I’ve been wanting to see Transformers 2 since it was released, but noticed that every few days I watched the IMDB score, it would drop farther and farther down.

Checking out Metacritic was even more dissuading, with a 35% overall score. I couldn’t believe how bad this movie sounded. I read comment after comment about how the movie was nothing but “balls jokes”, or how immature the use of Megan Fox’s beauty was or how 1-trick-pony Shia LeBeouf was… fortunately my curiosity and desire to see big robots do battle got the better of me and I went and saw it, and here are my thoughts:

1. I laughed for the first hour — Shia LeBouf is hilarious with his neurotic interactions with his parents, little spats with girlfriend Megan Fox or  delivery of 1-off snarky comments.  Whoever cast Kevin Dunn and Julie White as Shia’s parents was brilliant. The chemistry between the three of them is fantastically enjoyable and really a good fit as a family. As a side note, Julie White steals the spotlight as Shia’s neurotic mother for about 30mins of the movie and is absolutely fantastic at the roll — putting me close to tears twice.
2. Well done special effects are awesome — I don’t know what it takes in Hollywood to do effects like these or if you have to have special relationships with the industry’s best animations or something but Bay delivers — big time. There is so much robot awesomeness going around this movie with explosions and scene-interactions that at no less than 6 epic scenes I found myself floored with “Jesus… how did they film this scene?!” It is really impressive to see the coordination of 50 extras mocking a battle with huge building set pieces blowing up and everything being choreographed such that when the CG transformers are added later, the entire scene is completely fluid.
3. Story — For the die-hard Transformers fans out there, I have no idea how accurate this story is behind Transformers 2 (I won’t mention any details in case you haven’t seen it), but it drew me in pretty good. Only 1 or 2 parts struck me as pretty corny and the rest of it flowed with enough pace and accuracy that I had no qualms with it.
4. Characters — They got rid of the ridiculously good looking hackers from #1, which I was thrilled about, and seemed to remove about 20% of the cheese that #1 had in it. I felt the characters in this one were much more realistic and enjoyable — obviously I’m not comparing these characters to Shawshank Redemption anytime soon, but for a big-budget robot action movie, I didn’t find myself trying to rake my eyes out of my head once — which is a good sign. I also like the new Agent Simmons — I hate him from the first movie because he was such a neurotic simpleton even though he was suppose to be the head of some clandestine Sector 7 group — in this one he plays his character much better and isn’t annoying at all — I actually enjoyed his comedic relief in the 2nd half of the movie quite a bit. I also liked the portrayal of the military more in this one. Typically sci-fi movies paint the military as bumbling idiots as a story mechanic to get around the impossibilities of hacking and breaking in, and it ends up annoying me how inept and unrealistic the military is usually made to look — casting of Glenn Morshower as a general in this helped bring a lot of cred to the military picture painted. It felt much easier to get into the story than in #1 where the military was more inept and incapable.

Overall I have no idea what movie critics want… This is exactly what happened with The Matrix (Reloaded and Revolutions) — the followups were bigger, badder and brought way more awesome to the table, but they get dinged in the reviews.

I loved the Matrix trilogy — the 2nd and 3rd movies were awesome. I really liked Transformers 2, better than #1, and think movie critics don’t know what they want out of these movies.

Summary [5.5 out of 10]

Terminator Salvation is a terrible game whose unfinished feel, technical hickups and terribly scripted sequences all punish the player for trying to play it. Terminator Salvation has the feel of a game that only had 8 months of development time in order to make it’s launch along-side the movie. I wouldn’t even bother renting this title regardless of how much you enjoy the Terminator universe.

The Great

• Nothing…

The Good

• The Cover System — It feels like GRIN pulled this right out of Wanted: Weapons of Fate and re-purposed it for Terminator Salvation… while blatant re-use like this is lame (given that the transition animations are almost the same), the cover system still ended up feeling pretty good so we didn’t mind. Not as polished as Gears of War 2, but pretty good.
• The weapon/item/NPC highlight indicators are easy to spot as they “hover” in the world like a HUD indicator which is important in a game like this with blown-out environments and rubble everywhere, otherwise it would be hard to find ammo and other items in the world.
• Your NPC team members are actually useful. You can hide for entire battles and they will take out the enemies. If the NPCs had been useless, that would have made this game impossible to play, so this was one redeeming design choice.
• LT + RT aiming and shooting worked as you would expect and felt natural.
• Hit-detection is liberal which makes up for the crappy shooting mechanic so it’s not too punishing to try and put down enemies.
• Picking up ammo and items is as easy as walking over it — I prefer this mechanic over “pressing X to pickup” type of approaches — is it odd to anyone else that this game is so barren I’m praising the ammo-pickup mechanic here? Not the sort of thing you would see in a Gears of War review…

The Bad

• Cutscenes and scripted sequences were very roughly animated — in a handful of sequences character’s mouths didn’t even move as they talked and all the animations we saw were canned “robot-esque” animations with nothing touched up by hand. So robots, humans and everything else moved in a very herky-jerky or unnatural fashion.
• Actual flow and telling of the story in the cutscenes and scripted sequences was garbage. Early on in the game you have sequences that make no sense, characters are ridiculously stupid like any D-list action movie that goes straight to rental and the Terminators behave slow, cumbersome and retarded exactly like real terminators would not. This can be summed up as “terrible acting”, but when you think of animated cutscenes that may be absurd… but you get the idea.
• Weapons sound pretty good, but feel/look terrible. Almost no muzzle flash, fire, tracers or good impact effects help to make you feel like you are firing an unimplemented weapon in an example play-level or something.
• NPCs never stop cycling the same 20 or 30 lines over and over. “We gotta get going”, “Stop holding us up Connor”, “Nice shot Connor!”, “Nice job Connor!”… usually while you are already doing something.
• You are apparently John Connor — and apparently John Connor looks nothing like Christian Bale… my guess is that the publisher knew this game would be a flop and didn’t want to lay down the cash for any likeness licensing. That kind of “attention to detail” permeates the whole game.
• Gameplay is completely predictable — you walk through some alley or blown out building, come into a “scene”, X number of enemies spawn infront of you, you kill them, and then someone says something and you move forward again.
• When you walk into each “scene” or “arena”, especially when there is a weapon you are suppose to use, enemies will “post up” at certain locations and in certain positions to ensure that you go to the right spot to kill them or use the right weapon… once you start noticing the pattern you realize this completely nullifies the re-playability — not that re-playability was a huge concern, but not even enemy AI seems to be implemented, it’s all scripted.
• There is absolutely no gore in this game… I don’t think the dev team sampled a single effect/texture that is actually “red”. I’m not saying we need to be knee deep in blood but besides being a barren experience, this game also plays like a PG-rated title which makes it mind-numbingly boring.
• The actual game didn’t look as good as any of the screenshots the Terminator marketing team released to game sites — those screenshots looked a lot more colorful and sharper, the actual game looks about 10% more blurry and less detailed.
• The weapons in the game is a pretty plain lineup of grenades, machine guns and shotguns. Not a whole lot else going on.

The Ugly

• No online co-op, just offline co-op.
• Loading… seriously, if you added up the entire play time it takes you to start Terminator Salvation, play it and finish it, 35-45% of that time is spent looking at “Loading…” screens — even for levels that don’t last any longer than 3mins of gameplay.
• Lack of effects — The game, likely due to it’s short dev cycle, lacks most world/environment effects you’ve come to expect from a shooter, overall it just ends up feeling “dry”.
• Clipping issues with gun fire (both friendly and enemy) in the environment was frustratingly rampant. Leaning out from behind a wall and shooting a rocket at an HK resulted in the rocket exploding in our faces because it clipped the wall somehow — no worries though, the useless health system kept us alive.
• Frequently we would see enemy fire coming straight through block walls and hitting us as the Terminator on the other side lay into us with no concern for there piece a massive piece of clipping level between us and them.

Worth Noting…

• If you skip cutscenes you can finish this game in 3hrs on Easy… given that it’s such a poorly executed title, I can’t figure out if this is a bad thing or a good thing…

Conclusion [5.5 out of 10]

There is nothing redeeming about this game that would cause me to recommend this as a purchase to anyone or even as a rental. Sometimes low-budget games like this will have a particular gimmick that might make them redeeming, like over the top stunts, gore or nudity — but in this case, this game literally has nothing redeeming contained on it’s disk.

Just skip it — go rent Mercenaries 2 if you haven’t for a slightly buggy game that was hilariously fun.

Areas of Improvement

Like our other game reviews, we don’t feel right criticizing a game without providing constructive feedback on what could have been better, so here goes:

• Better/More complete animations. Even more so than “better graphics”, improving the animations would have gone a long way to make the game feel like a higher-quality production.
• Online co-op
• Gore, not such PG-themed gameplay… so boring.
• Destructible environments or use of physics anywhere in the game to make the world feel more real/alive.
• Better graphics, effects, world/environment details
• Better weapons and more of them
• Introduction of minigames or QTEs for the more epic sequences/boss battles.
• Boss battles… of any kind

Screenshot Gallery

Ok so I bought into the hype-machine that is everything-Nintendo and plopped down my $19.99 for a Wii MotionPlus when it came out and along with the only other highly rated Wii MotionPlus-enabled game that launched with it: Grand Slam Tennis.

