I am Haris!

Thoughts on comparing the reactions of Sony and Microsoft to getting hacked

2011-02-23T05:34:00.000+08:00

I read this article on Mashable comparing the reactions of Microsoft and Sony to the Kinect and PS3 getting hacked. I feel that the comparison isn't quite fair.

Hacking a peripheral device is a different degree of severity (I guess) compared to hacking the main console itself. That said,
Microsoft has gone after a guy who offers to mod 360s for cash which resulted in the prosecutors dropping the case, I assume to prevent the DMCA being tested in court. Granted, I am unable to find an instance where MS went after the guy who actually hacked it, but I think there was less publicity surrounding the hack as well. Which brings me to,
Microsoft's 360 has been hacked from day 1 as far as I can gather. They're probably used to it. The PS3 has just been hacked after 4 years. Sony is probably butthurt that this was not due to their amazing engineering, but rather it was because people simply wasn't interested. Consoles getting hacked quickly was pretty much the assumption then so the 360 being hacked didn't make much of a ripple. The PS3 remained unbroken for 4 years and suddenly being spectacularly cracked open was big news. The publicity that the hack and the hackers themselves were getting probably inflamed Sony even further.
In comparison, who the fuck hacked the 360? This is a good thing, maybe. I don't think they've managed to get to anyone from fail0verflow.

I think Sony is throwing a tantrum. I think MS's decision to release an SDK for the Kinect is good. I think if MS were put in the same situation as Sony, they would react the same way. I think that if you don't want to get taken to court, stay anonymous. I think that getting the case to court is potentially a good thing as it could get issues like the DMCA and who owns hardware I bought sorted out. Geohot is asking for donations for legal funds (first round is closed but there are some good links to read there). I think fuck Sony Entertainment.

MAG: the first week

2010-02-07T19:23:00.000+08:00

I have been playing MAG for just over a week now. I couldn't make up my mind about which PMC to join but I settled on Raven GmbH primarily because there seemed to be more of them at the forums I hang out on. Yeah, yeah I succumbed to peer pressure. But really, teamwork is essential in this game. More often than not when joining a game solo, I tend to get put in a squad with a quiet squad leader who doesn't talk or set FRAGOs, or worse: a squad that totally ignores the leader. So yes, I picked a PMC that guarantees me easy 8-man squads.

Well, over the week that we've played we have slowly improved. In the beginning it was hard to win a match as Raven but over the last couple of days we've managed to own Acquisition matches. We still have problems with Sabotage and Domination game modes.

I do have some issues with the clan list interface though. It needs to be sorted by who's online. At the moment I'm not sure how it is done but it's all over the place. Hunting through the clan list looking for who's online is a pain.

Thoughts on MAG open beta

2010-01-14T00:49:00.002+08:00

MAG had an open beta-test from the 4th until the 10th. It is supposedly an MMOFPS with huge maps supporting up to 256 players at a time. I participated in the open beta and the first thing that I noticed is that the graphics and sound effects seem to not be up to par with the likes of Modern Warfare 2. I think this is mainly because you have to download the client for the open beta and file sizes needed to be kept low. But, the effect was that the game did not feel as polished as others I could name. Hopefully they ratchet up the audio and graphics quality in the final release.

You have some objectives which you have to defend or capture to win the game. Squad leaders (or is it platoon leaders? I never played as squad leader) can give the order to take or capture an objective, destroy enemy assets, or repair yours. As with any multi-player game, the experience varies but by far I had the most fun when I got into squads that actually work together and use their headsets to actually communicate rather than just to talk trash.

I loved playing Domination. This is the 256-player mode where everything is just plain chaotic. People shoot at you from everywhere, and you've got to defend/destroy bunkers and SAM sites and gates and towers and APCs. It's just plain crazy. And I loved it.

I haven't quite made up my mind which faction I'll join though. I played the beta primarily as RAVEN, but I think I like the menu colour scheme of S.V.E.R. better. Thoughts?

I got my copy of Modern Warfare 2!

2009-11-12T10:06:00.001+08:00

My copy of Modern Warfare 2 arrived by courier yesterday, and I managed to plow through the campaign in one night. It was on regular though. It was short, but it had plenty of action and twists. I especially loved the part with the snowmobiles. Going downhill felt great!

I tried to get on the PSN to play online, but the Modern Warfare 2 servers were having problems. Lets hope they fix that soon. [UPDATE: It looks like they fixed it. I played for a couple of rounds. I sucked, as usual.]

I tried to play split-screen with my brother but they did that 16:9 split-screen thing instead of just a line down the middle, so the viewing area is really tiny on my 24" monitor. At first it was kind of a problem, but we moved closer and we got over it.

