tempest in a teacup

Went to see Whose Live Anyway this past weekend. I’m a big fan of Whose Line is it Anyway? (both the British and American versions, before you ask) so being able to watch this show was a real treat for me. It’s hard for me to pin down what my favourite part of the show was, so here’s a quick list of greatest hits (no pun intended):

• Drew Carey being a secret guest performer (although I should have guessed he’d show up, given that he’s the part owner of Seattle Sounders FC)
• Ryan Stiles and Greg Proops making a reference to the ‘Africa’s a continent’ incident from Whose Line
• Chip Esten and Jeff Davis taking the song title ‘Home Alone’ and turning it into a song about a prostitute called Malone
• Chip playing ‘The Ghost of Billy Mays’ during Celebrity Improv Jeopardy
• Jeff doing his Christopher Walken impression during the same game
• Ryan’s ‘WTF?’ face after someone in the audience suggested ‘Bangkok’ for the category ‘Names of places in China’

Actually, I don’t think I can remember all of them…it was generally a good time all around. Now I just need to hope that the Colin and Brad Show makes a stop around here sometime soon…

Fallout 3 has finally been evicted from my DVD drive.

(Because I completed it, not because I got fed up with it)

And no, I’m probably not going to buy any of the DLC, since the game itself didn’t impress me that much to begin with. And I don’t think I’ll be missing anything…not with the backlog that I have.

With my router between my modem and my PC:

With my modem connected directly to my PC:

Thee words: What the fuck?

EDIT: Apparently something in the router settings was messed up – I reset it to factory settings and suddenly I can watch 720p streams without buffering. o_o

I seem to have run into a bug that prevents me from progressing in the game without using a noclip cheat. WTF

Well, Doom Classic for the iPhone is a decent enough exception. It’s not perfect, but there seems to be a control scheme that at least approximates the feel of a keyboard and mouse. If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, like Doom and have $7 to spare, there are certainly worse apps you could buy.

The difficulty select is very well disguised on the menu screen, though – I played through the whole of episode 1 on Normal without realising that difficulty select was even an option.

Nothing of consequence to report, really. Although I will say that I finally sat down and finished Sonic Unleashed this past weekend, and that I was pleasantly surprised to find a reference to a particular Ray Bradbury short story (that I read ages ago for school) while trying to put Fallout 3 to bed.

So right now the backlog looks something like this:

• Fallout 3
• Lost Planet
• God Hand
• Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
• Advance Wars: Days of Ruin

Oh, and I installed Windows 7. Quite happy with it so far, I must say. The upgrade was surprisingly painless, even though I had to do a clean install from XP.

Yes, this is with regards to that Modern Warfare 2 controversy.

A lot of the people pooh-poohing the concerns of the PC gamers who have spoken out against IW’s move to exclude modding and dedicated servers from the game. I figured I would add my voice to the cacophony that has already risen in opposition to this move, but also perhaps explain why dedicated servers matter for multiplayer games.

There are two ways to organize Internet multiplayer games on a PC:

1. Listen servers, where one player ‘hosts’ the game and the others connect to him
2. Dedicated servers, where games are hosted on a server machine that all players connect to

It goes without saying that dedicated servers offer players a fairer and more robust multiplayer experience, for a number of reasons. The server doesn’t have to contend for resources with the host’s client game software, the host doesn’t get an advantage in terms of ping (his commands have to make the exact same round trip to the server as everyone else’ commands) and of course the server doesn’t go away as soon as the host decides he’s bored. On top of that dedicated servers are connected to the Internet by connections that are better equipped to handle the network traffic caused by dozens of players connecting and playing at the same time, as opposed to your garden-variety ‘broadband’ that most gamers have.

I can speak from personal experience too – I’ve hosted and connected to listen servers for Left 4 Dead, and the experience wasn’t as smooth as when I connected to a dedicated server to play (and when I hosted games the people playing on my server certainly complained about it).

And let’s not forget that having a place to go when you want to get your game on helps gaming communities to form. You might scoff at this notion, but a friends list isn’t really a good substitution for having a regular server that’s configured just to your tastes, where the regulars are people you have fun playing with. It’s a supplement, but not a replacement.

And lest you think this is a vestige of PC gaming, there are console games that use dedicated servers as well. Warhawk, for one.

So yeah, not having dedicated servers is a big deal for any predominantly multiplayer game. Some people are saying to ‘wait and see’ to see what Infinity Ward has up their sleeve with their new matchmaking service, but as long as it’s based on listen servers I don’t see how it can replace what they’ve taken away.

Just some thoughts I’ve been meaning to pen down for a while. They’re rather long, so I’ve hidden them behind a jump.

Click here to read more >>

I’m not sure at what point I stopped celebrating my birthday. It might have been when I started college and realised that it occurred smack bang in the middle of Fall midterms. Whatever it is, at some point in the last…seven years or so I just lost interest in celebrating my birthday.

To anyone wondering what the relevance of my above statement is, I turned 25 on Sunday. And to mark the occasion, I, uh, worked on some slides for a presentation I have to give at work, and ordered some Chinese food.

Yeah…I’m not sure what’s up with me either.

On which I discover that I still can’t aim with a thumbstick to save my life.

I’ve been playing the Uncharted 2 multiplayer demo recently, and while I enjoyed the first game, I don’t know that the mechanics necessarily work for multiplayer. For one, the camera doesn’t stay behind you, so you’re forced to keep rotating the camera to keep it facing in your movement direction. While this isn’t ideal, it would at least be nice to have a quick ‘centre the camera behind you’ button – maybe R3 or something.

On top of that it seems like you die in very few hits – by the time I can rotate the camera to see someone shooting at me from behind, I’m at low health and get dropped by his next shot. So my complete lack of aiming skill is amplified by these two other problems I have with the interface.

Maybe the console shooter vibe doesn’t really resonate with me too well – I do well enough when I play Quake Live and TF2 but when you slow the game down and make everyone only capable of taking a few hits before dying somehow my abilities just go down the toilet.

I’ll probably keep playing it for a bit, though, if only to see if I can get used to the interface quirks.