Here’s my single sentence description of the experience for everyone that was curious “Was it worth it?”:

Playing a Wii MotionPlus-enabled game with the new controller addon yielded no noticeable improvement in game immersion, realism or fun — you still end up playing “wrist tennis”.

To go more in-depth into what I mean there — even with the Wii MotionPlus addon enabled and a game that supposedly makes great use of it, the Wiimote still cannot properly discern the differences between fast hand movements and you end up executing the wrong swing.

I’d also point out there is no 1:1 or even 1:3 motion-mapping taking place here, it is still basic movement recognition used to trigger pre-scripted swings and strokes, exactly like Wii Sports 2 years ago.

NOTE: I’ve been playing tennis for years, really actively for the last 3, and playing this game felt nothing like real tennis. It felt like Wii Sports for anyone interested if you “really get to swing at the ball” or “can I really put top-spin on it?!” — no, no you can’t.

An example of the problem with motion detection is when you see a forehand coming at you, and swing your arm back to get ready for it — the swinging back motion registers in the game as a backhand instead of you preparing your forehand so your character executes a backhand in the game, inevitably missing the ball and you screaming in frustration.

I’d also point out that slices, lobs, dropshots, etc. are not done with swings of the remote, but again, just using the A and B buttons as modifiers.

This was hugely disappointing to me. I really tried to give this thing a chance, logging in about 8 hrs of gameplay in the last few days just to make sure I was “doing it right” as well as reading all the tips online — many people said to treat the side of the remote as the “face of your racket”. I couldn’t see any difference at all in the accuracy of playing with the MotionPlus regardless of the “side” of it I pretended was my racket face.

Overall the MotionPlus will likely provide excellent 1:1 motion mapping for any game that doesn’t require fast movements, but if you are hoping to finally get some awesome simulation of your favorite sports game or lightning fast sword-fighting or may light-saber fighting in the future, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Honestly, I’d sell your Wii and wait for whatever is next if that is what you want (which I do).

Over the last few weeks you might have seen a warning window like the one above (or similar to it) when visiting the site. Unfortunately it looks like some WordPress plugin-tinkering that I did right before going on vacation introduced an obnoxious malware hook into the site (don’t worry, it’s nothing epicly horrible).

I just finished manually cleaning it out using talgalili’s tip here. The infection was an invisible iframe-hack injecting a reference to the m-analytics.net site in every single .php or .html file hosted on the site — really obnoxious but easy enough to clear out and tighten up everything in the process.

Sorry you guys had to deal with that while I was gone, we should be good now.

It’s OK — It looks like AntiVir (among other antivirus companies) have decided to detect remote iFrame references in webpages as a “virus” — unfortunately WordPress (like this site) and many of the WordPress plugins make use of iFrames to work.

A lot of people are noticing this on all sorts of WordPress sites (More #1, More #2). We seem to have picked up this behavior right after updating to WordPress 2.8 so that might be what is going on here.

We are looking into this…

Given those results, I have to imagine Microsoft is going to allow advertisers to pay for higher search result placement — which, like this, will give us more helpful and completely unrelated search results to pour over.

Update #1: Awesome, Marc Chung noticed this morning that using Microsoft’s new super-search engine Bing, that when you searched for “Search Engine”, Bing ranked AltaVista higher than Google.

Dave Bullock just commented that Microsoft seems to have fixed the problem by completely removing Google all together from “search engine” search results. Nice! Just wait until advertisers start paying for those results and Bing will give you “PetsMart.com” as a search result for “Toyota Prius”.

Summary [7.5 out of 10]

Assault on Dark Athena is a great followup to the award-winning Escape from Butcher Bay title landing just-shy of perfect due to what I can only describe as a lack of “balls”. The well paced levels, interesting NPCs and fun melee combat are all back, but instead of bumping the Riddick franchise up a notch with some more of this and more of that it just sort of re-delivers the same Riddick experience we already had.

Story

Good Enough. The story is straight forward and very in-line with the existing Riddick lore out there and picks up right after Butcher Bay’s escape. Riddick is this super-badass that tends to find himself accidentally included in some sort of crazy situation that he is forced to participate in, in order to get himself out of said situation.

The mechanic worked in Pitch Black, it worked again in Chronicles of Riddick, it worked in Butcher Bay and it works again here in Assault on Dark Athena.

The story was a bit sparse… when I would get to cutscenes that would remind me of what was going on, they were sometimes so far apart from each other that I had forgotten what I was doing. But it wasn’t really a huge issue.

Graphics

Pretty Good. I remember when I played Butcher Bay, I was blown away by the graphics from this completely unknown developer. The melee/hand-to-hand combat was phenomenal, the use of bump mapping was everywhere and the texturing and modeling of character faces was so fantastic I couldn’t believe how good the main characters like Riddick and Johns looked.

In Assault on Dark Athena, everything looked good enough that you didn’t think about it. I was never struck by anything looking fantastic and only in a few instances did I think “oh that texture is muddy”. I did notice that facial animation was excellent though, I don’t know if Starbreeze hopped on the GTA IV facial animation bandwagon with Image Metrics or not, but it was great.

The levels are pretty sparse when it comes to detail, but I didn’t ding the game’s score for this because (for some reason) I didn’t notice it until I really thought about it. Just the way Starbreeze makes these Riddick games, you never think “Where’s the bustling ship I should be walking through” like Assasin’s Creed or something, you just accept that there only seems to be like 20 people on this entire ship and it never dawns on you otherwise.

There are little environment touches that get you into the world though that I liked — like punching the wall and making it bloody in addition to busting your hands up pretty bad:

Music & Sound

The voice acting is excellent in this game. I didn’t hear a single NPC that made my ears bleed and if anything the purposefully enigmatic and confusing lines from Riddick himself were the most annoying.

Most of the NPCs are perfectly cast with voices that match their characters perfectly. One of my favorites was Dacher:

The facial animation adjoining the voices were also excellent.

The sound effects in the game were “great”, no complaints. The guns sounded good, melee combat sounded good and meaty. Environmental sounds were high quality and fit the scenes well. I think it says a lot about the quality of something when you don’t notice it as a detractor in a game — bad sound could ruin any game and good sound that stands out to the point of you noticing it above and beyond everything else is rare, so some credit is due to the Starbreeze developers for doing such a solid job with the sound.

As for music, besides the “combat” music, I didn’t actually notice any other music in the game. It’s a fairly quiet game.

Combat & Gameplay

Great. The melee combat was by far my favorite part of Butcher Bay, even though it seemed like you could always have a gun with you, I still chose to use melee almost exclusively the entire game. Fortunately the melee in Assault on Dark Athena still feels excellent:

In Assault on Dark Athena you can rarely find guns that you can keep on you as the game encourages you to stick to melee combat, especially around meat-targets (on the few levels that have many enemies or robotic ones, you get more weapon drops to use). It’s not quite as bad as Condemned where guns can only be picked up with 2 shots left in them, but it’s also not Quake.

The mechanics of shooting in Assault on Dark Athena are similar to most modern shooters, LT zooms you in and RT fires. In this case the only thing I had to “learn” was that B reloads instead of X:

It all felt pretty natural.

Climbing and stealth mechanics are again just as they were in Butcher Bay, thankfully (again) they were excellent in the first game and there was really no reason to mess with them.

Sneaking up behind enemies will ready your weapons as soon as you are within “striking” distance to initiate a context-sensitive kill (just click Attack and let the scene play out):

Conclusion [7.5 out of 10]

Assault on Dark Athena by itself is a good game, there are no qualms about that. By completely remastering and re-including Escape from Butcher Bay in the same box that makes this bundle an excellent value and “awesome” if you like the Riddick movies and the Riddick character.

What you’ll notice about Assault on Dark Athena is that it feels identical to Butcher Bay — that’s not bad, but that is what kept the game from being “amazing”. Instead of amping up the Riddick character and his exploits for us in this sequel we pick up right where we left off and keep moving forward.

This would have been a lot like if Gears of War 2 hadn’t had the improved cover system, more epic battles, awesome co-op or any of the other enhancements in the sequel and they had literally just done some new levels with no attempt at making it “bigger and badder”. Assault on Dark Athena feels a lot like that.

Overall, if you loved the first game, you’ll like Athena. If you liked the first game, you probably want to rent this.

Areas of Improvement

As with our video game reviews, we don’t feel it’s fair to criticize a game unless we can provide feedback on how it could have been better, so here is our feedback for the Assault on Dark Athena team:

• Gore… more damn gore. You have an M-rated Riddick game, I know Riddick has never really been about insane gore, but when you Ulak someone in the face or in the chest, it would have been awesome to get some dismemberment from time to time… it would have made melee combat feel much more intense.
• More badass Riddick moments — I didn’t feel like a super-calm/smart indestructable badass in this game like I did in Butcher Bay… I think part of that is the lack of NPC interactions where I can be revered. This is a really hard intangible to describe, but in the movies Riddick tends to get to be a badass when doing something super-strong or really smart to double-cross someone or kill someone else… I just didn’t get that “omg I rock!” moment. An example of what I thought sucked, is when Revas dropped down from the cieling on Riddick after he found Dacher dead… that is the type of stuff that dupes chumps, not Riddick!
• Gore… did I mention gore? Serious… punching someone’s face in just to get the screen splattered with blood and cave in their nasal cavity would have been so awesome. More specifically, either matched Condemned 2’s gore or exceeded it slightly.
• More action-oriented cutscenes.
• More context-sensitive super-kills, like with the Alpha Drone, but more often and with more characters.
• More ways to kill people — I kept the Ulaks armed almost the entire game because other weapons were boring. Guns were the most boring and for melee the hair-pin and knife were really boring to use… you just “poked” the person straight on until you got lucky with a “disarm” or context-sensitive sequence… atleast the Ulaks slashed all over the screen like crazy.
• No magical boss fight requirements. We ripped Turok a new asshole for this one and up until the 1st Alpha Drone fight there were no special requirements for killing anything… then suddenly I spend a half-hour and 30 rounds of explosive ammo only to go online and find out I have to plant 4 or 5 rounds on the thing before detonating them… god lame.

