us.) Traveling in a vast buffalo herd also has the advantages of the weak stragglers getting picked off by loose aggro'ing mob predators along the sides, while the savvy hug the centre of the group. :) |
 |
| This is what the water invasion event looked like on the map. All the blue crossed swords are water invasion forces. The arrows show the path where they are going. The blue swirly whirlpools are water rifts. The squares with blue in them are footholds. It's an incredibly dense amount of info to take in at once, the realization that there are SO many mobs in our zone. We eventually figured out that the Mark of the Tidelord objects we had on our goal objective were the things out at sea (to the north of the shoreline.) |
 |
| More rifting. Water rift this time. There's some variety between lots of small mobs to kill at once, and a few big bads with sacks of hp to pound on. |
It's good energy there. It reminds me a bit of Warhammer in the early launch days. Somehow Warhammer died down because there weren't enough people to complete the public quests successfully, and people ended up queueing for scenarios because they gave the best rewards, leaving world PvP notoriously bereft of people. Zergs also ended up avoiding each other and just doing PvE against zone keeps, again beccause of min-maxing reward.
I heard that WoW's Tol Barad has run afoul of this recently. It is apparently imbalanced to the point that the defender has it much easier defending, by a factor of 10x or so. To offset this, the WoW devs in their infinite 'wisdom' decided to change the attackers' reward to 10x that of defending. So naturally, faced with such a prisoner's dilemma, some servers have come up with the cooperative defection solution of "don't defend, we'll trade wins every 2 hours" yielding maxed rewards on both sides. Clever clever players. Silly devs.
The real question is, will RIFT fall into these traps? The rewards so far avoid the Warhammer public quest trap of having rewards as gear tied to certain level ranges. (Making it useless for higher levels to go back and do lower level pq's.) RIFT also does a fairly good job in making the rifts very very hard to ignore. By god, these things will overrun your roads, your quest hubs, your crafters, your everything if you ignore them. I hear they eventually expire too. They don't just stay around statically unchanging like Warhammer pq's.
I think the key is whether players feel it is possible to defeat the rifts by themselves or in a small group. If it's impossible, if one keeps wiping on the attempt, one learns helplessness and to avoid it like the plague. On the other hand, I did see a planar goods reward for a stone that summons up Defiant NPC elites in certain places, which means that a soloist might eventually be able to use them to help out, even if the rest of the zone is deserted. I did also see small minor soloable footholds. Presumably RIFT devs were smart enough to tie in the spawning of certain types based on the number of players around.
A certain role flexibility also helps here. In Warhammer, if you were missing heals, you were screwed. No tank? Screwed. Got one but not the other? Still screwed. Hell, if you didn't have enough dps, it was possible you'd be overrun because the heals ran out of mana.
In RIFT, I have melee cleric tank'ed a decent amount of rift mobs, allowing watching rogues and mages to start participating. Hell, I've seen mage pets and rogue pets tank more sturdily than certain warriors. I know, because I only have two targetable ally heals, and I can keep the pet going indefinitely while a certain warrior (certainly they were effective at stealing aggro and taunting) melted most alarmingly and didn't stay up long enough for my heals to recharge. (I have a third self-heal triggered off meleeing with a mace, a fourth raid/party AoE heal that eats mana but can be fired to heal myself in a pinch and a faerie pet that heals me - that's how I can healtank.)
Having the infomation that there's -something- going on is also helpful. With the map, one can see at a glance where the hotspots are. WAR did this with areas where RvR was going on, but forgot to indicate PQs as well. With RIFT, hell, you can even see where the invasions are headed to. (And you get regular announcements that such-and-such Death invasion is attacking Quest Hub to spur you toward the town if you're anywhere in the area.)
Friday, January 07, 2011
Rockstar Embargo Lifts on Steam
No, it's not a Steam sale so soon. But this was noteworthy enough news to record for posterity.
During my regular Steam homepage check (a browsing habit as ingrained as reading RSS feeds through Google Reader), to my surprise, I saw Max Payne and Max Payne 2 out as "new releases."
Hang on, these are old games. Cool, they are now on Steam, went my first thought. I shall file them away in my mind as names to watch during a Steam sale perhaps. (Even though I owe the discs...somewhere.)
