Here’s a short little video review I made to a short little adventure game. I did it for A Hardy Developer’s Journal, a site you should totally read every day at least 14 times.

Game created by Steve Poulton, aka Calin Leafshade. Site: http://thethoughtradar.com
Download game

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• Saint’s Row 2: Just finished story missions, only way to describe it is to listen to that part in Won’t Get Fooled Again when Roger Daltrey just screams “YEEEEAAAHH!!!”
• Mass Effect 2: Got it preordered. Wanted to get the collector’s edition but, like an idiot, I waited too long.
• Arkham Asylum: Being Batman is just as much fun as you would expect.

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• Modern Warfare 2: The single player campaign is great, even if the story is a bit too WTF, but if you want an aneurysm, play the multiplayer online. I either do really good or really, really bad; one game I get up to a chopper gunner and beyond, the next, I’m getting shot like Tupac.
• Left 4 Dead 2, GMod, TF2, KOTOR, Prince of Persia, etc.: My laptop and I are in trial separation.
• Fallout 3: Good game, it just can’t hold my attention for that long.

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• Medal of Honor – European Assault: Oh man, there was a time when I thought that this game was anything other than boring, unbalanced eyestrain.
• Halo 3: … and a time when I thought that this game was anything other than boring, unbalanced ear-rape by 12-year-old brats.

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• Another game: one on which I’ll comment later, more extensively.

Every generation has a different view of the future, but people have been hoping for some things since the 20′s and humanity continues to drop the ball. Things like…

5) Space Elevators

Get this, according to Wikipedia, the technology for these things has existed since 1978. They’d even pay for themselves! After you get the elevator operational, just charge gratuitous amounts of money for people to have a couple hours in space. It worked for Richard Branson, and he hasn’t even taken anyone yet.

4) Spinal cord Bluetooth implants

This great idea belongs to Andy Ihnatko and would eliminate the need for printers, displays, keyboards, speakers, hell, basically everything needed for using your magical audio-visual communication and computation device today. Of course there’s the obvious security issues of your brain being open to wireless hacking, but there’s nothing in there that you haven’t already posted to twitter, facebook, and youtube.

3) The death of 3D

I don’t care what anyone says about 3D being “more realistic” or “the next big advancement in cinema/gaming.” They’re wrong. It isn’t. It hurts your eyes and causes visual overload. When I saw Avatar, (one word review: meh), I spent the whole time thinking how much I’d rather see the film in 2D, or at least a better film. Avatar’s problem was that the 3D made the already-pushing-it-in-terms-of-believability aliens lose all realism and turned them back into digital freaks. Also, particles in 3D are the most distracting thing ever; you’re trying to watch two characters converse but your eyes can’t lock down on one of the dozens of vertical planes in which movement occurs. Stupid flower petals/ashes/holy flying anemonae.

2) An Apple tablet

Seriously, Apple, get on that.

1) Laws against the stuff the 60′s people wanted

I know, personal jetpacks and time machines would be cool, but have you stopped to think about how impractical and dangerous those things would be? Time machines, if possible, have the dangers of paradoxes up the bum and jetpacks would need way too many safety features and airspace regulation. Don’t even get me started on artificial intelligence. Some of these things are just too dangerously powerful and powerfully dangerous to be created.

So on the whole, humanity as a whole has a lot of work to do over the next 10 years to keep me happy, which, admittedly, is probably not the best goal for the entire world to pursue.

So I succeeded in staying in bed for 24 hours straight. All in all, it was a fun experience, though I don’t plan to do it again anytime soon unless it’s for charity or something. Some highlights…

• I’d say most of my time was spent with video games, and most of my video game time was spent with Fallout 3. So far, pretty nice game, though arguably inferior to Mass Effect in most ways besides combat, graphics, and auto-saving. But it’s a different type of game for a different audience.
• It seems every time I rent Spider-Man 2, the DVD is scratched or really dirty or something else that prevents me from watching it all the way through. I still don’t recall if I’ve ever seen the whole thing.
• The best way to scare off someone on Omegle asking “m or f?” is to respond “lioness.”
• Richard Feynman’s a beast.

Thank you Ryan North of qwantz.com for the inspiration!

