Posts
Fired this up moments after midnight 2 weeks ago...(i.e., right when it was released; had already done the download)
Should explain part of that...last year at the company xmas party, which has door prizes, I won the grand prize, an Xbox One. I'm not a console guy so this was an interesting opportunity...
Can't say I'm overfond of the handheld with these things, it's WAY too hard to aim effectively...
But after a few months I thought -- I should get F4 on the Xbox. Then, in the fall, when I decide to advance order it, I discover that Microsoft has reversed their prior statement about it being too hard to produce a Xbox 360 emulator that will run on the One, and now there is such a thing, and a number of 360 games (but not all) will run on it, including Fallout 3, and that what you can buy is actually the F3/F4 bundle.
OK, that sounds good...I don't think I even finished playing F3. Parts were confusing and I was unable to find certain locations you had to go to, so I stopped trying to do that and just wandered around.
So, F4. Have played ~60 hours in the last two weeks. The controller is just as sucky as you will get told in PC Gamer--mouse is better for aim. Otoh, those little joystick things are better for very slow motion--you can walk at a very slow pace, turn very slowly. It's the fast turn that is very poor.
I crashed it once, yesterday. Loading a map for a building interior, bam, down it went. I could tell it had crashed, in the middle, and then the audio went bad, too, and it dropped back "to desktop". It was fine restarting again, so no loss. [Later: this has happened a couple more times, no indication why]
Overall, this is exactly the increment forward you are expecting from Bethesda. It is not pointy-end-of-the-spear state of the art, that seems to go to a PS4 game I forget the name of, but this is Bethesda's best. (Elder Scrolls 6 will be fabulous.)
The amount and precision of detail is amazing. This is a wander-around-and-look-at-things game, so I do a lot of that, and there's a lot to look at. I haven't yet felt I was looking at clones of anything yet, other than things like burned books n stuff. Watch out for Deathclaws until you have power armor.
You'd think that after 200 years, the local population would have done some actual cleanup, but there seems to be very little of that--and you can't tell them to do it either.
The color scheme overall is much the same light-brown-various-gray-earthtones that F3 and FNV had, which I think is kinda wrong. Plant life would recover at some point, esp after 200 years, as often as it rains, weeds especially would recover--just think about how many buried seeds there in your back yard. There would be plenty of green around. (OK, it turns out that if you are running Steam, there are user-mods that green things up. No good for me.) And there would be things like bicycles and brahmin-carts as transportation--and thus there would be more-or-less cleared roadways--if a brahmin can be a pack animal, it can haul a four-wheeled wooden cart.
I've meandered over about a fourth of the total map so far. Quite a ways to go...no hurry to do it all, I'm not one of those crazy folks who has to do a speed-run on it. Ultimately this game will have cost me 10 cents/hour to have played it, AND I get to go back and retry F3.
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Later (post xmas): have about 150 hours on this now. Other than two things (lack of color, and the endless amount of trash around that no one cleans up, even in a settlement that has people just standing around), this has been good fun. I still have a fair amount of territory to cover.
Definitely worth the price.
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Update: ok, the first DLC was just released. Apparently I had already paid for this with the Expensive Bundle back in the beginning. Time to build a robot!
Update 2: next DLC comes out in 2 weeks.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Monday, October 26, 2015
Martians
The Martian.
I read this a couple weekends ago. Guy at work recommended it. Mom gave me a copy because her "book club" group was reading it; I think that was because they were working on book/movie combinations.
Mom couldn't finish it. Too much sciencey-numbery stuff going on--not her cuppa.
I found three things annoying. Seriously annoying.
1. All that number chatter was distracting in the wrong way. And I understood all of it. It read too much like someone juvenile's private lab notebook/journal.
2. When you work for NASA, and you're an astronaut, and male, you are very nearly for sure an Eagle Scout. Almost all have been.
Problem is, you're also a Rocket Scientist. And when you're a Rocket Scientist, all problems get Rocket Science solutions.
So I'm on page 5, everyone else is gone, and our hero has recovered from the accident enough to walk around, and is in pursuit of repairing his radio, so he can tell NASA he's alive.
This is brainless. It's a Rocket Science solution, when he needs a Boy Scout solution. It does NOT take an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure this out.
That solution is to go outside an pile rocks up to make letters to spell out "Injured. Still alive." and a date. Granted that's one-way comm, but you do that first, before figuring out how to fix the radio. And later he can go out and spell more words.
Takes to page 160 before that occurs to him. Page 160. Or 170, I forget.
NASA has a dozen low-orbit satellites around Mars, and there's only 15 mins/day when the ground-site is not in visual range of one of them. So a REAL Rocket Scientist back at NASA would have been looking at the ground site as soon as the sand-storm passed, to see what remained. THIS NASA waits 30 days, and even then they aren't running change-detection software on the images, someone has to eyeball a detail or two, and THAT doesn't happen immediately.
And how come the spaceship that departs doesn't have a telescope/camera that can point at the landing site to look at the storm damage? No visual sensors that look backwards? Seriously? no comm to the satellites?
3. And then when he drives out to Pathfinder/Sojourner, he complains about navigating over a featureless but rocky terrain via dead-reckoning. He complains about there being no natural landmarks, and of course there's no GPS. And no compass, either, because there's no iron core to the planet, no planetary magnetic field, yadda, yadda...
What a knucklehead. Once again, you need a Boy Scout solution. If there are no landmarks, MAKE SOME. Pile up rocks every mile, in a straight line from the last couple of piles, you can go in a straight line a long ways. You're guaranteed to drift somewhat, but it'll be close. Pretty sure I learned this idea in 1970. Maybe 69.
He thinks of that on the way back. Well past when he should have been making them.
-----
Yeesh. I hope the movie is better. Well, you know he isn't going to go out and pile rocks up.
And I hope my tax dollars that go to NASA are helping them understand that they need multiple backup systems and alternatives for these sort of difficulties. The army has man-portable radios with funky antennas that fold up into tiny spaces. The landing site ought to have a wide variety of stuff dropped, with extras, especially comm gear.
I read this a couple weekends ago. Guy at work recommended it. Mom gave me a copy because her "book club" group was reading it; I think that was because they were working on book/movie combinations.
Mom couldn't finish it. Too much sciencey-numbery stuff going on--not her cuppa.
I found three things annoying. Seriously annoying.
1. All that number chatter was distracting in the wrong way. And I understood all of it. It read too much like someone juvenile's private lab notebook/journal.
2. When you work for NASA, and you're an astronaut, and male, you are very nearly for sure an Eagle Scout. Almost all have been.
Problem is, you're also a Rocket Scientist. And when you're a Rocket Scientist, all problems get Rocket Science solutions.
So I'm on page 5, everyone else is gone, and our hero has recovered from the accident enough to walk around, and is in pursuit of repairing his radio, so he can tell NASA he's alive.
This is brainless. It's a Rocket Science solution, when he needs a Boy Scout solution. It does NOT take an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure this out.
That solution is to go outside an pile rocks up to make letters to spell out "Injured. Still alive." and a date. Granted that's one-way comm, but you do that first, before figuring out how to fix the radio. And later he can go out and spell more words.
Takes to page 160 before that occurs to him. Page 160. Or 170, I forget.
NASA has a dozen low-orbit satellites around Mars, and there's only 15 mins/day when the ground-site is not in visual range of one of them. So a REAL Rocket Scientist back at NASA would have been looking at the ground site as soon as the sand-storm passed, to see what remained. THIS NASA waits 30 days, and even then they aren't running change-detection software on the images, someone has to eyeball a detail or two, and THAT doesn't happen immediately.