Gameplay Video Gallery

As mentioned a few times, I’ve been on the Windows 7 RC for a bit over a week now and been pretty much thinking it’s great.

It seems another one of the nice little touches in Windows 7 is that when you try and delete a file that is locked by a process, it no longer just tells you that the delete failed — Windows will actually tell you which stupid process has the file locked so you can go close it (instead of rebooting and hoping for the best).

Here’s an example of a PNG I tried to erase off my desktop:

Pretty slick!

Laurence Hartje just sent me a link over to Charlie Wiederhold’s blog where he reiterates the “Chair Story”.

We were talking about 3D Realms’s announced death and thought things started to sound fishy when Laurence sent this along. At first glance “The Chair Story” sounded stupid, but it was from a 3D Realms insider from back in 2001 when the company became infamous and EPIC started taking over the world with engine licenses and game exclusives.

A few paragraphs into it I was glued to my screen. Charlie purports that a deal was hatched between the leads of 3D Realms and EPIC (Mark Rein, Cliffy B, Broussard, Scott Miller, etc.) where 3D Realms would work on Duke Nukem Forever, acting effectively as a game-engine brainstorming and R&D factory for the Unreal engine and publicly report that they were using different/incremental/better versions of “Unreal Engine” over the years while never actually delivering anything.

On the flip side, the rumor-mongering using the incomparably popular and well-known “Duke Nukem Forever” name would drive licensing sales of the Unreal game engine for EPIC.

Pretty interesting story in an of itself already. At the end of the story Charlie clarifies that in the secret meeting where everyone had to sign off on the agreement, to hold everything as a secret for decades, he was attacked by Cliffy B, Mark Reign and Tim Sweeney to the tune of getting hit with a chair, held down on the floor and threatened with shoving his face into a broken chair leg to sign the contract because:

I apparently wasn’t aware how *real* business is done and that if I didn’t want to find out why those two companies had maintained such a strong position in the industry dating back to the shareware days (when it seems people didn’t ask nearly as many questions about why developers appeared, made a game, and then disappeared without a trace)… I had better reconsider my answer.

Damn… not that hard to believe if you have the least bit of vision and could see in 1990s how many billions were on the table in the gaming industry if you were able to pull it off the table.

I wonder what Microsoft’s secret deals have looked like… I could totally see Balmer hitting someone with a chair.

Solely in the interest of archiving the post forever, it’s pasted below. Please see the original link for Charlie’s original post though.

Update #1: I’m not claiming this is either right or wrong, but it’s a entertaining read non-the-less.

Original Post

This is a story I wrote on another site in response to someone wanting me to elaborate more on a “chair story” I had referred to that happened during my time at 3DR. It’s not something I wanted to lose to the shifty waters of the Internet though, so I’m re-posting here. It’s left as is except for some typo cleanups and other minor details. Enjoy.

Note: Unfortunately due to 3D Realms’ website being down, the images will not work. I’ll try to get the originals and host them here but I don’t imagine that’s the first thing on their webmaster’s mind right now so it may take a while.

I’m going to regret writing this and probably get myself into trouble but here it goes…

This all took place at E3 2001. I don’t know who here knows much about what things were like at that E3 but I’ll give a brief breakdown. DNF was being published by Gathering of Developers. They were known for being eccentric as publishers go, but had the best booths at E3 if you could get in. Rather than putting up a booth on the main floor, they rented out the parking lot across from the Staples Center, fenced it in and blocked off visibility. You could only get in if you were on the list, or for certain specified viewing events.

They had a stage with a huge screen behind it, midgets, strippers dressed as schoolgirls, punk and rockabilly bands, etc. Beer and burgers being grilled up by Levelord. The games were demoed in cool 50’s era trailers (not so cool for game demos but hey… they made the lot look cool). This was all affectionately called the GoD lot and it’s where the booth babes from all the *other* booths came to hang out in their off time.

Needless to say there really wasn’t much reason to go anywhere else for those few days.

I’ll use pictures from 3DR’s site to help match up visuals to the story.

So for example this was the line to get into the GoD lot:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_5125.jpg.html

The Stage:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e301/dsc00092.jpg.html

sCary (Shacknews Steve Gibson) playing around in the middle of the lot:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4712.jpg.html

Levelord grilling some burgers:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4337.jpg.html

Chicks sucking on popsicles:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4406.jpg.html

etc…

Strangely enough it’s hard to find stuff about the actual games being shown there. Dunno if that would have anything to do with why the Gathering isn’t around anymore.

Anyways…

The DNF 2001 trailer was out as everyone knows, and it was doing insanely well. The entire team was jazzed, people seemed to really love it and all anyone kept asking was “When the hell do we get to play this oh god!?!?!”

Before heading out to E3, George and Scott Miller had arranged a meeting between Epic, 3DR, and the people who had worked on Duke 3D but weren’t working on DNF. The intent of this meeting was… you guessed it… how best to handle the future of the Duke franchise. Epic was invited because having Duke around on the Unreal Engine was a constant PR boon for them. So they are almost just as invested in how well Duke does as 3DR (as you will see later). It was a secret meeting (there were actually two meetings, but I’ll get to that later), not even the publisher knew about it (except Mike Wilson… he was operating outside of the Gathering of Developer’s authority). The people there were Scott Miller, George Broussard, Cliffy B, Mark Rein, Tim Sweeney, Levelord, Allen Blum, Keith Schuler, myself, Brandon Reinhart, Mike Wilson, and even Todd Replogle and Ken Silverman made the trip out there.

Interestingly, Cliffy B wore his damn suits:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_5118.jpg.html

Which I don’t have to tell you was incredibly distracting and made it hard to take his points seriously. But at least we knew when he was raising his hand to speak. Due to the level of “heat” in this meeting we had to have a more formal process for speaking because we’d all just wind up talking over each other if we didn’t.

Brandon, Allen, and Cliffy on the way to the second meeting. Note that they aren’t as happy as in other pictures. There is a reason for this:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4867.jpg.html

Don’t forget that this is what we would see when we would look out the rear window of our trailer while having our meetings:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4509.jpg.html

The silver trailer behind Scott and George is where it was being held:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e301/dsc00090.jpg.html

Anyways…

Most of us didn’t really know what the meeting was for going into it… and for the guys at 3DR at the time, we thought it was just going to be current 3DR people. Imagine our surprise to walk in and see that group of people sitting there! I’m such a huge Duke 3D fanboy, that I have to admit was a little intimidating being in the same room as pretty much all the core guys that made the game that got me started down the path of a game developer in the first place.

Anyways (for real this time)…

Scott quickly got to the point. Max Payne was going to do gangbusters… and 3DR had some other stuff up their sleeves that would be generating so much revenue for 3DR that they could continue on indefinitely… or at least another 5-10 years… without making a dime on internal development. Scott being the marketing buff he is (and Mark Rein being pretty much the same for Epic), they got this idea for how to generate the biggest story in the history of gaming. DNF being a monster hit is fine, but it wouldn’t make “forever” history. As you can tell from the name and what I’m about to describe, Scott and George apparently had this idea from the very start but weren’t sure they were going to act on it, but there wasn’t any harm in using a name that would play into it. So in order to make “Forever” history there was only one way to do that, and that is to turn it into something completely unprecedented in the industry. Turn it into the sort of thing that will be talked about 100 years from now.

I’m sure you can guess where this is ultimately going.

See in 2001 the jokes about DNF being late and vaporware were already widespread. It had already won the damn Wired vaporware award twice. Here was the funny thing… the attention on the game was actually only getting stronger, not weaker. It was the release of the video and how it was received that put the nail in the coffin. The game just had something that nothing else in the industry had and there wasn’t any way in hell such an opportunity could be missed. The attention had peaks and valleys, but it was looking sustainable.

When Scott and George put this out there, those of us on the DNF team were furious. I felt like I had been told my childhood was just an implanted memory, my parents were really actors, and that my penis was about 50% smaller than I thought it was. What the fuck had we been doing the past 3 years? Everyone else actually seemed to already see this coming though, and took it in stride. Mark and Scott were a force to behold when they would get going on the possibilities. George seemed torn, because he loved the game and wanted to see people enjoying the stuff we had put together for the video, but he also knew this was just not something that anyone else in the industry would have a chance to try again for a very long time, if ever.

Todd and Ken didn’t say much, I think they were wondering why they were there. Levelord thought it would be fun to watch, but other than that had his own stuff going on with Ritual that was really his main focus. Mike Wilson kept cracking jokes, but he was clearly on board.

After they put it all out there, those of us on the team started to come around to what they were aiming for, and by the end of it we were bought in. It would be a lot of fun, we’d be paid well, and it would be a part of history that nothing else we would do would live up to. We didn’t quite know what we were getting into, but that’s why all the other guys were the experienced biz guys and we were young naive developers.