Well that’s my plan. I’m gonna stay in bed for 24 hours straight. Instead of going to bed and simply not getting up, I’m going to start at noon CST tomorrow and go to noon on friday. Why am I doing this? Why not? I’m officially on winter break, so I can do whatever the heck I want.

I will be a little bit more prepared than T-Rex; I’ll have all my electronics within arms reach, as well as a cooler full of tasty treats and maybe a microwave.

About the electronics, my Macbook Pro will not be joining my experiment on account of it being a broken piece of crap. Even after formatting both partitions and doing a full reinstall, the old girl’s still crapping out on me. I did upgrade my Windows partition to 7 and it’s pretty nice. The best part, though, is that I more than doubled the partition size so I can download all the games I want. I would very much enjoy playing my latest purchase, Knights of the Old Republic, except for the aforementioned fail. But I’ve got an appointment at the Apple store before zero-hour tomorrow and I’ll just drop the thing off.

So yeah. 24 hours in bed. I think it’ll be fun. I’ll have my Xbox, my iMac, and Richard Feynman’s autobiograpy, and I’ll be tweeting all the way.

Let’s have some structure:

1. Video games: I recently beat Mass Effect, and let me say that it is definitely one of the best games I’ve ever played. It gives COD4 a run for its money as my favorite Xbox game. Sure, it has a lot of flaws (annoying inventory system, the MAKO vehicle, Unreal engine 3), but it more than makes up for them with an incredible story, truly lovable characters, the best dialog system I’ve ever encountered, and more than tolerable combat. Go buy it now. Other games I’ve been playing recently: Left 4 Dead 2, Saints Row 2, Spider-Man 2, and Modern Warfare 2 (see a pattern?). All of them are really good, but none of them are quite as epic as Mass Effect. I’m planning on getting the collector’s edition (EDIT: For the sequel in January, that is), which is something I’ve never done.
2. Computer problems: If you’ve read my twitter in the past two weeks or heard my screams of anguish (audible radius: 2000 km), you’ll no doubt know that my computer is friggin’ screwed up. I have nearly exhausted my options for fixing it, but I don’t think it’s too late yet. After some preparation, I plan to back up all my essential stuff twice, including app licenses, and do a complete format and reinstall. I’m probably going to end up doing this for both my Mac and Windows partition, so I’m going to use this opportunity to upgrade to Windows 7 and increase the size of my Boot Camp partition. I honestly don’t know why I’m upgrading, since the last 3 times I’ve upgraded my computers I’ve wrought nothing but sorrows.
3. Christmas: I hate Christmas music. I like Christmas, but I hate the music more than anything. Other things I hate more than anything include the cold, rain, final exams, and media whores. Why I’m in Memphis during the winter and why I still have yahoo.com bookmarked is beyond me. But once again breaking my own rule of never announcing anything until it’s done, I have plans for literally 9 different thing for my holiday break. Instead of breaking my rule outright, I’ll just bend it a little by giving the first letter of each: M, C, A, K, F, T, P, S, and B. Guess away.

Well, it’s that time of year again. No, wait, it isn’t.

So it turns out MacHeist is doing a “nanoBundle” which, short story short, is a half-dozen odd Mac apps for $0, i.e., free.  There’s some good stuff in it, like WriteRoom and Twitterrific. There’s some details about unlocks and some stuff on Facebook to get another app or two, but the big deal is that it’s free.

In the realm of not free crap, some pretty stellar-looking games are coming out this Christmas season. I’ve got Left 4 Dead 2 and Modern Warfare 2 pre-ordered, and the demo of L4D2 is friggin’ uh-maze-ing. I’ve also been getting back into the swing of PC gaming, TF2, L4D1, and my second play-through of HL2, not to mention copious amounts of fun in Gmod. My MBP handles these games all pretty dandily, HL2 gets 60fps+ on absolute maximum settings. My main issue right now, though, is a lack of hard drive space on my Bootcamp partition. I’d like to give it another 25-30GB from my Mac side, and I’ve heard murmurs that such a feat can be done with GParted. I’ve used the live USB with my Eee with eventual success. While I’d prefer not having to backup and restore, I might be willing to do it with Windows XP, maybe as a transition to 7. But I’m not at all interested in wiping and restoring OS X. This is something I’ll have to research, being a potentially fatal operation.

