Archive for December, 2008

Why talk radio is better than television

Published
by
Mike
on December 28, 2008
in Nonsense and Writing
. 0 Comments

I’ll preface this post with a few facts. First, I’ve been drinking whisky. Second, all of this is based on my personal experience and opinions and is nowhere indicative of scientific fact. I have read nothing about this subject. This is just about me and my personal observations about television versus radio.

Having said all that, let me explain the background of my claims. I am not in any way a stranger to the allure of the television, the evil siren of the entertainment world. In the past, I have found myself easily succumbing to television and watching as my standards for worthy entertainment dropped time and time again. This usually ended up in me being hopelessly addicted to horrible reality television shows in which the freaks of society and their average counterparts are thrown together to mingle, fight, love and lose. Anyone living in the UK will be familiar with this sort of television. In this case, my example is Big Brother. Anyway, the point is not what it was but the fact that watching it can be almost as boring and monotonous as a television watcher’s meaningless existence. It is only slightly above the thrill I may get from – I don’t know – clipping my toenails, perhaps. Actually now that I think upon it further, clipping my toenails is more satisfying because of the delay between clipping sessions. Anyway, I haven’t been watching much TV lately because we don’t have one in a great location for us in our current living arrangements. Overall, I see this as a good thing.

I’m not by any means saying that all television is horrible. I love a good documentary, decent films, etc. You can’t get that sort of thing on radio in the same way and I appreciate some regular television as well. I’m a shameless fan of the new Battlestar Galactica show, and I don’t care that you know. I like it and I think that it is good television. The thing is though that most of the time, television is just not that good. I’d just as soon be playing games, taking photos, writing or just surfing the internet. Unfortunately, television does not allow me to do these things once I get into the habit of watching it. It sucks me into a time vortex and I waste the hours of my life in front of the box.

Since I came to the UK, I’ve been listening to BBC Radio 4. I started this practice because I was driving a total of around 8 hours on the weekends going to and from my wife’s house, before she was my wife. I’d leave right after work on a Friday night and get there about 4 hours later, since there was traffic and a long distance to contend with. The main problem was that I was always tired from a long day of work and I found regular music didn’t help me combat this. I’d just go into a sort of trance and it started to get dangerous. One day I tried listening to Radio 4, which is a spoken-word station. For some reason, this station kept my brain active and every time I’ve listened to it since, I’ve never been at risk for falling asleep.

Radio 4 broadcasts news, drama, comedy, science and history. It has a good mix of topics and all of the newsreaders, hosts, etc always seemed very well informed. I’m not going to tell you that I love everything on the station because I don’t. Some of it, frankly, caters to an older audience and I don’t care for the soap operas such as The Archers. I do very much enjoy the plays, the current affairs programmes, the pieces on literature and poetry and the programmes which focus on religion/spirituality and the like. I find that while I listen to the radio in this way, my mind is active. When listening to dramas, plays, or listening to a book reading, my imagination paints a picture using the words coming through the speakers. My brain is always working and assessing the words on the radio but when I’m watching the television, my brain is dead. I find myself wanting to eat or surf the internet while I watch television because watching television on its own doesn’t occupy enough of my brain.

Maybe your experience is different, but I’d urge you to give talk radio a chance if you haven’t done so already. Radio 4 is great and I hear good things about NPR although I don’t think their format is all talk. Anyway, that’s all from me for now.

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Prince of Persia – worth finishing?

Published
by
Mike
on December 27, 2008
in Gaming and Writing
. 2 Comments

Once again, this is a gaming post. If you’re not into it you may want to look away now.

I recently started playing Prince of Persia for the PC and thought I’d share a few thoughts with you about my playing experience so far. Let me first explain that I’m not sure if I’ll actually finish the game or not. I’ve finished the first 4 areas for cleaning and done a few which require access with one of the special powers, but perhaps you can enlighten be as to whether the game is worth finishing, given the information I am about to give you.

Nobody can deny that this game has achieved some interesting things. First of all, the animation is quite interesting. I hadn’t read a lot about it before I started playing but upon initial installation I was quite surprised. I hadn’t expected what I saw and all I can really say to describe it is that the whole thing sort of looks like a painting, and not a crap one done by a little kid. The movement overall is very fluid and the way the 2 characters interact with each other is quite good as well. I never feel that Elika is getting in my way so much that she becomes a huge nuisance, as can sometimes happen in other games. As for the dialogue, while not inspiring in any way and sometimes a bit cheesy, still changes as more story is revealed. Another great thing is that this game doesn’t require you to have the disc in your PC while you’re playing. Eureka!

