Recently in Gaming Category

My coping mechanism for stress has been broken for a while now. This means that when I'm stressed out, I tend to ignore things and prefer to focus exclusively on the [probably misidentified] primary source of the stress - and my ability to focus is severely diminished. This results in a feedback loop where I get more stressed out because I'm not solving the problem. I'm also having major issues 'switching off' when I'm not working. This makes doing things in the evenings/weekends difficult and even if I take actually time off, I often end up constantly thinking about work and come back just as worn out as when I left. I don't want to complain about it too much though. It's all my fault. Basically, I'm broken at the moment and this was my punishment :)

I've got a new phone (Nokia N900) and spent a bit of time customising that. I have historically always had retro game ring tones on my phones (the last one was the Leisure Suit Larry theme - the jazz version from Larry 7). The N900 has a lot more customisation options, so I've gone with a Space Quest theme. The N900 has multiple desktops available, so I created a few seamless backgrounds. The one I ended up sticking with was an EGA background from Space Quest 2. It looked suitably retro enough. The VGA backgrounds generally looked more like low resolution/badly resampled backgrounds - although a couple did look pretty cool. For my ring tone, I recorded the theme from SQ3 as produced by the PCjr 3 voice track (I recorded a straight PC speaker version too, but I liked the bass line in the PCjr version better - it was less shrill and felt more ring-tone-y).

Here's a video I recorded of it (first time uploading to Youtube!). Apologies for the crap video quality, I was out of focus it seems and I don't have time to re-record it. I had to use my Nikon D90 as the Screencast recording software I have on the N900 doesn't record UI animation, which was the whole point of having it seamless.

I made it outside for a while on Sunday afternoon. Went for a walk around Douglas and took a couple of pictures with the N900. It was astonishingly nice out. I really enjoyed it. I snapped a few pictures (5 I think) in order to test out the camera on the N900. You can see the rest in the Mobile Uploads set on Flickr if you're interested. I didn't do any manipulation to these, they're straight out of the phone.

I did manage to do a bit of gaming on Friday night and Sunday evening. I played some Mass Effect 2 and did the Kasumi recruitment/loyalty mission DLC. So I now have 100% achievements on that. I then started up Splinter Cell Conviction on Realistic. I had planned on playing some Red Dead Redemption, but even though my order shipped on Thursday, it didn't arrive in time for the weekend. Paul was also most displeased :) (Edit: He's happy now though, it arrived today).

I watched Avatar on Saturday night. It was a fun movie. I can see why people enjoyed it so much. It had a lot of the elements that made Star Wars and Lord of the Rings great. It was a fairly traditional story of Good vs Evil and overcoming odds, the hero's journey and fighting for what you believe in. It was actually quite refreshing not to have to be thinking about the plot too much (in that it wasn't difficult to follow). It wasn't trying to be clever, it was just trying to tell a story. It reminded me of some of the old Disney classics too. The visual effects were astounding.

Sunday night I watched two movies. The first was Terminator Salvation, It was definitely a movie. If it wasn't a Terminator movie it might have been pretty good. It was technically well executed, but the script was absolutely awful. The worst part was they kept doing little homages to the earlier Terminator movies like "see, we watched them and did our homework". But then turned around and left major plot holes like they didn't understand them at all. This shit isn't salvaging anything.

Spoilers Follow: Skynet should not have known who Kyle Reese was, let alone what he looked like. Unless you're telling me that Skynet checked John Connors Facebook page and saw that he listed Kyle Reese as his father. If Skynet knew who Kyle Reese actually was, why didn't Skynet terminate him the instant they found him (thus negating John Connor's existence as they were complaining would happen the whole movie). If it was so Marcus would still see him and get John to enter the facility, why didn't Skynet just falsify the information (or, you know, contact John directly itself). Skynet said Marcus was under its influence the whole time anyway. But regardless, only two people knew that Kyle Reese was Johns father (his mother and him - maybe three if you count him probably telling his wife). If Skynet didn't know who he was, why was he #1 on the kill list. That drives the whole plot and it makes no sense. The only reason I could think of that would explain some of it is the N-jump theory of time travel, but that might be giving them too much credit. There were other issues, but that was the most egregious issue I had with the plot. Spoilers End.

xXx was the other movie I watched. It's an older one, but one I hadn't seen. It was exactly what I expected. Light on plot, heavy on action and drowning in cheese. Coming straight after Terminator Salvation only made it seem better :) It was enjoyable, but I went in with low expectations.

On the gaming front I finished up Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Fun game, but it would have been nice to have referenced the story from the first one (even in passing). I was curious about what happened after the end of the first game. I also missed the openness of the first one. This one felt much more linear and constrained (almost on rails except for a couple of missions), a lot like Modern Warfare 2.