This was me during a break in the first meeting… I was actually wobbly in my legs and really did need to lie down:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4841.jpg.html

I don’t think this was actually taken on any of the meeting days, but this is Mike Wilson. Ignore the label on the image… I think Joe was in a hurry:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4710.jpg.html

The fateful video that I now wish hadn’t been as good as it was:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e301/dsc00004.jpg.html

Keith and I after the first day… trying to distract ourselves from what we had just learned:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4860.jpg.html

So about that chair?

The first meeting was really just getting everyone up to speed. We all needed time to absorb it… and what was being proposed. They needed everyone involved to buy off on it because we’d all be working through the years to maintain the plan.

The plan was actually pretty simple… create the longest developed game in history that eventually is one of the greatest games ever made. You have the time to work on it properly (no shit), so given the intelligence and talent of all the people involved, it was a pretty good bet. All 3DR had to do was make money on other stuff. All Epic had to do was open up a wide channel between the two companies. 3DR would serve as a research house for future Epic engine updates, but also give 3DR everything they did as well. The boots on the ground just had to keep the drum beating and keep the image of business as usual going. The truly hard to swallow part of this was some of us had to eventually leave, but we were guaranteed we’d be ok. All we had to do was let go of the idea of just making DNF in the traditional way… which I’m ashamed to admit was easier to let go of than I thought it would be.

In fact, with my role in this, I wouldn’t ever really work on the “real” DNF. That was a tough pill to swallow, but again the big picture looked good.

The beauty of the plan is that even though I’m telling you about it now, it is too late for it to have any negative impact on the long term goal. That’s something that took me a long term to come to grips with. It just *works* and I’ll be damned if I understand fully why or how. That’s biz and marketing brilliance for you… I just know how to put maps together or script up some gameplay. *sigh*

What Epic got out of this whole deal was basically this mystery project that is a constant “customer” of their engine, with people always speculating on whether it was updated to the newest one or not, etc. You would be surprised at how many licenses this has helped sell through the years. Who said business made any sense? Not to mention a team to just do research into engine upgrades without any pressure of actually releasing anything. Huge advantage. Notice that Epic really pulled ahead in the engine licensing business after 2001? That’s *not* an accident.

So that chair again.

We didn’t end the first chat on a particularly *good* note, but I think we were mostly exhausted… but there was an undercurrent of “can we really trust each other on this?”. That’s typical of any big business deal, but this was a case where we would be agreeing to hold this story steady for decades. Yes, decades. You don’t go into this lightly.

We all came back the next day (Cliffy in white thankfully, not red). We went around and gave our thoughts on things after having a night to sleep on it. Scott and George wanted to get paperwork signed that day if we were going to attempt it at all. This seemed *way* too soon and I didn’t have a lawyer around to read the contract or anything. I was young, but I had had enough experience by that point to know you don’t sign a contract of any significance without having a lawyer read it. Unfortunately it was made clear that this offer was active only so long as we were all in the room. Once any one of us left it was void and Scott, George, and Mark Rein (the three that put it together) would deny all knowledge. They had never done any discussions of this in written form except the contracts which Scott Miller was holding.

That was pressure… here was this deal where I would be set for life, and if I backed out of it, it would blow the whole thing for both companies and everyone involved. Not only would I be backing out of the opportunity of a lifetime, but I would also be ruined in the industry because those guys have way more power than I do. I wanted to do it, but how do you commit on such short notice and without really knowing what you are signing?

Brandon, Allen, Keith, and I kept hemming and hawing and we could tell we were really causing problems with everyone else in the room. I said that I wanted to do it, but I *had* to have a lawyer review it before I signed it. The fury in the eyes of the guys sitting across from me was literally enough to give me a third degree burn. I have *never* felt that much fear in my life. Well… up to that point at least.

I was told to think about my next words very carefully before giving my final answer. Honestly, I felt this was a test to see how well I would hold up to pressure later when we had to “hold the lie” (the similarity to “hold the line” isn’t on accident), so I held firm and said I really wanted to, but needed to have it reviewed…

oh fuck…

Faster than I can even remember (literally… I don’t remember) I was knocked out of my chair by I *think* of all people Tim Sweeney (it was a wooden kitchen chair) and was pinned on the ground by Mike Wilson and Cliffy B (he’s so much stronger than I ever expected). George walks over to my chair and fucking stomps the shit out of it until the legs are broken off. He casually picks up one of the legs that had split into a shit your pants style point and starts tossing it up and down. Scott and Mark Rein alternate on and off saying that I apparently wasn’t aware how *real* business is done and that if I didn’t want to find out why those two companies had maintained such a strong position in the industry dating back to the shareware days (when it seems people didn’t ask nearly as many questions about why developers appeared, made a game, and then disappeared without a trace)… I had better reconsider my answer.

I do remember the next part very very well though… I will never forget it and I have to admit that I have dreams about it pretty frequently.

Cliffy and Mike pulled me up and shoved my face about 6 inches from the point of the chair leg. I was drenched in sweat (the trailers didn’t have decent AC so it was already hot as hell in there)… and if they had let go of me I would not have been able to stand on my own.

George looked me in the eyes and asked me one more time what I was going to do… so at that point I did what anyone would do…

The bar for movie-tie-in games has officially been raised. In my estimation it began officially with Wanted: Weapons of Fate, right before that the Bond tie-in games were still a little weak, but after Wanted we had Wolverine and now Terminator that are both looking like pretty solid B/B+ games from what I’m seeing. The gore-fest alone that is Wolverine makes me want to play it.

Looking at the new Terminator Salvation gameplay video reminded me a lot of the Wanted cover-transition effects (which looked great, so it’s a +1) as well as some of the run-and-gun of Uncharted… I think it’s the pacing of the game that made me think of Uncharted:

Looked a little bit “shoot the machines… over and over and over”, possibly falling into the trap that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed fell into with repetitive gameplay, but who knows, there might be more under the covers.

Screenshot Gallery

Update #1: Confirmed, 3D Realms is dead.

Big thanks to Ted Regulski for sending this one in and Laurence Hartje for the clever post title.

ShackNews is reporting that 3D Realms is currently in a “situation”. The assumption, given that the company hasn’t released a game in 37 years, is that the “situation” is they are “broke” or more notably, that it’s impossible to run a company and meet payroll solely on hot air and “bullshit dollars” — that’s the currency I imagine they use internally.

While companies related to 3D Realms, Apogee and Deep Silver, seem devoid of financial trouble, no one really cares given that they are currently working on “Duke Nukem Trilogy” — a series of Nintendo DS and PSP games. Not to discredit their work, but when you start talking about a closing of 3D Realms, there is likely only 1 thing people think about: Duke Nukem Forever.

The most maddening bit about this and probably the karmatic force that caused this shit-storm to finally come to a head is 3D Realm’s co-founder and unflinching perfectionist (I don’t mean that in a good way) George Broussard. He’s been at the helm of that company since 1987 and in that time been entirely incapable of keeping the DNF project on track. The DNF development team has been through what I think is now 3 complete engine changes (someone with a better memory fill in the blanks, but I think it’s been something like Quake 2 engine to Unreal Engine to a Custom engine to some final mish-mash engine they were building on now with a 3rd party physics system no one ever heard of ).

I had the impression they were spending so much time (enjoying?) working on tools and creating their own engine that they lost sight of the ultimate goal: The Game. I’m sure it was justified with a hand wave and table-pound along the lines of: “The technology is limiting us! We have to have the right tools!”, but under it all anyone that has managed a team successfully before has to recognize this as a Type-A/perfectionist/developer mind set… your focus and enjoyment comes out of problem-solving, not out of actual product delivery.

The part that makes this announcement feel completely deserved is the constant mysterious babble from Broussard over the last 12 years baiting fans with promises amazement and wonder and year after year, decade after half-decade never delivering anything.

I can’t help but imagine that the realm folks suffering here are the developers that have been pouring blood into that title for 10 years. The creative directors, the designers the coders… the folks that truely believed in the title. They will never get a chance to see their creation sing.

I’d be really curious to know what the feelings are internally towards management/etc. about this whole ordeal… are the team members pissed off/relieved/etc… who’s fault was it really? Honestly, after 12 years, you know there is a tell-all book coming out of this. Hell, there was one for the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

Enjoy the teaser trailer from 2007, and the only gameplay you’ll ever see from this title:

… what’s that? You want to remember what it looked like back in 2004 when it’s released was right around the corner? Sure, here’s the first teaser that I still remember being totally pumped about:

P.S.> If you can tell I’m bitter — I absolutely am. I was never a crazy fan of Duke Nukem 3D… it was just as good as every “great” game of it’s time, but the buzz that started occuring around Duke Nukem Forever, even all those years ago got us all thinking that 3D Realms was going to introduce us, single-handedly, to next-gen gaming. When it continued to not happen year after year after year, with the promise that they would introduce us instead to next-next-gen gaming and so on… well it became more of a pie-in-the-sky adventure than it did a real product.

A young gamer inside of me from the 1990s, sitting infront of his 486 with his 3Dfx VoodoExtreme card is really really sad today…

At the urging of Grant Gochanuer (happy owner of 12GB of RAM), I went ahead and upgraded the RAM in my machine from 4GB to 8GB.