The most fun for me in Prince of Persia is during very fluid movement periods on the way to and from each fertile ground. In some ways, this interesting gameplay reminds me of Mirror’s Edge but with less available options. I think that if this part of the game had been expanded a bit more so that more areas were open for interaction in a creative way, it would have allowed a more interesting playing experience. As it is, you have to backtrack in generally the same path on which you came in. Although things change a bit after the battle to heal the fertile grounds, this generally isn’t enough to keep me extremely excited about the gameplay. It’s usually fairly familiar territory.

A couple of slightly niggling things which annoy me are the fact that this game was very obviously created for a console. Instead of clear indications of what I should be pushing in certain situations, I get color coded nonsense and strange directional indicators. It doesn’t really fly well on the PC. It isn’t a huge deal, but it can be annoying. Another such annoyance is the fact that they’ve obviously tried to make you feel connected to the healing process for each fertile ground by tapping a button repeatedly. This isn’t interesting and it doesn’t make me feel connected to the process. It’s just annoying. Just show me the animation while she’s healing the fertile ground, or let me have a more complicated role in this process. This is just a silly token offering which doesn’t work for me.

As for the combat, we’re looking at pretty basic stuff, on the whole. While the steel and magic duo thing is interesting and can make for some fun times in the beginning, the combat system soon feels a bit boring. Also, there is no real way to lose a battle, since Elika bails you out of every situation. This also applies to falling off cliffs, stepping into goo or anything remotely dangerous. It really removes the thrill and anticipation from the game and turns her from a love interest into a more motherly figure, in my view. It just isn’t exciting, and that’s the problem.

The real problem lies in the fact that you’re generally just doing the same thing over and over again, and there is no real urgency or reason to go on. You’re going to head to a fertile ground by navigating through the same sort of obstacles. You can’t die on the way because Elika won’t let you. Any illusion of time constraints is really thinly veiled and I personally feel no urgency to get anything done. When you get to the fertile ground, you’ll battle some baddy. This won’t be difficult because even if you mess up horribly, Elika will save you. Your abilities are generally limited to block, whack with sword, acrobatics thing (this one is pretty useful in interacting with Elika during switches between magic and sword attacks, etc), gauntlet and magic. Magic is just one thing, not many. Oh no, not the MAGIC attack! Any way, it isn’t horrible but it isn’t great. The problem with it is really just the fact that you’re going to have to do generally the same thing many times in order to finish the game.

I’ll readily admit the good things – the art, the fact that I love running around on walls and stuff and that the story is intriguing (but not gripping) so this is why I am at an impasse. Does the story warrant me going on? Is something great going to happen or am I going to be disappointed? Don’t tell me what happens, but what do you think? is it worth healing a lot more of these blasted fertile grounds just to get to what for all I know may be a lackluster cut scene?

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Why Identica is better than Twitter

Published
by
Mike
on December 26, 2008
in Web/Technology and Writing
. 3 Comments

When I started using Twitter seriously not all that long ago, I wanted a way to be able to manage my tweets and to monitor the tweets of my friends without having to go to the page repeatedly throughout the day. I found many ways to do this on the Mac – Twitterfox, Eventbox, Twhirl, etc. I settled on a mix of Twitterfox and Eventbox but at around the same time, I saw Stephen Fry testing out posts from something called Identica. He had a few exchanges with some people who didn’t seem to like this service and I thought I’d check it out. When I got there, I was immediately struck by the lack of beautification in the way that Twitter is a sort of cutesy world of design. I must admit that I like the way that Twitter looks and didn’t immediately like the way that Identi.ca looked. That was soon not to matter to me, as I discovered all of the neat things which Identi.ca does better.

Identi.ca allows me to post to it via xmpp. I use GTalk through Adium to do this. Not only can I post this way, but I can also get my messages this way. This allows me to only go to the site when I really want to, which is a liberating experience for what is essentially a microblogging social network. The other thing I love is the ability to see the replies other people have received, which I cannot do via Twitter to my knowledge. I can also tag posts on Identi.ca and these tags will be clickable and when clicked they will take you to recent items which have included those tags. It really makes it easier for people to find other people with similar interests. In this same way, you can tag your profile with interests so that people can find you easier.

