News from Great Castle Wilson

At CES, Microsoft announced “Game Room for XBOX 360″, which is purported to “recreate the old school arcade experience for you (and your avatar)”.

(Image courtesy Engadget)

For Pete’s sake people, can we please stop finding yet another way to re-deliver games that we got bored of twenty years ago. If we ever want the world at large to treat games like a valid art form, we’ve got to stop glorifying trivial gameplay and graphics so stupid-ugly that they can be implemented by emulating the whole bloody machine in JavaScript.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is the sequel to the 2007 game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. At it’s core, Uncharted 2 is an “action adventure” game — think Tomb Raider — with all the standard features: run and gun levels, platforming, environmental puzzles, etc., but what really sets this game apart is the cinematic quality of the ultimate experience.

To give you some idea of what I mean, I can tell you that I happened to be watching the latest Indiana Jones movie on the day after I finished Uncharted 2. Hands down, the game beat the movie at every level — action, story, characters, even emotional impact.

This is a good game. It’s definitely the best PS3 game I’ve played in 2009, and I’d put it up with the “greats” like System Shock and Mass Effect in terms of how much I enjoyed the experience. If I had to complain about anything, I’d say that the strength of the story ultimately limits the replayability, but even at that, I suspect that I will play it again at some point.

Click the picture above to get to the official game site. If it doesn’t start automatically, check out the “E3 Trailer” to see what you are getting yourself into.

Summary: Get it.
Rating: 9.5/10

Here’s a quick link-of-the-day with MacWorld’s take on an a number of the currently available e-book readers:

Review roundup: E-book readers

Personally, I’ve tried all of the Sony’s, the Kindle 2, and a couple of other e-ink based ones. In all cases, I found the screen flash on page turns quite frustrating. Ken tells me that you get used to it, but for me the iPhone still bests all of the other devices, as long as you aren’t trying to read PDFs. (And that’s not just because I’ve always got it with me.)

What I really want is an Apple tablet with a Pixel Qi-like display.

Ok, so the story isn’t deep — seriously, the guy beside me in the theatre brought a four year old and a six year old and despite the disturbing parenting choice they both “got it” just fine.

And even though the er… avatars didn’t quite make it out the other side of the uncanny valley, they were close, oh so very close. I can honestly say that there were many scenes where it never even occurred to me to think about how long it would have taken to render.

You owe it to yourself to go see this in 3D. Even if it doesn’t seem like your kind of movie, the sheer artfulness of it is enough. Afterwards, leave a comment. There are things worth discussing.

Update: There are likely to be spoilers in the comment stream, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t click through.

I continue to be thankful that we are lucky enough, as Canadians, to have access to the best-of-breed, thought provoking, genuinely compelling content from CBC Radio One. I have talked about their shows both positively (e.g. Ideas) and negatively (e.g. Wiretap) before, and now I’d like to draw another excellent program to your attention: Afghanada.

Afghanada is a radio drama series about the day-to-day life of a small group of Canadian soldiers stationed in Kandahar Province. The writing is strong, with a cast of characters that truly feel like living, breathing individuals put in frequently hellish situations. Having never been a soldier, I cannot say whether the portrayal of these people’s lives is accurate, but I can say that the power of this show has made me feel more compassion for the individuals in our armed forces than all of the traditional news reporting put together.

I am particularly pleased that you can now get all three seasons worth of Episodes of Afghanada via iTunes. Season one is an awesome deal, at $12 for 22(!) half hour episodes.

I highly recommend this series to anyone who enjoys well acted, radio programming.

(and say “Hi” to Coach for me)

It’s fascinating.

I was reviewing the comment spam for this blog, or rather I was reviewing the ones that didn’t get automatically caught — there’s always a couple. This time, there was one reply that genuinely looked like it could have been legitimate. The content was apropos of the original post, if not directly focused on it; it was clearly not machine generated (i.e. no “dissociated press” style errors); and the tone was heartfelt.

The only things that seemed out of whack were:

1. The text was written in a way that it could apply to a fairly wide range of original posts.
2. There was a website link attached to it that seemed a bit dubious.

I really couldn’t definitively cast it as spam. But, for those that don’t know, I loath spammers. To give you some idea of how much, on one of my other sites you can find this:

I formally curse all spammers as follows:

Your children will die of a disease that would have been curable, except that you put such a drain on the internet that the communication needed to discover the cure did not happen.

You get the idea.

In any case, this time the particular comment in question didn’t make it. So, if you’re out there thinking that you legitimately replied to this site, and you don’t see your response, and you’d like to have a discussion about it, feel free to send me a note.

A reasonably good timewaster, for a reasonable price ($20 US), but not much more than that.

Torchlight adds a couple of minor additions to the Diablo formula but they don’t enhance the gameplay significantly. Graphics are definitely better than Diablo II, but are still stuck with the same isomorphic perspective. Finished in about 18 hours and, with no chance for multi-player, unlikely to have much replay value.

Summary: Don’t buy this, unless you need a Diablo fix.
Rating: 7/10, but it gets an extra point for being a budget title.

Capsule summary: Vista sucks dead warthogs. The remainder of this post is just me writing for catharsis. Feel free to ignore.

It all started at around 19h00 last night. While playing with the new MacMini, I decided to boot up my PC in preparation for a night of mayhem with the guild, playing Warhammer Online.

