tempest in a teacup

In about…40 minutes, to be exact.

I’ve got a lot of things to say right now, but between my last-minute shopping, packing and watching random Daily Show clips, I’ve got a bit of a headache. I’ll pen down some thoughts later, but for now…

Happy New Year 2009 to all my friends and colleagues. Make the most of it.

Damn you for sneaking up on me again this year. Not that it really matters since I don’t really celebrate it anyway. Besides, I’ve bought myself plenty of stuff this year already…I guess my iPhone can count as an early Christmas present to myself.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all, and especially to my colleagues and friends in Seattle who seem to be enjoying (?) their second white Christmas in three years.

It looks like EA has finally decided to set up shop on Steam. The most interesting part of this venture is that the Steam-purchased versions of their games will not contain SecuROM DRM. This deal apparently extends only to current EA releases, such as Mass Effect, Warhammer Online and (unsurprisingly) Spore, but it looks like Mirror’s Edge, Red Alert 3 and Dead Space will be joining them shortly.

Steam’s built-in DRM is far less annoying than anything else on the market, in my opinion, so this is a good move, I’d say.

My friend Perfect Stranger has posted pretty comprehensive impressions over at Orochinagi, so if you haven’t been following the news go read up on his thoughts here.

While I still like the way the game looks, the game itself is still not really impressing me that much. I’ve sort of gotten over the fact that the game doesn’t improve on the tagging system, but there are plenty of other things to complain about.

The main thing is that the game just feels incomplete at this point. I know that it’s technically not ‘complete’ yet (there are still four months before release) but we can assume that by this point they’re not going to be adding any more characters or major subsystems since they’ve already started public beta testing. At this point, not only does the roster feel small, the characters themselves seem to be exhibiting KOF2002 syndrome with small, stripped-down movelists.

A lot of comparisons are being drawn between this game and KOF’94, but that game actually let you use far standing normals to poke and control space effectively, and had DMs that you could actually combo into. It looks like SNKP is trying to get people to get into close range to use their strong attacks, but what’s actually happening is that players, noting that their standing normals have been nerfed, have resorted to using crouch Bs and Ds to poke and start combos instead, making for some rather boring matches overall. The minimalist system just doesn’t really seem like KOF to me, not after SNKP managed to hit two successive balls out of the park with KOFXI and KOF’98 Ultimate Match (with the upcoming KOF2002 Unlimited Match looking to follow in their footsteps).

The graphical makeover is astounding, but I still stand unimpressed.

Got back to Singapore two days ago. The flight was uneventful, and I managed to gather more data to support my hypothesis that turbulence only occurs at mealtime. I watched Iron Man and judged it worthy of all the praise it got when it was released – that’s one I’ll have to pick up on Blu-ray or DVD at some point. I also watched Get Smart, and I only really enjoyed Steve Carell’s performance (and Anne Hathaway’s presence) – the rest of it felt a bit trite.

So what have I been doing for the past few days?

1. Meeting friends for dinner and catching up
2. Trying to get my ancient (vintage 2004) laptop to run Half-Life 2 under Wine and failing (it runs the first game just fine, but then again that game actually had an OpenGL renderer)
3. Putting time into Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
4. Trying out some iPhone games (I Love Katamari and SimCity – and I’m not really impressed with either one)
5. Troubleshooting computer issues (as always)

I’m hoping to buy some programming books and spend some time programming. I’ll probably start with the OpenGL Red Book since the Graphics professor I had in college was pretty terrible, and I’ve always wanted to revisit the subject in a more competent setting. I’ve also brought my copy of The Ruby Programming Language with me, in the hope of finally getting down to writing that IRC client I wanted to write.

I thought about getting a gaming laptop to play TF2 and L4D, but then I remembered that I have a perfectly good desktop computer that does that already. No sense buying something I’ll only use for a few weeks. Still, my ageing Dell needs a replacement…time to go shopping. I guess.

God damnit.

I hope the I-5 isn’t a giant ice-skating rink tomorrow.

As some of you might already know, I purchased an iPhone this past weekend. In fact, I’m composing this entry on that very iPhone…Wordpress already has a client available for it, which, much like their ubiquitous blogging platform, is free.

Overall, I like it; if I had to nitpick (and I do) I would point out the lack of an FM tuner (that NPR habit is hard to kick). You can listen to Internet streams of radio stations pretty easily, but cellphone networks being what they are, the quality of the stream isn’t too reliable. On top of that, the fact that you can only have one set of email and contacts synced at once is annoying (though not a dealbreaker). There are a few issues with the way the calendaring system interacts with Exchange as well.

After having spent just three days using the device, I have to say that the amount of convenience it provides is truly…frightening. This morning I found myself checking my email as I walked to work. To put things in perspective, I live two blocks away from my workplace. I’m starting to understand the mentality of the anti-Blackberry crusaders who decry it as an intruder into our private lives.

On another note, this weekend I’m flying back to Singapore on vacation for three weeks. I don’t have a way to play TF2 or L4D during this period, so let’s see how long it takes for me to go mad.

Of more concern to me is the possibility that the snow forecast for this weekend will mess with my travel plans, either by delaying my flight or by making it impossible for me to get to the airport. The latter occurred back in 2006 when I was here interviewing with Microsoft…an encore would really not be appreciated at all.

I bought 4GB (2x2GB) of RAM during Amazon’s pre-Black Friday sales last week. I got it on Monday and installed it, and things ran smoothly…until I popped into Left 4 Dead today and my computer turned itself off. Twice.

One quick run of memtest86 later, and the result was clear – one of the sticks was bad. In fact, ONE BIT on that stick was bad. It would have passed the complete test suite had it not been for the random number test where that bit failed to get flipped correctly.