Baldur's Gate Trilogy on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Linux

2009-11-09T08:00:00.021+08:00

I had been feeling the itch to play Baldur's Gate again. To my eternal shame I've never actually finished either Baldur's Gate or its expansion and sequel. I found this guide and managed to install and play Baldur's Gate using the Baldur's Gate Trilogy (BGT) mod on my Linux box. BGT is a mod that makes it so that all Baldur's Gate games are played as one giant epic continuous game. It starts at Candlekeep and I suppose it ends wherever and whenever Throne of Bhaal ends. Since I've never actually finished it I don't know for sure but the idea is intriguing.

The installation was successful and I've played it for a bit. There are a couple of issues though:

I can't seem to put it into windowed mode
It sometimes hangs when I quit while actually in a game. I usually get out of this by doing a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and going back to the gdm.

I haven't run across anything else so far. I'll update when I do.

So here's what I did:

First things first, make sure you have a copy of the original Baldur's Gate, it's expansion: Tales of the Sword Coast, Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, and Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal. You have to have all of them. If you don't, I suggest getting the Baldur's Gate 4-in-1 boxset.
Make sure you have the following packages installed: mmv, tofrodos, and wine. If you don't have them or you are unsure just execute the following command:
```
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential mmv tofrodos wine unrar-free unzip libjpeg62-dev zlib1g-dev  
```
Execute
```
$ winecfg
```
Under the "Audio" tab, make sure that only the box labelled "OSS" is checked. Click OK.
Download and save winetricks into a folder in your PATH. Execute:
```
$ ./winetricks directplay
```
Download Mos Pack and extract the contents of the source directory within. I extracted the files into /home/haris/src/mospack. Execute:
```
$ cd /home/haris/src/mospack
$ make -f makefile.unix
```
This will create the executables mospack and mosunpack
Move, copy or create symlinks for the resulting mospack and mosunpack in a folder in your PATH.
Using wine, install Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast, Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, and Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal. Make sure you install everything. I installed Baldur's Gate at /home/haris/games/baldursgate and Baldur's Gate 2 at /home/haris/games/baldursgate2. When you see these folder names in this post just change them to match where you installed the games on your system.
Then, if you need to, download the appropriate patches for Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 from Bioware's site and install those too.
Download Baldur's Gate Trilogy-WeiDU and extract it into your Baldur's Gate 2 folder. The current version is 1.08.
Download bgt_linux.rar and also extract it into your Baldur's Gate 2 folder
Download the Linux version of WeiDU. Unzip it into a folder in your PATH. Personally, I extracted to a new folder and added that folder to the PATH. Whatever you choose to do, switch to whatever folder you extracted it to and execute:
```
$ tolower
```
Change to your Baldur's Gate directory and execute tolower:
```
$ cd /home/haris/games/baldursgate
$ tolower
```
Change to your Baldur's Gate 2 directory and execute tolower:
```
$ cd /home/haris/games/baldursgate2
$ tolower
```
Still from your Baldur's Gate 2 folder execute:
```
$ ./bgt-linux/bgt-linux
```
When prompted, type in the location of your Baldur's Gate install. In my case this is /home/haris/games/baldursgate.
Wait.
After the installation is done, put in your Baldur's Gate 2 CD and type:
```
$ wine baldur.exe
```

Enjoy!

Adapted from BGT in Linux (Successfully I think) by lodgey
References: DirectPlay Games at Wine wiki

Dragon Age: Origins — No top down view. No spell-casting while paused. I am a sad panda

2009-11-05T02:40:00.006+08:00

Playing on the PS3 after finishing the PC version, I felt hamstrung by the console interface. In combat, it replaces the expandable ability bar and hotkeys by mapping spells and abilities to the face buttons. You get two sets of commands and can alternate between them with R2 (or right bumper for the 360).

Tactical combat is sadly stripped down for the consoles. In the PC version, you may use a handy top-down viewpoint of the battlefield. You can maneuver the camera above the characters on the console, but it doesn't scroll in and out. It's also more difficult to command characters to take specific positions on the battlefield, and I couldn't cast spells while paused. This really takes away from the combat -- it's a shame that console players again don't get the options that PC players enjoy. via 1up.com

I was very much looking forwards to playing Dragon Age. But after reading that, I'm a bit bummed out. Getting it for Windows is not really an option because I don't run Windows anymore. So the PS3 is my main gaming outlet.

Why do console games get "simplified" interfaces/control schemes by default? It's not like I can't plug in a USB keyboard and mouse on my PS3 and game away. I understand that it might be an unfair advantage in multiplayer games. But this is single-player AND multi-platform. A keyboard and mouse control scheme and its attendant advantages should at least be an option for games like this.

I bat-caved

2009-09-24T11:35:00.002+08:00

After saying that Batman: Arkham Asylum is only worth a used buy, I went ahead and bought it anyway. I've always been weak to such temptations.