After a full day of use, Windows 7 Resource Monitor looks like this:

While the performance difference is not night and day for me, I will say that the first thing you notice is that the more RAM you give Windows 7, the less often it seems to hit the hard drive.

I have some fairly monsterous Firefox working profiles and Java IDE configurations that by all accounts brought my old Windows XP and Vista installs to their knees on loadup. Now with 8GB in Windows 7, my disk blinks lazily along while everything stays completely responsive and whatever I’m loading fires up in half the time (give or take).

I will say one huge data point that used to drive me crazy on my old Windows install was when I fired up my working Firefox profile for blogging — I maintain 10 or so tabs at all times in this working profile, each site a Gmail account or WordPress administrative interface along with AJAX traffic analysis tools — pretty much a worst case as far as JavaScript/Memory load times go. On my old installs of Windows loading up this profile could take anywhere from 10-20 seconds depending on what my computer was currently doing. Now it seems regardless of what I’m doing (Java IDE + VMWare for example), the profile comes up in about 6-8 seconds and doesn’t seem to trash my hard drive anymore.

Windows 7 is becoming a must-have upgrade for me and anyone else willing to throw some serious memory at it. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than an SSD and this 8GB upgrade only cost me $94.

Ignition Entertainment is asking the fans of The King of Fighters series (in preparation for KoF XII release) to hop over to the official KoF forums and vote on your favorite box art for the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game.

King of Fighters is (one of / the only) remaining fighter that is still using hand-drawn animation. For some enthusiasts of the fighter platform, this is the only way to play fighters and for others, seeing classics like Street Fighter IV move to full 3D was jarring at first, but I think Capcom has shown with careful attention to detail, the transition can be made without entirely changing the game. The retro in me loves to see new releases coming out for the KoF franchise with the characters fully intact in 2D however… most likely because that’s the only way I’ve ever known them.

Here’s some gameplay bits from the Terry Bogard character intro for KoF 12. Note that while the animation is still hand drawn, the fighting has certainly been spruced up with plenty of 3D effects:

The choices have been narrowed down to 2 options for each platform and you must create a forum account to vote for one:

• PS3 Box Art Choices
• Xbox 360 Box Art Choices

Check out the gallery for the box art choices for each platform:

Looks like Ubisoft is taking another cut (hahahha!) at the series designed around the advanced 1:1 motion mapping controls offered by the upcoming Wii MotionPlus and the trailer… well the trailer made me want to pre-order the shit out of game:

TIP: You can download Windows 7 RC for free.

Ok, you’ve been hearing the buzz about Windows 7, maybe you read our take on it (or saw the screenshot tour), and you want to give it a try. Let’s say you downloaded it, installed it and are now sitting there wondering “Wait, so what’s so cool about this?”.

This is the blog entry for you, we’re going to try and sum up every cool tip and trick for Windows 7 that we could find online (and from our own experience) and post it here for quick and easy consumption. So get ready to either memorize everything below, or just print the page out

We’d also recommend checking out Tim Sneath’s Bumper List of Windows 7 secrets for a great list as well. Thanks goes out to Chris Hunkele for sending that one in.

Aero Window Management Keyboard Shortcuts

Below is a list of the cooler keyboard shortcuts that you can now use in Windows 7 for quickly managing your windows.

• Dragging any window against the LEFT, RIGHT or TOP edge of the screen will perform the following operation:
  • LEFT: Anchor window against left side of screen, vertically maximize window and fill about half the screen horizontally
  • RIGHT: Anchor window against right side of screen, vertically maximize window and fill about half the screen horizontally
  • TOP: Maximize the window

  

• WINDOWS-KEY + LEFT/RIGHT: Dock the current focused window against the LEFT or RIGHT side of the screen, maximizing it vertically.
  • Add SHIFT to the keystrokes above to send windows across multiple monitors to other desktops.
• WINDOWS-KEY + UP/DOWN: Maximize the current focused window to full screen (UP) or restore it’s original size (DOWN) or minimize it to the taskbar (DOWN again)
• WINDOWS-KEY + HOME: Hide all windows except the current focused window. Pressing the keystroke again will un-hide all the hidden windows. This is a convenience keystroke for visually decluttering your monitor.
• WINDOWS-KEY + SPACE: Momentarily make all windows transparent, allowing you to look at your desktop. Can we helpful if you are trying to double-check the name of something or possibly view a gadget.
• Hold CTRL while clicking on a taskbar icon that has multiple instances of the app open will cycle through all the windows of that same kind. For example, having 5 Firefox windows open, I can hold CTRL and keep clicking the Firefox taskbar icon, and each window will popup focused until I see the one I want.
• WINDOWS-KEY + T: This will focus the taskbar and allow you to use LEFT and RIGHT to cycle through the apps on the taskbar.

Tips, Tweaks and Launch Apps

Below is a list of some of the cooler tweaks or tips on using Windows 7 that you’ll love.

• Hold SHIFT + RIGHT-CLICK on any folder in Windows Explorer to show the advanced items in the context menu such as Open command prompt here:



• WINDOWS-KEY + 1/2/3/4/5: Will automatically launch 1-5 of the pinned icons from your Taskbar for you. For example, if Firefox is my first pinned icon on my taskbar, I can launch it with WINDOWS-KEY + 1.
• Hold CTRL + SHIFT + LEFT-CLICK to automatically launch an application in Administrative mode. No need to right-click > Run as Administrator anymore.
• Hold SHIFT + LEFT-CLICK on any application icon in the taskbar (pinned or unpinned) will start another instance of whatever app you clicked on.
  • TIP: You can even just use a single MIDDLE-CLICK on the app to launch a second copy if your mouse has a 3rd middle mouse button.
• Adding NAS folders to Windows 7 Libraries. By default Windows 7 doesn’t support adding NAS folder locations to your Libraries, Chris Hunkele tells us that the reason for this limitation is that the remote host serving up the folders must be running the new Indexing Service — which most 3rd party NAS’s (like the ReadyNAS series) won’t be running. You can work around this issue two different ways:
  1. If you are just trying to replace your My Music, My Videos, etc. folders with NAS-located folders, bring up the properties for those folders, go to the Locations tab, and “Move” the location from the current hard-drive location to your NAS location:

  

  2. If you are trying to add additional folders to the libraries that are on your NAS, you can use this tip using mklink (sort of like Unix’s symlinks) to link what Windows thought was a local dir, out to a NAS-located dir out from under it, allowing you to get NAS folders into your libraries.

Hidden Cool Apps

“Hidden” in the sense that there are not Start Menu shortcuts for these apps, and the jobs they performance are pretty slick.

• Problem Steps Recorder (psr.exe): A troubleshooting tool that will record mouse movement, keyboard input and screenshot every changed screen of a workflow and when done (”Stop Recording” is pressed), will ZIP everything up with screenshots into a nice ZIP file that can be shared with a technician.
  • TIP: For any software companies out there, you can use this to make capturing documentation flows a lot easier!
• Display Color Calibration (dccw.exe): Used to tweak the color and display calibration of your monitor. I found this wizard to be designed in a sub-optimal way, showing you the “target” display examples on one page, and then asking you to adjust your settings for “optimal viewing” on the next page — where the example of what you wanted was no longer visible. I can’t say I saw a huge improvement with this.
• ClearType Text Tuner (cctune.exe): Used to tweak the hinting and way ClearType text is displayed on your LCD monitor. I didn’t end up needing this, but if you have a problem with how text is displaying, this can help.
• Burn Disc Image (ISO burning support): You can double-click on any .ISO file now and be prompted with an application to burn it to a disc:



• Windows Movie Maker: You’ll notice in Windows 7 RC, Windows Movie Maker is missing. It’s now part of the Windows Life Essentials package and is currently being reworked inside Microsoft for inclusion in Windows 7 final release. In the mean time you will have to make due with Windows Movie Maker 2.6:

Update #1: Make that 20 tips, Aero’s snap-to-edge behavior TIP added above in the Window Management section.

Introduction

It is no mystery that I’ve been part of the parade yelling “Vista Sucks!” since it’s inception – I’ve even taken the time to review Vista’s shortcomings for everyone willing to read it by only taking a look at changes in one program as an example of the half-assed decisions made throughout the entire OS.

The problem with Vista was that it was a collection of half-done idea, some bad ideas and some good idea sprinkled in there leaving the all-to-common feeling of “This is what I waited 6 years for?”

It’s more or less accepted across the web-ter-net-i-sphere that Microsoft released Vista and immediately set to work on what was suppose to be Vista in the first place and later got to known as Windows 7.

This review are my thoughts on running Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) after 3 days.

NOTE: To get an idea of other top-level changes and features coming in Windows 7, check our our screenshot tour.

The New Taskbar

I think it’s a lack of innovation combined with brain-atrophy settling in, but when the concept of a “Taskbar” comes into my mind, I literally think of the Windows XP taskbar. You boot into an Ubuntu desktop running GNOME and you see more or less a copy of the idea there as well. One of the most notable places you see nothing like the Windows XP taskbar is Mac — it has this concept of a bar thingie… it sure looks like a bar, but it behaves very differently:

It combines multiple ideas like showing if an app is running or not running (via the little blue light bulb under the icon), it also includes alter-notification behavior by bouncing the icon around (Windows colors the taskbar item orange and/or blinks it).

