PEW PEW PEW

Followup to the previous mouse post. In trying to avoid carpal...

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 01:59:57 -0400

Followup to the previous mouse post. In trying to avoid carpal tunnel/RSIs, I’ve found that this combo is delightful:

Add it up and you have a mouse that glides on air. With a lighter mouse than this MX1000, you should feel nearly zero resistance - the heft of the MX1000 results in a little bit of resistance, which I like.

(In the photo above, I’m using cut-up Glide MS feet, originally designed for Microsoft mice. Got ‘em free. When they wear out, it’ll be a more fitting set of Glide MX feet taking their place.

Old and busted, meet new hotness. The venerable Logitech MX1000...

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 02:51:10 -0400

Old and busted, meet new hotness. The venerable Logitech MX1000 laser mouse, loved by many and mourned when Logitech stopped production, is my favorite mouse. Ever. I really can’t use anything else. (Well, I could, but don’t wanna.)

Since 2004 I’ve been buying them on a fairly regular basis (I’m rough on my mice) until maybe a year and a half ago, when Logitech unveiled the MX Revolution.

The MX is a ghastly mouse. It’s so contoured that you have no choice but to slide your fingers “into” it and move it with your entire hand. Now to some folk (freaks!), they might be perfectly alright with palming their mouse. I can’t - I’m a fingertip man all the way. My palm rarely touches the mouse, as evidenced by the worn out areas where my fingers rest and click on all previous mice.

Anyway! So my most recent MX1000, the one in the back there, was finally on its way out. But if I called Logitech (that is, if I had the time to), they’d give me an MX as a replacement.

Ew.

Luckily I was able to find a source with a bunch of brand new MX1000 mice. And the best part? These models come with different materials and color scheme - a much better design than the MX1000’s I’ve used over the years. Glossy dark dark purple plastic, black rubber button frame instead of silver plastic, button action all around feels better (and it’s not because it’s new). The entire package just feels better than all my previous MX1000 mice. Like a Bugatti versus a Volkswagen.

Totally tempted to buy out the entire stock right now, so I have plenty of mice for years into the future.

Logitech, you really need to consider bringing this mouse back into production. For the folks that dig it, nothing in your current product stable can quench our mousing needs!

I’m sure they don’t care, but they just lost a...

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:43:00 -0400

I’m sure they don’t care, but they just lost a customer. I’m not surprised - all the HP PCs we bought were horribly inefficiently packed. Click here for more details on HP using tons of cardboard to ship sheets of paper. (Granted, it’s all recyclable, thanks goodness - but not the fuel burned shipping it, for example.)

Brooklyn Bridge from Anchor Park

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:49:23 -0400

Brooklyn Bridge from Anchor Park

Wait, nevermind.

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:23:00 -0400

I have time for something, how about that! So let’s get started.

GTA IV, Post Completion.

What was done right:

• The cars. Handling of the more “advanced” cars is a great mix of realism and arcade handling. The crunch when you go careening into a median is delightfully nauseating, as is the damage to the vehicle.

• Some missions. The bank robbery (one of Packie’s missions) had a great Heat feel to it, and the over-the-shoulder aiming really helped put you in the moment.

What was done wrong:

• Everything else. Keeping people I meet happy and entertained is something done in the real world, and is a terrible game mechanic. It feels like work. I don’t want to work in a game, I want to play a game. This is why Saint’s Row remains the best GTA ever - they cut out all the bullshit and focused on the mayhem. I can’t wait for the sequel.

• The game felt like a giant Tamagotchi. Captivating at first, then once your character and the storyline have matured, and you eventually complete the sequence of events, that’s it. There’s no replay value. (Yes, I have owned Tamagotchis. Yes, plural.)

• The story stunk. Nothing happened. No conflict, no resolution, aside from a ton of allusion to a crisis in the main character’s home country. Frankly, I wanted to play *that* game. The voice acting was damn good though.

• But here’s the big one. I have a big 60” HDTV at home. Playing great looking games on a set this size is a total trip. Assassin’s Creed was the most immersive gaming experience I’ve had in the longest time - the combination of fantastic controls and incredible visuals made for an addicting time. But GTA IV breaks all immersion. Here’s what I should be seeing:

And here’s my actual experience:

Yeah, that’s a problem. Don’t say you haven’t had the same experience, because I won’t believe you. Anytime I’m in a car going faster than a snail, I fixate on the minimap as it’s the only indicator of where I need to go. So I find myself traversing this large, expansive game environment using a 2D map only a few inches in diameter.

Saint’s Row solved this a long while back, by putting a semi-transparent 3D directional arrow about 1/4 down from the top of the screen (along with a minimap, by the way). This small addition meant I could sail through the game environment and actually experience it - get immersed in it - because the only time I needed an actual map was to locate my destination. After that, never had to take my eyes off the road.