HANG ON, said my brain, doing a double-take. Weren't these games from a company that had previously region-locked them to NA and perhaps EU only? 2K and Rockstar are the main culprits...
Sure enough, a check revealed Rockstar Games as the publisher.
WHOA, whoa, WHOA, exclaimed my mind. Rockstar Games...aren't they the infamous makers of GtA, Red Dead Redemption, Bully, Manhunt and other such unredeemingly violent controversial 'mature' games?
Finally regaining enough presence of mind to look and scroll down past Max Payne and Max Payne 2, to my immense surprise, I see Manhunt, GtA 4, GtA 3, GtA: San Andreas and GtA: Vice City proudly on display as new releases. A little further down, lurked Bully: The Scholarship edition.
This is a fairly stunning development, although Red Dead Redemption is still missing from the list.
The Steam forums also have a thread regarding this sudden availability to various parts of the world, including Australia, Germany, Argentina and Asia. It's generally received with much glee, if a certain grumpy cynicism at them having conveniently waited for the Christmas sale to be over first. There is also the expressed hope that certain rabid anti-videogame violence fanatics and media censorship bureaucracies do not catch wind of the windfall.
I share in that hope. Though after the fools MDA made of themselves in trying to ban Mass Effect for a human-blue alien clothed sex scene on account of it being a 'lesbian' scene, I hope they will have the decency to *ahem* shut their pieholes. (Oh noes, the moral corruption of the internet has worked its evil mind-altering schemes on me!)
After all, the more they attempt to ban something, the greater free publicity they will ultimately be giving it.
And actually, GtA and its variants have been available on sale here in box form for a long time now. Only Manhunt and Bully haven't been.
During my regular Steam homepage check (a browsing habit as ingrained as reading RSS feeds through Google Reader), to my surprise, I saw Max Payne and Max Payne 2 out as "new releases."
Hang on, these are old games. Cool, they are now on Steam, went my first thought. I shall file them away in my mind as names to watch during a Steam sale perhaps. (Even though I owe the discs...somewhere.)
HANG ON, said my brain, doing a double-take. Weren't these games from a company that had previously region-locked them to NA and perhaps EU only? 2K and Rockstar are the main culprits...
Sure enough, a check revealed Rockstar Games as the publisher.
WHOA, whoa, WHOA, exclaimed my mind. Rockstar Games...aren't they the infamous makers of GtA, Red Dead Redemption, Bully, Manhunt and other such unredeemingly violent controversial 'mature' games?
Finally regaining enough presence of mind to look and scroll down past Max Payne and Max Payne 2, to my immense surprise, I see Manhunt, GtA 4, GtA 3, GtA: San Andreas and GtA: Vice City proudly on display as new releases. A little further down, lurked Bully: The Scholarship edition.
This is a fairly stunning development, although Red Dead Redemption is still missing from the list.
The Steam forums also have a thread regarding this sudden availability to various parts of the world, including Australia, Germany, Argentina and Asia. It's generally received with much glee, if a certain grumpy cynicism at them having conveniently waited for the Christmas sale to be over first. There is also the expressed hope that certain rabid anti-videogame violence fanatics and media censorship bureaucracies do not catch wind of the windfall.
I share in that hope. Though after the fools MDA made of themselves in trying to ban Mass Effect for a human-blue alien clothed sex scene on account of it being a 'lesbian' scene, I hope they will have the decency to *ahem* shut their pieholes. (Oh noes, the moral corruption of the internet has worked its evil mind-altering schemes on me!)
After all, the more they attempt to ban something, the greater free publicity they will ultimately be giving it.
And actually, GtA and its variants have been available on sale here in box form for a long time now. Only Manhunt and Bully haven't been.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
On the Knife Edge of a Fence with RIFT
So the big news broke today that RIFT is releasing March 1, 2011 and pre-orders plans are rolling out.
I don't know... I'm tempted, unabashedly tempted - otherwise, I wouldn't be here agonizing over my choices. The biggest draw for me is that RIFT is pretty and polished.
There's a lot packed into those two simple words, so let me unpack that. When I say pretty, I mean gorgeous. As in drop dead triggers-all-my-love-of-fantasy-art gorgeous. Strong acrylic colors, the stuff I love Guild Wars for. A certain bright vividity of WAR. The realism of the models and crisp high def graphics push it over the top. It is very pleasant to look at, to collect screenshots of, and a lot more open and unconfined than say WAR, or perhaps even Aion.
