Baud Attitude

OK, c’mon now.

Posted on February 11, 2008 by baudattitude

Since PC gaming is in rather better shape in Europe than the US, I’ve been ordering some budget games from UK dealers via eBay. This leads me to today’s rant.

British people:

I accept the fact that you get free health care, that your silly “pounds” are now worth well over two of our “dollars”, and that you get to feel all smug and stuff when you talk about “proper English” and how it lets you add extra “u”s to pretty much any word you feel needs an extra letter.

Do you also have to get way cooler postage than us? Is it fair? Is it just?

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Creepy actor coincidences.

Posted on February 9, 2008 by baudattitude

I saw “The Sum of All Fears” shortly after it came out on DVD, which was some while before I started watching “Alias”.

I’m also not very good at keeping track of actors, so I didn’t realize there was any overlap in the casts.

I watched the movie again recently.

Having Arvin Sloane as a presidential adviser was a very creepy thing, especially as he’s supposed to be the Voice of Reason in the oval office. Made watching the movie a very different experience; I kept expecting him to betray the main characters at any moment. 🙂

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Say Hello to Vanity

Posted on February 5, 2008 by baudattitude

There’s a reason the latest PC in my apartment is named Vanity: I really didn’t need another PC. I certainly didn’t need a small form factor PC.

But… I kept seeing references around the net to the Intel BLKD201GLYL motherboard, which is a mini-ITX form factor motherboard with a 1.33Ghz Celeron M processor and integrated graphics, sound, LAN, USB, everything you really need for a basic PC.

It was also $69.99 from Newegg, which is much cheaper than other small form factor motherboards I’ve seen in the past. Mind you, you don’t get a fancy box or manuals for your 70 bucks:

But who needs that stuff anyway?

And here’s the thing: I have an old Athlon box I use for, well, leaving on for days at a time while it downloads huge files.

And when I’ve done a lot of that in any given month, I notice it on the electric bill. Athlons, while great processors for the time, are not exactly shy on the power usage.

Building a box around the D201GLY, with a 2.5″ HD, means that I have a PC that pulls less than 40W of power.

It’s also a lot quieter and doesn’t push out nearly as much heat as the Athlon.

So that’s my justification.

Getting everything together was trickier than I’d anticipated, and not just because I had to take the case completely apart to get the motherboard in. I’d expected to have to fuss about with getting components to fit, and I’d actually expected to wind up having to go out shopping for some essential adapter or another that hadn’t been included with the motherboard or case. It turned out that the iStar case came with a whole mess of cables, so the physical assembly actually went off all right.

The biggest problem was that, to save power – and also to save the cost of a slim-line DVD drive – I didn’t build in an optical drive.

I was booting from an external USB DVD-ROM drive and that didn’t work very well with the first drive I used, which was an I/O Magic external DVD-RW drive – I couldn’t get a Windows XP CD to boot at all.

I could get a Windows 98 CD to boot, but this motherboard doesn’t play nice with Windows 98.

I had the best results booting from a bare IDE drive hooked up with a Newertechnology Universal Drive Adapter, which is an essential piece of kit and one I strongly recommend to any geek who finds themselves having lots of bare drives lying about.

Once I switched to that, XP booted up promptly and the rest was a matter of partition, format, install, blah blah blah.

Installing Windows XP from a pre-SP1 CD is fun, by the way. Windows Update doesn’t work when you’re starting from that far back, so I had to find a way to manually download SP2 from Microsoft’s web site, and after that was installed I wound up with 90 (!) updates to install from Windows Update.

Here’s Vanity, assembled, OS installed, and ready to be put to work:

Cute, no?

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Vin Diesel: The Game

Posted on February 5, 2008 by baudattitude

Movie-licensed games tend to be pretty dire.

Most people make an exception. They say “Movie games are crap… except Goldeneye, of course.”

And that is fair, because Goldeneye was a fine game.

Personally, I would add the “Batman” game for the Genesis to the list of Movie Games That Aren’t Crap, but moving on…

A few years ago, people started saying “except Goldeneye and Riddick, of course.”

And I had a bit of a hard time swallowing that. I don’t know why, it just seemed really unlikely.

However, I am always willing to give something a fair chance, so I picked up a used copy of the Xbox version of The Chronicles of Riddick from Gamestop for the princely sum of $4.50 and put it on the shelf where it remained unplayed for some while.

Then I saw multiple references to the PC version looking really quite nice, so I spent another $10 to get The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay : Developer’s Cut. I installed this and it refused to run, which is one of the drawbacks of PC gaming – I needed a patch, and Sierra no longer made the patch available on their web site.