• For a game called “Grand Theft Auto,” when you have a few cop cars on your tail, the game refuses to spawn any cars. This is most aggravating when you have to ditch your wreck and find new transportation - you can walk for minutes without finding a *single damn car.*

So. Overall, 6/10 if a number must be given.

Zero Punctuation fan goodies.

A bunch of great single scenes from Yahtzee’s hysterical game reviews, in Photoshop format. He’s never done a review that I didn’t totally agree with - though honestly, I thought Bioshock wasn’t close to being a game of the year. Still haven’t gotten more than maybe 1/10th of the way in before getting bored to tears. I think it’s that there’s nothing in the game to care about, and I can’t force myself to push on to *find* something to care about.

I throw these in the corner of my favorite desktop pics. They make me grin. Sample included. Link action. I’m sure there will be more added in a future update.

The desktop pic used is one created by the talented Psychopulse.

iDisk after the Mobile Me update, sucks.

I have a .Mac subscription, recently converted to MobileMe.

iDisk has always stunk on ice. It was always dreadful. I thought hey, maybe they improved things for the new MobileMe service.

I also have, and adore, Dropbox. If I could I’d just keep talking about it.

Get this:

I want to upload a 13.5MB file, via 2Mbps upstream.

Dropbox, 6 seconds.

MobileMe iDisk, 3 F✗✗✗ING MINUTES.THREE. 180 seconds.

Good lord. Apple really needs to give those guys a metric ton of money, their own department, like “Room 104 - Things That Are Awesome,” and ditch iDisk completely.

Speaking of Apple…

Still no real-world iPhone testing for the new 3G model. Don’t get me wrong, I had the same issue with my previous Samsung phone, but I really expect more from Apple.

If there’s any alert dialog onscreen (an SMS, calender notification, etc), the alarm clock won’t go off.

Seems like if they gave iPhones to say, 50 people, even just employees, *someone* would have used the alarm clock and coincidentally had an alert dialog up at the time the alarm was supposed to go off. And if not, it should have been caught during internal testing.

Fail.

And that’s all for today, kids.

Gone Dark

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:14:00 -0400

As if you couldn’t tell from the lack of updates. Need to continue the dark spell while we finish up a major project at the office. Should clear up a week or two after August 1st, along with a site redesign to account for longer articles.

Upcoming reads:

• Post-completion notes on what GTA IV did right, wrong, and a big observation I (surprisingly) haven’t heard or read anywhere on immersion.

• Zero Punctuation fan goodies for personal use. Hope I don’t get C&D’d, because I’m a massive Yahtzee fan.

• How bad iDisk after the MobileMe update continues to be absolutely embarassing compared to Dropbox. (Sneak Peek: It’s f✗✗✗ing horrendous.)

• Personal notes on why I think that Apple does an absolute minimal amount of real world testing on both the original iPhone and new 3G model. Usability testing, definitely. Out in the open? Nope.

• A bunch of game industry-related articles that I haven’t had a chance to finish. Hopefully Juuso @ GameProducer.net accept my apologies!

Back in a flash.

Apple, I assure you that it will be okay if I turn Bluetooth...

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:23:25 -0400

Apple, I assure you that it will be okay if I turn Bluetooth off.

What irks me is, this dialog doesn’t have a “do it anyway dammit” option of some sort.

This is a clip from Carlin’s recent HBO Comedy Special,...

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:35:00 -0400

This is a clip from Carlin’s recent HBO Comedy Special, “It’s Bad For Ya,” and makes a fitting tribute to the country’s hardest working comedian and social commentator.

George, we’ll give you six weeks.

Catch the entire special by heading to HBO’s Schedule page and searching for “Carlin”.

Great photo taken by Kiku that I couldn’t help but repost....

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 09:04:00 -0400

Great photo taken by Kiku that I couldn’t help but repost. Great photo in its own right, though what gets me is that those cops aren’t all over those storm troopers for the replica weapons they’re carrying.

I waited in the rain for GTA IV…

Thu, 01 May 2008 09:57:00 -0400

… and it feels like I got a different game than everyone else. 99 out of 100, seriously? Granted, I’m only maybe four hours into the game, and I suppose a lot can change, but I’ve got gripes galore that progress won’t address.

I’ve never seen such a bizarre amount of depth-of-field blur, which I assume is there to hide the poor draw distance and object pop-in. Humans don’t see like this. It’s the modern-day equivalent of the old fog trick, Cf. Superman (N64) and Turok (first one), off the top of my head.

There is visibility of maybe 60 feet in the game world. Beyond that, everything turns into this fuzzy mud. Oftentimes, the engine doesn’t even bother to draw the buildings or cars past this point, objects that take less than 15 seconds to run to, and less than 5 to drive to.