And how come the spaceship that departs doesn't have a telescope/camera that can point at the landing site to look at the storm damage? No visual sensors that look backwards? Seriously? no comm to the satellites?
3. And then when he drives out to Pathfinder/Sojourner, he complains about navigating over a featureless but rocky terrain via dead-reckoning. He complains about there being no natural landmarks, and of course there's no GPS. And no compass, either, because there's no iron core to the planet, no planetary magnetic field, yadda, yadda...
What a knucklehead. Once again, you need a Boy Scout solution. If there are no landmarks, MAKE SOME. Pile up rocks every mile, in a straight line from the last couple of piles, you can go in a straight line a long ways. You're guaranteed to drift somewhat, but it'll be close. Pretty sure I learned this idea in 1970. Maybe 69.
He thinks of that on the way back. Well past when he should have been making them.
-----
Yeesh. I hope the movie is better. Well, you know he isn't going to go out and pile rocks up.
And I hope my tax dollars that go to NASA are helping them understand that they need multiple backup systems and alternatives for these sort of difficulties. The army has man-portable radios with funky antennas that fold up into tiny spaces. The landing site ought to have a wide variety of stuff dropped, with extras, especially comm gear.
Bio Schockers
I finally went through Bioshock 1 for the first time. Got this on steam a while ago...actually played through successfully this go-round...I had the DVD-installed game 10 years ago, but it had a problem with crashing, and then I got to an airlock/map-level-change that wouldn't work, so I had to give up.
Didn't really get the supposed Ayn Rand feel of it, tho. I've read Atlas Shrugged, 40 years ago. Maybe it's been too long since I read that. This seemed more about generic power struggle between Ryan, Fontaine, Tennenbaum, etc. I played about half of it in silence, as my computer's internal audio was broken (still is, but I got a usb-audio stick).
Well, this new version from Steam got all the way through to the end, but not without some of the same flavor of seg-fault crashes. Gad. Isn't anyone able to do anything about this? *My* software doesn't seg-fault (well, actually some of it does, and those seg-faults are caused by third-party tools, and they crash in strange ways; usually I have to alert the 3rd-party-manuf about them: you know, "the JVM has detected a failure in native code" and then you get the damn core-dump, which doesn't actually terminate properly, so I can't have an auto-restart; I have a different thing where a sub-process called in a shell crashes on me so hard that it doesn't just kill itself, it takes out my code too (on Linux! no less); man I hate other people's software).
Bioshock 2 crashes on me too...entirely too often. WAY too often. Piece of crap.
At least Windows doesn't get killed along with it. But still...I wish there was some way to complain to Steam about this--entirely too many games that I have bought from Steam have had serious crashing problems (or completely failing to start at all).
-----
Anyway...B1 was ok, although I found the controls a little hard to work with again. The worst of which was discovering repeatedly that I had bought a plasmid upgrade only to find that the slot for the plasmid had been moved, so where I thought I had dropped it was different, and then I'd have a time cycling through them to select again. I think that happened every time--making them not that useful.
And I think that the only really useful plasmids were electro-shock and TK. Incinerate was ok once in a while, but it drank Eve like a sand-dune.
With TK, you can grab an opponent's missile/grenade out of the air and throw it back at them. *That* is nifty--except that when it came time to take on Fontaine at the end I completely forgot about doing that and just did the usual run-n-gun with occasional grenades.
And what's with the deal that when you're using a gun, and you run out of one flavor of bullet, it doesn't auto-switch you to another one? You end up using the wrong ones most of the time anyway...
A rule of thumb--you should either hack or destroy every single health station you come across; hack the easier ones, and destroy the hard ones--otherwise splicers you didn't quite kill are using them against you by re-healthing.
-----
B2 was properly harder than B1. The controls are essentially identical, so no re-learning what to do. Big Sisters were appallingly hard to kill.
Which brings up another point: there's limited value to trying to dodge death, since you just get re-vitalized nearby.
Another rule of thumb: Bee Swarm is your friend. Upgrade that to max *early*, because the swarm is independent from you, can detect targets around corners, and will attack things out of sight. And out-of-sight opponents won't come running at you. You can take down anything with bee swarm if you're patient and they don't see you. Also: upgrade Hypnotize as fast as you can--that's your other best friend--get the opponents to fight each other, esp the big ones. Then get killed, stay in the Re-Vi chamber until they are done, then prep bee swarm for remaining singletons, or another hypnotize for small crowds.
One tonic you can take will do something unusual: prevent you from using nearly all your weapons, but also cuts the Eve cost down 90% or so, which means you're the magic man, but weapon limited--the drill just doesn't do that much for you. If you want to play this mode (which I did for a while, it was distinctly harder), you probably also need the shock/fire-protection add-ons, since you'll do a lot more melee. I did not try Decoy @ max here, which would be interesting too.
I mostly didn't listen to the audio diaries. Once in a while they contain a passcode for a locked door, but other than that they're pointless.
This crashed-out-to-desktop on me 2-3 times a day while I was playing it. Really. Talk about crappy software...
-----
[March 6, 2016] So this past 10 days I played Bioshock Infinite. Wonder of Wonders, it did not crash even once. Hooray!
Didn't understand it, tho. As with the others, you have to die at the end. And apparently, if you do like I did, and quit during the credits, you don't see the end thing that explains how it turned out (ok, well, it doesn't, really). So the ending is pretty meaningless. I'm still not sure I understand the explanation. You begin the game as Booker DeWitt. But maybe you are also Comstock? How is that possible? There's a baby. Comstock's baby. Maybe; that seems to have been a lie. Or maybe she was a created thing? Or something? Anyway, at age 19, she's been able to open "tears" between, well, "places", that might be parallel universes. One of which was Rapture. You have to rescue the girl and trade her for something, not clear what that is, maybe it's death. Or someone else' death? Huh? Why does your dying fix anything?
I'm told the "infinite" part of the name is about the multiple worlds...I've have believed that more if it was made more clear that you were traveling between them. And that each one had more that was different. It really only felt like two of them.
The setting feels like The Music Man. Or maybe a little older than that.
In the end: (spoilers!) it's your daughter, not explained how/why, you are/were/could-be Comstock, you have to time-travel to undo something that prevents him from being born, but that means you aren't born, something something something. I didn't understand it, such as that was. And I'm well familiar with the parallel universes routine.
I didn't find the "vigors/plasmids" to be that interesting. Except levitate. That was fun. Except when it didn't work on George or Abe.
-----
and of course this is just killing time before Fallout 4 arrives on Nov 10. I did the XBONE pre-order last night, that took hours to d/l, but I'm ready. And F3 comes with it, apparently. That was interesting. That's a 360 game, sounds like it's had an update for X1? Or something like that...I hope so, F4 cost was $90, which is pricey.
Only a few days left.
[Later: Fallout 3 bundle with F4 is because Microsoft did something they said they couldn't, which was to create an X360-emulator that runs on the XBOne, so that 360 games don't just go dead. But not all 360 games make the grade, but as I have zero of them, so what?]
Didn't really get the supposed Ayn Rand feel of it, tho. I've read Atlas Shrugged, 40 years ago. Maybe it's been too long since I read that. This seemed more about generic power struggle between Ryan, Fontaine, Tennenbaum, etc. I played about half of it in silence, as my computer's internal audio was broken (still is, but I got a usb-audio stick).
Well, this new version from Steam got all the way through to the end, but not without some of the same flavor of seg-fault crashes. Gad. Isn't anyone able to do anything about this? *My* software doesn't seg-fault (well, actually some of it does, and those seg-faults are caused by third-party tools, and they crash in strange ways; usually I have to alert the 3rd-party-manuf about them: you know, "the JVM has detected a failure in native code" and then you get the damn core-dump, which doesn't actually terminate properly, so I can't have an auto-restart; I have a different thing where a sub-process called in a shell crashes on me so hard that it doesn't just kill itself, it takes out my code too (on Linux! no less); man I hate other people's software).