Poking around the web scored me the patch, and then I put the game aside for a few months, until after I’d finished Prince of Persia and wanted a bit of a change.

I can report that the PC version does indeed look brilliant. The world it’s depicting is rather nasty and not pleasant to look at… but it looks damned good even when you don’t really want to be looking at what you’re looking at. It also supports 1680 x 1050 resolutions right off the bat and even works quite well with a gamepad, which I didn’t expect from a PC title. I had to go into the configuration and tell it that I wanted to move with the left thumbstick and aim with the right… but once that was sorted it was, well, pretty much like playing a console title.

And yes, as far as movie licensed games go, it’s pretty darn good. The middle bit of the game, where you’re running around some mines with virtually no way to defend yourself and getting shot a bunch, does drag on a bit, but once you get past that you get some real payoff.

I understand they’re remaking it for the current generation of consoles, and this is why the Xbox version isn’t backwards compatible, but if you have any kind of recently-built PC I don’t see why you wouldn’t play it on that instead.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames, xbox | Leave a comment

Prince of Persia: The Sands Of Time

Posted on February 1, 2008 by baudattitude

I realize that I am roughly the last person on the planet to not yet have played the new Prince of Persia games. There is a reason for this:

Back in the heady days of my youth, I quite enjoyed Karateka. I spent many happy hours playing it on the Apple II computers at school, and I believe it may be the first game I ever managed to “finish”

The designer of Karateka, Jordan Mechner, went on to design the original Prince of Persia game, which may have the distinction of being the first game that ever hurt me so brutally that I gave up on it for all time. I tried to play it, I really did, but I inevitably died before even getting to the sword, and that’s about 4 rooms into the game.

With that kind of history, is it any wonder that I might be a bit skeptical about a modern 3D update?

On the other hand, it’s one of those games people rave about, so I bought it last year while Gamestop was having a 2-for-1 Xbox sale and it’s been sitting on my “play this” shelf ever since. I have also bought the sequels. This is a bad tendency of mine.

So anyway: I finished Brute Force a couple of days ago – and I will say that, as dull as the main character is and as repetitive the environments are, the two asteroid levels made up for the trouble playing to them and “Flint” is nicely easy on the eyes – and I needed something new.

My typical method of selecting a game is to look down the list of games on my backlog and Google for reviews, paying special attention to phrases like “too short” or “only 8 hours of gameplay” or “too easy”

Prince of Persia came with lots of reviews complaining that it was too short. Some reviewers added “and too easy”.

Sounded like my kind of game.

In what I will consider a personal homage to the original game, I died many, many, many times before I even got to the Dagger of Time that the whole damn plot revolves around. I came quite close to abandoning the game completely before I’d even passed the training level.

But I did eventually get the dagger and I have been happily platforming around and killing zombies for a couple of hours now.

The game has a pretty smart checkpoint / save system. It works something like this: Every time you manage to get through a particularly hairy sequence of the “I can’t believe I survived those whirling blades” variety, you hit a checkpoint. Every once in a while the game throws a bit of platforming at you that is going to require new techniques and make you die over and over again, but just to be nice you get a save point first.

Save points in Prince of Persia can be assumed to come with a blinking red sign: Frustration ahead.

This makes them a great way to know when to take a break.

I do, however, have a minor quibble with a design decision as far as the checkpoints go.

I will describe.

Last night I met the first boss fight. It’s the scene where you meet your father again and catch up with Farah. If you’ve never played the game, it consists of fighting 16 zombies and then a boss. The boss is actually kind of pathetic, but the zombies can wear you down through sheer numbers, if nothing else.

When I got to this boss fight, I had just had some whirling-blade-related mishaps. I was running on a tiny sliver of health and one full tank of sand. That won’t make any sense if you haven’t played the game, but as I’m the last person on the planet to play it, I feel confident that I don’t need to explain about the sand. “Tiny sliver of health” makes sense to anyone, and I am confident that we can all visualize what kinds of mishaps one can experience when whirling blades are involved.

Anyway: I looked at the mass of zombies in front of me. I looked at my health bar. I said to myself:

“I hope there was a checkpoint just before this fight.”

And there was, and it was a good thing, too, because the zombie horde killed me without breaking a sweat.

Not that zombies sweat, I guess. Anyway, they only had to land three hits on me to kill me.

So I get the “you died! retry?” screen, as expected, and it puts me right back into the boss fight, which I didn’t entirely expect but I’m glad not to have had to go back through the platforming bits, and…

…I still have a sliver of health and one tank of sand.

