For Sunday: First Ever Tech Support

Game Play: The Last Guy Demo (PSN)

The only real complaint I can make about The Last Guy is that I'm not sure I can agree with such a loose definition of the term "zombie". I mean, this is just the demo and we're already staring bouncy eyeballs in the, uh ... eye.

That's just not a zombie. It's an eyeball.

But in general the game is pretty much gold. You rush around, collecting people along the way and try to determine safe routes to get them back to the escape zone. Thebouncy happy dance music is completely in tune with the pace and atmosphere. The backdrops, drawn from satellite images, look amazing.

It's hard to tell just how long the simple concept will last - but based on the demo I'd would certainly be giving it a try.

What's Old Is New Again

This picture was cheerfully lifted from this article, talking about integrating rich media elements with consumer electronics for fancy information age mashups (more or less).

What's crazy is that when I saw that picture, I realized I had seen it before. Or rather one very, very much like it. I was at a conference in San Francisco held by a company some people might have heard of called Netscape where they were illustrating their new flagship, Communicator. Communicator was Netscape's salvo into what they thought would be the next generation of browsing: a one stop shop of information integrated deep into your computer where you could pick your email, schedule your life and get information pushed to you whenever it wanted.

At one session they pondered - why stop at computers? why not televisions? And showed a mockup of a baseball game with Internet fed information scrolling on the bottom. TV channels and push channels - all rolled into one.

Of course, another company we might have heard of was a bit annoyed at the idea of Communicator being the core location of their own flagship and spent many a dollars putting it back into a much smaller box.

And that certain company is not completely to blame, mind you. Communicator was full of weak points. Push channels never really took off. We now live very comfortably with their simpler, more portable and more maintainable cousin - RSS. Webtops in general were a pretty buggy affair (and I should know, I hacked one together for State Farm capable of launching Windows apps). Instead we have a modern web app world, where you don't really need either a webtop or a monolithic application capable of running all your apps in one stable.

But over a decade later, it's interesting how the song very much remains the same. It's a big world of information out there - and sooner or later it will get crammed onto my big TV.

Game Play: Warhawk

Well that was disappointing.

After reading a few reviews and being quite interested in the so called "4-player offline" mode. From what I read the game was a delightful little romp dogfighting while making good use of the PS3's motion sensing controller.

Thing is? Not so much. For one thing, "4 player offline" means "LAN". Yes, some reviewers are either reporting or repeating that this phrase but let's get specific - you cannot play Warhawk without being online somehow, be it your local network or the Internet.

Which really sucks because if there was ever a game that needed an offline mode it would be Warhawk. To be precise, Warhawk really needs a tutorial mode so that you can learn the controls before waltzing into a map and getting shot down over and over again while you can't figure out how to even aim.

I won't waste too much time complaining about a game I've already deleted from the hard drive, but let me finish with wondering why the hell they even have walking and driving portions to the game. It makes the entire offering feel like a cheap Halo knockoff - especially when they are the only bits you can figure out quickly.

Big thumbs down.

Movie Watch: Perfume - The Story Of A Murderer

Perfume is an odd corner of cinema. It's wonderfully shot, stars a handful of notable actors (including Dennis Hoffman), has a tight and interesting story and most people probably have never heard of it. The movie follows the life of perfume journeyman John-Baptiste who has "the greatest nose in the world". While that might sound like possibly the most dull concept in the world, read the subtitle again. Baptiste is a man who enters life in a gruesome way, lives abused and outcast and seeks desperately for the ability to cling on to the one thing he understands, aroma, in what quickly turns into brutal ways.

The main problem with Perfume isn't that it will bore you, but that the tone can feel to topple between drama and horror without submitting to either one. At time there are even moments which feel not necessarily light, but the narrative adds a kind of whimsical feel. Still, while not entirely unpredictable, Perfume will grab you with its unique plot and keep you until the end.

And again, the visuals are lush here. One of the curious things about HD is that a good DVD can upscale to the point where you might think it's Blu-Ray if the source material is good enough. Perfume is that kind of film.

Sony - Could I Have My Download?

Last night I did some purchases from the PSN. Mostly demos and that kind of thing, but I also rented The Bank Job as a backup movie for the coming weeks. I wanted to download it overnight since when we watched 30,000 B.C. it didn't work so well trying to watch it "on the fly" as it were.

Unfortunately it didn't work so well "as a download" last night. As in, it wouldn't download. It just sat there, stuck at 0% and wouldn't activate the download in background either.

Not really good behavior for a store selling downloadable content...

Game Play: Civ Revolution Game Level Bug

OK, so - seriously. What the hell?

I just tried to win a domination victory by besting the other civs in the year 2100.

I was closest to an economic victory by a narrow margin.
I was the only civ I know of to put anything into space.
I was the only civ who conquered another civ.
I was the cultural victor by a very wide margin.

Let's be clear: I could have won the game about forty turns ago.

The computer, however, in its wisdom - deemed me second place. As far as I know, despite the hours (and those hours are about four times what they need to be thanks to game crashes) I've put into this game there is no way I can win it even though all of the above is true.

