Archive for May, 2005
Burnout
Having gotten all my Xbox games back from Mark yesterday, I spent all night playing Burnout 3, first in single player and then via Xbox Live!
I don’t know what it was that suddenly made me want to sit down and play it, it’s been a while since a videogame called on me in that way. But play it I did, for a solid four hours or so. The online play resulted in me winning some races, and getting my ass handed to me on a plate in others. But it was darn good fun.
The criticisms I have for Burnout 3 all revolve around the UI. Firstly it’s trying too hard to be cool, with Crash FM and all that crap, but the main problem is how badly it lays out the goals you have to achieve. The path through the game is very non-linear (a good thing), but it doesn’t make it clear what you’ve completed and what you haven’t. Instead you’re forced to jump around map points in different continents, trying to find races you haven’t got a gold medal in, or races you haven’t even tried yet.
The other problem is just how many screens it keeps popping up, and how many confirmations you have to go through in order go get anywhere, especially when starting and finishing a race. There’s all the screens telling me how many points I’ve just collected, or silly unskippable panoramas of new cars I’ve just unlocked, or postcards I’ve collected. I mean honestly, who cares, just let me play the damn game! There’s even a screen after it’s autosaved, where I have to confirm something. I’m not sure what it is that I’m confirming, that I’ve seen the autosave message for the hundredth time?
Burnout 2 was terrible for this as well, so I don’t hold out much hope that Burnout Legends will include an option to switch off the bullshit.
One
It is now 1 year since I decided to write a post every day, instead of the random posting schedule I had before that. Originally designed to clear up my head in order to help me sleep, I’m not sure what the purpose is anymore. I keep writing it though, in the hope that maybe one day I’ll find a use for it.
If my memory serves correctly then there’s only one day that I’ve actually missed completely in the last 365, which isn’t a bad record, and certainly the longest that I’ve actually managed to sustain something (I’m pretty terrible for sticking to something once it’s started). I’d write some code to generate some pointless stats based on the text I’ve produced in the last year, but that’ll have to wait until a later date.
One pointless stat I can give you without code though is that even after a year of solid writing, the content hasn’t got any more interesting.
Ladybird
It was family day today, visit to Craigencalt Ecology Centre, walk around Kinghorn Loch, and then back for dinner and chat. It was Christmas when I last saw my brother, so it was nice to go over and see them all, as well as take back my Xbox games so they could gather dust on my shelf instead.
I took photos, but only one of which I think is worth publishing.
Right
Well my plan is already coming together, I spent a fair amount of today sleeping and another part of it procrastinating.
There were moments when I even combined the two.
You do realise what a said yesterday was a plan. Right?
Potential
And we crash to the end of another week, and with the next one starting with a bank holiday, it’s nice to have three days of potential ahead of me.
Which I’ll probably waste through a combination of sleeping and procrastination.
Announcing
Shortly after going to bed last night I had the realisation that the code for the user groups which actually checked to see whether somebody had the right to do something was completely broken and would actually result in the wrong permissions being assigned.
Why I didn’t realise this until after I went to bed is anybodys guess.
So tonight I had to sit down and actually make user groups work properly, instead of the sham that was the first attempt. Everything certainly seems good now though, so for the second night in a row, I’m announcing that Chatbear has user groups. Hopefully I won’t be doing the same again tomorrow.
Groups
Chatbear development continues with the addition of user groups. This should make it easier for people to manage the rights that they assign people by dealing with them all at once, rather than individually.
At the moment you can only assign user rights to a group, but I’ll also let you give a user group a custom title, and a user group an award (once board owners can even give awards that is).
This productivity streak really is scary.
CTU
So that’s the end of 24 then, another season over. If you haven’t seen all of season 4 yet, I suggest you stop reading now. Spoilers follow.
The final episode was a bit of a let down, because I really wanted that missile to hit. The terrorists had managed to win all year and I wanted them to have the guts to end the series on CTU failure, and kill a million people in the process. The death of Marwan and the rescue of Tony seemed a bit anti-climatic, especially since it was so obvious Tony wasn’t dead.
Glad they rescued Tony though, didn’t think he was going to make it after getting back with Michelle. Under normal war film rules, he should be dead.
Overall though, still excellent television and another great year. You still can’t help but want to see the next one as soon as each episode finishes, and I already want to see how they’re going to handle next season. Seems to me like they’ve written themselves into a really tight corner.
But then, that’s why it’s so fun for the viewer.
View
Password protected boards are used by a lot of people for varying reasons, but the biggest problem with them is when you have a closed group of users and one of them leaves, or is thrown out. Then you have to change the password and notify everyone else of the change.
That’s why tonight I added a new board setting called "Can View Only" and a new user right called "Can View". When the board is given that setting, only people with that user right are allowed to access it.
Of course since Chatbear doesn’t usually rely on people being logged in, if you’re not, it’ll force you to do that first.