I had to kill all 16 zombies, and the boss, while taking fewer than 3 hits. This took, I do not want to think how many tries, but it turned my “I’ll just play a little bit more and then I can get to bed by 12:30” into “I hope I don’t wake the wife up coming to bed at 2.”

But, damnit, I feel good about winning that fight. I got really, really, REALLY good at blocking, I will tell you that. 🙂

Posted in videogames, xbox | 2 Comments

A New Perspective on Bitching.

Posted on January 28, 2008 by baudattitude

OK, so:

Back in 2002, early 2003, Microsoft rolled out the Hype Train for an upcoming game called Brute Force. In retrospect, they probably poured the hype on a little TOO strongly, as it got a bit of a backlash when it came out and wasn’t the Next Halo… but I digress.

I’d played the demo version included with a magazine and quite liked it, and it came out shortly before my birthday, so my loving and thoughtful wife made sure that I had a copy.

Keep in mind, I hadn’t played Halo, or really any similar games on the Xbox up to that point. I’d spent an awful lot of time playing Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball and Panzer Dragoon Orta.

With those as my gaming foundation, Brute Force was Hard. I died over and over again just getting through level 3, then finally gave up on the game as a lost cause thanks to an escort mission on level 4 where I simply couldn’t keep the guy I was escorting from running in front of me and getting to enemies before I had a chance to clear them.

It didn’t help that, while the game looked great, the main character had all the personality of a rock.

Not an interesting rock, either.

Four years later I decide: Yeah, the main character is still pretty damn uninteresting, but I’m going to man up and and least TRY to play it.

I got through the first six levels in a sitting. I barely even noticed the escort mission this time. I’m not going to do anything silly like complain about this; I’m just going to feel a little silly about all the bitching I’ve done about how I really wanted to like this game, but they had to put in a stupid impossible escort mission and blah blah blah blah.

Posted in videogames, xbox | Leave a comment

Backlog: The Progressing.

Posted on January 27, 2008 by baudattitude

3 months ago – October 26, to be precise, I made up a list of 45 games to put at the top of the backlog. Everything else went into plain white storage boxes so I could concentrate on titles that were either highly regarded, or that I’d played through partway and been distracted, or that, well, just had a cute main character.

Finishing Kameo today brings me up to having finished 7 of those, so that’s some decent progress.

I’ve also played through, well, six games that weren’t on that original list, so I pretty much suck at sticking to a plan.

Still, it’s keeping me off Everquest. I get the occasional twitch now and again, but whenever I consider resubscribing, I remember that if I do that I’ll never get anywhere with the backlog. 🙂

Posted in videogames, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment

Kameo: Making Things Difficult For Myself.

Posted on January 25, 2008 by baudattitude

So, I’ve gone back to the Xbox 360’s launch library for my next game, Kameo. This was a game I was really looking forward to when it was announced as a Gamecube title – I even had a Kameo wallpaper as my desktop background for some while.

…but, then it got moved over to the Xbox, and then it got delayed long enough that it turned into a launch title for the 360, and I don’t pay full price for launch titles on any system so I wound up not getting it until I found a copy in Sears for 20 bucks…

Anyway, when I was looking at “what should I play next”, I picked it because it had a reputation for being fairly short, and well, cute fairy in miniskirt.

Ahem. Carrying on. It’s a really pretty game and I forgive it for taking so long to come out. I know Rare’s gotten some knocks for not being the juggernaut developer they were back in the Nintendo 64 days, but this is a really gorgeous bit of software.

It is, however, possible to make some truly tragic mistakes while playing.

For example: The intro level is a tutorial kind of mission, and when it’s over you wind up in a garden that serves as kind of a hub for the rest of the game.

If you go poking around the garden a bit, you wind up with all kinds of power upgrades, including two extensions to your health meter and a doohicky that serves as a health regen item.

If you dash right off into the world, and don’t go poking around the garden, you might wind up cursing for the first several levels of the game, including a couple of boss fights, before you look up a FAQ to see if it really IS supposed to be this annoying and if you really ARE supposed to be dying so often.

Let’s pause for a moment and consider which approach I might have taken.

Thank you, and good night.

Posted in videogames, Xbox 360 | 8 Comments

The Doctrine of First Theft.

Posted on January 22, 2008 by baudattitude

Pardon me for a minute while I get serious and ranty. I promise, it’s all back to “yay, I finished another game!” or “look at the neat thing I bought” next post.

I was browsing around for new wallpaper last night and ran into something that really annoys me – it’s something that, in a play on the “Doctrine of First Sale”, I’ve decided to call “The Doctrine of First Theft.”

It’s the idea that, because you’ve stolen something, it gives you some kind of ownership over it.