I then started up Mass Effect 2 (I'd been originally planning on Dragon Age, but it wasn't meant to be). I need to finish a run on Insanity difficulty to get the remaining two achievements. It's tough work at times, but I'm getting there. Playing as a Sentinel with a bonus ability of Armour Piercing Ammo. The Tech Armour is literally a life-saver.

I keep trying to get something constructive done whenever I have time off, but I guess I'm working myself too hard the rest of the time. By the time I get any time off all I want to do is goof off and do something that allows me to switch off my brain. It is looking like this next week is going to be pretty rough too, I'm actually wishing I hadn't taken Monday off (but I didn't have any idea of the schedule before then). Oh well. I'm sure it'll work itself out :)

On Saturday night I sat down to watch Avatar on Blu-ray. I had missed it in the theatres so I was looking forward to the weekend so I could I watch it. The Blu-ray came with a DVD version of the movie as well, which I thought was a nice touch. Plugging the movie into my HTPC setup, I was greeted with a lovely error from AnyDVD (which I use because my DVD collection is split between R2 and R4 with the occasional R1 DVD). The error explained that AnyDVD had failed to read the disc and I should check the status window for more information. It seemed that the BD+ check had failed.

Not a problem, I thought. It's a Region B Blu-ray, so I'll just turn off AnyDVD and start watching it. I don't need AnyDVD to remove the region coding in this case. My pizza is beginning to get cold at this point, so I just want to get on with the movie. I obviously need to update AnyDVD to support the latest Blu-ray DRM. So I disable AnyDVD and the disc starts playing. After I get through all the copyright and warning notices (and most of a slice of pizza), I finally get to the disc menu, which I see for about 3 seconds before I am booted back to the Total Media Theatre 3 Platinum startup screen with a message stating that my hardware is not HDCP compatible.

It's right too. My HTPC is connected to my Projector via HDMI. It turns out that the projector does support HDCP over DVI-I apparently, but that's not how I have it configured - and I wasn't aware of that at the time in any case. AnyDVD would have removed that requirement, so I decided to see if there was an update. After a bit of searching it turns out they did have an update, it just wasn't rolled out to their website yet (so I had to grab it from the forums). A couple of reboots later and the movie was finally playing. I could finally enjoy my (now cold) pizza. I'd considered plugging the DVD in, but why the hell should I have to pay more for something I can't use? I bought the Blu-ray, so I wanted to watch the Blu-ray. In retrospect, I wonder whether that is exactly why the DVD was bundled.

Fast forward to Sunday. I decide I'm going to continue my second Dragon Age play through on the 360. I connect to Xbox Live and start the game up. I am greeted with a message telling me that the game couldn't connect to the Dragon Age Servers. Fine, I don't need to be connected anyway (my Xbox is definitely online, as I connected to Live just fine). I hit Resume Game and it starts loading. A few seconds later I am booted back to the main menu because some of my DLC apparently could not be found. Strange, as I'm certain I haven't deleted any of it. This DLC came free with the Collectors Edition.

A quick google search tells me that sometimes this can happen and the solution is to re-download the DLC. So I delete the offending file and try to start up the game again in order to re-download. Oh wait, that's right, the Dragon Age servers are down at the moment. Crap. Now I don't have any way to download that DLC again. So. my Dragon Age save game is currently unplayable (unless I started a new game so it wasn't associated with that DLC).

After being deprived of Dragon Age, I figure I'll start up Mass Effect 2. I decide to start up a new character on Insanity difficulty to get the remaining two achievements I need. After starting that up I am greeted with a message welcoming me to the Cerberus Network and asking me to enter my code that came with a new copy of Mass Effect 2. You see, they have this plan to incentivise buying new copies of the game rather than renting or buying a used copy.

That's all well and good, but I have already used the code that came with my new copy of Mass Effect 2 when I went through this process the first time I played the game. So apparently it's forgotten that I already have a Cerberus Network activation on my account. I'm hoping that this is somehow related to the same reason the Dragon Age servers were down (both games are published by EA) but I'll need to verify that later. Just wanting to do some gaming and not jump through hoops right then, I hit Cancel as I'm pretty sure I've played Mass Effect 2 without connecting in the past, and sure enough, I can start a new character.

A close call. I was lucky in that case and it all worked out in the end. Wait a minute. I was lucky? I was lucky to be able to play the game (that I paid full price for) in spite of the DRM. Screw that. This would have been lessened somewhat if EA wasn't so intent on controlling the whole process. If they just used Microsoft's DLC strategy, I might have still been able to play (I at least pay Microsoft a yearly subscription fee to keep Live running). But regardless, it illustrates the point fairly well. Pirates don't care if EA's (or Microsoft's) servers are offline or glitching. 