The polish is a secondary factor, but after playing many rough-around-the-edges MMOs, it is very nice to find an MMO company that has given significant time and attention to smoothing out the corners - smooth and flexible UI and keybinds, functional tutorial and tooltips, stuff that works like you'd expect it to, rather than break down akin to what you'd expect one lone indie programmer to put out. One feels like rewarding that hard work.
I've often said that I was staying away from vanilla WoW to await the WoW version 2.0 variants. Those that have learned and refined their game from the gorilla in the room. From the beginning of LOTRO onwards, I've been playing them and on the whole, enjoying my time in them.
I've even given WoW 2.0, the Cataclysm edition a try and enjoyed that. Still am, though the grind at level 54 is beginning to rear its ugly end somewhat as the gaps between levels gets exponentially longer.
RIFT is a classic WoW version 2.0. At first, the lore didn't strike me as anything original, but I have to say, after just one beta, a lot of reflection and some perusal of hype-building articles, I can get my mind around it somewhat. Enough to be intrigued at the thought of playing through it at any rate.
But for what?
Since moving ahead from CoH to sample other more standardized MMO waters, I have essentially been leaving a trail of dead bodies and fossilizing avatars behind me.
I have a max level 80 Guardian in Age of Conan. I have a sub-50 (level 42-44ish) Marauder in Warhammer. I have a sub-50 (level 42-44ish too) Gladiator in Aion. And those are just the games that I probably won't go back to, even though I still am fond of the games per se. They just ended up a bit too tedious to grind up to max level, I didn't find a guild I liked and endgame wasn't appealing.
The fact of the matter is that I appear to have personal problems with MMO endgames. They take up a significant time investment to find a guild, involve way too much socialisation with strange people for my liking, and all the nice people that I might like to hang out with appear to be across oceans in terms of timezones. Then it involves organized group activities (PvE or PvP) in which one has to make a committment to a schedule and practice and rehearsals and and ... I might as well just join a local community club sports or martial arts team if I were inclined to that sort of thing.
That said, I don't regret any of the time I spent in the games above. They all had their memorable, entertaining moments.
For example in AoC, I got huge kicks out of watching Rhino and Mammoth mounts stomp around, or climbing up to the highest peaks in order to look doooownn at a zone with incredible depths and draw distances. Of seeing little artistic/realism nuances like a slippered Stygian foot peeking out of a very sated giant snake, wolf and lion cubs following their parents prowl around and a flower that looked very much like a portion of female-specific anatomy. I had interesting experiences of leading some PUG teams around on a great big sewer dungeon map crawl where no one knew anything about the area and we were basically mapping it and making it up as we went along, as well as tried to raid for the first time and learned about things like "kiting."
In Warhammer, I had exhilirating scenario PvP moments and romped around capturing keep sieges in big zerg-y hordes, firing siege machines, etc. I got a total kick out of seeing my Marauder's arm shapeshift from one shape to the next and changing roles in turn from backstabby pokey git to AoE machine to debuff-utility-claw-thing. Of course, it was the first taste of Public Quests and Open Groups, and for what it's worth, they were interesting mechanics, even as they ran into some preliminary problems.
In Aion, I probably grouped the most due to the very traditional Asian forced grouping mechanics. Besides fending off the ubiquitious Chinese gold farmer bots, I also met a tank most likely from our continent who had a distinct preference for East Asian players as being more competent over Aussies and Americans, and joined in for a few fun world boss kills with him and a cohort of distinctly Chinese-guild "ninjas," who were distinctly professional in the way they killed stuff, and also had a reputation for ninja-looting from practically everybody (you got the feeling they picked 'need' on everything because they wanted to maximize their profit run for the day). I ended up winning the day on a survive-the-near-endless-waves quest with a PUG on the first go by lucky dint of everyone blowing their cooldowns at the right moment and surviving most heroically until the timer went down. And I greatly enjoyed the dungeon instances and elite areas in which gliding properly to spots to evade mobs was used as a tactic - though at the time, it was nerve-wracking to not screw that up.
So the question is, do I want to jump on board with RIFT? Knowing how the ship is likely to sail?