In this particular case, it was someone who scanned images from art books, stuck them in front of a background, and then claimed that the result was their creation, and as such you couldn’t take it and put it on your own page. This is a rationale used quite a bit on fan sites, whether it’s something that doesn’t take any real effort – screen captures, scans, that sort of thing – or whether it’s something that actually takes some creative efforts – wallpapers, fan-subtitles, and so forth, that take a piece of existing art and create a derivative work.
My innate reaction to the concept is “To heck with that, you stole it in the first place, so you don’t have any control over what’s done with it.”

But, it strikes me that I might be being somewhat unfair, so I wanted to go through my thought process on the matter.

This is a photograph of a cel I own.

This is a physical object and bit of artwork. I own this; I can sell it to someone else or cut it into pieces, put it into a collage with other things, and sell the collage.

This is a scan of the same cel:

I don’t own this. If I were to put this image on a T-shirt and try to sell it, Shogakukan could legally stop me from doing it.

In fact, by putting it up on the web, I’ve infringed on their copyright. They could ask me to take it down. They could ask me in all sorts of nasty legal ways, and they’d be in the right. I rather hope they don’t, but I can’t complain if they do.

Now, then – if you were to take this image and put it on your own web page, what recourse do I have? I don’t have any ownership of the image, so it’s not like I could come to you and say “Hey! You stole my picture! Take it down!” – I have no right to distribute it in the first place, it’s not my picture.

I suppose I could go to Shogakukan and say to them “Hey, this guy has an illegal image on his web page, make him take it down”

But that would be kind of silly since I put it up on the web in the first place.

That’s not the whole issue, though. Let’s continue.

Here’s a photo from my last vacation to Japan.

I’m pretty sure I own this. I’m within my rights to put it up on this web site, and if I wanted to publish a calendar of “temples in Japan”, I could probably use the photo. I’m not entirely sure how the presence of bystanders in the photo affects that, but I think I’m still in good shape legally.

By taking the photograph, I automatically get copyright protection. This means that if you copied the photo and put it up on YOUR web site, I could legally say “Hey, take that down!”

Not that I would, because I’m not a jerk and I don’t think my vacation photos are all that special, but in theory I own this image.

So let’s combine this with the image I don’t own:

Let’s take a moment and admire my amazing Microsoft paint skills.

…

OK, let’s continue.

I’m pretty sure I don’t own this. I own the background, sure, but by adding an image that I don’t have any rights to, I think I’ve created a composite image that I don’t have any rights to. So, again, Shogakukan could say “Hey, knock it off!” and I’d have to comply.

But I’m also pretty sure that, again, I can’t tell anyone else what to do with it. I can’t say “I stole it first! It’s mine!”

Anyone out there want to chip in with their two cents?

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I achieve perfection!

Posted on January 22, 2008 by baudattitude

…well, in at least one way.

I finished Phantasy Star Universe’s offline, single-player Story Mode tonight, and that gave me 1000 gamerscore of a possible 1000. So, I got a perfect achievement. See?

Moving on…

While I still wish that Sega would get their act together, ditch the 3d action pseudo-MMORPG thing, and put out a turn based Phantasy Star V, it turned out to be pretty enjoyable. Your own enjoyment potential will depend on how much you can tolerate truly dreadful voice acting and one-dimensional button-mashing gameplay, but apparently I have a decent tolerance for both these days.

It helps that the storyline is broken up into twelve episodes, as if it were a TV show, each with an opening sequence, ending credits, and next episode preview. This is a design that I’d like to see more of in RPGS – one pitfall it’s easy to fall into in an RPG is not knowing when to call it a night and save, to grind just a little more and get just a little further. That way lies boredom and burnout. With highly episodic content, it made it easy to stop playing and take a break, and that in turn helped prevent burnout.

The game also gets many bonus points for providing cute girls in bulk lots. There’s one character in particular that will appeal to any old Gall Force fans with Catty fixations, but even if pink-haired robot girls aren’t your thing, you’ll probably find someone to bring a smile to your face.

Oh, and the voice actors do eventually get better. I’m still an “original language or die” kind of guy, but the actors seemed to be much more in touch with their characters by the end of the game.

I understand that there’s also an online mode, where you team up with up to 5 other people and take on instanced missions while you grind experience and loot, gaining access every five levels to a new set of instanced missions and better loot. I’ve played that. It was called Lost Dungeons of Norrath. I’m not playing it again.

I’ve never played the Phantasy Star Online games, because, well, the “Online” in their title turned me off. I’m given to understand, however, that they may actually have offline story mode play as well, and I may have to go back and check them out.