Bioshock 2 crashes on me too...entirely too often. WAY too often. Piece of crap.
At least Windows doesn't get killed along with it. But still...I wish there was some way to complain to Steam about this--entirely too many games that I have bought from Steam have had serious crashing problems (or completely failing to start at all).
-----
Anyway...B1 was ok, although I found the controls a little hard to work with again. The worst of which was discovering repeatedly that I had bought a plasmid upgrade only to find that the slot for the plasmid had been moved, so where I thought I had dropped it was different, and then I'd have a time cycling through them to select again. I think that happened every time--making them not that useful.
And I think that the only really useful plasmids were electro-shock and TK. Incinerate was ok once in a while, but it drank Eve like a sand-dune.
With TK, you can grab an opponent's missile/grenade out of the air and throw it back at them. *That* is nifty--except that when it came time to take on Fontaine at the end I completely forgot about doing that and just did the usual run-n-gun with occasional grenades.
And what's with the deal that when you're using a gun, and you run out of one flavor of bullet, it doesn't auto-switch you to another one? You end up using the wrong ones most of the time anyway...
A rule of thumb--you should either hack or destroy every single health station you come across; hack the easier ones, and destroy the hard ones--otherwise splicers you didn't quite kill are using them against you by re-healthing.
-----
B2 was properly harder than B1. The controls are essentially identical, so no re-learning what to do. Big Sisters were appallingly hard to kill.
Which brings up another point: there's limited value to trying to dodge death, since you just get re-vitalized nearby.
Another rule of thumb: Bee Swarm is your friend. Upgrade that to max *early*, because the swarm is independent from you, can detect targets around corners, and will attack things out of sight. And out-of-sight opponents won't come running at you. You can take down anything with bee swarm if you're patient and they don't see you. Also: upgrade Hypnotize as fast as you can--that's your other best friend--get the opponents to fight each other, esp the big ones. Then get killed, stay in the Re-Vi chamber until they are done, then prep bee swarm for remaining singletons, or another hypnotize for small crowds.
One tonic you can take will do something unusual: prevent you from using nearly all your weapons, but also cuts the Eve cost down 90% or so, which means you're the magic man, but weapon limited--the drill just doesn't do that much for you. If you want to play this mode (which I did for a while, it was distinctly harder), you probably also need the shock/fire-protection add-ons, since you'll do a lot more melee. I did not try Decoy @ max here, which would be interesting too.
I mostly didn't listen to the audio diaries. Once in a while they contain a passcode for a locked door, but other than that they're pointless.
This crashed-out-to-desktop on me 2-3 times a day while I was playing it. Really. Talk about crappy software...
-----
[March 6, 2016] So this past 10 days I played Bioshock Infinite. Wonder of Wonders, it did not crash even once. Hooray!
Didn't understand it, tho. As with the others, you have to die at the end. And apparently, if you do like I did, and quit during the credits, you don't see the end thing that explains how it turned out (ok, well, it doesn't, really). So the ending is pretty meaningless. I'm still not sure I understand the explanation. You begin the game as Booker DeWitt. But maybe you are also Comstock? How is that possible? There's a baby. Comstock's baby. Maybe; that seems to have been a lie. Or maybe she was a created thing? Or something? Anyway, at age 19, she's been able to open "tears" between, well, "places", that might be parallel universes. One of which was Rapture. You have to rescue the girl and trade her for something, not clear what that is, maybe it's death. Or someone else' death? Huh? Why does your dying fix anything?
I'm told the "infinite" part of the name is about the multiple worlds...I've have believed that more if it was made more clear that you were traveling between them. And that each one had more that was different. It really only felt like two of them.
The setting feels like The Music Man. Or maybe a little older than that.
In the end: (spoilers!) it's your daughter, not explained how/why, you are/were/could-be Comstock, you have to time-travel to undo something that prevents him from being born, but that means you aren't born, something something something. I didn't understand it, such as that was. And I'm well familiar with the parallel universes routine.
I didn't find the "vigors/plasmids" to be that interesting. Except levitate. That was fun. Except when it didn't work on George or Abe.
-----
and of course this is just killing time before Fallout 4 arrives on Nov 10. I did the XBONE pre-order last night, that took hours to d/l, but I'm ready. And F3 comes with it, apparently. That was interesting. That's a 360 game, sounds like it's had an update for X1? Or something like that...I hope so, F4 cost was $90, which is pricey.
Only a few days left.
[Later: Fallout 3 bundle with F4 is because Microsoft did something they said they couldn't, which was to create an X360-emulator that runs on the XBOne, so that 360 games don't just go dead. But not all 360 games make the grade, but as I have zero of them, so what?]
Wednesday, September 02, 2015
Far Cry 2 and 3
There are a few things in computer games that REALLY REALLY torque me off.
1) Not letting me save where *I* want to. I.e., checkpointed saves, only when THEY want to let it happen.
2) Forcing me to play some scenes THEIR way instead of MY way.
3) Stupid and un-changeable keyboard settings.
4) Timed scenarios or sections.
5) No auto-saves at all. So that way, when the game crashes, you are going back to whatever was the last save, and redoing a bunch of stuff, as opposed to the autosave that SHOULD have taken place a few minutes ago when you made a huge transition in the game (Spore just screwed me over on this, I have to replay the entire third section ("Tribe") of the game; maybe I'll just punt--seriously, people? How hard is it to automate this? Does it take an Advanced Degree to understand this?)
Checkpointed saves mean you have to repeat actions that become annoying. This is generally compounded by being forced to play certain areas a particular way, AND being unable to modify control settings in such a way that I can do better. This is what killed Far Cry 1 for me.
Forcing me to play it their way--seriously folks? If that is what you want, just make a cut-scene of it, and let's move on. I hate that routine, and it will cause me to stop playing and then delete a game.
Un-changeable settings means typically that someone doesn't understand what other people need to do. *I* have to play with left-sided-left-handed mouse, because of RSI issues 15 years ago. I want to pretty much completely remap the keyboard/action settings, as well as flip mouse buttons.
Far Cry 2 was ok. I was able to finish it, and pretty much play it my way. That was good. Didn't like the ending, tho. You get two choices, but you die either way.
Far Cry 3 eventually pissed me off about action/controls, so I've quit playing. I was about 1/2 way through when I decided I couldn't tolerate it any more.
1) Not letting me save where *I* want to. I.e., checkpointed saves, only when THEY want to let it happen.
2) Forcing me to play some scenes THEIR way instead of MY way.
3) Stupid and un-changeable keyboard settings.
4) Timed scenarios or sections.
5) No auto-saves at all. So that way, when the game crashes, you are going back to whatever was the last save, and redoing a bunch of stuff, as opposed to the autosave that SHOULD have taken place a few minutes ago when you made a huge transition in the game (Spore just screwed me over on this, I have to replay the entire third section ("Tribe") of the game; maybe I'll just punt--seriously, people? How hard is it to automate this? Does it take an Advanced Degree to understand this?)
Checkpointed saves mean you have to repeat actions that become annoying. This is generally compounded by being forced to play certain areas a particular way, AND being unable to modify control settings in such a way that I can do better. This is what killed Far Cry 1 for me.
Forcing me to play it their way--seriously folks? If that is what you want, just make a cut-scene of it, and let's move on. I hate that routine, and it will cause me to stop playing and then delete a game.