I blame the multiple times I played the demo, figuring out more Batman-like ways to take out the bad guys. I've lost count of how many ways those last five inmates can get incapacitated :D “What would Batman do?” is the question to ask yourself when you play the game.

Another factor that convinced me to buy the game is the availability of DLCs. The Joker DLC is already available on the Malaysian PlayStation Store. I hope the rest will follow too.

Reminder to self: You have quit WoW

2009-08-18T01:40:00.003+08:00

Remember kiddies: World of Warcraft is evil. *puts video on repeat*

Battlefield 1943 is great — Welcome to July!

2009-08-15T10:54:00.007+08:00

I've been playing Battlefield 1943 on and off between bouts of Fat Princess for the last couple of weeks and it has been really fun. It is also (as far as I can remember) the first first-person shooter I've played on a console — Fallout 3 doesn't count. Now, I haven't played FPSs in a long while and my last one was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on the PC. But comparing those two games directly wouldn't be fair to BF1943. CoD4 was a full-fledged game with a single-player campaign and a multiplayer aspect with modern weapons. BF1943 on the other hand is a completely multiplayer experience with one game mode on three different maps (well four if you count the Air Superiority map, but I never play that).

You get to choose between three classes: a rifleman, an infantryman, or a scout. As far as I can tell the only difference between the classes are their equipments. The rifleman is armed with a bolt-action rifle, a grenade launcher, grenades and a bayonet. The infantryman has a submachine gun, a bazooka, and a wrench that lets him fix things. The scout is your basic sniper armed with a scoped sniper rifle, a pistol, and dynamites. You can switch classes between respawns. You can also pick up a dead soldiers backpack to change classes.

You can also use several vehicles in the game: cars, tanks, and airplanes. What I love most about the game is the tank, sure it's big, slow and pretty much an explosives magnet. But usually before you inevitably blow up into a million tiny pieces, you can do a hell of a lot of damage. And that makes me happy. The planes on the other hand … I've never been able to fly them properly and I probably never will.

But that doesn't matter. Not really. The bottom-line is the game is fun and that is why I play it.

Batman: Arkham Asylum demo

2009-08-09T00:19:00.010+08:00

I downloaded the demo from PSN yesterday and played through it once today. Right off the bat one thing I have to say: The game looks gorgeous. I spent an embarrassing amount of time just staring at Batman.

The combat sort of reminds me of Assassin's Creed. You press □ to attack and △ to counter. Sometimes the game shows the action in slow motion which I totally do not understand why or how. Pretty though. You also have batarangs that you can throw at people. It knocks them out for a few seconds but they can dodge it if they see it coming (I think).

At the core of it though Batman: Arkham Asylum seems to be a stealth game — Batman doesn't use guns and directly facing enemies who have guns is suicide. Luckily he can use grappling hooks to climb up and swing around a room, drop behind enemies and silently take them out. And that's mainly the way I played the demo. It just seems to simple too simple to me and I wonder how they are going the ramp up the challenge as the game progresses. I hope it's not simply by throwing more bodies in your face.

From the scenes after the demo I'm assuming that there will be showdowns with the various supervillains they have as guests at Arkham so I wonder how these boss fights are going to play out. I wish they had a mini boss fight in the demo just to demonstrate that. Maybe just a slightly stronger than average doped up inmate, perhaps? But that didn't have that so I'm just going to have to wonder.

I wasn't really excited about the game before I played the demo and I remain so afterwards.

P.S: Yup, blogging about things you don't really care about. Thats what all the cool kids are doing these days. I tend to gush more about the things I like (or hate) at my identi.ca account.

LittleBigPlanet is fun!

2009-01-22T22:12:00.000+08:00

[caption id="attachment_118" align="alignleft" width="170" caption="LittleBigPlanet"][/caption]

It is kinda late in the day for a review of LittleBigPlanet since the game was released in October. But I've only had it for about a month and I have yet to finish the story mode - yes, I suck.

The story mode is fun to play, although I don't really know why I'm jumping around all over the place but it is fun nonetheless. And then there is the user created content. Some of the objects that you collect during play can be used to create your own LittleBigPlanet levels. You can then publish your levels online where other LBP players can download, play, comment and rate them. It's sort of like Youtube but only with LittleBigPlanet levels. Aside from me being hopelessly bad at timing my jumps, these user created content is the main reason for me not finishing the story mode yet.

Where the game really shines though is the multiplayer. The way they implemented is was pretty painless: just pick up another controller and press "Start" and another Sackboy magically appears. You can cooperate with each other to reach areas (and goodies) that are otherwise unreachable, or you can just have fun by slapping each other silly and pulling your mates down. It's all good.