tempest in a teacup

Yes, I know it’s not Okt- er, October.

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I took one of the existing themes and reworked it to suit my needs. I think it turned out alright. :)

In case you’re curious, the banner picture is from a photograph I took when it snowed here last December - my first real experience with snow in quite some time.

I’m not sure I want to migrate 5 years worth of posts given how tedious it is, but I’ll need to keep my Livejournal account for other things, so it shouldn’t be a problem. For now I’ve just imported all my recent blog posts up until the start of 2008.

So…welcome, everyone! Stay a while and listen. :)

…from LiveJournal. I didn’t even know Wordpress had a feature like that…

There are some caveats, though…embedded items don’t show up (those are stored on LJ servers for some reason), and LJ cuts aren’t translated properly. In addition, all the LJ user tags which I used to link to other people’s blogs are missing. And on top of that, the comments and tags don’t carry over either.

Looks like I’ll have a lot of cleaning up to do.

Another peeve - LiveJournal only lets you export your posts one month at a time. Seeing how my LJ post history goes all the way back to 2004, this may be more of a pain than it’s worth.

I got my H-1B visa today.

Just thought you would like to know.

Our price on NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams dropped to $30 recently, and I decided to go ahead and get it. So far I've put in a couple of hours, and played the first two levels of Helen's story (and have yet to finish the first level of Will's story).

How is it, do you ask? Well, it's definitely not what I'd call “bad.” It does have rough spots, though. For some reason, Sonic Team decided that the mission-based level approach from Sonic and the Secret Rings was awesome enough to be replicated (Hint: it wasn't). As a result of this, each “level” actually consists of five disparate missions, only two of which actually involve flying. The first mission is always a standard flying mission followed by a boss fight (much in the vein of classic NiGHTS), but the others can vary quite a bit. My favourite of the lot are the Octopaw missions, which are essentially a race to see how many links you can get in a given time limit. The standard flying missions as well as the boss fights are also really fun. The experience of collecting chips, flying through rings and trying to rack up ridiculous link chains remains as addictive as it was 12 years ago.

The other missions types are…not quite as fun. Some involve platforming with the two children (who control pretty sluggishly), and others have you flying around trying to paraloop Nightopians, or collecting water bubbles in a round arena, or something along those lines. The bottom line is, they're not really developed as well as the main game, and feel out of place. Much like in Secret Rings, it feels like a lot of the missions were put in for silly reasons (story, most of the time), and I think the game would be better off without them, even if the result is shorter length.

The classic flying levels have also seen a bit of a change since the original game. Instead of collecting enough blue chips to break open the Ideya capture, you now have to steal keys from giant birds flying around each level. I don't mind the change too much, although it does make it tempting to focus on the bird flying away from you with the key and forget about trying to get links. The new levels I've seen so far look pretty nice - an Alpine area with snow-capped peaks and balloons, an underwater area and a castle surrounded by large crystals. The graphics are serviceable, although framerate dips do occur from time to time. The music is also really nice, but that's really to be expected - if there's anything Sega has done right in the past few years, it's the sound production on their games.

Oh, and there's voice acting.

It's actually not THAT bad - better than the shitty voice acting typical of most Sonic games, but it's not going to win any awards. I have to say, though…something about NiGHTS talking seems so…off. It's not a dealbreaker by any means, but I thought NiGHTS' lack of a voice added to the mysterious, playful appeal of the character. Here, he/she/it has a weird British accent, which works alright, I suppose. Of course, now that all the characters can talk, Sonic Team has gone and thrown in a whole bunch of cutscenes to bookend the levels. The pre-rendered stuff is stunning as always, but the in-engine cutscenes make my eyes bleed. On top of that the game is very inconsistent about whether it'll let you skip cutscenes or not, which is kind of irritating when the designated helper character (an owl with a British accent, creatively named “Owl”) keeps jabbering on and on about the storyline, oblivious of the fact that I just want to start playing already.