Un-changeable settings means typically that someone doesn't understand what other people need to do. *I* have to play with left-sided-left-handed mouse, because of RSI issues 15 years ago. I want to pretty much completely remap the keyboard/action settings, as well as flip mouse buttons.
Far Cry 2 was ok. I was able to finish it, and pretty much play it my way. That was good. Didn't like the ending, tho. You get two choices, but you die either way.
Far Cry 3 eventually pissed me off about action/controls, so I've quit playing. I was about 1/2 way through when I decided I couldn't tolerate it any more.
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Steam Summer Sale 2105
Once again the Steam summer sale has killed my budget. Not the $ budget, the time budget. I spent about $125, got something like 25 games, and they will take me a couple of years to complete, during which time OTHER things will come out, or go on sale cheap, etc, an endless cycle.
I hope I don't run out of disk space too soon...There are games I already had that I haven't reloaded following the crash disaster last fall...
What all I got: Hitman series (5 titles), Rez Evil 4/5/6, Far Cry 2/3, Baldur's Gate 1/2, Icewind Dale, Just Cause 1/2, Shadowrun 1/2, Starpoint Gemini 1/2, Wolfenstein Old Blood, and some others...nearly two dozen...
So I'm playing through Far Cry 2 first. That's the Africa one. You can kinda stealth through a lot of it, and the sniper rifles are pretty good, super accurate. You get to drive vehicles and boats. The in-game currency is conflict diamonds, appropriately questionable morality.
There's even a little of fast travel! OK, it's just the bus lines, but still...
The one thing that really bugged me about this game at first was the fact that as soon as you clear out one area and leave, when you come back by it's been repopulated with opponents. The game does dynamically load/unload around the edges as you travel (Skyrim/et al do this too), and you don't have to go very far, maybe just out of sight, to cause map territory to unload and reload with more opponents. That was really aggravating, but it does give you plenty of tries at optimizing how you tackle any given spot.
One thing it needs: a compass, small, upper right corner, or at the top a la Skyrim, with a direction indicator in it.
Later: well, I broke it. Reached a point where I had to talk to an "associate", and it hung badly. No solution. Well, not to that interaction--I reloaded slightly back, and finished that specific mission a different way, all was ok, but that one path had no forward motion. It's the one where you have to take a bomb fuse to a guy waiting on the bridge at the far east edge of the map, so he can blow the bridge. I went there, he says "give me the fuse", and then the game hangs--not broken, there is still the standard Brownian motion in the graphics, it's just stuck somehow in the interaction. You have to either go to Task Manager, or log out. I had to log out. Sheesh.
You will do a lot of driving in this game, or boating. I did find a couple of hang-gliders, which is amusing except that those are terribly hard to fly, and they don't go anywhere useful.
I hope I don't run out of disk space too soon...There are games I already had that I haven't reloaded following the crash disaster last fall...
What all I got: Hitman series (5 titles), Rez Evil 4/5/6, Far Cry 2/3, Baldur's Gate 1/2, Icewind Dale, Just Cause 1/2, Shadowrun 1/2, Starpoint Gemini 1/2, Wolfenstein Old Blood, and some others...nearly two dozen...
So I'm playing through Far Cry 2 first. That's the Africa one. You can kinda stealth through a lot of it, and the sniper rifles are pretty good, super accurate. You get to drive vehicles and boats. The in-game currency is conflict diamonds, appropriately questionable morality.
There's even a little of fast travel! OK, it's just the bus lines, but still...
The one thing that really bugged me about this game at first was the fact that as soon as you clear out one area and leave, when you come back by it's been repopulated with opponents. The game does dynamically load/unload around the edges as you travel (Skyrim/et al do this too), and you don't have to go very far, maybe just out of sight, to cause map territory to unload and reload with more opponents. That was really aggravating, but it does give you plenty of tries at optimizing how you tackle any given spot.
One thing it needs: a compass, small, upper right corner, or at the top a la Skyrim, with a direction indicator in it.
Later: well, I broke it. Reached a point where I had to talk to an "associate", and it hung badly. No solution. Well, not to that interaction--I reloaded slightly back, and finished that specific mission a different way, all was ok, but that one path had no forward motion. It's the one where you have to take a bomb fuse to a guy waiting on the bridge at the far east edge of the map, so he can blow the bridge. I went there, he says "give me the fuse", and then the game hangs--not broken, there is still the standard Brownian motion in the graphics, it's just stuck somehow in the interaction. You have to either go to Task Manager, or log out. I had to log out. Sheesh.
You will do a lot of driving in this game, or boating. I did find a couple of hang-gliders, which is amusing except that those are terribly hard to fly, and they don't go anywhere useful.
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Disk drive troubles
or other "storage devices", since they ain't always rotating platters any more.
Fall 2014 I had an OMG bad system crash at home, when the power supply on my PC decided to die in the middle of when Windows was doing system updates (you know, the one point where they tell you "Don't turn off your computer now" -- yeah, that's bad, there is no recovery).
So this time I put in an SSD, re-intalled Windows 7. So far, that's been just fine. Windows definitely boots faster, and software installed there starts faster. Great. Hmm. I wonder: did I clone that thing afterwards? I probably should have put in a smaller drive, or partitioned it smaller, and then cloned the boot partition. Well, Acronis doesn't work the way I'd like (which is to say: just like CCC on Mac). [Later: well, it didn't at that time, or I didn't figure it out; subsequently, at work, we've cloned a smaller onto a larger without the prob I had]
Anyway...early this year, I got a "promotion" of sorts: I am now leading a tiny team (4 ppl) doing a new version of a project at the customer location. New (used) hardware, new concepts and variations on things I was doing last year.
So we bought some used servers, partially filled rack. Twelve HP DL 360 G6 1U dual quad-core intel 5560, four drive slots, in which we are putting 3 SSDs and one platter drive for backup, 96 GB RAM each (going to be trying a software system re-architecting using RAMDISK instead of actual disks). Three clusters for federated databases for dev/int/rel usage.
The SSDs are small, 128 GB SATA. Crucial MX100.
Well, ina few weeks already I have broken one drive totally dead, a second is going bad, and I might have pushed a third one onto the death-track.
How? Well, I've replaced the indexing engine in the commercial database we've been using with Berkley DB, a very seriously fast (but not, itself, SOTA) hashing engine. Whatever BDB does and how it does it apparently kills an SSD pretty fast; exceedingly the write-limit on it.
Remember that an SSD has a finite lifetime, quite short in comparison with a regular old platter-style disk. I have indexed hundreds of millions of objects with BDB on platter drives at work over the last year--with zero failures. I can't even get through a few million objects on the SSD before it is reporting "unable to find sector" errors, which means I have damaged it. I don't even know if CHKDSK can repair that--it may be completely hosed (the first one is totally dead; won't mount).
OK, this means for now that we are going to RAMDISK a bit sooner than I anticipated, which presents its own interesting challenges. Not because making/using a RAMDISK is hard, it's nearly trivial, but the logistics of how to not lose any data permanently presents challenges around the rest of the system requirements. 96 GB allows for an interesting-size RAMDISK.
Talking with a friend who's a disk/storage-system expert, RAMDISK is probably the final answer anyway, but at the least an Enterprise SSD would be a good idea. So we might be trying that too.
First, however, I've bought an Enterprise 146GB 10K SAS drive for the moment ($25, omg), to replace the now-dying SSD (which was itself a replacement for the first REALLY dead one), we'll see what that does. And then maybe we'll try an Enterprise SSD to see what that buys us.
There are a bunch of performance needs on this new system (current prod system has speed issues all over, but it has ZERO optimizations, so new system delivers with ALL those optimizations, as we figure them out).
But really...I've killed two SSDs in the last 4 weeks. and I could easily kill the others in a matter of hours...