Hopefully this will make it easier for people who want to create a community, but don’t want to invite the public.
Awards
I added the code to support user awards into Chatbear today. This is going to be used for a number of things which I hope will people will enjoy.
Awards will be given for statistical reasons, the top 10 posters will get a little rosette for example, and there will be others for the person who writes the longest posts, or uses the longest words, or posts the most within that week or month. On your birthday, a cake or balloon award would also appear.
Awards may be given by the board owner to their users, probably as an indicator of status, but for any other reason they want too. Board owners will be able to upload their own award graphics.
And finally awards can be purchased, either for yourself or for another user, as a replacement for the current donation system. If you buy another user an award then it will indicate who it was that bought it for them. Expect a wide choice of rewards, and varying prices depending on exclusivity.
Community
After giving it some thought, I don’t think Bearthing is going to replace Chatbear like I originally thought it would. Bearthing is about users having their own individual site, with their own databases and potentially their own user systems. Chatbear is about a single community of users, where posts on one board effect your ranking on them all, something you won’t get on Bearthing messageboards.
Technically, somebody could use Bearthing to create a competing Chatbear service, with their own user system and board creation system. That alone makes them very different services.
So I’m going to make some changes to Chatbear to push that community aspect even more, so it acts as a complement to Bearthing. I spent tonight applying a new design to the Bearkey site, and making the content a lot simpler. I plan on doing some more of that, and redesigning the Chatbear site as well. Much less text, much more fun and hopefully much more inviting. There’ll be some new features in Chatbear as well, like user groups, awards, friends and foe improvements and a members club for those who donate.
There are a few other things swirling in my head as well, and I may launch Blogbear too, just as the simple blogging service it is now. I mean it handles my blog fine, there’s no reason why it couldn’t handle someone elses.
With Bearthing realistically still a few months away, these improvements will hopefully start building new communities within what’s available now.
Stormtrooper
At around 0:30 this morning we left the flat and headed out into the dark and wet night to see Revenge Of The Sith at the local cinema (which is about a 55 second drive away). We were to see the second of two performances they had on within five minutes of each other, meaning we were with the group stupid enough to stay up to see the film this early, but not eager enough to book sooner.
We were here because I thought it would be fun to go to the cinema this late, and also in the hope we’d see somebody in the audience dressed as a stormtrooper or something equally retarded. Sadly this wasn’t the case, all those with Chewie costumes must have stayed in bed.
As for the film itself, great stuff. A huge improvement over the previous two prequels, with way more good stuff outweighing the bad. Incredible artistry, fabulous special effects, no shying away from the more gruesome shots, and a final half hour that reminds you just how cool Star Wars can be. You will want to see Episode IV straight after.
Unless, like me, you almost passed out when the end credits appeared.
Punishing
Spent the day doing my best not to fall asleep at my desk, so very tired. Slept for a fair proportion of the evening, but ended up feeling worse after I woke up.
Despite this, I booked tickets for Star Wars. Which would be fine if the performance weren’t just after midnight.
Sometimes I wonder if I just enjoy punishing myself.
Revolution
Today it was the turn of Nintendo to take centre stage, showing off their next console, Revolution, for the first time. Well, at least, they held up a representation of what it’s going to look like (it was in fact an empty box).
Glad to hear them talk about online gaming at last, frankly I’m not sure what’s taken them so long. Mario MMORPG anyone? Especially cool to hear that not only is it backwards compatible with the Gamecube, but also every other previous Nintendo console as well, with their entire back catalogue of games promised for download.
It’s certainly the smallest of the next-gen bunch, but it’s also currently the most mysterious. They showed no game footage, claimed elsewhere it was only 2-3 times the power of the Gamecube (while Sony tout the PS3 as 35 times more powerful as the PS2) and continue to hide anything which could be described as revolutionary (something to do with the controller apparently).
Also at their press conference was the cute looking Game Boy Micro (small is good) and the latest Zelda trailer, which I still fail to be excited about. I liked the cel-shaded look more.
Cynical
So today we got actual footage of Xbox 360 and PS3 games, and it’s fair to say that the quality varies wildly.
On the Xbox front, games like Need For Speed: Most Wanted look like a lot of fun, and it’s great to see them showing actual in-game footage. But it doesn’t look truely next-gen. Project Gotham Racing 3 looks much more like a game from the next wave, while Quake 4 looks like Doom 3… and Gears of War has the look of something promising, but not quite the framerate to match. Overall it’s the promise of Xbox Live! that interests me most right now, but these games are all running on Power Mac G5’s with much slower gfx cards than the final hardware, so there’s no doubt things will look even better in six months.
As for the PS3, it’s difficult not to be impressed. In fact, at times in their video showcase, it’s difficult to pick your jaw up off the floor. If these are real-time, in-game movies then we truely are seeing a leap in performance. Whether or not you believe they are, depends on how cynical you’re feeling. Killzone 2 is most impressive, in that OMFG!!??! kinda way. Vision Gran Turismo and F1 sometimes look like TV footage, Tekken was surely pre-rendered and MotorStorm is the most impressive racing game I’ve seen in years. I can actually hear the guy saying “oh poo” at the end of it.