There are a bunch of control options - not being a masochist, I opted for the classic controller straight away. It's definitely the best of the options I've tried, but I have one gripe with it, and it may be a problem in the longer run. The Wii's analog stick is 8-way, much like the GameCube, and this restricts NiGHTS' flying motions to the 8 cardinal directions with no granularity in between. You can get used to it in time, but it still doesn't feel quite “right,” in the same way that it didn't quite feel right to have to hold down the 2 button to jump properly in Sonic and the Secret Rings (I'm still not used to that, by the way). As a caveat, I never got to play the original NiGHTS into Dreams with the Saturn analog stick, so I have no idea if the game had a full 360 degree range of motion. Still, if there's any game out there that would benefit from something like that, it's this one.

At this point, I'm not regretting my purchase - I was hesitant to buy it for full price since I had heard about the issues, but at $30 it's a pretty good buy. I'd really like to compare it to the recently-released NiGHTS remake for PS2, especially since the PS2's controller may resolve the control oddities I mentioned above.

Remember that X-men manga I blogged about a while back? The one that was trying to do a weird shoujo version of X-men with the institute being an all-boys school?

Pictures have surfaced.

Many lulz were had.

From time to time, when faced with a question about industrial development in Singapore, someone will trot out the predictable line “What do you mean we don't have any successful private home-grown MNCs? Look at Creative!”

Never before in my life have I felt more like punching that hypothetical person in the face.

Creative is not what I would call a “successful” MNC by any means - while their sound cards were good once upon a time, and they were one of the pioneers in hardware-based positional audio, they completely missed the boat when it came to integrated audio (something they're belated trying to make up for), and have been utterly flattened by Apple in the digital audio player space in spite of having been one of the first companies to enter the market. Their practice of disabling card features in software so they can force people to “upgrade” for better features (and suing people who try to make up for their lacklustre drivers) is pretty reprehensible. And of course, their drivers have sucked for a long time, and often come packaged with useless bloatware. Their failure to perform is most evident, of course, in their quarterly results, where performance has been abysmal for years on end.

So where am I going with all of this? Well, I have a Creative sound card. An X-fi XtremeGamer, to be exact. And I'm not sure that it was a good buy.

The first warning signs that I had made a bad purchase were when I tried to play Sam & Max Episode 104: Abe Lincoln Must Die! (which is awesome, by the way, if you like point and click adventure games) on it. The audio would periodically hiss or play back way too fast, which was a major issue for a game that focuses a lot on funny dialogue. It turned out this was an as-yet unresolved issue with the X-fi. More recently, after installing the latest driver, any WAV or MP3 files I play have the same issue. Even when my MP3s manage to play correctly, they're interrupted by intermittent popping and hissing. I'm really glad I backed up all my favourite tracks to my new 8GB Sansa e280 (which I seem to have forgotten to mention on this blog) or I would be even more mad right now.

A few Google searches suggests this is an issue with X-Fi cards ONLY on nVidia chipsets (due to PCI bus behaviour), which is of course not at all what I wanted to hear.

I'm going to try a reinstall to see if it fixes anything, and failing that I'm getting rid of it and switching to my onboard sound chip.

EDIT: Looks like the reinstall fixed something…I saw a whole bunch of registry entries get deleted and re-added while I was running the setup program.

YOU WIN THIS ROUND, CREATIVE! D:<

As you might have guessed from the title, this is another geekspeak-heavy post. I’ll try and make it digestible for the less technically inclined, as usual :p

This past week I took part in a course at work, meant to help Amazon employees understand Amazon Web Services (Click here if you don't know what those are). They’re basically a bunch of services that we vend to software developers to use in building applications. Examples of this are the Simple Storage Service (or S3) which is a simple data store which charges users based on how much space they use. There’s also the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which is a service that lets developers purchase computing time to perform tasks that they can’t do with the resources that they already have (like, say, running complex operations on data sets). In any case, as part of the course, we had to build something using the services that we sell, without access to the internal tools that make our lives easier.

I teamed up with a friend from my team, and we set to work building a system that would allow people to search for MP3 downloads on the Amazon.com MP3 store (shameless plug!) using the lyrics from the song instead of the title or artist name. We did get it working successfully (about half an hour before the deadline), and presented it to the entire class. At the end an award was given out for the best project.

We didn’t win, but it didn’t bother me that much, mainly because of something else I found out from one of the facilitators of the course. Apparently, while testing our code over the weekend, we generated so much traffic to one of the services that the engineer who was on call for the service that week got paged, and had to figure out who or what was creating so many requests to the service.

