Dragon Age Origins

So this is a Bioware game, and it sucks like all the other Bioware games I've played, and this will be the last one...

The visual is good, the 3D well done, the building/terrain models good, but as always, it's the game-play that bites almost totally. The game has to be played the way the developers want it played--which is pretty much NOT the way I want to play things.

Sometimes you're solo, sometimes you have a squad. Inevitably, your squadmates will all get killed by opponents because you can't actually manage them quite right, and then you likely will get killed too.

The game is WAY to heavy on their chatty cathies and their cut-scenes (look! we made another mini-movie).

Camera control isn't what I want it to be. Can't much look "up". Can't quite "stealth" enough. Way too heavy on left-hand-keyboard/right-hand-mouse -- which I can't do: I was having RSI trouble on the right hand years ago, so I switched to lefty-mouse, and now my keyboard is different too. Not going back.

Excruciatingly linear, on micro maps.

I did not get very far into it.

Where's the delete button?

Steam and their various games

Steam is a fabulous service, the market leader.

But the products are really iffy. I have a number of games that simply do not play on my PC.

Max Payne 1
Max Payne 2
Serious Sam 1 HD

Others are wonky in one way or another, like they sort of work, but have some serious problems and halt for some reason.

Alice 2 (I reach a point where I have to use a custom item, and it simply doesn't do anything)
Batman Arkham City required a mouse that has a different kind of "middle button" than mine.
Supreme Commander 2 has some problem (I forget what was wrong here, but it wouldn't do something).

Do they not do any kind of testing? Or have some minimum testing requirement to impose on game creators to make an attempt at compatibility?

Some work just fabulous

Skyrim
HL 2
Torchlight 1/2

Given the qty of either total or partial failures I've encountered, I only buy games there when they are low-priced, under $20.

And why do so many games insist on installing yet another version of Visual C++ Runtime? or some variant of DirectX? I'm always a little nervous about this.

Wish there was a way to get the broken ones fixed. Or send them an email saying "BROKEN!"

Batman Arkham City

played some of the PC version of this...it's obviously a console port...visually quite good, possibly the best *looking* game I've played. It's obviously a console port. The controls feel too much exactly like PCGamer Mag always complained about with console ports--not really built for the mouse and keyboard, checkpoint saves

Very much of it is about the keystroke combination sequences that get the Bat Man to do the choreographed motion-animations they probably rotoscoped and re-animated from there. If you can't quite do the special things, it's just a button-masher, which is ultimately kinda boring.

Seems like every notable opponent Batman had is in this, all kinda flat, really depending on you already being very familiar with them. I'm not, of course.

And I have hit a wall. I have to fight the very first opponent who has body armor. It doesn't matter how many times I apply normal hits, it requires me to do a special move THAT MY MOUSE CANNOT DO.

So I'm done playing this one. Which is too bad, because I don't think I really got all that far along.

Moving on to Dragon Age Origins.

Some more notes on Parallel FS

OrangeFS looks kinda like what I want, but it has the usual Linux-only aspect.

http://www.orangefs.org/

The lack of real portability bothers me. I do most of my Java Dev work on OSX, 2nd-most on Windows, with Linux a distant third, mostly for concerns about portability. (I do note that that is really the reverse-order list of "able to patch the OS" behavior).

So of course in terms of what I can do for myself, it has to completely be portable across OSes, and not require any sort of "kernel patch" because there's no way I'm going to do that--just not interested.

Orange FS does have similar aspects, but at least in the doc reading I've done, they don't quite have a conceptual theme/analogy.

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Related, but a little weird: I'm actually thinking about writing some/all of this in Lisp (ok, that'd have some portability issues, but there's no reason a Librarian couldn't be written in Lisp). I haven't done any work in Lisp in years, so that'd be kinda cool...and there are some free Lisp versions that are pretty good these days (I recently re-discovered CLisp for Windows, it's a Cygwin package). Already I can see an issue: I need a build that includes multi-threading, and the basic CLisp does not.

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Desiderata for my Grid FS:

OS-agnostic
Can make use of any/all machines on the local net (scales)
Doesn't require mount-points for every machine (doesn't scale)
All shared space is available to any machine (scales)
Fault-tolerant about machines coming/going; system contains much self-discovery (scales)
Local apps don't really have to know much about the actual system, they're just going to interact with local files (scales)
Has some amount of redundancy
Doesn't require a bunch of special services