At first, I said I didn't want to be an early adopter of this MMO. Give it time to mature and develop... But actually, virtual worlds are at their most entertaining and memorable when they are populated.
Would it hurt to just play it through once and just see the sights?
I like teaming up when the dungeons are unknown and the guides and tactics haven't been written. The expectation to stand in a certain way or react in a certain way is not there. I dearly want in on the remaining betas.
Nor am I expecting to do anything about SW:TOR, the lore just leaves me cold, I'd just read up on what other people like about it at some point. I've got nothing until Guild Wars 2, basically. That and replay old MMOs and all the Steam games that I just bought for this whole year.
What it will cost, to be an early adopter is as follows:
If I preorder the normal edition digitally off Trion, it will set me back $64.40 in sgd.
If I preorder the collector's edition digitally off Trion, it will set me back $77.30 in sgd.
If I preorder the non-digital collector's edition off Amazon, it will set me back $103.10 plus an unspecified amount of shipping, which is likely to be at least 20 bucks in usd, or $25.80... leaving it as a grand total of $128.90.
If I go to Sim Lim Square and get the collector's edition there, it will probably cost me $130 or more, plus the agony of waiting for it to arrive, and the agony of having to go down to the store to get it.
This is not inclusive of the founder's monthly fee, which is a 10 buck rate for 6 months, or $77.40 all told, or 12 bucks for 3 months, or $46.40.
The absolute cheapest to get into the game and the betas would be $110.80 for three months.
The absolute most expensive would be $207.40 for six months. (Which when you average it out, is still stunningly a little cheaper per month, but we're still talking about between $34-36 a month.)
(Yet the cheaper option per month technically speaking would be the normal edition and six months, then we're talking about paying $23-24 a month. And the most expensive option per month is a whopping $58.80 per month for three months.)
Is it worth picking up RIFT for 60 odd dollars, and a free month? I'd say yeah, probably, and one will get beta access to play it sooner, which is always tempting. And it is actually a game worth playing, unlike some other betas I can think of immediately. It's worth rewarding the devs at Trion for hard work at a decent game that is significantly bigger than a 5-10 buck indie game.
Is an additional $12.90 worth starting with a backpack with 24 slots (assuming there will be an option to buy it in game later) and a two-headed turtle mount at level 20 and a shiny weapon? (there are other options to make up for those in game, for sure.)
Well... The two-headed turtle is kinda persuasive.
I'm leaning towards yes... if I even get the game at all.
The next question would be, are the non-digital goodies in the box worth $51.60 to ship over? There is a soundtrack, a mouse pad, an 8 gig USB drive, and a hardcover 128-page comic. I love all the goodies, and I especially crave the comic. But the truth is that I don't think it's worth 50 dollars to move it all over.
I will probably be able to download the RIFT soundtrack from -somewhere- eventually, and maybe the comic will make its way to those sites as well. I hope. Those are the two things I'd want. I can live without another mouse pad, since I already have a very good, expensive one from Razer. And the USB drive is nice, but if I really needed space, a hundred bucks at Challenger will probably get me a terrabyte worth of space.
And it would save me the agony of waiting. I hate waiting for parcels. Especially since Trion downloads are silky smooth and blazingly fast.
So it seems I might get the Digital Collector's Edition from Trion, and a six-monther. That will last until the end of 2011, at which point, I think Guild Wars 2 mania wil be rearing its head and it will be time to pause from RIFT.
I don't know when I want to stop from WoW yet. It's still being amusing.
What I do need to take another long hard look at in another blog post is ATITD. So far I've been paying it a premium for its ability to feed me my MUD nostalgia cravings. More on that later.
I don't know... I'm tempted, unabashedly tempted - otherwise, I wouldn't be here agonizing over my choices. The biggest draw for me is that RIFT is pretty and polished.
There's a lot packed into those two simple words, so let me unpack that. When I say pretty, I mean gorgeous. As in drop dead triggers-all-my-love-of-fantasy-art gorgeous. Strong acrylic colors, the stuff I love Guild Wars for. A certain bright vividity of WAR. The realism of the models and crisp high def graphics push it over the top. It is very pleasant to look at, to collect screenshots of, and a lot more open and unconfined than say WAR, or perhaps even Aion.