Windows hasn’t really had this concept of a feature-full taskbar until Windows 7, and my impressions of it working with it are generally excellent — I really like the new approach.:

The new Windows 7 Taskbar removes the idea of the Quick Launch Bar and the separation of shortcut buttons and running apps like Windows XP had:

The entire Taskbar can be thought of as a single display area. There is a concept of “pinned” shortcuts that will stay on the taskbar after the application has closed and the concept of “unpinned” shortcuts that represent a running application and will disappear right after the applications closes:

What this gives you is a more functional version of the Mac OSX application bar. You can choose to treat it like the Mac OSX application bar by “pinning” everything you want to it, and have icons fill the entire taskbar. Then you’ll be able to tell running applications from non-running applications by way of the shaded highlight box that is rendered around those icons and non-running apps won’t have that effect rendered around them.

In addition to application state and event-notification, Windows 7’s new taskbar also integrates with actual window-management in a much more intuitive way than the grouping behavior was that was introduced in Windows XP.

When an application has multiple windows open (as seen in the previous screenshots) the icon on the taskbar gets a “stack of cards” effect to indicate multiple windows available. Mousing-over or clicking the icon on the taskbar brings up a grouped preview display of all the windows:

You can then hover over the window preview you think you might want and Windows will actually make all other windows transparent while bringing that window (belonging to the preview) to the foreground so you can see exactly which window you are about to focus. If you mouse-out of the preview box and do nothing, nothing happens — if you click, that window will become focused.

One nice small touch to this process is that the wait-time of mouse-over that must occur before the preview is shown or window highlighted is very small, like 250ms, so you don’t get the false impression that you have to click anything. It just does what you want it to do before you get fed up waiting.

So far I have liked using the new taskbar much like an expanded Windows XP Quick Launch Bar, in that I only pin the applications I use constantly and launch the rest from the awesome Windows-Key/Search/Enter series of keystrokes that become possible in Windows Vista with the new immediate-start-search:

Performance

Overall excellent so far, definitely feeling like a step-up from Windows Vista. I’m noticing a lot less disk thrashing and faster load times even after long developer sessions.

One thing pointed out by Grant Gochnauer is how insanely aggressive Windows 7 caches recently-used programs in the Standby area of memory that it manages. This allows you to get markedly better performance with the more RAM you throw in your machine.

An example of the Resource Monitor application on my machine:

Notice the reported 0 MB of free RAM? But also notice the 1.5 GB of Standby RAM used up — even if I fire up my development Java IDE there is no disk thrashing as Windows pulls (most of) it from RAM as it’s one of my most-used apps.

As an example of taking this to an extreme is Grant’s desktop:

… yes, that’s 12 GB of total RAM with a Standby cache of 8.8 GB. Grant does report “insanely fast load times” with his IDE, application servers and other huge applications that would normally take quite a while if spinning them off the disk.

Given how freaking cheap good DDR3 (and DDR2) RAM is now-adays, you can easily get SSD-esque performance out of a machine by dropping many gigs of RAM into it instead of sinking a small fortune into a performant SSD.

In every-day use, the performance boost in Windows 7 has been a welcome addition. It basically takes your Vista machine and makes it feel like Windows XP again — minus all the disk thrashing and horrible memory management… so in cases where you have a machine with a ton of RAM, it absolutely will be a huge performance boost for you.

Overall Impressions

Summing everything up and helping you decide if you should replace your Windows XP or Vista install, here’s the scoop:

• In the most general sense, Windows 7 is a functional, feature-complete, stable and performant version of Vista that actually works.
• New taskbar behavior is excellent. From a Window’s-user perspective, it’s a more familiar design than directly copying the Mac with some nice touches.
• Window management has some nice touches making it a bit easier to layout multiple windows on your desktop easily.
• Performance of Windows 7 64-bit on a machine with 4GB or more of RAM generally feels “great”, the more RAM, the snappier the feeling to the point of 8GB+ setups offering “SSD-feeling performance” out of a normal computer.
• UI performance seems snappier, less lag with heavy UI effects on.
• Noticably less disk-thrashing noticed on other versions of Windows on the same hardware. Most notable with Windows XP, but also notable in Windows Vista, after long periods of inactivity, Windows was more than happy to page items in-memory to disk even though it didn’t need the ram, leading to long reload/slow repaint artifacting as you tried to refocus those windows and use those apps after a long period of inactivity.
• UAC has been calmed down to not occur so often, and when it does, the screen doesn’t do the whole “go black and repaint momentarily” thing anymore that Vista did.
• New “Library” concept, while mostly superficial, gives a nice organized “feeling” to the desktop.
• Native Windows XP Emulation support is a ridiculously huge win for folks needing backward compatibility.
• Unfortunately focus-management is still as frustrating as it was in Windows XP. It’s still entirely possible be typing text into a chat box just to have IE (or any other app) focus itself and steal the keyboard input from you mid-sentence and if there is a default focused button on that dialog, the next time you hit “Space” you make that choice… it’s already happened to me once in the 3 days I’ve been on W7… by holy christ god in heaven, Microsoft please solve this problem. Hell, just copy Mac.

Final Impression: Great Upgrade to Windows XP and Vista. I’m back on the Windows bandwagon and eagerly awaiting polish in all areas for Windows 8 in 2012.

I was just shopping on Newegg and decided to purchase some more RAM for my computer. I added the item to my shopping card, hit purchase, entered my Credit Card info and hit Finish.

I had forgotten that I had enabled the frustratingly stupid “Verified by Visa” check-out security process in the past… I somehow always manage to forget my password and lock myself out… Visa remembers every past password you’ve used and won’t let you reuse one.

After failing to login to the Verified by Visa service and getting kicked out to select a new password, I decided this bullshit was too much trouble and just cancelled the transaction. A dialog popped up warning me:

If you cancel this login process, your purchase will not be complete.

I didn’t care, this was too much hassle to order some freaking RAM. So I hit “OK” and cancelled the whole operation. At that point, the Verified by Visa service forwarded me to my “Order Summary” page:

… wait, I thought the transaction failed?

Oh well, I’ve bought from Newegg in the past and am familiar with the follow-up “We were unable to charge your credit card” emails, so I figured this was just a fluke and waited for that email.

Instead, I got this email:

While I’m happy I’m getting my RAM now, I’m trying to figureout what that useless Verified by Visa service actually does at this point.

For anyone looking for a Netbook, a hell of a deal for the Lenovo S10e — $50 cheaper (~15% discount) than the regular price from Newegg.

From Dealsea:

1. Go to http://www.lenovo.com/cpp
2. Enter “familyandfriends” as passcode
3. Click the following: “notebooks” > “ideapad” > “view S series”
4. Under “IdeaPad S10 High capacity battery”, select “view models”
5. Under either Black or White, select “customize”
6. Add to cart
7. Enter eCoupon code “USENETSALE” at checkout
8. Total price is $298.45 with free shipping

Specifications:

• Intel ATOM Processor N270 Single Core ( 1.60GHz 533MHz 512KB )
• Genuine Windows XP Home Edition
• Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950
• 1 GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz
• 10.2 ” WSVGA AntiGlare TFT with integrated camera 1024 x 600
• Industry Standard Touchpad
• 160GB 5400
• 6 Cell Lithium-Ion
• Broadcom 11b/g Wi-Fi wireless
• One Year Warranty

NETGEAR has made available the 4.1.5 release of the RAIDiator firmware (operating system) that their ReadyNAS line of personal NAS devices run.

For those that aren’t familiar with the ReadyNAS line, they originally started as personal servers from a company named Infrant that provided more than just dumb network-attached disk space (like the Drobo), they focused on additional functionality like scheduled backups, streaming services, print server functionality and so on.

With the release of the RAIDiator 4.0 OS last year, Infrant (soon bought by NETGEAR right after) exposed the underlying Linux-based OS to users via SSH, allowing you to treat the machine essentially like a Linux server — hosting websites or doing whatever you more or less wanted with it. In addition to these changes Infrant added additional streaming services support for photos and some other cool plugins (like BitTorrent support) that snapped right into the RAIDiator OS and provided slick functionality.

In addition to that, improved UPnP AV streaming support was added to the ReadyNAS operating system, removing the requirement for most people working with streaming audio/video libraries on their network to rely on 3rd party software like TwonkyVision to stream the media for them.

So far the UPnP AV streaming has been working more or less “pretty good” for me, with some exceptions, but the changelog that comes with the 4.1.5 release has announced a completely new implementation to UPnP AV support which should hopefully improve performance even more.

The complete changelog is as follows per the NETGEAR announcement:

New features

1. ReadyNAS Vault option has been added in this release.  With ReadyNAS Vault, you can back up specified folders on your ReadyNAS to an online data center in a matter of clicks.  The option appears in the Backup page, and more info and a quick how-to and be found here.
2. Time Machine support for Mac users just got a whole lot easier. The ReadyNAS can now be set up for Time Machine in a matter of a couple minutes. The option is available in the Backup/Time Machine tab. Follow the simple instructions here.
3. FrontView Backup Manager now has treeview for selecting local share folders.
4. ReadyNAS Duo now has DHCP Server, WINS Server, and Network UPS support.
5. ReadyDLNA replaces the existing UPnP-AV server support, providing excellent compatibility with DLNA devices, including the latest TVs with built-in DLNA client.
6. TiVo HMO (Home Media Option) support. TiVo HMO support allows TiVo to stream music and photos straight from the ReadyNAS. This option is available through ReadyDLNA.
7. Added an option to specify the NFS thread count.
8. Added TLS option for SMTP setting.
9. Simplified Domain/Active Directory setup.