I’ve never really been called picky before; I’ll eat almost anything and try to give new things a shot. What I have been called is petty. Even if I try something, I’m always quick to point out the smallest imperfections that taint it. The one area in which I am the pettiest is video games. Some examples…

• I can’t stand unskippable company logos when I start a game. Mass Effect and Gears of War 2 both suffer from this. Sometimes, I just want to jump in and play, which brings me to my next point…
• Little/No/Difficult continuing playability in sandbox games. After you beat one, you should be able to go back and mess around in the big, open world fairly easily. One example of a game that messes this up is Assassin’s Creed. After you beat the game, if you still want to parade around slitting throats, you have to listen to your master’s old spiel again, which was boring enough the first time, but becomes exponentially so each time you have to watch it.
• Pickiness about what constitutes “Start” in the main menu. This one’s really petty, but for so long, I’ve been used to being able to press A to move to the next page of the title screen and instead having to press the actual Start button seems stupid. Incidentally, Mass Effect and GoW2 both feature this quirk as well, which leads me to deduce that these two games are planning my murder.
• Not pausing after saving. Again, Mass Effect does this, as well as Bioshock. I know it’s sort of a compromise between the regular save of most console games and PC’s quicksave, but I would like a little confirmation in between saving my game and returning to being maimed so I don’t have to immediately load back because I was unprepared.

That’s it.

I can see many ways this can be taken out of context.

Not too long ago, Google announced “Wave.” It seems to be a shiny online collaboration tool made out of pure heroin. Or at least you’d think so by looking at how desperate people are to get their hands on an invite to the exclusive online party. But the obsession seems to have died down; Wave’s been out of the Twitter trending topics for a while now and I’m seeing fewer shameless pleas for invites.

Why all the fuss?

Sure, Wave looks pretty spiffy, and if you do a lot of collaborative work, I could see how it would be useful, but the demand goes beyond that. A lot more people want Wave than need it. Why? Well, for one, it’s new and exclusive. “Gosh, maybe if I can get a Google Wave invite I can finally feel special!” Plus, with the power to invite others comes responsibility, or, conversely, power-hunger. “Sure I’ll invite you… if you make me a moderator on your forum.” These motivating factors have led me to deduce that the hype surrounding Wave and the invites thereto stems at least partially from the economy of scarcity. Since there seems to be only a limited number of spots that Google will allow at this point, the value of an invite increases with time, to the point where invites start showing up on eBay. Because people want into the Google-select so badly, they are willing to pay actual money for a service that they’ll eventually be able to get for free. Of course, since time is money, some people can justify this monetary sacrifice.

I’m biased though, I really wouldn’t have anyone to collaborate with except classmates, but that’s commonly known as cheating. Plus, I haven’t really done any research at all on Wave. Still, I can see the allure of holding such a power, the potential for evil is… staggering. Yes… quite staggering.

At work, I’ve started creating an iPhone app for my rapper boss and am looking at getting into iPhone development as a “serious hobby.” It could fit into some entrepreneurial ideas I have for the future involving videos for university courses, too. Now the virtual iPhone that comes with the SDK certainly works, but I imagine it would be much nicer doing the testing on an actual device. No doubt it would also be friggin’ sweet for mobile browsing, games, utilities, and more or less anything I could imagine. But, daaaamn, a data plan is expensive! Not to mention the charges I’d undoubtably rack up by going download-crazy on the app store. I have a phone. I have an iPod. Do I need an iPhone?

Condawg says no, an iPod Touch would do. I initially brushed off the suggestion as impractical because the Touch didn’t offer enough improvements to replace both my phone and iPod. I’m starting to think it still might be an option, but I’m unsure. Clearly, I’d prefer an iPhone, but would it be an investment or an indulgence? Before I bought one, I’d need to know that I could at least partially cover the costs from app or work income. So before I make the purchase, I’ll want to be more fluent in app design and Objective-C.

Or I could blow all my money on a plane ticket to New Zealand to get some dandy books.