The polish is a secondary factor, but after playing many rough-around-the-edges MMOs, it is very nice to find an MMO company that has given significant time and attention to smoothing out the corners - smooth and flexible UI and keybinds, functional tutorial and tooltips, stuff that works like you'd expect it to, rather than break down akin to what you'd expect one lone indie programmer to put out. One feels like rewarding that hard work.
I've often said that I was staying away from vanilla WoW to await the WoW version 2.0 variants. Those that have learned and refined their game from the gorilla in the room. From the beginning of LOTRO onwards, I've been playing them and on the whole, enjoying my time in them.
I've even given WoW 2.0, the Cataclysm edition a try and enjoyed that. Still am, though the grind at level 54 is beginning to rear its ugly end somewhat as the gaps between levels gets exponentially longer.
RIFT is a classic WoW version 2.0. At first, the lore didn't strike me as anything original, but I have to say, after just one beta, a lot of reflection and some perusal of hype-building articles, I can get my mind around it somewhat. Enough to be intrigued at the thought of playing through it at any rate.
But for what?
Since moving ahead from CoH to sample other more standardized MMO waters, I have essentially been leaving a trail of dead bodies and fossilizing avatars behind me.
I have a max level 80 Guardian in Age of Conan. I have a sub-50 (level 42-44ish) Marauder in Warhammer. I have a sub-50 (level 42-44ish too) Gladiator in Aion. And those are just the games that I probably won't go back to, even though I still am fond of the games per se. They just ended up a bit too tedious to grind up to max level, I didn't find a guild I liked and endgame wasn't appealing.
The fact of the matter is that I appear to have personal problems with MMO endgames. They take up a significant time investment to find a guild, involve way too much socialisation with strange people for my liking, and all the nice people that I might like to hang out with appear to be across oceans in terms of timezones. Then it involves organized group activities (PvE or PvP) in which one has to make a committment to a schedule and practice and rehearsals and and ... I might as well just join a local community club sports or martial arts team if I were inclined to that sort of thing.
That said, I don't regret any of the time I spent in the games above. They all had their memorable, entertaining moments.
For example in AoC, I got huge kicks out of watching Rhino and Mammoth mounts stomp around, or climbing up to the highest peaks in order to look doooownn at a zone with incredible depths and draw distances. Of seeing little artistic/realism nuances like a slippered Stygian foot peeking out of a very sated giant snake, wolf and lion cubs following their parents prowl around and a flower that looked very much like a portion of female-specific anatomy. I had interesting experiences of leading some PUG teams around on a great big sewer dungeon map crawl where no one knew anything about the area and we were basically mapping it and making it up as we went along, as well as tried to raid for the first time and learned about things like "kiting."
In Warhammer, I had exhilirating scenario PvP moments and romped around capturing keep sieges in big zerg-y hordes, firing siege machines, etc. I got a total kick out of seeing my Marauder's arm shapeshift from one shape to the next and changing roles in turn from backstabby pokey git to AoE machine to debuff-utility-claw-thing. Of course, it was the first taste of Public Quests and Open Groups, and for what it's worth, they were interesting mechanics, even as they ran into some preliminary problems.
In Aion, I probably grouped the most due to the very traditional Asian forced grouping mechanics. Besides fending off the ubiquitious Chinese gold farmer bots, I also met a tank most likely from our continent who had a distinct preference for East Asian players as being more competent over Aussies and Americans, and joined in for a few fun world boss kills with him and a cohort of distinctly Chinese-guild "ninjas," who were distinctly professional in the way they killed stuff, and also had a reputation for ninja-looting from practically everybody (you got the feeling they picked 'need' on everything because they wanted to maximize their profit run for the day). I ended up winning the day on a survive-the-near-endless-waves quest with a PUG on the first go by lucky dint of everyone blowing their cooldowns at the right moment and surviving most heroically until the timer went down. And I greatly enjoyed the dungeon instances and elite areas in which gliding properly to spots to evade mobs was used as a tactic - though at the time, it was nerve-wracking to not screw that up.
So the question is, do I want to jump on board with RIFT? Knowing how the ship is likely to sail?
At first, I said I didn't want to be an early adopter of this MMO. Give it time to mature and develop... But actually, virtual worlds are at their most entertaining and memorable when they are populated.
Would it hurt to just play it through once and just see the sights?