Of course, it’s not all good news. Killing Day looks like a 4 year old PC FPS, and I truely hope the developers are hanging their heads in shame after seeing Killzone 2.
Me, I’ll be buying them both regardless. Decisions are not something I make.
Impressions
I finally tried out the PS2 I bought a few weeks back today, by playing Devil May Cry 3 and Midnight Club 3. First impressions of each follow, with full reviews going up on whatvideogame once I’ve played them both some more.
First impression of Devil May Cry 3 is that it looks great, and sounds pretty good too, but that it felt more like a button mashing contest than something I had any real control over. The difficulty curve is also non-existent, getting far too hard, far too fast, and sending you back to the beginning of each stage when you die is usually on reserved for cruel games that need some way to boost their play time. It may be fun if I get the hang of it some more, but I had to stop playing before I threw the controller at the TV.
Midnight Club 3 is fun enough. It’s a racing game which tries too hard to be cool, and style wise shares a lot in common with the Burnout series (just without the crashes). It has various different racing styles, but the main one is an open ended style around a city, where you just have to get from checkpoint to checkpoint using any route you want. The career mode pits you as a street racer, where you buy your car and then take up the challenges from other racers around the city, playing to win cash in order to upgrade your wheels. It certainly seems like it’s going to be large and challenging, but it’s missing any real magic. The PS2 also struggles sometimes to keep the framerate up, especially in the wet, so it may be that an Xbox purchase would have been the better option.
As for the PS2 itself, I still hate those controllers.
Preferring
I wrote my first proper Bearscript today (something I actually intend to use for a site, rather than simply a test script) and discovered a lot of bugs in the process, some fundamental which I haven’t yet managed to fix.
While the Bearthing side of things is very incomplete, creating a site using Bearscript becomes a much manual process. Things that the admin system would obviously make easier for a potential user aren’t there yet, so everything takes much longer than it should. There’s also the problem that my brain hasn’t yet gotten used to converting my thoughts to the correct finger movements that will enter Bearscript, still preferring to produce it’s output in Perl. Looking up the documentation isn’t much good yet either, considering it’s so out of date, so I end up looking through the actual compiler itself just to find the syntax for a particular built-in function.
I’m sure things will get better with practice, and it is great fun to finally be producing something useful using it. It just seems a little stupid sometimes when I can’t remember how my own language works.
360
Well the Xbox 360 has been revealed. Hardware wise, it’s looking pretty good. The design of the box isn’t anything spectacular, but you’re unlikely to be embarassed about having it in your living room. The specifications are good enough, although realstically these days most numbers indicating performance start to become fairly meaningless.
The dashboard, with even more Xbox live connectivity, streaming pictures, music and movies from your Windows XP based machine, the ability to plug in your iPod to provide a custom soundtrack for whatever game you’re playing and the section where you can download updates, add-ons and demos, sounds great. Having it act as a pass-through for your TV so that gaming invitations popup over whatever you’re watching also sounds very futuristic, as does the idea of leaving video messages for people.
The games are where it currently falls down. MTV seemed to do their best to show each title for as short a time as possible, and although Gamespot has since posted screenshots that look very good indeed, there’s nothing that’s been announced yet that really makes you wet your pants in anticipation. Have we just left behind 1995 product demos like Nintendo showing off Mario 64 for the first time, where you really couldn’t believe what you were seeing? Are those days long gone?
Maybe E3 will bring us more, not only from Microsoft but from Sony and Nintendo as well. Surely one of them can show off a console that can not only create graphics worthy of a new generation, but gameplay ideas as well.
Support
It looks like all my computer problems were caused by Microsoft security update 893036, released on April 15th. The problem is mentioned in this follow up support article, but I decided to simply uninstall it rather than go for the hotfix.
The great thing is that from the moment I removed it, everything has been back to normal. Uploading from Editplus is once again instant, and problems sending email or blogging have all cleared up as well. Which means no more excuses for not working on Bearscript.
On an unrelated note, my skill in picking up Corn Flake boxes is unmatched.
Quote
Quite simply, quote of the week.
They’re not games - they’re a second, virtual, life, for people who aren’t content with reality as it stands in its difficult, elf-free state. People who’d regard being, say, a shoemaker as a grossly tedious occupation in real life, but will happily spend hours and hours making pretend shoes in some gruesome Tolkienesque fantasy world and paying a fat monthly fee for the privilege. (With the ultimate goal, of course, of buying a great big pretend sword and slaying a big pretend dragon-type monster with it - rather than, say, just buying a game where you have a big sword from the start and can get straight on with the monster-slaying without making any shoes at all.)
Read the whole story from someone far better at expressing themselves than me.