Bug fixes

1. Fixed rarely seen bug where the backup manager could not connect to remote CIFS shares on some older systems.
2. Fixed guest access for AFP in user-based security modes.
3. Fixed power timer support on newer Duo systems.
4. Fixed support for all WD Green Power drives on the compatibility list.
5. Truncate backup logs.
6. Fixed slowness with ReadyNAS Photos.
7. Fixed notification of alert test failure.
8. Fixed quota violation alerts to domain users.

You can download the update from here, or more easily just login to your admin interface on your ReadyNAS device, go to System > Update, and click Check for Updates:

One of the selling points of all of the new systems, particularly in reference to their various online services, is the ability to download extra content. This extra content varies from new levels, modes, characters, costumes, and anything else you can imagine. One of the first offerings out of the gate of Microsoft’s Xbox Live was the poorly priced and all but worthless horse armor for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. This misstep was met with a clamoring fervor that seemed to sting the makers of downloadable content such that gamers saw generally better material offered. Now, Capcom has decided the moratorium on screwing gamers without buying them dinner first is not only overdue for a return but also in need of an upgrade. And with that we have the Resident Evil 5 (RE5) Versus Mode.

RE5 is the first in the series to offer real online functionality, and no I am not going to count the PS2 abortions they call the Outbreak series, and as such offers some excellent co-op in both local and online multi-player. An obvious omission was some kind of death match mode or any sort of competitive play. That is understandable given that when you design a game with one sort of play style in mind, you don’t want to rush or half-ass a mode just to have it on there. So it sort of makes sense to release the game and then offer that mode later as downloadable content, right? And the five dollars you spend to download said content is worth it right? A whole new mode for just five bones? That sounds like value. Then you pay your money and see the download is only 1.86 Mb. That is right kids, the content is ALREADY ON THE DISC.

So basically what has happened here is that Capcom took the time to build the mode and put it on the disc and then locked it. You paid $60 for the disc (or $90 if you went for the collector’s edition) and then you have to shell out an additional five dollars to get all the content on it. Well, that is assuming that all the content has been unlocked at this point. It wouldn’t surprise me much if there were additional modes or characters or a picture of a big middle finger buried in the code just waiting for extra proceeds to be given up for it.

I really don’t care all that much about paying for new content. It is kind of cool really and saves a trip to the retail store for expansion packs and the like which will replace old discs and create waste. So that is fine, but when the shit is on the disc to begin with? Uh no.

Capcom pulled similar nonesense in February with the extra costume content for Street Fighter IV. The chumps who shelled out for the collector’s edition got four extra costumes on their retail disc and the rest of us had to buy it…er…unlock it with money or points. The subsequent costume packs must have also been included on the disc as well and I am sure that the upcoming online tournament mode is too.  Capcom is my favorite developer but they are really making angry. Judging by the reaction by gamers, I am not alone.

So what could the reasoning behind this possibly be, outside of the obvious desire to gouge as much money out of gamers as possible? According to IGN.com, a Capcom representative had this to say: “Versus mode represents content that was created outside the scope of the original design of Resident Evil 5. This is an all new mode that required additional resources to create, not to mention the additional bandwidth costs.”

So apparently because the development team spent some extra time on it to put it on the disc we have to pay. That is patently ridiculous. The additional bandwidth cost is apparently to cover costs leveraged on publishers by Sony to keep the Playstation Network free. Of course that doesn’t speak to why Xbox users have to pay given that we are already paying for the service. But even aside from that disparity, downloadable content should be just that and what is on the disc should be playable. Unlocking things through gameplay is one thing but paying for it is assinine.

In addition to the above statement, Capcom and its loyalists are pointing out that the mode is really just piggybacking on the modes that already exist. The versus mode utilizes assets that already exist in the Mercenaries mode that unlocks when you finish the game. Basically it is just the Mercenaries duo mode with competitive scoring and the ability to damage other players. So the argument is that the mode wasn’t actually built for the disc and then just unlocked but rather that the small download reconfigures things to make up the versus mode. And that would be a fine argument so long as there was no extra charge. If all you are doing is toggling the assets the way that most games would allow you to adjust settings and calling it a mode then it does not justify extra charge. The fundamental argument that this is content that could have and should have been included for free remains unchanged.

Unfortunately, even with the somewhat basic nature of the mode, versus is something that people want and are willing to pay for and judging by the activity on LIVE last night, it seems like plenty of people did.  Which means the practice is likely to continue in the future.  This is one of those situations where you have to speak with your pocketbook. All the angry message board posts in the world are not going to mean anything if the sales numbers support the practice.

It is fairly horrifying to think that this sort of practice may become common place. When prices on games raised from $50 to $60 with this new generation, most people figured fair enough. But if this catches on, we could be paying more and more money for disc content. Now, again, I don’t mind paying for new content or added material later on, but if it is on the retail disc then I shouldn’t have to pay for it. It would be like if you had to fork over some extra cash for deleted scenes or commentary tracks on a DVD.

Maybe it is an academic distinction to make between something on the disc or something added as the principle is similar. I just wouldn’t want to buy a shirt and then have to pay extra to take the sleeves out of a pouch or something. If it is actually on the physical disc then it should be available as part of the price. Capcom’s assertion that the development team spent extra time on the mode is a non-issue. It would be one thing if they just didn’t have time to include the mode and needed more time to finish it but that is not what happened here.  Obviously they had plenty of time to do the mode or it wouldn’t have made the retail disc. So I don’t see how that is worth an extra charge. The idea is EXTRA content, which would be content not included on the original release. It is on there. If Rockstar can be on the hook for the Hot Coffee code in San Andreas then Capcom needs to own up to the fact that they have just fleeced loyal fans by making them pay for what was already theirs to begin with.

Usually, when people complain about paying for extra content for downloads it is because the material SHOULD have been on the retail disc.  This takes the argument one step farther in that the content IS on the disc.  If things keep going this way, we’ll be paying $60 for the first few levels and then have to pay more to finish the game. I can understand companies trying to find ways to stay solvent in the current economy but this is not a good, nor honest way to do it. Certainly given the financial difficulties we all find ourselves in your dollars are better spent on something that gives you every thing you paid for. For shame Capcom.

About a year ago I started writing an article titled “Linux on the Desktop: 10 Years of Wasted Time”. I was trying to summarize why Linux does not compete on the desktop for the mainstream computer user. As a Linux user since RedHat 5.0, then a Gentoo user for years then a Mandrake user for 6 months then finally an Ubuntu user for years after that — I’ve been around the block. I’ve seen “This is finally the year of Linux on the desktop” no less than 6 times, about every 2 years or so to be exact. And I’ve seen, everytime, that claim get dashed by the same issues that plauged Linux 10 years and still plague it today.

In all my effort to write up this article to communicate to the readers why Linux will never succeed for the mainstream on the desktop, I found complete clarity in a single comment on Slashdot from this thread on DVD ripping.

This comment is from reader TheWanderingHermit and is as follows:

That could cause problems. VLC is crippled in the latest Ubuntu. While the VLC people blame Ubuntu on their mailing lists, it turns out that the FFMpeg library uses different names for some codes in their newer version — and on the latest Ubunut (Intrepid), that version of VLC doesn’t use the newer names.

I was on both mailing lists for a while (VLC, FFMpeg) and the latter admitted to changing the names but did have all the codecs available under Ubunut. The VLC people claim some of those codecs are not available under Ubuntu (even with extra repositories), but they’re there — just with different names.

Until Ubuntu gets this straightened out, anyone using Intrepid or following versions will have trouble with video codecs, including ripping DVDs and, in my case, trying to read files from my HD camcorder that were easily readable in Ubuntu Hardy, but which nobody was quite sure how to read (or what settings to use) in Intrepid.

After wasting several days of my life on this issue, I gave up, ordered an iMac, and since switching, have spent more time doing what I want on my computer and less time at the computer overall. I no longer have to spend time trying to make sure the tools taht are supposed to help me are set up properly or if I’m using the right settings.

It’s nice to have more time for real life than to be spending time adjusting my tools.

Just read the first 3 paragraphs of the post. It sums up in perfect clarity exactly why Linux will never succeed on the desktop in the mainstream. Obviously not in the literal sense, but in the broader sense.

Problems like these have always been the challenges that had to be overcome on Linux. It’s never an issue of reinstalling a driver or running through a wizard when a device doesn’t work — it’s usually a problem on par with incompatible libraries, requiring a rebuilt binary or potentially a new kernel module to support what you are doing.

On locked down hardware like netbooks, phones or other devices Linux can make a lot of sense, and be tuned out so specifically that you can provide “Restore” wizards that can get things back into a working state. Unfortunately in the world of desktops you fight battles like the one above and waste half your life on it.

Unfortunately the fact that Linux operates like this is a side effect of the operating system being driven by developers and not by business interests. If Linux were drive by business interests, there would be kernel releases once every 2 years and there would a driver compatibility layer a mile thick — technically appalling to all the hardcore devs that work on Linux, but all the users of Linux would know is that things “just work”.

While that has never happened until recently, with the adoption of Linux on more mobile devices I imagine we’ll see commercial entities like Canonical start driving stabilizing effects into the community and maybe in 10 more years we can talk about how this is “the year of Linux on the desktop”.