In other news, Triumph of the Nerds is now for sale on ebay for $20! Check it out here.

Sucks!

1. France: Obvious
2. Mexico: Dirty
3. USA: Jerks
4. China: Full
5. Greenland: Cold
6. Japan: Craaazaaay
7. Libia: Hot
8. Brazil: Wet

Helpful one-line summary for people who can’t read good: “I’m getting Brütal Legend instead of ODST.”

Halo 3: ODST, for douchebags or just jerks?

Lots of my friends are getting real big hards on for Bungie’s new crack baby, Halo 3: ODST. They say to me, “Drew, this game rocks my socks!” “Well it steams my broccoli,” I reply. Truth be told, I haven’t actually played the game, but I don’t really have any intention to do so. I’ve never been a huge Halo fan in the first place; the most immersion I’ve experienced with it is that, through a bizarre chain of events, I now think Korean food “smells like Halo.” The first game I played to the end was Halo 3. I’d played some of the campaign of the first one and a bit of the multiplayer of the second before then but, needless to say, I didn’t have a very firm grasp of the story. After a half-dozen or so hours of shooting the same four or five enemies in poorly designed levels, I came away with the feeling that most of my friends must have had frontal lobotomies to think that Halo was the pinnacle of modern gaming. By contrast, I beat Call of Duty 4 in an even shorter time, but spent a much lower percentage of it wandering around, backtracking, or getting warped back to inconsistently placed checkpoints. Furthermore, I found myself much more attached to the characters. When *SPOILER FRIGGIN’ WARNING* Miranda Keys *ALL FRIGGIN CLEAR* died in Halo 3, I didn’t give a flying flip. Conversely, when *AGAIN WITH THE SPOILERS* Captain Price and Gaz *THAT WAS A CLOSE ONE* kicked the bucket, I literally let out a saddened “Awww!” To be fair though, I admit I was relieved that *LAST ONE PROMISE* the American player character *ALRIGHTY* got deep fried so I wouldn’t have to put up with his squadmates constantly yelling “Bad guys in the open!” in the same kind of voice a ten-year-old boy would use to warn his mates of the impending treehouse assault by the neighborhood girls.

Either way, ODST. For one, the acronym is stupid and doesn’t flow. Until the commercials started polluting the airwaves, I thought it was OSTD, as if it was some kind of occult sexually transmitted disease, instead it sounds like Ontario daylight savings time. Another thing is the troopers themselves. From what I’ve gleaned about the story, you’re basically part of the crew of Firefly. I think this is big, fat, honkin’ STUPID. I’ll admit that I watched the show and liked it a bit, even if my overall goal in watching was to be able to see the movie so my Blockbuster subscription wouldn’t go completely to waste. At the time, I was completely caught up on Lost and the Office had started to get a bit dull, so I was desperate for a new show. I find it strange that Bungie would put in their commercial, frat boy franchise obvious homages to the characters of a cult TV show that is worshiped by the nerdliest of the nerds. Halo is a series for people with very low standards, or at least it is now. I’ve now beat Combat Evolved and I’ve got to say, that while the level design was at best repetitive and at worst labyrinthine, the story, gameplay, and overall experience were a lot more enjoyable and fun. But the thing is, I’m much more interested in filling in the gaps with Halo 2 than playing through the adventures of Mal Reynolds and his spunky crew in ODST.

Also, I’m against the game in principle because it looks like just more of the same. Now I have nothing against sequels, especially not in gaming, but once a developer reaches the fourth iteration of a successful formula without any major changes to the concept or implementation, I’ll have to ask them to please watch the trailer for Brütal Legend. Now that is the kind of game I look forward to. You don’t see Tim Schafer making Psychonauts 2: The Last Hemisphere, do you? What I’m getting all excited about isn’t just the heavy metal (hit and miss), Jack Black (fair share of crap), or the humor (will probably rock, actually), it’s the fact that Brütal Legend is a new idea. It’s the same principle that made Pixar so successful, ideas so crazy and unique that you can’t imagine how the writers came up with them without divine inspiration. It doesn’t take much more than a coin flip to make a game where you shoot aliens as a space marine. Even the first trailers for ODST made it look like a radical departure from the run-and-gun-and-loathe-your-squadmates of Halos 1-3 to a more stealth-based, exploration style . But the gameplay videos seem to show that you’re still running and gunning and still have to put up with all your teammates’ “witty” banter over your radio.