I like teaming up when the dungeons are unknown and the guides and tactics haven't been written. The expectation to stand in a certain way or react in a certain way is not there. I dearly want in on the remaining betas.
Nor am I expecting to do anything about SW:TOR, the lore just leaves me cold, I'd just read up on what other people like about it at some point. I've got nothing until Guild Wars 2, basically. That and replay old MMOs and all the Steam games that I just bought for this whole year.
What it will cost, to be an early adopter is as follows:
If I preorder the normal edition digitally off Trion, it will set me back $64.40 in sgd.
If I preorder the collector's edition digitally off Trion, it will set me back $77.30 in sgd.
If I preorder the non-digital collector's edition off Amazon, it will set me back $103.10 plus an unspecified amount of shipping, which is likely to be at least 20 bucks in usd, or $25.80... leaving it as a grand total of $128.90.
If I go to Sim Lim Square and get the collector's edition there, it will probably cost me $130 or more, plus the agony of waiting for it to arrive, and the agony of having to go down to the store to get it.
This is not inclusive of the founder's monthly fee, which is a 10 buck rate for 6 months, or $77.40 all told, or 12 bucks for 3 months, or $46.40.
The absolute cheapest to get into the game and the betas would be $110.80 for three months.
The absolute most expensive would be $207.40 for six months. (Which when you average it out, is still stunningly a little cheaper per month, but we're still talking about between $34-36 a month.)
(Yet the cheaper option per month technically speaking would be the normal edition and six months, then we're talking about paying $23-24 a month. And the most expensive option per month is a whopping $58.80 per month for three months.)
Is it worth picking up RIFT for 60 odd dollars, and a free month? I'd say yeah, probably, and one will get beta access to play it sooner, which is always tempting. And it is actually a game worth playing, unlike some other betas I can think of immediately. It's worth rewarding the devs at Trion for hard work at a decent game that is significantly bigger than a 5-10 buck indie game.
Is an additional $12.90 worth starting with a backpack with 24 slots (assuming there will be an option to buy it in game later) and a two-headed turtle mount at level 20 and a shiny weapon? (there are other options to make up for those in game, for sure.)
Well... The two-headed turtle is kinda persuasive.
I'm leaning towards yes... if I even get the game at all.
The next question would be, are the non-digital goodies in the box worth $51.60 to ship over? There is a soundtrack, a mouse pad, an 8 gig USB drive, and a hardcover 128-page comic. I love all the goodies, and I especially crave the comic. But the truth is that I don't think it's worth 50 dollars to move it all over.
I will probably be able to download the RIFT soundtrack from -somewhere- eventually, and maybe the comic will make its way to those sites as well. I hope. Those are the two things I'd want. I can live without another mouse pad, since I already have a very good, expensive one from Razer. And the USB drive is nice, but if I really needed space, a hundred bucks at Challenger will probably get me a terrabyte worth of space.
And it would save me the agony of waiting. I hate waiting for parcels. Especially since Trion downloads are silky smooth and blazingly fast.
So it seems I might get the Digital Collector's Edition from Trion, and a six-monther. That will last until the end of 2011, at which point, I think Guild Wars 2 mania wil be rearing its head and it will be time to pause from RIFT.
I don't know when I want to stop from WoW yet. It's still being amusing.
What I do need to take another long hard look at in another blog post is ATITD. So far I've been paying it a premium for its ability to feed me my MUD nostalgia cravings. More on that later.
Monday, January 03, 2011
Zee Tee's Endless Groundhog Day
 |
| Eversion |
Is full of win.
I actually bought this without realizing there was a free version. (Twice.)
I don't begrudge a single cent.
Go play now.
There is a HD version sitting in your Steam games list.
Word of warning: 4-5 and 6-7.
Oh they still give me nightmares.
And I was resorting to walkthroughs by the time I got to world 6 or 7, but wow.
Makes me wonder if I'm maoschistic enough for VVVVVV.
Probably not. I was already in agony with this.
Could. Not. Stop.
For. About. 48. Hours. (In between sleep, food and work, of course.)
How could I not reunite Zee Tee with the Princess?!
... I just don't want to know how many times I died. Probably hundreds.
Sunday, January 02, 2011
Herding Cats in Neverwinter
My apologies to cat lovers out there, but cats are still independent and difficult to control creatures.