Painful lesson. Those "consumer" SSDs have an entirely different target audience than me and my HPC work.
Later: the SAS drive works great, no errors, $24 delivered. So we bought more of them, to be the boot drives in each server. They aren't as fast as I'd like, but RAMDISK is still the target, because we're going to deliver on machines with 256 GB of RAM--what the heck else should we do with that much RAM?
Later later: it turned out that RAMDISK didn't make a difference in our usage of commercial database--that wasn't the slow part. I was bummed.
RAMDISK would have been great on a previous effort, if I'd had machines I could have put enough RAM in to make that worthwhile, because I was pounding some enterprise 2T drives enough to have to replace four (out of 60, in a SAN). The region thing I was pounding that hard could have been replaced by RAMDISK where I booted the system, copied some executables into RAMDISK, and then run from there, avoiding the pounding on the drive where those things sat (the pounding was reading them + libs hundreds to thousands of times per minute, totaling hundreds of millions by the time that activity ended.
Later(3): we punted that commercial database. There were other issues about being unable to deal with the volume of data we were putting into it. Other customers were apparently able to put a lot more data in, but their data was different from ours--we were banging up against some implementation decisions that were poor ones for data like ours (supernodes in an object database). We've replaced it with Neo4J, because of some other speed reasons; don't yet know if that is going to play out long term.
Fall 2014 I had an OMG bad system crash at home, when the power supply on my PC decided to die in the middle of when Windows was doing system updates (you know, the one point where they tell you "Don't turn off your computer now" -- yeah, that's bad, there is no recovery).
So this time I put in an SSD, re-intalled Windows 7. So far, that's been just fine. Windows definitely boots faster, and software installed there starts faster. Great. Hmm. I wonder: did I clone that thing afterwards? I probably should have put in a smaller drive, or partitioned it smaller, and then cloned the boot partition. Well, Acronis doesn't work the way I'd like (which is to say: just like CCC on Mac). [Later: well, it didn't at that time, or I didn't figure it out; subsequently, at work, we've cloned a smaller onto a larger without the prob I had]
Anyway...early this year, I got a "promotion" of sorts: I am now leading a tiny team (4 ppl) doing a new version of a project at the customer location. New (used) hardware, new concepts and variations on things I was doing last year.
So we bought some used servers, partially filled rack. Twelve HP DL 360 G6 1U dual quad-core intel 5560, four drive slots, in which we are putting 3 SSDs and one platter drive for backup, 96 GB RAM each (going to be trying a software system re-architecting using RAMDISK instead of actual disks). Three clusters for federated databases for dev/int/rel usage.
The SSDs are small, 128 GB SATA. Crucial MX100.
Well, ina few weeks already I have broken one drive totally dead, a second is going bad, and I might have pushed a third one onto the death-track.
How? Well, I've replaced the indexing engine in the commercial database we've been using with Berkley DB, a very seriously fast (but not, itself, SOTA) hashing engine. Whatever BDB does and how it does it apparently kills an SSD pretty fast; exceedingly the write-limit on it.
Remember that an SSD has a finite lifetime, quite short in comparison with a regular old platter-style disk. I have indexed hundreds of millions of objects with BDB on platter drives at work over the last year--with zero failures. I can't even get through a few million objects on the SSD before it is reporting "unable to find sector" errors, which means I have damaged it. I don't even know if CHKDSK can repair that--it may be completely hosed (the first one is totally dead; won't mount).
OK, this means for now that we are going to RAMDISK a bit sooner than I anticipated, which presents its own interesting challenges. Not because making/using a RAMDISK is hard, it's nearly trivial, but the logistics of how to not lose any data permanently presents challenges around the rest of the system requirements. 96 GB allows for an interesting-size RAMDISK.
Talking with a friend who's a disk/storage-system expert, RAMDISK is probably the final answer anyway, but at the least an Enterprise SSD would be a good idea. So we might be trying that too.
First, however, I've bought an Enterprise 146GB 10K SAS drive for the moment ($25, omg), to replace the now-dying SSD (which was itself a replacement for the first REALLY dead one), we'll see what that does. And then maybe we'll try an Enterprise SSD to see what that buys us.
There are a bunch of performance needs on this new system (current prod system has speed issues all over, but it has ZERO optimizations, so new system delivers with ALL those optimizations, as we figure them out).
But really...I've killed two SSDs in the last 4 weeks. and I could easily kill the others in a matter of hours...
Painful lesson. Those "consumer" SSDs have an entirely different target audience than me and my HPC work.
Later: the SAS drive works great, no errors, $24 delivered. So we bought more of them, to be the boot drives in each server. They aren't as fast as I'd like, but RAMDISK is still the target, because we're going to deliver on machines with 256 GB of RAM--what the heck else should we do with that much RAM?
Later later: it turned out that RAMDISK didn't make a difference in our usage of commercial database--that wasn't the slow part. I was bummed.
RAMDISK would have been great on a previous effort, if I'd had machines I could have put enough RAM in to make that worthwhile, because I was pounding some enterprise 2T drives enough to have to replace four (out of 60, in a SAN). The region thing I was pounding that hard could have been replaced by RAMDISK where I booted the system, copied some executables into RAMDISK, and then run from there, avoiding the pounding on the drive where those things sat (the pounding was reading them + libs hundreds to thousands of times per minute, totaling hundreds of millions by the time that activity ended.
Later(3): we punted that commercial database. There were other issues about being unable to deal with the volume of data we were putting into it. Other customers were apparently able to put a lot more data in, but their data was different from ours--we were banging up against some implementation decisions that were poor ones for data like ours (supernodes in an object database). We've replaced it with Neo4J, because of some other speed reasons; don't yet know if that is going to play out long term.
Monday, June 08, 2015
Games for Girls
or Women, if you prefer.
several years ago I came across someone else's blog, in which she did one of the classic rants about games being created by males for males, and where were the games for females?
and of course I gave the classic response of "if you want one, make one" -- that really is the surest way to bring about something you want. Complaining about it accomplishes nothing.
In the general case, this is the most classic complaint you see about most any creative/consumptive endeavor. You see it here, you see it with music, movies, magazine articles...
Magazine articles? well, for smallish, single-topic magazines...there are a few writers, they are all free-lance, which means they are not being assigned stories by the editor, they write what they want...and then there are the readers, some of whom will complain something along the lines of "why don't you publish an article about X?" because they want to read an article about X. But they don't want to WRITE an article about X, they want to read it. And of course the editor always responds "how about if you write the article about X? and then we'll publish an article about X" but the complainer doesn't want to do the writing, just the reading, and generally seems to think that the magazine has this room full of writers just waiting to be assigned a story...well, maybe big mags and newspapers work like that...but I imagine they get the same kind of complaints too :)
back to games
it turns out there is a category on Steam called "Female Protagonist" (ok, you can play Skyrim as a "female", but I've done that, and I couldn't detect any differences; I seem to recall Voyager Elite Force 1 allowed you to play as female, and you'd have a different romantic interaction with an NPC (if you chose to) than if you played as male.
So are the "Female Protagonist" games any good? There are 400 games tagged with that label (not clear how/why "Zombie Army" got tagged with "FP"). "Neon Struct" and "Toren" look good, but too many of them look sprite- or anime/manga-based ("Hyperdimension Neptunia"). "Republique Remastered" looks excellent, but it's developed by pros.
How many were created by women programmers? Does that really make a difference? (I'm expecting it would, but in what ways?)
What would you say constitutes a Game for Girls/Women? What are the criteria?
I've put a couple on my wishlist, we'll see if they go on sale during the summer "Steam sale".