There are the same glitches that have plagued what is, I assume, the same engine used since GTA III. Such as, cars that magically drop from the sky when you turn around, and cars that pile up because too many were spawned at once. My favorite is walking out into an empty street, looking left, seeing no cars, looking right, seeing no cars, then looking left again to find traffic has backed up. Just like Looney Tunes.

Get chased by, say, three cop cars. The framerate nosedives and makes it hard to actually play the game. How are you supposed to evade the law when faced with the game-world equivalent of blinking your eyes repeatedly?

I like the ability to be killed by a cardboard box that was resting on my leg when I hopped out of a car. Good times.

The camera is lousy. The auto-snap back to center is way too… something. Fast? Snappy? The rubber-banding is crazy. On foot, or in a vehicle. Trying to rotate the camera while moving feels like you’ve taken a cameraman hostage and need to force him into pointing the damn thing where you want it to go.

And when in a vehicle, the camera isn’t high enough, resulting in plenty of crashes purely because your vehicle obscures objects directly in front. Like, other cars. It also tends to drag behind your car when turning, only catching up centering the view after you continue moving straight, resulting in limited visibility of what is around the corner and severely limited time to change your course.

There’s a “mobile phone” sub-interface, with about as many controls and options as a real mobile phone. That’s a bad thing. Rockstar spent so much time making it similar to the real world, your own mobile phone and all, yet someone there must have lost the list of details to include; I can’t run while on the phone, something I can do in real life.

Speaking of running, paint dries faster than your character moves. Controllers have analog sticks for very good reasons. I shouldn’t have to press a modifier button to make the characterwalk at a productive pace.

And hey, speaking of the imitation of real life, if you get clipped by a car it can knock your hat off your head and onto the ground. There’s a control to pick things up - cans, bricks, whatever - but I can’t pick up my hat. To put my hat back on, I need to go back to my safehouse, and go through a very slow clothing-change process to put my hat back on. The same hat that I dropped and couldn’t pick.

Oh no, and speaking of slow, everything takes forever to do. Go shopping? Takes forever. Change clothes? Takes forever. Buy a gun? Takes forever.

Almost every button has two, three or more actions attached to it. My phone rang a second before I hit the button to jack a car. This somehow cancelled the call altogether. Why not just let it ring? If you’re giving me a control to forward calls (according to the manual), at least let the phone keep ringing until I decide what to do about it, or the calling party hangs up. Or better yet, fewer controls.

What’s the story with enemy damage? I have to run over a bad guy’s skull three or more times before they go down.

The cover system must have been tacked on at the last minute. While it does the job alright, firing while exposed is somewhat of a joke. One shot at a time before popping back behind cover.

Melee combat is terrible. As soon as the first one started, I was aching for a gun. Hit detection is lousy, enemies have more dynamic moves than you (Cf. the “shove”), and the controls are completely unresponsive.

And I haven’t even gotten to the driving, a key part of a title with a name like Grand Theft Auto. All the cars (so far) drive like boats, even the supercar that was parked at mansion. They capsize if you so much as cough. Cornering is nonexistent. The game recommends you use the (standard) brake for making plain old turns, but I have yet to see the brakes actually do much of anything.

Cornering while braking is something that has been done in driving games - whether a dedicated racing title or just a part of an open world game - for years, and the implementation here is nothing like I’ve ever experienced. It just doesn’t act like expected - when you’re on the throttle and you brake simultaneously, the game shouldn’t bounce back and forth between braking behavior and acceleration, as seems to happen here.

The minigames, such as pool and bowling, are horrid. A copious amount of controls and time involved for what should be something simple and fun.

There are no onscreen navigation aids besides the little map in the corner. Saint’s Row pulled this off beautifully, with onscreen “GPS” arrows on top of the screen that helped you navigate without having to take your eyes off the road to refer to the mini-map. Maybe adding arrows like that would have meant even less draw distance. Ha!

Speaking of which, in a game world this size, why isn’t there one-button access to the large fullscreen map?

Let me tell you something, over a year ago I said Saint’s Row was a better GTA that GTA ever was, and I stand by that with the release of GTA IV. This is the same old game that GTA III and GTA:VC were - it’s all here, down to the same glitches. But in pulling the series into this next generation of hardware, it feels like Rockstar didn’t do anything to improve the game. The few hours I’ve been playing have felt like a chore - moving from cutscene to cutscene, occasionally stealing a car, getting into a fistfight… going on a date? Dating is the big change?

Maybe I just don’t see what is impressing people. I played GTA III, and loved GTA:VC to death. That was my go-to game when I was bored. For its time and hardware, it looked good enough, and played great. Plenty of people said that its lack of graphical prowess was made up for with the gameplay, the fun of the game, and I agree. But GTA IV is the same game - same in the goddam world - with a new coat of paint on it. It’s not new, it’s regurgitated.