Anyone from Firaxis care to explain this nonsense? This is seriously an impediment to me wanting to play the game any further, knowing that the computer will simply elect a winner based on anything but logic. Granted, this is Emperor mode - but the only victory I'm missing from Emperor is domination and I don't see that happening by capturing each capital with the all Civ pile-on which is the AI. And if another civ can beat out the "most points" rule by having a single edge in any of the categories, not sure if I can get it by hitting 2100 either...

Game Play: Civ Revolution Crash Level Bugs

OK, as much as I can adore Civ Revolution as a game, it is rather inexcusable that for a single game I have tried to finish except that the following occurs:

1. The game can't decide combat and just "dances" into eternity
While kinda humorous in one sense, this isn't nearly so funny when you have been playing a single player game for an hour and suddenly all of your work goes up into smoke because the AI is too stupid to decide between two numbers. I mean, seriously, this is the kind of programming a high school student could accomplish and in the last two days it has managed to lock up my game twice. The last time was after a couple hours of play - which all vanished.

Not good, 2K. Not good, Firaxis. This is game development on the level of shameful, to be honest.

Oh, or it just locks up
Can't confirm if this is a specific PS3 bug or not, but again it is somewhat annoying when you spend half the night trying to develop a decent Emperor level defense only to have the game die because apparently the nuke animation locks up the entire operating system.

Not good, 2K. Not good, Firaxis. This is game development on the level of shameful, to be honest.

Oh, did I say that twice? I'd say wobble, wobble - but you seem to have lifted enough Simlish from other games to understand that. Just not "quality assurance" it would seem.

Movie Watch: The Dark Knight

I'm not sure how much there is to say about a movie with as much buzz as The Dark Knight. It's every bit as good as you've probably already heard, it does feel a little long but not uncomfortably so and Ledger is so dead on brilliant in his role that the whole situation surrounding his death is probably even more tragic it might seem.

There's a few slips of editing from here and there where you might wonder just how scenes fit together, but in general the movie feels epic in nature for a comic film. The story blends key elements of the Batman mythos in general - the Caped Crusader's relationship with The Joker, with the law, with chaos itself - and handles it smoothly. If anything the movie is an affirmation that the superhero genre can evolve and mature with style and grace.

Gone are the overly digitized backdrops and it was something to see Chicago look like Chicago. We didn't outright the scenes in our hood that they shot so they were either cut or they may have been some of interior scenes (my suspicion is that it might have the Gordon residence).

Also, The Watchmen had a trailer prior to the show and it looks completely smashing.

Meme Watch: Diablo III

Every now and then a scuffle will appear on the net and it kinda scuttles past me. Such was the case with people complaining about the colors of Diablo III, a complaint which I honestly thought was some kind of LOL Blizzard style joke, but apparently not so much.

So let me just sum up my opinion on it. Complaining about a more diverse color palette on Diablo III is akin to bitching about getting a brick of gold because it arrived in a paper bag. It's idiotic and completely misses the point. I've been more or less addicted to Diablo since the first and as long as they don't convert the entire art direction to a My Little Pony theme - I just thank goodness we're getting a sequel at all.

Game Play: Soul Caliber IV

I've always been a huge Soul Caliber fan, from playing the game first with Big Brother on the Dreamcast. I'm not a huge fighter buff in general, despite a huge flirtation with Eternal Champions which might point to the opposite, but I like the genre when it's done well.

For the most part I'm willing to say that Soul Caliber IV is the genre done well. Briefly though, I want to talk about one bit which is just truly annoying.

There's been some fuss about the inclusion of Star Wars characters into Soul Caliber. I gotta say that with a so-called plot along the lines of Soul Caliber, they could pretty much have Kris Kringle fighting Kris Kristofferson and I'm not sure I'd notice.

No, the problem is that someone seemed to have let the inclusion of LucasArts essentially break, or at least throw a decent sized monkey wrench into, the arcade mode of the game. While I think including The Apprentice from the upcoming Force Unleashed games is perfectly fine, I don't see why he has to be ten times harder than anyone else in arcade mode.

I mean I played as Darth Vader and took the so-called boss out for pancakes after not so kindly making him my bitch in about ten minutes. The Apprentice, who is not the boss of the mode, took almost an hour of complete swearing and near controller tossing. I don't see how that is anything but bad design and someone's idea of Lucas worship. I don't give a damn who The Apprentice is or how powerful his little mitochondria are supposed to be - he shouldn't stand out as significantly more powerful than everyone else in an entire roster during an entire game mode. It's just stupid.

Otherwise I'm mostly enjoying the game. Even playing as The Apprentice, which is of course not as godlike as playing against, is something worhwhile - but would someone please tune this jackass down a notch?

App Store Hijinks

Personally I think the App Store is only just shy of completely brilliant. One of those times that philosophy that drives Apple really shines and pulls together something which quite honestly changes the conversation as well as the game.

But I did say just shy. There's some pretty glaring faults to be had here. Nothing which is odd or surprising considering what's going on - but they still exist. There's no good way to deliver trial software - which has lead several developers to start distributing "lite" and "full" versions of their software to accommodate. Juggling the apps I've downloaded from my phone, from iTunes, kept, deleted, etc. onto the phone itself is a bit of a mess and I keep forgetting to update the sync settings prior to actually syncing.