Politics
"What would be the prospects for any Republican seeking their party's nomination today at any level if he or she stated that they believed in evolution, that the earth is over 3 billion years old, that the Bible is not the literal word of God, and that separation of church and state is an essential part of the American way of life as envisioned by the founding fathers? Thirty years ago, none of these ideas would have been controversial for Republicans as a whole. Today, espousing any one of them would be death in the eyes of the GOP base voters."
Forget where I read that, it was a comment on a story on Daily Kos.
Why are those topics so toxic?
What is it about their "base voters" these days that makes them this way?
I couldn't possibly vote for someone who did NOT believe the above things...
Friday, June 05, 2015
Wildlife @ The Ranch
Geez. Found what was I think a copperhead last weekend, at the bottom of a drain spout. Not very big, seemed like 18 inches or so, but still...where there's one that size, there are others that are bigger.
Hard to be sure...the pattern wasn't that well defined. Maybe a cottonmouth...it didn't open its mouth, which would have been a dead giveaway.
Definitely not a rattler...It did wiggle its tail some like a rattler, but The Ranch is too far north, anyway.
I gave it some flying lessons while transferring it to a location at the edge of the property. Hope I don't see it again.
We have a couple of other snakes, but they're harmless ones.
Pretty sure I saw a bigger cottonmouth a year ago while mowing...it didn't occur to me about it being one at the time, or I'd have driven over it to be sure it was dead. I'd have driven over this one, too, except I figure it was going to run away while I went to get the mower...Thus the flying lessons.
And now I have to have my boots on all the time outside. Not that I don't like my boots, I do, but now I have to watch out all the time.
------------
a month later: took the dog along to get gas when i drained the mower to the bottom...coming back, partway along the driveway, we saw a big black dog we hadn't seen before just standing there..."Look, Gabby" I said. "There's a dog we don't know. What kind of dog is that? It's tall, like Russian wolfhound maybe?" Then it turned to go back in the woods and I realized it was not a dog at all--it was a BEAR! A black bear. A young bear. Which means that larger Momma Bear and Papa Bear are around somewhere.
And I had forgotten to take my phone with me to get gas, so I don't have a photo of it. AAARRRRGGG!!!
Hard to be sure...the pattern wasn't that well defined. Maybe a cottonmouth...it didn't open its mouth, which would have been a dead giveaway.
Definitely not a rattler...It did wiggle its tail some like a rattler, but The Ranch is too far north, anyway.
I gave it some flying lessons while transferring it to a location at the edge of the property. Hope I don't see it again.
We have a couple of other snakes, but they're harmless ones.
Pretty sure I saw a bigger cottonmouth a year ago while mowing...it didn't occur to me about it being one at the time, or I'd have driven over it to be sure it was dead. I'd have driven over this one, too, except I figure it was going to run away while I went to get the mower...Thus the flying lessons.
And now I have to have my boots on all the time outside. Not that I don't like my boots, I do, but now I have to watch out all the time.
------------
a month later: took the dog along to get gas when i drained the mower to the bottom...coming back, partway along the driveway, we saw a big black dog we hadn't seen before just standing there..."Look, Gabby" I said. "There's a dog we don't know. What kind of dog is that? It's tall, like Russian wolfhound maybe?" Then it turned to go back in the woods and I realized it was not a dog at all--it was a BEAR! A black bear. A young bear. Which means that larger Momma Bear and Papa Bear are around somewhere.
And I had forgotten to take my phone with me to get gas, so I don't have a photo of it. AAARRRRGGG!!!
Fallout 4
FNV was better than FO3. No argument there.
FO4 is in Boston. Local outdoor stuff, like statues n such.
You will have a dog. And a jetpack. Dude. About time.
And more color. Seriously, folks, photosynthesis is not suddenly go from green to brown because of radiation. "life will find a way" (Jurassic Park)
There will be plenty of plants around, along with dead spots.
11-10-2015.
Yeah. That's what I'm talkin about. There goes another 1000 hours of my life :)
Probably on the XBone this time. Think I'll try that.
-----
Later (nov 7): it's almost here. I have to be sure I can do this offline, at The Ranch. First opp for that is nov 14, then xmas.
-----
2 years later:
OK, no jetpack, far as I can tell. And other subtle things. I just got informed that it's possible to see the extra-perk-points options, so that apparently there IS one where you can fast-travel while over-encumbered. But it's six levels away, so at Level 72 that's going to take a while to get there. I couldn't leave the institute because I was carrying too much, and lacked that perk. Geez.
Did discover something interesting, although I didn't test it long enough to see if it's permanent: The time comes when you are going to help a synth courser, but if you go collect him, you can then go do other stuff for a while and have a SECOND follower (I have the reporter (fewer paper cuts) already, AND then the courser). Only flaw with this is that your followers all bop around a bit, get in between you and targets, etc, meaning that you have to let them fight for you lest you shoot them in the back.
Thursday, May 21, 2015
What is "Genesis" really about?
This is a bit of a recap of a fascinating book, "Eve's Seed", by Robert McElvaine. 2001.
I read this about a year after it was out...because there was an excerpt written for the WaPo editorial section the sunday after 9/11. That little bit was weird enough an idea that I got the whole book.
What's Genesis about? Not what you thought...
It is of course a mythology about the origin of humanity. An allegory for some things. Interesting things. But *not* about Adam, Eve, a serpent and an apple.
That story is putatively about "the fall of man", but really it's about "the fall of men", which is a subtle distinction. A fall from grace, yes. Beginning when...
Eve ate a fruit from the tree of knowledge.
What knowledge?
Now for the anthropology history aspects: early humankind are of course wanderers. Hunter/gatherers. As are most "higher" animals. Cows are not, they just eat grass. Chimps are gatherers. Humans are omnivorous, so some hunting and some gathering. Can't be otherwise, because we know too little to do anything else, and besides, food is reasonably plentiful--lots of trees produce fruits and nuts, you can watch what other animals eat and do the same, and occasionally you eat of them.
Gathering of things that fall from trees. Hunting the occasional large beast.
That hunting might actually take a couple of days, days of wandering, finding, shooting, following, and then dragging the thing back to camp. That requires upper body strength, so it's the men doing it. Women are doing the gathering. When you "exhaust" an area, you move on.
When you wander into the area that has A LOT of stuff, you end up staying for a while, because you can't exhaust the area. Men go out to hunt. Women stay behind, with babies, kids. And trash.
When the time comes that they stay in one area for a number of years, what happens? The women are in the same place every day, and have the opportunity to observe something: things they eat have seeds. Seeds which they have thrown away. Seeds sprout in the ground. Sprouts become new plants. New plants eventually make more food.
Hoorah! We can grow it ourselves! Let's dig in the dirt and plant seeds and have more food and stop having to wander all over tarnation.
Eve has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. Knowledge of agriculture. Men (upper body strength again) now have to do the backbreaking work of tilling and harvesting--they have fallen from grace.
Women must be punished for this. And have been ever since. Because I was once a hunter, but now I'm a slave. A slave to the fields. And my johnson.
All the chatter you read here/there about "it was the tree of knowledge about good and evil" is baloney. The origin of the story is pre-history, when humans went from hard wandering, to find the "garden of eden, where food was plentiful". Good. And then to farming. Evil.
So the story was invented where the snake tempted Eve with knowledge of seeds, of planting, of growth and harvesting.
The book is fascinating, and well worth your time to read. Unless of course you are a bible literalist, in which case it might make your head explode.
- - - -
So why did I encounter this in WaPo? Well, there was the excerpt variant by the author, written as an Editorial essay. About Muslims, for the most part; appropriate a few days post-9/11.
