tempest in a teacup

No, seriously. I was wearing a jacket to work as recently as 3 weeks ago and now the temperature regularly hits 30 degrees Celsius, turning my apartment into a sauna just in time for me to get home (my patio faces west) and making me sweat while I’m sitting on my couch and reading.

I thought Seattle was supposed to be the land of lovely summers and dreary winters, not central Texas.

I bought an oscillating floor fan off Amazon to mitigate the problem, but it won’t get here until Wednesday. In the meantime I guess I’m in for some sweltering nights :/

[08:22] <SonicTempest> man, with Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 both on the way Blizzard is really trying to sap my productivity
[08:23] <Sakuya-san> :3
[08:24] <Fuu> "diablo sapping mah productivity!"

The announcement of Diablo III (for PC and Mac, as per Blizzard’s MO) is bloody awesome, but with sequels to both of my favourite Blizzard franchises on the horizon I think I’m not going to be able to do much else when they’re finally released :(

That said, Diablo III looks fantastic. The game is entirely in 3D now (although still using a 3/4 view perspective), and they’ve added things like the ability to use the environment against your enemies which is very, very cool. Blizzard has released cinematic and in-game trailers here, so check them out.

Currently they’ve only revealed the Barbarian and Witch Doctor classes, but there will be five classes in total. Hoping for a Paladin or something resembling one :p

Not much in particular I want to talk about…just dealing with various things that have been happening recently.

I got a new video card recently - a GeForce 8800GTS 512MB from EVGA. It was a bit of a pain getting it into my case…it’s pretty much the same length as my motherboard, so it was a pretty snug fit (it’s nestled right up against my SATA connectors). Performance-wise, though, it’s a dream. I get anti-aliasing in Mass Effect now (as well as a much better frame rate), and games like Half-Life 2 Episode Two that would chug a bit on my old card now run smooth as butter.

Of course, as luck would have it, the same week I decide to upgrade, nVidia drops the 9800GTX to $200, and ATI comes out with brand new cards that keep up pretty well with nVidia’s current offerings. Such are the travails of the PC gamer :p

In the meantime, work has been…not really as interesting as it could be. After the problems we had on the site a few weeks ago, my team has dropped what we were working on before and has been working full steam on mitigation measures. This is kind of annoying for me since I was just getting my first taste of real software engineering(requirements gathering, writing technical specs, getting them reviewed, the whole lot) when this happened. I can’t complain too much though - the site is what keeps us running, and we’re beholden to the customers to make sure it stays up.

(And if you’re still waiting for me to tell you what actually happened…forget it. I like my job too much to risk it like that. If you must know something, get our official position from Jeff Bezos’ radio interview on KUOW this past week)

Speaking of work, in a couple of weeks, I’ll have spent a year at Amazon.com. I might have been in India by this point had it not been for the interim regulation that lets me stay here until my work visa starts on October 1st. Still, one year…what a year it’s been. There have been low points, but the good has outweighed the bad by a significant margin.

I really should do a proper retrospective before I forget.

In the shorter term, though, I was thinking of watching a movie this weekend since I don’t really have anything better to do, and the release of a Pixar movie is always reason to celebrate. Both Wall-E and Get Smart are looking like good candidates for my dollar…any recommendations?

A big news story I’ve been following recently is Bill Gates’ departure from Microsoft. I can’t help but wonder what will become of the company after his departure…Microsoft is hardly the powerhouse it used to be back in the 90s, and has ceded a lot of ground this decade. I found a vitriolic blog post from a (now former) stockholder, who has used the occasion of Gates’ departure to dump all his Microsoft stock. It makes for very interesting reading.

Given the occasion, I’m wondering if I should pick up Microsoft 2.0 by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. I’m in the mood for some insight on where the world’s largest software company is going, and where it might be going wrong.

Speaking of Microsoft, I’m actually writing this blog post in Microsoft Windows Live Writer. Aside from the cumbersome name, it’s a really nice blog client that works with a wide variety of blog sites and services. Very cool, and easily the most impressive thing I’ve seen out of Windows Live so far.

On a final note, the Jun Senoue remix of Lee Brotherton’s Dreams of an Absolution is currently stuck in my head. Yes, I know it’s from the horrendous next-gen Sonic the Hedgehog - but this is one of the (very) few good things about that game. The others being the instrumental version of His World and this cutscene from Shadow’s story.

I sense my last.fm profile looks pretty messed up right now…

Capcom and Konami appear to think that it is.

First off, Megaman 9. Let’s start off with a disclaimer - I’m not a Mega Man fan. My experience with the franchise is limited to a few minutes with Megaman X and Megaman Zero 2. That said, MM9 has me somewhat dumbstruck. It’s not that it’s a 2D sidescroller (that isn’t an issue at all, and in fact is probably a good move to appeal to Megaman fans). What I take issue with is this:

Mega Man 9 eschews the style of the more recent PlayStation-era Mega Man 8 or even the SNES Mega Man 7, instead going all the way back to 8-bit visuals, imitating the style of the NES games. Series creator Keiji Inafune commented that old-school Mega Man games don’t “fit into the grandiose and expansive world that the consumer gaming industry has become, and so you have to make games that match the current expectations.” This helped determine the game’s direction as a retro-style downloadable title for the WiiWare service.

2D is one thing, but the last thing I expected Capcom to do was take a leaf out of SNK’s book and completely recycle old assets. Actually, even that comparision isn’t appropriate any more, seeing what SNK is doing with King of Fighters XII. Yes, the old Megaman games are revered as classics, but if anything they are loved because they were good games, not because they used art from the 8-bit era! All this seems to be is another cheap attempt to cash in on fan nostalgia (see Street Fighter IV) by completely missing the point of why people love these games in the first place.