Some other key features are the ability to favorite posts by people, and the posts with most favorites will go into a popular tab on the main site where everyone can see them and see what is happening in the larger community. It is the community which really makes this service magical, though. When I first got onto Twitter, I felt as if I was alone in my little world, tweeting away to nobody. When I got onto Identi.ca, I was immediately surrounded and embraced by like minds and differing minds, by geeks, poets and hippies and all sorts of people I’d never think to immediately seek out. It happens on Identi.ca because it is a wild and strange world in which anything can happen.

I sort of see Identi.ca as the Facebook of the microblogging world, to Twitter’s Myspace. While this analogy is not perfect in any way (mainly because Facebook is not Open Source and still has many flaws) but maybe you’ll see my point. Twitter is the closed old system while Identi.ca is the trendy new system which is growing fast and making changes which Twitter will eventually be scrambling to make itself. The software on Identi.ca is Open Source and enabling in nature, allowing people to connect instead of just sticking to their individual groups.

I still use Twitter, as many people on Identi.ca do. I’ll tell you one thing though. Twitter may look prettier on the outside, but Identica has more heart. I’ll be looking forward to seeing your ‘dents’ as opposed to your ‘tweets’ in the future.

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Peggle Extreme & Peggle Nights – Both just Peggle

Published
by
Mike
on December 26, 2008
in Gaming and Writing
. 0 Comments

Another gaming post – escape now if you can.

A lot of people have probably played Peggle, the addictive peg-and-ball game from PopCap Games. I too, have played Peggle, and at first I really enjoyed it. I finished the Adventure mode and started doing the challenges, eventually working myself up to a point in which I spend about an hour or so on each impossible challenge trying to beat the damned thing. It’s mostly something I do when I’m bored. I’m not obsessed or anything – no, really. I’m not. Anyway, I was quite excited to hear about Peggle Nights and the fact that Peggle Extreme was available for free download. I was gifted with Peggle Nights on Steam by my brother-in-law, John and I downloaded Peggle Extreme to try it out as well.

Now that I have played through the Adventure mode of all of the Peggle games, I feel that I am qualified to pass righteous judgment upon them, and that is what I intend to do. Peggle, though decent as a distraction, does get old. I thought that surely upon the release of the new games, something new and different could be expected. I was very wrong. They’re basically the same thing.

Let me explain. Peggle Extreme is essentially just Peggle with an Orange Box face on it. You basically get 10 levels of Peggle which are essentially made to look like another game. You still get the pegs, but the background is art which is made to look like Half Life 2, Counterstrike, Portal and Team Fortress 2. The pegs go along with the art but the art is really of poor quality, if that isn’t too harsh. The really thing I didn’t like about this game though wasn’t the lack of anything spectacularly new. I’ll admit that it was ok and fairly fun as a short distraction from doing something altogether more constructive. What I didn’t like was the fact that the only special power you had access to when you used the green ball was the power characterized by Bjorn the Unicorn guy. While it has its uses, it isn’t a really fun ability. That’s what really threw the whole experience off for me.

As for Peggle Nights, it is a lot better. The game is essentially the same as Peggle, but you still get to access all of the characters and their abilities, plus one new one which does a sort of zapping ability which eliminated all of the pegs in a straight line from the first peg hit to the bucket at the bottom of the screen. It is a decent skill on the right level and in the right hands, but by no means my favorite. You still have to play through the painful bits in which you play using that horrible pyramid ability with the cat mascot, and my least favorite of all, the claw/flipper ability with the lobster mascot. You can see more of my thoughts about him here, where I compare him to the Smoker from Left 4 Dead. I really hate that guy.

Anyway, the premise behind Peggle Nights is that you’ve arrived to the world at night when all of the characters are dreaming, or something. They have the same abilities, but they reveal their deepest hopes and dreams to you. For example, the Lobster wants to be huge and walk around in Paris so his countrymen don’t call him a shrimp anymore. The once enlightened owl sinks to his desire for rockstar fame and sort of jams out on a guitar and sings in the background art. Anyway, they all have different things, some of them quite ludicrous given their previous characterization. The only one which doesn’t have a dream is the new one, Marina. She appears to be some sort of fishy entity.

All of this was slightly amusing at most and I really wanted more new abilities or something to mix up the gameplay a bit. There did to be some slightly more difficult twists on some of the levels, but nothing my original Peggle skills couldn’t handle. I can say that some of the UI seems to have been made slightly more attractive, though. Other than that, it is the same old Peggle.