Why do the men grow beards? Why did it become a religious requirement? Because women can't. And therefore having a beard proves that one is "not-a-woman".
Read the book. Fascinating. I can't hardly do it justice here.
I read this about a year after it was out...because there was an excerpt written for the WaPo editorial section the sunday after 9/11. That little bit was weird enough an idea that I got the whole book.
What's Genesis about? Not what you thought...
It is of course a mythology about the origin of humanity. An allegory for some things. Interesting things. But *not* about Adam, Eve, a serpent and an apple.
That story is putatively about "the fall of man", but really it's about "the fall of men", which is a subtle distinction. A fall from grace, yes. Beginning when...
Eve ate a fruit from the tree of knowledge.
What knowledge?
Now for the anthropology history aspects: early humankind are of course wanderers. Hunter/gatherers. As are most "higher" animals. Cows are not, they just eat grass. Chimps are gatherers. Humans are omnivorous, so some hunting and some gathering. Can't be otherwise, because we know too little to do anything else, and besides, food is reasonably plentiful--lots of trees produce fruits and nuts, you can watch what other animals eat and do the same, and occasionally you eat of them.
Gathering of things that fall from trees. Hunting the occasional large beast.
That hunting might actually take a couple of days, days of wandering, finding, shooting, following, and then dragging the thing back to camp. That requires upper body strength, so it's the men doing it. Women are doing the gathering. When you "exhaust" an area, you move on.
When you wander into the area that has A LOT of stuff, you end up staying for a while, because you can't exhaust the area. Men go out to hunt. Women stay behind, with babies, kids. And trash.
When the time comes that they stay in one area for a number of years, what happens? The women are in the same place every day, and have the opportunity to observe something: things they eat have seeds. Seeds which they have thrown away. Seeds sprout in the ground. Sprouts become new plants. New plants eventually make more food.
Hoorah! We can grow it ourselves! Let's dig in the dirt and plant seeds and have more food and stop having to wander all over tarnation.
Eve has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. Knowledge of agriculture. Men (upper body strength again) now have to do the backbreaking work of tilling and harvesting--they have fallen from grace.
Women must be punished for this. And have been ever since. Because I was once a hunter, but now I'm a slave. A slave to the fields. And my johnson.
All the chatter you read here/there about "it was the tree of knowledge about good and evil" is baloney. The origin of the story is pre-history, when humans went from hard wandering, to find the "garden of eden, where food was plentiful". Good. And then to farming. Evil.
So the story was invented where the snake tempted Eve with knowledge of seeds, of planting, of growth and harvesting.
The book is fascinating, and well worth your time to read. Unless of course you are a bible literalist, in which case it might make your head explode.
- - - -
So why did I encounter this in WaPo? Well, there was the excerpt variant by the author, written as an Editorial essay. About Muslims, for the most part; appropriate a few days post-9/11.
Why do the men grow beards? Why did it become a religious requirement? Because women can't. And therefore having a beard proves that one is "not-a-woman".
Read the book. Fascinating. I can't hardly do it justice here.
Monday, May 11, 2015
It IS about the nail
My sister sent me this link a few days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg
which is amusing, and cringe-inducing, at the same time.
The worst of it, I think, from a male view, is when she says "It's not about the nail, I need you to listen to me"...because what we hear is "I am not interested in your opinion or participation", and then we just check out of the conversation. You get head-nods, "mmm-hmm"s, and maybe "how do you feel about that?", but we aren't actually listening any longer. If we internalize that enough, we aren't listening to anything you say after that, ever.
Few of us are clever enough to figure out how to lead her to come to the realization that it IS about the nail, and that we are wired to be suppliers of help if you come with a complaint of some sort.
It's not that we are being dismissive of your feelings (altho I'm sure some are), but that you want to talk about something which is causing you trouble, for which there is a clear and unmistakable cause and effect, and for which there is a clear solution.
and we are unable to imagine that removing the nail is NOT the first order of business.
It's worse for me. I'm an engineer--EVERYTHING looks like it needs problem-solving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg
which is amusing, and cringe-inducing, at the same time.
The worst of it, I think, from a male view, is when she says "It's not about the nail, I need you to listen to me"...because what we hear is "I am not interested in your opinion or participation", and then we just check out of the conversation. You get head-nods, "mmm-hmm"s, and maybe "how do you feel about that?", but we aren't actually listening any longer. If we internalize that enough, we aren't listening to anything you say after that, ever.
Few of us are clever enough to figure out how to lead her to come to the realization that it IS about the nail, and that we are wired to be suppliers of help if you come with a complaint of some sort.
It's not that we are being dismissive of your feelings (altho I'm sure some are), but that you want to talk about something which is causing you trouble, for which there is a clear and unmistakable cause and effect, and for which there is a clear solution.
and we are unable to imagine that removing the nail is NOT the first order of business.
It's worse for me. I'm an engineer--EVERYTHING looks like it needs problem-solving.
Crytek games
Steam had a sale of their usual style a few months ago, and I got a Crytek bundle:
Crisis 1, 2 + plus some expansions.
I also had a DVD of Far Cry from a while ago that I had not installed or played.
They'd had good reviews, as I recalled.
Far Cry 1: well, it's interesting until you get to that derelict ship (actually, this is fairly early). That was a nightmare for me.
Why? Checkpoint saves. Only. I hate that. That is nearly a complete deal-breaker, because those saves are generally not where I'd want...one of them is right before you climb out onto the top deck of that derelict, which is good, because that is a really really hard segment to run...and when you've cleared it, you have to get into this little dinghy that is hanging, I fell out of it twice all the way to the bottom where there is no way back up, meaning you have to reload the last checkpoint save and try to evade that damn helicopter AGAIN. Quit, and deleted the game--the annoyance is too great.
Crisis 1 is better. Actually, it's REALLY good, for a lot of reasons. 1) the enemies are North Koreans. That's almost as good as Nazis, except that I really wish they'd been wearing those ridiculous bouffant hats you always see them wear in photos. 2) Quicksaves and named saves. 3) The tank battle. 4) You drive the cars, the tanks, the boats, eventually a VTOL (which was weird). 4) It's much more about stealthing your way through some areas. 5) It's not terribly linear. It does get harder as you progress. 6) Lots of open territory. You don't have to go through it the same way every time. 7) There's some semblance of real story there (rescue a science team, discover the NKs, then the aliens, then the BIG aliens).
Crisis 2 is ok. I thought the end was a little disappointing. The aliens were individually interesting, but we're back to checkpoint-saves only. The settings/levels were all WAY too linear--but the setting kinda forces it that way, since it is basically outdoors in NYC. I'd have rather been able to just walk around in NYC, but there's a lot of jumping large distances between levels. Felt a little too episodic. Not much vehicles action--what little there is is unimportant (well, in C1 you can probably do the tank battle on foot, but that wouldn't be as interesting). Too much cut-scenes (arrrrg, if you want me to watch a movie, just make a movie).
I'll play Crisis 1 again (altho probably NOT that final battle on top of the carrier). Crisis 2, maybe. Far Cry, not a chance.
Crisis 1, 2 + plus some expansions.
I also had a DVD of Far Cry from a while ago that I had not installed or played.
They'd had good reviews, as I recalled.
Far Cry 1: well, it's interesting until you get to that derelict ship (actually, this is fairly early). That was a nightmare for me.
Why? Checkpoint saves. Only. I hate that. That is nearly a complete deal-breaker, because those saves are generally not where I'd want...one of them is right before you climb out onto the top deck of that derelict, which is good, because that is a really really hard segment to run...and when you've cleared it, you have to get into this little dinghy that is hanging, I fell out of it twice all the way to the bottom where there is no way back up, meaning you have to reload the last checkpoint save and try to evade that damn helicopter AGAIN. Quit, and deleted the game--the annoyance is too great.