If they’re going to put it on a modern console, why not go all out and make a game with state-of-the-art 2D graphics that still stays true to the Megaman legacy? Heaven knows.

On top of that, it looks like Konami saw the announcement and decided to one-up them with their announcement of Castlevania Judgement for the Wii. The game is (of all things) a 3D fighter with motion controls.

I don’t know why Konami thought that Castlevania was great fodder for a fighting game. The system snippets in the article suggest that the game will play exactly like the main games, with heart meters and sub-weapons, but in a 1-on-1 format, which sounds strange. Still, it may be doable. The main reason I’m panning this announcement is the fact that the game uses motion controls.

I cannot think of a single fighting game on the Wii that has benefited from motion controls. Bleach: Shattered Blade is a shallow waggle-fest. Guilty Gear XX Accent Core has motion controls but no-one with any sense will use them. And the flagship fighting game on the Wii, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, eschews them entirely. The precision and timing that such games demand from their players means that control is of paramount importance (which is why any fighting game player will always insist on using an arcade stick). After about 9 months of using the Wii, I can safely say that the Wii remote does not have the necessary control. Games like Sonic and the Secret Rings suffer because of this, particularly on the later levels where it demands split-second reaction from the player.

If Konami knows what they’re doing, they will provide a classic controller option.

There was also that Ubisoft announcement of that new Prince of Persia platformer for the DS which inexplicably uses a chibi art style, but I don’t really consider that to be on the same level as these two dumbfounding announcements (although I think it’s probably just as unimpressive at this point).

Here’s the original list.

Games that have been knocked off the list due to completion:

• Psychonauts - I didn’t get all the scavenger hunt items, etc, but I was level 50 by the time I hit the final boss, and he didn’t give me much trouble.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - Excellent game, but that final boss was far less challenging than the platforming area that led up to him.

Updated progress for the remaining items:

• Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition - No progress made. Haven’t touched my PS2 in a while, actually.
• Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition - Mission 5-2. @#%@ Regenerators.
• Zack & Wiki - No progress made. I don’t expect any will be made for a while, actually…
• Super Mario Galaxy - No progress made. That Luigi purple coin mission is really hard if you just bumrush it without any planning (like I tend to do)
• NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams - Finished the main story on both sides (not that it was hard, there being only 3 levels on each side and a common final level + boss fight). But I always try to play platformers to completion, so my next target is A-ranking everything. Yes, that includes that music mission in Memory Forest, a mission whose designer really needs to be shot.
• Advance Wars: Days of Ruin - I, uh, played a few more turns of mission 13. Still haven’t beaten it.
• Sonic Rush Adventure - I’ve been doing more time attack runs than Sol Emerald hunting, if you get my drift.

New entries on the list:

• Mass Effect - Level 20, just picked up Liara T’Soni. I’m playing as a Soldier, and will be going for a Paragon rating, like the goody-two-shoes that I am.
• Beyond Good & Evil - I actually haven’t gotten very far in this game because of a weird bug that causes my framerate to drop like a stone when I’m in the overworld. Just to remind you all, this is a 2003 game having problems running on a 2006 video card.

The graphics are beautiful, but the silly number of boost pads and essential linearity of the levels is somewhat worrying. I’d hate for this game to devolve into a mindless speedfest after the positive impressions people have been having. As much as people criticize the Rush series for emphasizing speed, they also remembered that they were platformers first and foremost, with speed being a secondary concern.

Of course they haven’t seen fit to show us any of the wolf segments yet, and the game is releasing in six months’ time.

This makes me very, very happy. Especially because the Pyro is my favourite class.

Hopefully the achievements will be better designed than the Medic ones…some of those are just ridiculous (can you really expect a Medic to kill 50 Scouts in regular play with his needle gun of all things?). I’d like to earn my achievements through good Pyro play, not going out of the way to piss off my team.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

As you can see, I’ve added a banner to the right for Firefox Download Day 2008. The occasion? Firefox 3 is finally being released. Technically it’s been out there for months now (I’ve been using it since the second beta version) but this marks the completion of development.

The primary focus of the Firefox devs for 3.0 has been improving performance - a new memory manager has been put in, and many of the outstanding memory leaks from 2.0 have been fixed. In addition we now have Acid2 compliance (not a really big deal in the larger scheme of things, but an important psychological milestone) as well as a spiffy new UI (which conforms better to the OS Firefox is running on), and a new feature called the “Awesomebar” which really deserves the name. There’s a nice video outlining some of the new features in Firefox 3 here (Flash required).

The Mozilla folks are trying to get as many people to download it on Tuesday as possible to set a Guiness World Record, so if you already use Firefox 2, or are looking to switch, be sure to pledge your support!

I’m a big fan of the SimCity games…or at least I was, until the two-pronged attack of SimCity DS and SimCity Societies made me retreat to the safe haven of SimCity 4, sobbing like a schoolgirl. The handheld iteration of my beloved franchise was nothing short of a shoddy port to a platform that couldn’t handle the complexity that SimCity fans demanded, and Societies pretty much did away with everything that made SimCity what it was, while providing absolutely nothing to make up for it.

I suspect EA and Tilted Mill Studios are well aware of this, because last week they released a demo of the game, based on the most recent patch of the game, that supposedly adds a new strategic layer to the game. I decided to take it for a run, and for some context, I decided to compare it to another recent city simulator, City Life by Monte Cristo Software.

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