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Left 4 Dead: The Smoker

Published
by
Mike
on December 25, 2008
in Gaming and Writing
. 2 Comments

Those of you who aren’t into gaming may want to look aside, because I’m about to unleash a torrent of gaming information.

Left 4 Dead is a good game. I may be inclined to call it a great game on one of those days. You know the ones – you happen to fall into the spare Infected slot each time you join a server, the Survivor group is made of up toddlers who just installed the game and don’t even know which way to run, you get to be the Tank when it is time and the rest of the time you were the Hunter and the Boomer.

That’s right. What did I leave out? The Smoker. The forsaken Smoker from the pit of gaming hell. Let me put it to you this way: Have you ever played Peggle? You know the stupid French lobster who gives you the Flipper ability when you hit a green ball? Yeah, the Smoker is the equivalent to that dumbass. Just as the flippers flail there on the side as the ball finds its way down the center over and over again, you’ll stand on the sidelines watching your Hunter and Boomer cohorts having a grand old time raping and pillaging the internal organs of the Survivors as you stand with your long tongue slowly reeling back in like a fishing line stuck on some bottom muck in the proverbial game pond.

The Smoker is not a viable Infected class. Basically, you’ll spawn, find a place to stand from which you have a vantage point and should be able to grab a separated Survivor as he meanders around the level. These are the things that may actually happen:

1. You’ll try to grab someone but they will become mysteriously untangled from your tongue without actually having done anything. They will then walk away as you recharge your ability. This takes until the end of the universe.
2. You’ll grab someone, and start reeling them in from millions of miles away. For some reason, this will not damage them. No – strangling someone with your rope-like tongue and dragging them across the ground will not damage them at all. Damage only occurs when the dragging stops. The dragging stops usually when they get to you or when they get to some large obstacle and can’t move anymore. Even at this point the damage is so low that it is practically not worth doing it. Someone will see you from the other side of China, shoot one bullet which hits you in the little toe, and you will then die. You might as well kill yourself intentionally so you have some chance in hell of getting into one of the other classes.
3. The person will be able to shoot you just as they are getting pulled in, rendering the whole thing useless and alerting everyone to your presence. You will then die.

The only chance you have of doing anything worthwhile as a Smoker is if of chaos has seized the battlefield, and the Survivors are separated and being accosted on all sides by the forces of your teammates. This is good. You’ll do a little bit of damage if you can manage to grab a guy. Grab one, though. See what happens. After one of the Hunters finished off his, he’ll come take your kill. Tell me I’m not wrong. Oh, and if the Tank is around, just stay out of the way. He’ll probably just kill you in a blind battle fury as he mows over your slightly damaged victim and knocks them off the map.

All said and done, you’re not going to top the damage list with a Smoker in Left 4 Dead. You’ll limp in behind. This will be true especially if you spawn as one time and time again as seems to happen to me, the Karma Director of the game somehow deciding that it is my turn to suck ass. Yes, the Smoker does have its place – this is also true of the French Lobster man from Peggle – but its place is only on a small number of levels and in near perfect circumstances. Nobody wants to be the Smoker.

Some suggestions for fixing the smoker would be as follows:

1. Make the tongue faster. Make it reel in faster, make it shoot out faster. Just faster, dammit. Give us a chance.
2. Make damage start as soon as the tongue starts reeling, at halfway point, or give us a nominal damage number upon impact with the victim.
3. Give us a damage bonus when hitting small obstacles or objects, or when the victim is hanging. If you think about it, hanging by the neck would probably do a lot of damage.
4. When the victim gets within melee range, make the automated hitting faster, or do more damage per hit.
5. Give the Smoker a run speed increase so that they can get away if they fail.
6. Make the damned tongue cooldown MUCH shorter. The times when I can survive after successfully damaging a Survivor are made extremely painful by this long wait until I can attack again.
7. Make the death smoke (when the Smoker dies) deal some damage, obscure vision in a real way, last longer or have some other actual use other than a tiny effect and coughing noises from the Survivors.
8. DO NOT allow the Hunter to pounce on victims which are currently being constricted by the Smoker. If you want us to be able to work together, that’s fine. Give us a release button for our tongue so we can work with the Hunter. As it is, they just steal the kills and do all of the damage.
9. Make the tank unable to destroy the other Infected. I know this isn’t likely to happen, but they just mow you over if you’re standing there with someone constricted. It seems a waste since at the moment the Tank battle is the best time for the Smoker to come into use, as everyone tends to be distracted.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

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