For some reason, Vista asked me for a keyboard driver, which was odd because…

1. It was a bog standard, MS, wired keyboard
2. I had changed no hardware on the system (including the keyboard) in weeks

Even stranger was that, after allowing it to go look for a driver on MS Update, it couldn’t find one. I mean, you’d think they would have the drivers for their own keyboards, if they were going to have anything.

“Oh well”, I think, “I’ll just go get the driver from the Microsoft download site”. But ten minutes, a few megabytes, and a reboot later, I’m staring at the same message. WTF? And now things were worse: Previously, I had been able to use the keyboard (even though it claimed to have no driver) in a generic way (i.e. standard keys worked, special keys didn’t), but now I couldn’t type on it at all. Once again, I tried all the standard hardware debugging steps, but no luck.

Now you’ll remember that this was all supposed to be in preparation for a night of Warhammer gaming, so the fact that it was now close to 20h00 and I still had no keyboard meant that I was starting to get stressed. Which probably explains why my next leap of er… intellect was that maybe it was actually the keyboard hardware itself that was failing. (Although I suppose that wasn’t a totally unreasonable assumption, since it was several years old, had had pepsi poured on it at least twice, and was missing a key or two).

Those of you who know me will be surprised to find out that I had no spare keyboards lying around. Which meant that I had to rush off to the local Staples to pick up a new one. The Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 7000 was on sale, and that’s what I ended up with.

Brought it home, installed the drivers — made only somewhat painful by not being able to use the keyboard — , plugged in all the bits, and… (you guessed it) no keyboard. This time, it was complaining that it couldn’t find a driver for the wireless dongle (neither from the just installed CD nor Windows Update). Very weird.

Going back to the MS download site (on my Mac, because the lack of a keyboard was starting to get to me) I found out that there were newer Intellitype drivers. I downloaded them, but then wasn’t able to connect to the Mac’s file share from the PC. That is, in Vista I could still type in the password using the Character Map applet and lots of clicking, but it wouldn’t connect anyway. Hm…

[It's now 21h00, and I'm officially missing guild night. Time to get creative!]

Copy the Intellitype drivers onto a USB key, stick the key in the Vista machine and… it can’t find a driver for the USB key. WTF++?

So finally I start to clue in: It’s not the keyboard at fault, it’s that Vista can no longer find drivers for anything. Going back to the worlds greatest help desk (i.e. the web), I find that the query “Vista stops being able to find drivers” has many hits. Sifting through the chaff leads to several patterns for common ways to attempt to fix it, which I tried without success. In the end, a depressing number of people said “The only way I could fix it was to reinstall.”, so I joined the club and at 22h15 started the looooong task of reinstalling Vista.

Somewhere around 1h00 I had gotten far enough that most stuff (including the keyboard) was working again, which explains why Vista makes me tired. In any case, I’m now down to a single yellow “?” in the device list, for an “unknown device” with no driver. If I can figure out what it is, I should be done. I guess that’s tonight’s job.

If you’re reading this, then NfGCW has successfully returned to the web after being moved (along with all the other sites) from my trusty ol’ G5 PowerMac to a brand new MacMini. Overall, the Mini is awesome; with the exception of 3D gaming (which I never do on my server box) it’s faster than the G5 at everything I’ve thrown at it. I suspect that’s being helped by the increased RAM in the Mini — 4Gig, up from 1.5 in the G5.

I’m also running Snow Leopard now, which meant that once again I had to go through the dance of getting the AMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP) configured properly. Highlights for 10.6 include:

• I installed the latest x86_64 version of MySQL. For my traffic level, I doubt that will make a significant performance difference, but you never know.
• The PHP that comes with SL is actually current and includes the PDO drivers for MySQL. That’s great because it’s one less thing to install/configure versus previous upgrades, but there is still some work to do:
  • edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to uncomment the LoadModule for php5_module
  • copy the /etc/php.ini.default file to /etc/php.ini, then edit php.ini and modify (at least) the lines that contain “default_socket” to point at /tmp/mysql.sock, and lines that contain “default_port” to 3306.
• At this point, php and mysql both worked (as evinced by the fact that phpmyadmin would run, and tell me useful stuff), but the blogs were still failing. It turns out that everyone (i.e. php and mysql), were now finally agreeing that I needed to use the “new” password format, so with a touch of…
  

  SET PASSWORD FOR 'wpuser'@'%' =
PASSWORD('not really my password');

  …we were good to go.

Of course, I still have all the other sites to work through. Sheep’s Ahoy is fine. Both the wiki(s) and the gallery seem to be working, but the genealogy site is completely busted. Unfortunately, that’s going to take more effort to get going again, since it has several dependencies on php4. I may have to rethink that one; one possibility is just to suck the content out of it, and then switch to a Mac based genealogy program that can publish to the web. The good news is that the G5 box is still around, so that can wait until I have some free time.

Anyway, let me know if you see anything weird happening.

Like a whole bunch of other people, I tried to get into the Champions Online open beta tonight. After carefully pre-loading the files from FilePlanet at one point last week, I waited patiently for them to unlock today. Then started the launcher, and…

…was immediately told I needed to download a 3Gig patch. Apparently, the pre-load had put some of the files in the wrong place, and the launcher assumed it needed to download them all again.

Not an auspicious start.

It seems like they’ve got a new version of the launcher up that moves the files locally, but now that one seems to be constantly hanging while getting the content for the things that do need to be patched.

Anyway, it’s a beta, so you get what you pay for, but let’s hope they do better on launch day, or we’re going to have another Anarchy Online on our hands. Ugh.