The pirates have it pretty good. They don't have to pay for their content. They don't have to deal with DRM. They don't get told over and over again that they shouldn't pirate the movie they already paid for. They don't have to sit through trailers for movies they might already own but don't have a choice to skip. They aren't at the mercy of an infrastructure that might go offline at any point for any reason (and eventually - indefinitely). They get to experience the content when they want to. It's on their schedule, at their convenience. I'd like to hope that I'm an edge case with my experiences, but it does feel more like "when" DRM goes wrong, not "if".

Until we make purchasing content as easy and convenient as pirating it. What kind of argument can we really make against those that pirate that content. When we make piracy look like a better experience, we can't be doing ourselves any favours with our paying customers. I've heard the argument that "Well, it prevents casual copying". Bullshit. And even if that were true, we shouldn't be indirectly educating the casual consumer on how to remove the DRM so they themselves can use the content. We make piracy more attractive with this kind of crap.

When I say "easy and convenient", I don't mean simply during the purchasing phase. It has to be end-to-end and it should include similar freedoms (that they'd get otherwise). Things like the Gamers Bill of Rights are on the right track (and even Steam and iTunes DRM to a degree - they do a pretty good job of getting the DRM out of your way). The pirates don't deal with DRM, so why are we punishing our customers?

I finished Splinter Cell: Conviction over the weekend. It was a lot shorter than I thought it'd be, but it was all quality. The story was very well paced, any longer and it might have started to drag. It was a fairly large departure from the prior instalments in the series. You really had to look for the traditional 'Splinter Cell' gameplay. There was a lot more emphasis on getting your gun off. Early in the game it felt less stealthy, but as you progress it settles down a bit and becomes a "faster and more intense" version of Chaos Theory.

I finally started Heavy Rain last weekend. It definitely considers itself interactive drama first and a game second (which I mostly expected after playing Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy and it tells you as much when it starts up). It has been entertaining so far. I do find that the quick time events and timed decisions can be a bit annoying at times. Specifically, I find it difficult to stay in-character while playing. I'm probably not supposed to be in-character, but I made some choices I wouldn't have made if I had more information and/or time to think about it. I found that this tends to pull me out of the experience and alienates me a bit from the character.

It also doesn't help that I am primarily an Xbox 360 gamer these days. I see X and instinctively press Square. I ended up building a mental map of the buttons (X = A, O = B, Square = X, Triangle = Y) which unfortunately makes me very slow or inaccurate at reflexive button presses (even on easy). That's definitely my fault though. I should play more PS3 games. I never really got hooked on the Trophy system as I did with Achievements, so whenever I have the choice between a game on both platforms, even if the PS3 version is superior - I'll go with the 360 version every time. It's telling that I have well over 100 Xbox 360 games, versus only 12 PS3 games - not including downloadable games on either platform, but the ratio would still be somewhat similar.

While I am enjoying it, it does seem to be incompatible with how I want to experience interactive drama. I'd prefer to be able to take my time and consider decisions I'm going to make. I'm being asked to dedicate a considerable amount of time to this story, and I have no option of retrying a section and changing my mind if I'm unhappy with the results. I didn't have any problems enjoying Fahrenheit. If Heavy Rain was movie-length or even mini-series length, I'd have less issues with accepting my choices with the intention to just replay it again later. I'm about 6 or so hours into it, and it doesn't feel like I'm near the end yet.

I understand they are trying to get you to make choices and live with the consequences. I just feel they could have allowed you to control your own saves (or restart a chapter/episode or being able to rewind it) without taking too much away from that. Increasing the difficulty of making some of the choices - perhaps with multiple successes over time required to achieve it - might have done the same thing. Does it really matter if you have this intricate branching story if you frustrate your players to the point they can't be bothered replaying it?

It's not like the decisions I made that I took issue with were even major life or death decisions. Minor things that I accidentally chose were the ones that annoyed me the most - but there was no way I was going to replay the entire game it just to change that decision. I might have replayed the last 5-10 minutes though. Some of this stems from my controller issues, but it wasn't limited to accidental button presses. It's just as bad when it seems the game has lied to you (through lack of information or a misinterpretation).