The aggravating part is that this happened to me one year ago with the RAM I originally bought to build this machine. The same exact problem – one bad stick of RAM.

On top of that, my five-year old Creative speakers finally gave up the ghost this week, so it looks like I’ll be needing a new set. I’m not into 5.1 or 7.1 setups that much (I used to have a 4.1 setup way back in 1999 but I kept tripping over the rear satellites), so I’ll probably pick up a cheap 2.1 set. There’s a Logitech set on Amazon going for $30 that’s gotten some good reviews.

Fortunately we have a pretty good returns service, so I’ve already asked for a replacement, and will be shipping this dud RAM back to Amazon for a refund. I hope they don’t mind that I snipped off the bar code to submit for my mail-in-rebate, though…

Poor console-to-PC ports are getting annoyingly common these days – Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed (and almost assuredly Prince of Persia since it runs off the same engine) is the most recent one I can think of, but now it looks like Rockstar’s port of Grand Theft Auto IV has joined the club. Apparently the game requires you to be signed in to not only Games for Windows Live, but also something called ‘Rockstar Social Club’ if you want to do any multiplayer matchmaking. On top of that, the performance is terrible, and the game is clearly in a pretty unfinished and buggy state. Here are a few choice quotes from the Steam forums:

“all drivers are upto date and all i get it around 20-25fps, ive spoken to R* about this and they said 20fps is what they class as ‘playable’”

“I am amazed that any company would release a game that requires you to have a computer that can max out Crysis to play it on MEDIUM detail…I would laugh right now if that wasn’t so pathetic.”

“Here’s the problem people have: It doesn’t stack up on the ‘performance to prettiness’ ratio. The visuals are incredibly subpar for the colossal system requirements, and when a rig finally comes along that will run it maxed out at a playable (solid 60) fps; the visuals will be even less impressive when compared to future titles which will not only look better, but run better.”

“I have a 8800GTS 512MB, run crysis on high with no problem, run crysis warhead on highest setting with a solid 30 FPS but in this game I can’t even pick HIGH under texture? The game looks so bad under a benchmark run, there are no detail on the cars, people, the street… I would love to run the game on high and see whats like, with my current setup (Highest setting that I can pick) I average about 38~47 FPS so I see no problem why the hell it won’t let me run the game on high.”

Rockstar’s official explanation is even more pathetic:

Most users using current PC hardware as of December 2008 are advised to use medium graphics settings. Higher settings are provided for future generations of PCs with higher specifications than are currently widely available.

So apparently their engine is so awesome that they included super high resolution textures with the game that can only be displayed on some hypothetical future computer! That must be why they shipped it without SLI support.

One word: BOLLOCKS.

One thing I’ve heard is that the engine is incredibly CPU-intensive (moreso than most Source engine games), and predictably, like so many console-to-PC ports this gen, is terrible at scaling down to single-core processors and, it seems, even dual core processors. But hey, according to Rockstar, it scales up just fine!

On an occasion like this, I would normally rant about how the big publishers treat PC gamers like dirt, but this is honestly way too funny right now. One of Rockstar’s biggest titles, the flagship title for the relaunched Games for Windows Live, has turned into a major embarrassment for Microsoft, Rockstar, Take 2 and SecuROM.

Hopefully the other big publishers are taking notes.

And to top it all off, here’s a hilarious article I found linked off Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Random-Ravings/20-Easy-Steps-to-Starting-GTA-IV-on-Your-PC

I’ve spent about an hour with Fallout 3 so far, and unfortunately the one thing that’s stood out to me so far has nothing to do with the game mechanics.

Did Bethesda’s graphics programmers spend the last three years giving each other piggyback rides? That’s the only explanation I can think of for why Fallout 3‘s character animation shows just about no improvement over Oblivion‘s. Both character animations and facial animations are terrible, and nowhere near the standards that have been set by more recent games. I mean, hell, they aren’t even up to the standards of Half-Life 2 and that game is four years old now.

This might sound like nitpicking, but honestly, when the opening scene has you as a baby looking up at the Valium-induced-shitfaced-grin-bearing-expression-never-changing face of your father, it leaves a pretty bad first impression.

As for the game itself? It seems alright so far, I suppose. It feels like Oblivion through and through, although I don’t think anyone was expecting it not to be. I’m honestly wondering if I should put this game aside until I beat the first game, if only to get some proper perspective on whether the change is for the better or not.

This past week I was on call for my team. This past week was also Thanksgiving, and since I work for a company that is in the business of selling things to people, it was more than a little hectic for me.

In other words, being on call for a critical service at Amazon + Black Friday = PAIN.

I’ve been paged more times this week than any week I’ve worked at Amazon so far, and I spent most of the week working on an urgent fix requested by another team, one which necessitated that I load test our software to make sure that the fix didn’t affect performance adversely, and then spend hours on Saturday deploying the fix to our production boxes. On top of that I’ve had to attend early morning conference calls for high-velocity sales events (some of which you may have heard of). So yeah, I’m pretty worn out.

Still, while it does sound like I’m whining, I’m pretty happy that I was able to get through the week without any major problems on the site. The Amazon philosophy is to have all employees think like owners of the company, and given that we got through Black Friday without any major problems, as an owner, an employee and someone interested in customer experience I’m pretty happy.

I would be happier if we could ensure that sort of thing without driving the on call engineer nuts, though…

On a somewhat related note, I did manage to score 4GB of Corsair DDR800 RAM for the awesome price of $50 plus a $30 mail-in-rebate, and a copy of the PC version of Fallout 3 for $30 (both off Amazon, of course). I haven’t finished the first Fallout yet, but it’s already pretty clear that the third game is a vastly different beast from the first (and I’m not sure if it’s in a good way, either).