The first thing I found upon loading up Neverwinter Nights 2 was that the camera control was finnicky. Very finnicky. To turn my character, I had to move the mouse to the edge of the screen. And when my mouse hit the edge of the screen, the entire camera swung around wildly. Oops -- I've overshot. Swing mouse to the other side, whoa, overshoot again.
Searching in the video options, I found the 'camera turn speed' and 'mouse turn speed', so I pushed them all the way down. It seemed to make a minute difference, but barely enough to notice. Ah well...I will get use to it. I hope.
I got used to it, it was a constantly annoying thing to work under. At any time, the camera will suddenly zoom in, because my character was in a certain alignment against the wall or pillar or even some barrels. I could never really focus on what I wanted to look at, and I could never see the entire 'picture' the way I'm used to in games such as Baldur's Gate or Fallout (1, 2).
This finnicky camera really exacerbated the subsequent real problem with NWN2. My NPC teammates are literally less-than-idiots. An idiot would at least listen to orders, but they won't.
Stand here, I order. Whoa, next moment the guy has run off to attack some random mob on the other side of the map and is dying or dead.
Attack this mob, I order. I switch to another character to issue orders and I find that the first guy had abandoned his fight and is charging off to attack a bunch of archers somewhere else. Meanwhile the badly wounded mobs he was supposed to be fighting are smacking his back. Especially bad if those mobs are thief types.
No, no, no, I scream. You got to finish off the badly wounded mobs first. Why do you keep attacking one mob, injuring it, then going off to attack another? Stop!
Nope, the NPCs give a token nod as I issue the command, then run off and do their own thing when I turn I head for even one moment.
Finally, we're down the the last few mobs. Almost done, then we can rest... whoa what!? The fighter has charged off to the opposite end of the map to engage a new spawn. I stare in disbelief as the new spawn make short work of the sole wounded fighter, then charge down on the rest of the team, still fighting the previous spawn.
Eh, time to reload the previous save game.
The alternative would be to disable the AI completely, but I don't fancy a micromanagement game. (Although it's like micromanagement already.)
So reload the previous save game.
Until there comes a time when it becomes, time to stop playing.
The first thing I found upon loading up Neverwinter Nights 2 was that the camera control was finnicky. Very finnicky. To turn my character, I had to move the mouse to the edge of the screen. And when my mouse hit the edge of the screen, the entire camera swung around wildly. Oops -- I've overshot. Swing mouse to the other side, whoa, overshoot again.
Searching in the video options, I found the 'camera turn speed' and 'mouse turn speed', so I pushed them all the way down. It seemed to make a minute difference, but barely enough to notice. Ah well...I will get use to it. I hope.
I got used to it, it was a constantly annoying thing to work under. At any time, the camera will suddenly zoom in, because my character was in a certain alignment against the wall or pillar or even some barrels. I could never really focus on what I wanted to look at, and I could never see the entire 'picture' the way I'm used to in games such as Baldur's Gate or Fallout (1, 2).
This finnicky camera really exacerbated the subsequent real problem with NWN2. My NPC teammates are literally less-than-idiots. An idiot would at least listen to orders, but they won't.
Stand here, I order. Whoa, next moment the guy has run off to attack some random mob on the other side of the map and is dying or dead.
Attack this mob, I order. I switch to another character to issue orders and I find that the first guy had abandoned his fight and is charging off to attack a bunch of archers somewhere else. Meanwhile the badly wounded mobs he was supposed to be fighting are smacking his back. Especially bad if those mobs are thief types.
No, no, no, I scream. You got to finish off the badly wounded mobs first. Why do you keep attacking one mob, injuring it, then going off to attack another? Stop!
Nope, the NPCs give a token nod as I issue the command, then run off and do their own thing when I turn I head for even one moment.
Finally, we're down the the last few mobs. Almost done, then we can rest... whoa what!? The fighter has charged off to the opposite end of the map to engage a new spawn. I stare in disbelief as the new spawn make short work of the sole wounded fighter, then charge down on the rest of the team, still fighting the previous spawn.
Eh, time to reload the previous save game.
The alternative would be to disable the AI completely, but I don't fancy a micromanagement game. (Although it's like micromanagement already.)
So reload the previous save game.
Until there comes a time when it becomes, time to stop playing.