Posts
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.
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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.
Monday, October 26, 2015
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).
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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.
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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...
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[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.
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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?]
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