So, we didn’t win, but we did cause some poor guy to get paged over the weekend.

Sometimes, it’s the little things in life that matter. :D

It's been about 5 months since I got my Wii. I don't usually get consoles this close to the start of their lifetimes, but I made an exception in the Wii's case since I was intrigued by the possibility of new methods of interacting with game worlds. Well, that and the fact that there was a Sonic game on it that wasn't entirely bad. Five months on, I find myself satisfied on the whole, yet still disappointed at certain ways in which the experience has been lacking.

First off, let it be known that there IS good third-party software for the system. I've been largely happy with Capcom's efforts on the system, and Sega has also shown some rare (if rough) inspiration with titles like Sonic and the Secret Rings and NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams. I've heard largely good things about other titles like No More Heroes as well. Unfortunately, good third-party software is far from common. There's a LOT of shovelware on the system, and much of it is either in the form of completely uninspired minigame collections or lousy ports of PS2 games. The Wii has the largest install base of all three current-generation consoles thanks to its low price and emphasis on “casual-friendly” gaming, but so far long-time gamers appear to be expressing dissatisfaction at the third-party software available on the platform, and I would have to agree with their complaints. Nintendo's first-party efforts have been largely solid, if excessively familiar, but what really keeps gamers committed to a platform is a reliable stream of quality third-party software. It's why the DS continues to be a success in spite of its own casual gaming focus, and one of the reasons why the PSP and PS3 are finally seeing success.

The other thing that annoys me about the Wii is how underdeveloped certain aspects of the system are. This isn't a knock against the CPU/GPU performance of the system (it's not even as powerful as the first Xbox, seeing how it lacks programmable shaders, but that's not my focus here) - it's a gripe with the capabilities of the hardware. For one, the 512MB internal memory is incredibly limiting. The lack of significant internal storage has already gimped Guitar Hero III's feature set, and the much-anticipated Rock Band will similarly lack downloadable content. In addition, once the WiiWare service launches, Wii owners are going to find themselves strapped for storage space with downloadable titles vying for space with Virtual Console games. An easy fix would be to support USB hard drives (and Harmonix has already openly asked for such a feature) but it seems unlikely Nintendo will do anything of the sort.

In addition, the Nintendo Wi-fi Connection has proven to be a major hassle. A limited online service hampered by the need for “friend codes” made sense on a handheld with relatively simple firmware and no in-built storage, but on the more powerful Wii it makes absolutely no sense. Why doesn't the Wii have support for the same things that Xbox Live or even PSN does? I've been gaming online since before it was even possible on consoles (1997, with Starcraft, Diablo and Quake) and even those games had far more robust online features than anything on the Wii. No unified friends list, strange and hard-to-remember friend identifiers (which are game-specific for some reason), no support for voice chat peripherals of any kind…WFC is just lacking in so many respects that it's not funny. I do play Super Smash Brothers Brawl online, but it's enough of a hassle that such occasions are rare (compared to say, the times when I log on to Steam and play Team Fortress 2).

I've had fun with the Wii, and there are games, both upcoming and currently available, that I'd like to play on it, but I feel that Nintendo is in danger of squandering its lead if it doesn't address the shortcomings in its platform. Attracting casual gamers is all well and good (and lord knows there are still millions of people out there who shell out money for shovelware) but annoying the core gaming audience who have bought into their platform is far from a recipe for success.

Aria figurines, which I bought last year, but which only shipped a couple of weeks ago :P
(Yes, my webcam is shitty, although that has more to do with the fact that I don’t have any lights in the corner of the room where my PC sits)

I like them overall, although I think Alicia’s face is a little too chubby orz

Man, with all this stuff I’m buying I’m turning into Fat Cat Lim.

In any case, I have a few extras (it was a pack of ten) - Alicia, Akari and Alice, so if anyone wants one, let me know.

(yes, I have two Aikas…one with pigtails and one without. I’m willing to give someone the pigtailed version if they don’t mind the fact that I opened it already)

EDIT 2008/04/12: Replaced the photo with a better-quality one from my cell phone.