$100 million was spent, 1000 people involved, and it took around four years to make. But I’m having a really hard time wondering what all that time and money was spent on. Voice acting, cutscene direction and textures? Surely it couldn’t have been on Euphoria, because I haven’t seen anything that didn’t look like plain ol’ ragdoll yet. They sure didn’t spend it on a brand new engine, I don’t think.

Yes, I’m really really oversimplifying, but my point stands - there are other games with parallel features that have pulled off what I expect from the “next generation.” This game doesn’t cut it.

Other open world games have managed to really knock my socks off: the previously cited Saint’s Row, Assassin’s Creed, Crackdown. None of these games had the technical issues cited above, so obviously it can be done on this generation of hardware. And it’s been done very well. I will concede that Saint’s Row did have a lot of glitches at first, though there wasn’t one I ran into that affected my enjoyment of the game.

Having said all of the above, I’m definitely going to continue playing. While it’s not blowing me away, it does feel like an old friend, and I’m hoping it has learnt a few new tricks.

For now: 5/10. Blaow!

When we were in our old office, our fax line died. This resulted...

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:42:50 -0400

When we were in our old office, our fax line died. This resulted in a 4+ hour trek around Chelsea with a seasoned Ma Bell technician. After going down into multiple neighboring townhouses and apartment buildings, one of which was straight out of a horror movie (40-year-old telco switching equipment, beams of wood nailed to the back of the teeny tiny elevator door, etc), we came through a basement into this cul-de-sac nestled in the middle of a city block, surrounded by the backs of towering buildings.

As twilight engulfed this tiny hidden alley, we turned a corner into an even narrower passage, with a door all the way at the end. I kid you not, it felt like that door would lead to the inky blackness of nonexistence, especially after all the trekking we did into areas of a normal city block that you just don’t usually get to see.

The technician started looking around the door, around the doorknob, the ground in front of it, the junk piled next to it.

“What are you looking for?” I ask.

“The code… for the door.”

Fucking hell. It does lead to the inky blackness of nonexistence.

He says, “You see, there are so many doors like this that we usually just scrawl the codes somewhere around it - the frame, the ground, wherever.”

So he finally finds it - a combination of a partial code on the door frame and a few calls to other local technicians. He punches in the code, and the door opens.

It was full of inky blackness, until he reached in and flipped on a lightswitch.

Inside the room was a folding chair, empty cans of soda, state-of-the-art fiber optic switching equipment humming with powers, but the highlight was the wall full of technical paperwork, documenting the “history” of the area’s telecommunications, some dating back to the 1960’s (IIRC). Unfortunately I couldn’t take photos in the room. “Security,” he explained. Oh well.

He checked over some of these old documents, found where our old copper should be routed to, and after we got out of these he was able to patch things up.

This goes down as one of the most bizarre experiences I’ve had in this burg.

Photo taken by my brother. That’s one spelling you...

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:17:16 -0400

Photo taken by my brother. That’s one spelling you don’t want to screw up. (Click to enlarge!)

Photo taken in Australia. (Can’t track down the source...

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:48:49 -0400

Photo taken in Australia. (Can’t track down the source though…)

I love Dropbox. The future, it’s here! Beats iDisk like a...

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:03:17 -0400

I love Dropbox. The future, it’s here! Beats iDisk like a dead horse - no more random Finder crashes during a 1MB copy operation. And its icon looks great with the Smokestack Growl theme. Bonus!

Just like Looney Tunes. No, a can opener doesn’t work on...

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:45:31 -0400

Just like Looney Tunes. No, a can opener doesn’t work on this kind of can. What would I have done if I were stuck on a desert island without a blunt instrument to crack this bad boy open?

A bug in Rainbow Six Vegas 2. There’s you plus two...

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:44:34 -0400

A bug in Rainbow Six Vegas 2. There’s you plus two teammates. Who the heck is that fourth green icon? QA is important!

Every once in a while, video games get used on a show (rather,...

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:59:16 -0400

Every once in a while, video games get used on a show (rather, on TV in general) in exactly the right ways. Play Hilary Clinton and escape from those Bosnian snipers!

A random box of wine appears at the office! Command? (The...

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:36:18 -0400

A random box of wine appears at the office! Command?

(The vintage went very well with the Brent & Sam’s chocolate raspberry cookies in the silver tin.)

Longcat is in the new Paul Robertson animation! Woo!

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:09:38 -0400

Longcat is in the new Paul Robertson animation! Woo!

Lightbulbs

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:04:00 -0400

Q: How many jerks who ask stupid questions does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Change it to what?