Crisis 1 is better. Actually, it's REALLY good, for a lot of reasons. 1) the enemies are North Koreans. That's almost as good as Nazis, except that I really wish they'd been wearing those ridiculous bouffant hats you always see them wear in photos. 2) Quicksaves and named saves. 3) The tank battle. 4) You drive the cars, the tanks, the boats, eventually a VTOL (which was weird). 4) It's much more about stealthing your way through some areas. 5) It's not terribly linear. It does get harder as you progress. 6) Lots of open territory. You don't have to go through it the same way every time. 7) There's some semblance of real story there (rescue a science team, discover the NKs, then the aliens, then the BIG aliens).
Crisis 2 is ok. I thought the end was a little disappointing. The aliens were individually interesting, but we're back to checkpoint-saves only. The settings/levels were all WAY too linear--but the setting kinda forces it that way, since it is basically outdoors in NYC. I'd have rather been able to just walk around in NYC, but there's a lot of jumping large distances between levels. Felt a little too episodic. Not much vehicles action--what little there is is unimportant (well, in C1 you can probably do the tank battle on foot, but that wouldn't be as interesting). Too much cut-scenes (arrrrg, if you want me to watch a movie, just make a movie).
I'll play Crisis 1 again (altho probably NOT that final battle on top of the carrier). Crisis 2, maybe. Far Cry, not a chance.
Friday, January 02, 2015
new Games via Steam pt 2
So I also got/played Batman Arkham Asylum over christmas vac. Only paid like $5 for this, so there was no way to be disappointed.
Annoyed, yes, but for $5 you can't say you didn't get your money's worth.
And what was annoying was the UI. It really feels like it's a console game, and that you should play it like that. (Something else that annoys me is that Batman doesn't use any hand-weapons; pretty sure that wasn't true 70 years ago.)
The thing I have the most trouble with in this sort of game is how the UI behaves (or fails). Example: about mid-way in the game you have to go find "Killer Croc" and collect some stuff. Then you have to get out. This is mostly about stealth, and knowing that you have to throw batarangs at him when he charges...except that when it comes time to leave, as you begin the final stretch suddenly the camera changes position--instead of being 3rd-person look forwards over the right shoulder, now it's in front of Batman, looking back at him--and you still have to run and dodge. So what, you say? Well, the camera has changed position to be in front looking back instead of in back looking front--which means that your key and mouse movements are now backwards, and for just this stretch the direction you run is not 100% under your control. I had a terrible time with this.
When you have to tackle Scarecrow, that game turns into a side-scroller. I hate those. When you take on Poison Ivy, that too is a side-scroller. And there's NO caps-lock=always-run.
Most of the combat is many-to-one kung-fu-punch-n-kick stuff, all about the "move" combinations, where opponents are mostly auto-targeted
I.e., it's a button-masher. That is quickly tiresome for me, partly because I can't do it all that well.
So I gave up in the middle of trying to beat Poison Ivy--that one has a little too much going on for me when I don't have control over the camera.
Still...only $5.
One thing that was useful was the character info, and dates. There's a lot of modern Batman that is things I don't know (Arkham Island/Asylum didn't exist in the old Batman I remember from 50 years ago).
Annoyed, yes, but for $5 you can't say you didn't get your money's worth.
And what was annoying was the UI. It really feels like it's a console game, and that you should play it like that. (Something else that annoys me is that Batman doesn't use any hand-weapons; pretty sure that wasn't true 70 years ago.)
The thing I have the most trouble with in this sort of game is how the UI behaves (or fails). Example: about mid-way in the game you have to go find "Killer Croc" and collect some stuff. Then you have to get out. This is mostly about stealth, and knowing that you have to throw batarangs at him when he charges...except that when it comes time to leave, as you begin the final stretch suddenly the camera changes position--instead of being 3rd-person look forwards over the right shoulder, now it's in front of Batman, looking back at him--and you still have to run and dodge. So what, you say? Well, the camera has changed position to be in front looking back instead of in back looking front--which means that your key and mouse movements are now backwards, and for just this stretch the direction you run is not 100% under your control. I had a terrible time with this.
When you have to tackle Scarecrow, that game turns into a side-scroller. I hate those. When you take on Poison Ivy, that too is a side-scroller. And there's NO caps-lock=always-run.
Most of the combat is many-to-one kung-fu-punch-n-kick stuff, all about the "move" combinations, where opponents are mostly auto-targeted
I.e., it's a button-masher. That is quickly tiresome for me, partly because I can't do it all that well.
So I gave up in the middle of trying to beat Poison Ivy--that one has a little too much going on for me when I don't have control over the camera.
Still...only $5.
One thing that was useful was the character info, and dates. There's a lot of modern Batman that is things I don't know (Arkham Island/Asylum didn't exist in the old Batman I remember from 50 years ago).
new Games via Steam
Got reminded last month that it was time again for the annual Christmas game sale at Steam. I went to see if Civilization: Beyond Earth was on sale, got lucky and it was, and I picked up the other two Batman games (Arkham Asylum, Origins).
Civ BE is clearly the successor to Alpha Centauri (Firaxis, 1998?/99?), which PCGamer mag rated the highest score ever before or since. That score convinced me to get it. I have played Alpha C a lot since then, and I don't disagree with the score. Yes, it outscored HL2, all the Elder Scrolls games (which I like)...and while I will probably play Oblivion and Skyrim again, once each, Alpha C I return to FAR more often.
Without a doubt, Civ BE is a lot prettier than AC. I played for a while, was far less successful at building new cities (others were comparably slow), got sneak attacked more than once by both neighbors, and generally had a hard time figuring out what the hell the "tech-tree" was about. Success in this game (as with AC) requires you to understand the tech tree, or at least to let the AI direct your research.
Parts of the GUI were very nice, and parts sucked big time. I thought the terrain view, and the per-hex content variations were WAY too busy. AC had a less pretty, but I think far smoother terrain variance. (I didn't fully appreciate this until I was digging into the graphics files, to see what they hold. The terrain/map generator uses some form of fractal-based algorithm for computing similarity of one square to its neighbors. That's not what I'm doing, at least not yet--more work than I want to go through at this moment.) Another suck: I want to know what units are in a city. You cannot find this out. Another suck--any "fight" between two units takes multiple turns. Everything in the game just seemed too slow to me.
One thing that AC does well is give you the ability to micro-manage your cities OR NOT. Civ BE doesn't seem to give you that option, and in fact seems to do the worst possible thing--be unable to create a construction queue of multiple items, so that every time something is built, you have to completely replan what you are doing. (OK, if your ability to create more cities is really low, that may not be so hard, but when you have more, that last thing you want to have to do every turn is rescan the entire list of options and rethink what you should do--takes way too long when you have a bunch of cities.
I've played about 180 turns I think, I have four cities (two others were wiped out along the way, as a result of sneak attacks). I do not know what facilities those cities have built already, you don't seem to get to know that, only what yet remains to be built. There doesn't seem to be a way to create your own forces/units; AC had an entire window dedicated to this.
The tech tree is very strange. AC has a good tree--it makes sense to me based on the names and the item descriptions (granted that some of them are far-fetched, but it's a sci-fi game, some of it *should* be far-fetched). This is not to suggest that AC is perfect, but the only thing I think it misses the mark on is that there are some inconsistencies in the tech/special-projects options.
So Civ BE seems weird to me. I think what I really wanted was a better version of AC--better graphics, for sure, more tech, probably more things going on. This is like opposite what I wanted.
I may continue to play, but I'm disappointed.
And that's why I waited for it to be on sale.
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