I don't want my virtual drama to mirror real life in exacting detail. I can make poor choices in real life just fine. I've always felt the point of being part of a virtual experience is that I can say "Stop. That wasn't how I meant to handle that". When I played the Choose Your Own Adventure books many years ago, I would sometimes just alter my decisions or stats if I felt I would enjoy the outcome more ("If you help the dwarf break into the bank, turn to page 76 otherwise turn to page 184" - turns to page 184 - "As you sneak inside the Sheriff and his deputies spring their trap. The dwarf attempts to escape and you are stabbed in the resulting struggle. You are dead."  "Ugghhh" - turns to page 76). I feel I'd be having more fun if I could do that with Heavy Rain.

I have a ridiculous backlog at the moment. A quick glance at the Xbox 360 games shelves I can see Bayonetta, Bioshock 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Borderlands, Brutal Legend, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, Lego Batman, Lego Indiana Jones, Wolfenstein, Wet, Far Cry 2, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, and at least 4 or 5 others. That doesn't even include the games I've played before that I'd like to replay. Ugh. I've just had such a shortage of time recently. It must almost be time for a break so I can burn through some of that. Some of those games I've actually started already and and others are reasonably close to completion (story completion, not achievement completion). <Hangs head in shame>

I haven't watched any movies recently. I did watch some Family Guy, but other than that, there just hasn't been the time - especially with the new schedule. I find myself getting tired fairly early, so I'll usually just read or browse the net after dinner and then go to bed. I spent the bulk of the weekend working (half of Saturday, and all day Sunday). It was mostly a debugging session for some system tests early this week. Debugging is an aspect of programming I tend to really enjoy, but dealing with multi-threading related crashes can be a bit trying. I managed to track them down though, so it was at least a successful effort.

I finally cancelled my Manx Telecom mobile phone. I've had that number for 6 years but wasn't using at anymore (it had been set to redirect to my new number for the past 2+ years). If you have my number as +44 7624 485 957 then you'll need to get in touch to get my new number. 

I started up Battlefield: Bad Company as I'm interested in playing the sequel when it comes out next month and missed the original game when it was released. Not bad so far. I've also got BioShock 2 arriving this week which I'm reasonably excited about. All I need to do now is invent that time machine so I actually can get through all of this; lots of new releases over the coming months and not enough spare time.

I've finally got some of the prints I've been collecting over the years framed. I'll post some pictures once a few more have arrived. It's something I've been talking about doing for about 5 years and it's nice to finally have some movement there.

I'm playing Mass Effect 2 currently. It's really impressive. I have some complaints about some of the story choices and new gameplay mechanics, but nothing really major. I'm having a blast saving the galaxy again. The import feature is probably my favourite thing they've done, as being able to continue my story that reflects my choices is pretty amazing. It feels like I'm nearing the end though.

Recently I've watched Moon.  A very nice movie - even after I had most of the major plot points spoiled. Sam Rockwell does a really good job in it (especially considering the bulk of the movie is just him and Kevin Spacey's disembodied voice). I also watched Blue Harvest and Something, Something, Something, Dark Side. I haven't really watched any Family Guy in the past, it came on after I stopped watching TV, but I really enjoyed those. I might have to pick up some of the episode box sets.

Unfortunately the G25 isn't compatible with the 360. Back in August I had pre-ordered the Porsche 911 Turbo S wheel by Fanatec in preparation for Forza 3's release. This wheel is compatible with the PC, PS3 and the Xbox 360, which is brilliant because the wheel needs to be bolted onto the frame of the racing seat so it's secure enough - this makes changing wheels painful to say the least. Ultimately they had some production problems and the wheel - that was originally scheduled to coincide with Forza 3's release - slipped by about a month and a half.

While I was waiting, Forza 3 arrived. I was keen to try it out and after initially just playing a few laps with the controller, I went through the arduous task of attaching the Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel to the seat. The issue was compounded by the fact that the wheel doesn't have bolt mounts to attach it to things. The official way to attach the wheel to surfaces is to use the clamp that comes with it, but that doesn't work on the Playseat. The creators of the seat came up with a mounting "solution" using sticky velcro strips and some plates you can bolt onto the frame. The end result was sturdy enough, but pretty tacky.

Using the wheel was such a disappointment. It had been years since it had last been used and, unfortunately for it, my new frame of reference was the G25. The difference was utterly astounding. The Microsoft wheel feels like a kids toy. The force-feedback is ridiculously weak and the pedals are floppy with no real resistance at all. I'd also become used to 900 degrees lock-to-lock of turning; the MS wheel only has 270 degrees (a usable 221 according to wikipedia).

I decided that it just wasn't worth potentially ruining Forza 3 attempting to play like that.  So I put it aside. That should change soon enough though, as I received confirmation on Friday that my Fanatec wheel has finally shipped! Words can't describe how excited I am to finally be able to get some quality time with Forza 3.