But, honestly, I haven’t played it so there’s a slim chance it could surprise me. The thing is, though, that the trailers, reviews, gameplay footage, and franchise history don’t give me any motivation to give it that chance. Of course, I might just borrow it from somebody and play it just to get riled up some more. I’m crazy like that.

One simple question, who is the best Dennis? Well little kids, through the science/magic of the patented Wellman Dennis Score Index™, we’re about to find out!

Dennis from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

This anarcho-syndicalist peasant from 10th century England worked hard to get on this list. He had to overcome the forces of imperialist repression to prevent the perpetuation of national and regional totalitarianism and blahdy-blahdy-blah. If there’s one thing wrong with Dennis, it’s that he talks so bloody much. He’s like someone’s dad at their party who drones on and on to uninterested guests about good choices of major in the current economic climate.

Hit Points: 62/100

Intelligence: 80/100

Flavor: 12/100

Denis Leary

You might say that Leary doesn’t belong on this list because his name only has one “n” per the traditional Irish spelling. 1: That’s racist. 2: SHUT UP. Besides starring in some movies and TV shows, Leary also features prominently in my fantasies as the captain of the Roxanne.

Hit Points: 77/100

Intelligence: 38/100

Flavor: 96/100

Dennis Kucinich

I honestly don’t really know anything about Kucinich or his political stances because politics is a joke without a punchline that’s not funny. So basically, politics are like Family Guy. The one thing I do know about Kucinich, I learned while watching the Colbert Report, which puts the punchline back into politics. Apparently, Dennis Kucinich always carries around a pocket-sized copy of the constitution. I approve 100%! I think that everyone should carry one too! That way, we’ll always have something to blow our noses with to slow the spread of swine fl- sorry, “Aych One Enn One.”

Hit Points: 24/100

Intelligence: 88/100

Flavor: -8/100

Dennis Nedry

Nedry’s a pretty rad guy, backstabbing notwithstanding. For one, he helps the little girl in the film give a good name for “hackers.” He adds to her contribution of “whiney, screamy, annoying little cuss” his own fair share of “overweight, socially retarded douche-bag.”

Hit Points: 112/100

Intelligence: 1/100

Flavor: -48/100

Dennis Quaid

I’m running out of Dennises.

Hit Points: Gopher

Intelligence: Fairly Balmy

Flavor: Teal

Winner:

With a score of 211, DENIS LEARY wins this year’s Hall of Dennis Awards! Be sure to see next year’s ceremony for essentially the same thing!

So I was frolicking through the interwebs when I found this story on Microsoft’s deep discounts on Windows 7 upgrades for students. People with an .edu email address, like myself, are able to buy Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade for $30 US, a suspiciously close price point to Snow Leopard’s.

And while it is only available for students, the actual OS does not appear to be any different than the full version, and can be used to upgrade either Vista or XP. While the article speculates that the intent of this discount is either to net Mac/Linux users or, more likely, to get current PC users to upgrade, I think that it is actually a move to combat piracy. I haven’t done extensive research, but of the students at my school, the ones who have torrented Windows is roughly “a buttload.” When Microsoft gives these piracy-prone students the option to upgrade legitimately for a price that, in the long run, might as well be free, they might entice a good percent to avoid either the risks involved in illicit file-shareing or the ethical dilemma of stealing.

My personal dilemma is actually whether I want to bother with upgrading at all. I have XP installed on a relatively small Boot Camp partition (46 GB) and use it mainly for gaming and engineering programs. I would like to know if 7 did a similar thing to OS X 10.6 in saving disk usage. Also, to upgrade from XP to 7, I’d have to do a full backup, wipe, install, restore. Do I really want to trade the hassle of installing and the disk space for a small performance boost and interface changes that I probably won’t like anyway? I’ll have to think on this one, but I might still end up buying 7 while this offer still lasts and maybe installing it down the line.

Read full story on Windows 7 Student pricing.

Or read it on Macrumors.