Looks like some buzz going around the net that the DRM used on Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena for the PC (by Atari) is hard-locked to 3 install counts and then the game will not install again. (Thread 1, Thread 2)

Early indications suggest that there isn’t even an support number to call to unlock the installs, you are just done with the game and need to go pickup another copy if you want to install it.

You have to love how utterly retarded this is… it’s not hard-locked to some reasonable limit, like 8 or 10 — some amount that couldn’t succeed if it were mass-pirated, but instead locked to an amount that a normal gamer might encounter in a year with a reformat and possibly building a new computer OR just troubleshooting a wonky game install.

I think this policy should be carried forward to movie theaters where you only get to get up and out of your seat once to go to the bathroom during a movie. If you get up more than that, you aren’t allowed back in the theater and have to buy a new ticket to finish watching the movie.

Common Sense and Human Decency: 0

Retarded Corporate Fuck-face Policy: 1

Thanks VE3D!

Summary [9.0 out of 10]

Resident Evil 5 continues the saga and ties the early games in the series back into the new storyline started in Resident Evil 4. The game trades solitary survival horror for intense co-op action. Retaining the control scheme and third person, over the shoulder perspective seen in Resident Evil 4, this installment replicates the that title’s tight gameplay and adds some new and fun innovations.

Introduction

I’ve been a big fan of the Resident Evil(RE) series since it first debuted on the Playstation and when RE 4 showed up on the Gamecube I loved it enormously and said that if the sequel would just give me more levels of that I would be happy. As it turns out, that is pretty much what they did and it was mostly for the better. As much as I liked number 4 there were some things that could have been done a bit better or not at all. Overall, however, RE5 is an enormously tight and addictive game that largely hits the mark.

The Great

• Gameplay: Basically this is RE4 with a fresh coat of paint and a buddy. While that may sound like a dismissal, given just how great RE4 was this is a very good thing. All the basic mechanics work very well and all fit together to produce a fun experience. That is really the biggest thing here, it is just really fun. I never really get bored of anything that goes on in the game and keep coming back for more.

• Unlockables/replayability: There is a ton of extra material here from additional modes to costumes to weapons. The level of extra stuff here is staggering and makes the game absolutely addictive. I finished the game weeks ago but continue to play day after day unlocking things to go back in and play with. It is a testament to the quality of that content and gameplay that it is worth so much additional play for its own sake.
• Graphics: The visuals in the game are gorgeous. RE4 was a revelation on the Gamecube and this puts that to shame. The in game graphics are just as strong as the cut scenes and the environments are equally beautiful. Explosion effects, fire, water, and all the generally hard stuff looks great as well. It isn’t quite up to Uncharted or Metal Gear Solid 4 but it is still a wonder to behold.

• Sheva: I was super skeptical when I heard about having a partner during the single player campaign as typically AI sucks like a chest wound but I am totally sold at this point. The single player goes pretty well as your partner Sheva isn’t braindead. She uses healing items a bit too much and will sometimes wander off when you need her but compared to other partners in games, she does pretty well. Also? HOT.

• Multiplayer: Mutiplayer is where RE5 really shines. Both local and online co-op are offered and both are awesome. In both cases one player takes Chris and the other takes Sheva. Local co-op is served through split screen which is somewhat off-set to make it easier to differentiate between the screens and while it is sometimes difficult to see on the smaller area, having another human controlling your partner makes up for it. Even better, the online co-op obviously gives each player their own screen. It is exactly like playing the single player campaign only you can talk to your partner who is most likely a better player than the AI. The addition of voice chat is key and was not a foregone conclusion given its omission in Capcom’s previous attempt at an online muliplayer RE by way of the Outbreak series.

The Good

• The Inventory Screen: The on the go inventory select screen no longer takes you out of the action and you can switch equipment on the fly. This way you don’t have to stop in the middle of the game every couple of minutes to run through menus to reload or switch weapons. This is particularly important in co-op games where you can’t be pausing both players games just to use a health spray.
• Controls: the controls are largely carried over from RE4 for better and for worse. Given the controls on that game were enormously tight and responsive, this is a pretty good thing. The button layout is all right there for you and you won’t struggle to do anything once you get the hang of it. There might be a bit of a learning curve if you didn’t play a lot of RE4 and are coming off an FPS but generally it is pretty intuitive.  Some people are trying to call this ‘Tank’ controlling and are complaining about it but the addition of a quick turn command gives you the ability to do pretty much what you want. The big caveat to that is that there is no strafe feature so when you fire you have to plant in one spot. This was apparently to keep the game scary or frightening but given that the gameplay style eschews the horror for action, this is sort of a lame reason and smacks of Capcom trying to force a bad design choice down gamers’ throats and reminds me of the lack of voice support in the Outbreak series. Still, even without strafe, the controls are tight and intuitive.

• Mercenaries Mode: This is a RE staple since RE3 and it has taken different forms across the games. This incarnation may be my favorite. It is not terribly different from the Mercs game in RE4 but the online and local co-op makes it shine. I am not a HUGE fan of this mode offline but the multiplayer is a huge amount of fun. The premise is simply to accrue points through kill combos in a variety of levels against a two minute time limit.  With two players, this mode is addictive and adds even more unlockable content to go after.

• Wesker: Albert Wesker is to RE what Randall Flagg is to Stephen King’s universe. He has been a pain in players’ asses since the first game and he takes center stage as the main heavy in RE5. Fighting Wesker in the game is always unique and interesting and he always manages to keep his sunglasses on. Impressive.
• Weapons: RE5 throws a lot of weapons at you in this game including special ones you unlock once you’ve upgraded particular others all the way. The sheer variety is staggering and most of them are actually worthwhile. Being able to upgrade the guns is a hold over from the previous game and still works well. That being said,  it is probably best not to take the Gatling gun into a local multiplayer game, however, as the back pack takes up a goodly portion of the limited screen.
• Chapters/item carry over: This seems like a small thing but it really isn’t. Unlike previous games in the series, RE5 allows you to go back and replay whatever levels you want and allows you to keep all your gold and items from each play through. This means you can go back and find anything you might have missed with ease and also allows you to mine levels of riches over and over again which makes upgrading much easier. It also makes you a better player as it turns out since you have to keep on fighting over and over again.

The Bad

• Storyline: The story is where everything gets dicey. There are a few problems. The first is that by and large there isn’t much of a story at all. Chris and Sheva are chasing down an arms dealer after a bust goes bad. Then there are not-zombies that are similar to the Los Ganados from RE4. That is pretty much it. Then you have some nonsense tying it all in to Umbrella and a twist so bad that I saw it coming from the preview trailers. RE4 took the series in a new direction with the story and RE5 makes a U-turn back to the well worn floorboards of the first four games in the series. I would have much rather seen the plot line from RE4 lead somewhere entirely new. What we are left with is something that is a tangled mess but still manages to be sort of bland and uneventful.
• Structure: There have been people complaining that the series needs to go back to the pre-RE4 days fixed camera,  pre-rendered backgrounds and real tank like controls but I think that is ridiculous. RE4 was a response to those same people complaining against those things they are now advocating. I think people are confused. It isn’t the gameplay or any of that which is stale but rather the structure of the story and the game. It is just as if they pallet swapped Chris for Leon and changed the scenery a bit. Follow me here: I show up, a couple of dudes that aren’t zombies but have weird alien shit coming out of their mouths show up and put them down. Then I witness a brutal slaying by a guy with a big ass weapon that can kill me in one hit. I have to survive in a shanty village long enough for a gate to open up so I can get out of the stage. Quick which game’s opening level am I talking about? It doesn’t stop there either. It just keeps on following the same tired beats all through the game.

• No Leon: He is a badass and I would rather play as him than Chris any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
• the Inventory Screen: I know I have it listed in the good column but this causes some problems in its own right. Sometimes when you have a bunch of dudes bearing down on you with spears and machine guns you just don’t have the time to switch weapons or find that healing item. They should have implemented some kind of hot key assignment to the D-pad so you could change weapons and items on the fly. A quick reload feature you can perform with a button press helps this a lot but it is still a drag when you mean to switch to your magnum and end up accidentally holding a box of shotgun shells instead.
• Difficulty/length: I should say lack of difficulty. I have played a lot of Resident Evil over the years so maybe that is it but I found the normal mode to be way too easy and amateur to be laughable. Veteran is a bit more like it but overall the difficulty leaves a lot to be desired. It is also way too short. It is 6 chapters but it could have been longer. I suppose you want to leave people wanting more but I could have done with a lot more.

• Boss Fights: the bosses are generally big and impressive looking but they all go down like bitches. Once you know what you are doing with each fight they are super easy.

Conclusion [9.0 out of 10]

Resident Evil 5 is not a perfect game and I doubt it will see the Game of the Year awards that its predecessor enjoyed but it is still enormously fun. The move to action over horror has put a lot of fans out but as an action game it soars. Length, difficulty and story could have been better but again what is there is amazing. There are tons of things to unlock and collect and plenty of modes to keep you busy. It is a fun time and worthy of the franchise despite the issues which keep it from snatching a 1o.  Highly recommended, particularly to fans of RE4.

Note: There is a versus mode available on Xbox Live and the Playstation Network which basically plugs competitive play into the Mercs mode. This is a fun mode but with a price tag of five dollars for something that just unlocks content already on the disc, it is better to just skip it altogether. The co-op Mercs mode is more than enough to satisfy.