The other half of the App Store problems involve, well, the apps themselves. The now much blogged $999 "I Am Rich" app is probably the epitome of the controversy - but much of this is also due to a much inflated sense of what Apple would allow and disallow from the store in general. And much of that was a complete lack of messaging on Apple's part on what they would allow and disallow. It was, and probably pretty much is, roughly designed as "what we want". Some people took that to mean that if you didn't follow Apple's much touted design concepts, you wouldn't get through the door.

Honestly I was always skeptical of that and somewhat expected to be ... well, pretty much what it is. There's been a lot of comments about Apple allowing an app like "I Am Rich" onto the store as well as for Apple removing such an app. My suspicion was always that Apple would be more like a bouncer than a fashionista at a party - it's in Apple best interests to have the widest range of apps on the store and a high volume. They pretty much can't lose here, a lot of free apps mean that there is more incentive for people to own an iPhone and a lot of pay apps means more to their bottom line.

The key phrase there being - a lot of apps in general.

The real problem, I think, goes back to the concept of trialware. The real problem is that there isn't a decent mechanism for determining what's truly crap and what is not. Something like "I Am Rich" is probably pretty easy to discern for most rational people but I could see where Apple might pull it just to avoid dealing with an angry customer. "I Am Rich" is really a non-issue, a humorous footnote in what will be the history of the App Store, but the real problem for Apple would be a glut of $9.99 and $19.99 apps which completely suck. If people pay up front for apps that don't pay off, they'll be less likely to try them out in the future.

Which defeats the whole "have a lot of apps" angle in the first place.

Game Play: More on Civ Revolution

Civ Revolution has now easily overtaken Bad Company for staple stress reducer around the pad. The Girl started her first empire last night while I've beaten Emperor with a economic and cultural victories so far. I've played a small amount of online, but will probably play more of that down the road.

Despite this addiction, the game isn't without some flaws. Perhaps it's my paranoid fear of the world being overtaken by giant robots, but I swear the computer starts cheating more and more at battles with the higher difficulty levels. Maybe it's just random chance, but there's often a slew of combat which just feels cheap and annoying. When my rifleman crew defending at 59 gets blown away by a cannon army with an attack of 27, my battleship of 18 falls to a cruiser of 9 and my modern infantry gets squashed as they walk off the assembly line ... all in the same turn - you start to wonder what that floating point unit is doing behind the scenes.

More annoying, though, is the computer AI's near complete inability to engage in war with itself. After winning last night I saw the chronology show that the Russians and the Aztecs had been at war at some point ... which I can't quite comprehend since both of them were throwing everything they had at my capital at the time. At one point the Aztecs were going to win with a tech victory, so I spent a bunch of money bribing every other nation to go destroy them. Ten rounds later I was 5,000 bucks poorer and the Aztecs were one space shuttle richer.

Which brings me to the fact that the diplomacy is so two dimensional that it's paper thin. The biggest use for it is bribing off other leaders to stop attacking for a few rounds so that you can finish that infantry army to defend yourself. Otherwise you have a lot of telling them to go shove their demands where the pixels don't shine.

And there is the occasional just outright bug. The funniest is the "dance bug" where the combat logic locks up and armies just dance around for eternity. Moderately funny was the odd "Roman Settlers" which briefly appeared instead of barbarians - with an attack strength of 999. Before anything happened, though, they vanished. Less funny ones are where the interface glitches out and makes it difficult to do things like activate defending units.

It's a great game, don't get me wrong. But it could use a patch or two and maybe some tweaks to some existing gameplay.

And a co-op mode would rule.

iPhone 2.0.1 out, "Fixes Bugs"

If you ask your local iTunes nicely, it will update your iPhone from 2.0 to 2.0.1, and if I recall correctly, the changelog was as simple as "Bug Fixes". I just got mine updated but haven't had much of a chance to see if it fixes any of the random app crashes I've seen. I'm reinstalling the (also updated) Galcon now to give it a test drive.

Movie Watch: The Orphanage (El Orfanato)

I think The Girl put it best when she called The Orphanage a "thriller with a plot of gold". There's far more going on in this movie than the average horror fan will expect and it is all used for excellent effect. Presented/produced by Guillermo Del Toro, which essentially just means the guy from Pan's Labyrinth thinks you should watch it, the subtitled foreign film could only distract the most jaded of viewers as the cinematography and acting are completely brilliant.

Scare-wise I would best describe it as chilling. It reminded me of both Poltergeist, The Changeling and even a touch of Blair Witch Project - and before you wince I mean the creepy psychological parts and not so much the shaky camera and running through trees. Even with this pedigree, the movie takes off into avenues and angles that none of these manage and hit an emotional depth that one could only hope a Hollywood studio could show an audience.

It's not as outright scary as one might as expect, though, and people who have been fed a large diet of Japanese horror imports should be warned that this is as much, if not more, drama than fear.

Highly recommend.