One Geek's Approach to Everything

CNN has a post up this morning about this Fall’s upcoming “must-play” lineup.  I’ll spare you some of the pain there and tell you the five they’re mentioning:

• Halo: Reach
• Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Civilization V
• Medal of Honor

I”m experiencing a bit of indifference because for the first time in a long while, I don’t really want to play any of the games coming out in the very expensive, normally quite crowded holiday season.  It’s actually kind of strange because I’ve been into video games for quite a while.  I know that I’m experiencing some changes in my personal life with my attempt at heading back to school to finish up a BA degree soon but still… What is this?

Games represent a lot to me– aside from enjoying a (sometimes) interactive storyline, I enjoy playing them both for their rewards and their experience.  My friends also play video games and so it’s common topic of conversation: “What are you playing this week?”  ”Did you try out (insert title here)?”.  Often we talk about shared experiences of beating a tough boss or finding some cool new thing that we’ve never seen before.  Unfortunately I find myself to be getting burnt out by the “sameness” of some of these titles.

Let’s take a look at that list again: 3 out of 5 of those titles have a colon in their title somewhere suggesting that instead of providing a number indicating the sequel’s position they decided to not tell you just which one this is in the series.  All of the titles are sequels– this is Halo 5, Guitar Hero 5 or 6, Fallout 4, Civ 5, and Medal of Honor 5 or 6.  Of these titles I’d say I’ve played all of their predecessors at least once, and some of them I really enjoyed.  All of the titles seem to have had an inception somewhere around 2001 it seems as well aside from Fallout (which received a reboot a few years back), and Civ (which seems to go long stretches in between game variants anyway).

2001 was the start of the Xbox-PS2-GameCube race that apparently has moved the industry to where it is today: 3 large companies competing over the same market, and pumping out the same titles over and over.  When did I suddenly start not liking the same stuff?

Some of it has to do with playing smart original titles that don’t necessarily fit any of the existing categories and surprising myself.  A lot of these titles belong in the scene I’ve dubbed “Indie-cade“, sort a mash of Indie Arcade.  These titles are often created and produced from one or two brains instead of a team of 30-100 people.  One title that I recently finished, Limbo was done with 5 people including art, dev, music and production.  That’s crazy and really cool at the same time.  They’ve now sold over 300,000 copies on XBLA, which I hope means it paid for itself and are continuing their awesome sales run. Limbo itself has a very simple concept: get the main character through this side-scroller with one action button, and survive. There are booby traps, environmental puzzles, and occasionally an enemy or too that wants to kick your butt.  The game took me about 6 hours of playtime and was well worth the $15 I think.

I told you it was B&W...

The art style is fantastic– very minimalist, black and white with some occasional twists thrown in.  If I could hear the soundtrack over my “helicopter-taking-off-Gen1-X360-fan-noise”, I’d tell you it was creepy and effective.  This title was unlike anything I’d played before and unlike the major-AAA titles coming out this Fall.

I picked up a MacBook Pro back in April, one of those snazzy i7, 17″ beasties that I love.  Soon after, Valve released a MacOS Steam client and I started to play some more Indie-cade games on the Mac.  Again, these titles don’t scream AAA but I found them to be more fun than sitting on my X360 playing shovelware.  Torchlight is one of the standout dual-platform games I’ve found and enjoyed playing in-between tasks.

I’m wondering what I’ll by occupying my time with in the coming months– I’ve started a little game with myself to try some of the older titles I own but never really played a lot of.  Maybe I’ll find some gems there, but certainly not coming out of a major publisher.  Perhaps that’s ok.

Last year Comcast turned on a rather controversial feature on their High-Speed Internet users known as “DNS Hijacking”. It was designed to be a feature: try and access “www.wallstreetjournal.com” and it’ll instead take you to a Comcast branded search portal and give you some simillar suggestions if the domain does not exist. Sounds great right? WRONG. I use Google Chrome and typing into the AwesomeBar up at the top will automatically search Google (or another provider if you wish) with your relevant query. But because Comcast interprets that query as a search amongst its stupid DNS Helper service first!! Check out this example results window below:

Results Page using Yahoo Search

Here’s the most irritating thing of all: Last year, I opted out of the stupid thing . There was a handy link on the Accounts page that enabled you to wipe out their stupid service (You can get there too: http://dns-opt-out.comcast.net/. Now suddenly today I’ve been magically “opted” back in! Upon returning to the same Account Settings page from last year, the link to change DNS Helper settings is now gone.

Below this line sat an option to opt out...No longer.

GRRR….

Before the nerds pounce on me, yes I could be using OpenDNS or even Google’s DNS to try and straighten this out. However, I VPN into…”a company” a lot for work and “the company” won’t allow a non authoritative-DNS to query from. It sucks. I either have to flip my DNS settings back and forth when I sign in (not fun) or turn this stupid crap off at the source.

Anyone in the Armed Forces and need some help accessing their own networks? I found this excellent site, MilitaryCac.com which shows step-by-step information for anyone needing to legitimately gain access from their home machines (following DOD policy of course). The instructions are well put together and detail out some of the absurdities of gaining access, one of which is needing to drop into the secure portal from a different machine, which you can only do by using a CAC (Common Access Card) reader.

Anyhow, once we got it figure it out was dead simple. You’ll need to install the ActiveClient and not just the drivers for the CAC reader. That client is what is behind closed doors and requires authentication. It did require going out and fetching DOD certificates which are apparently freely available which kind of tripped me up a bit– shouldn’t those certificates be hidden? Aren’t they essentially keys? Maybe I’m misunderstanding all this…

I used to work for a company that would self-sign their SSL certificate in order to have “secure” https Outlook Web Access (OWA). Given that the certificiate was signed by “itself”, and not some other authority, what is the purpose of having a certificate that can’t be vetted against a chain?

Clearly I don’t know enough about this…I’m hoping to do a bit of research as a side project and come back with some notes. Some day…

In the meantime I’m fooling around with iOS4, and thinking lazily about that new shiny thing that was announced yesterday. It’s very nice, but I haven’t had the brainpower to really drill too deeply into it…

Apologies for the long delay here between updates. I’ve started a new gig (to be written a in a future post) and have been kind of fumbling around a bit trying to get my rhythm. I also seem to be trying to do an inordinate amount of “household” things as Spring is here and my apartment is a mess. What better way to waste some of that critical time than by playing a game?

The Limited Edition case...

You play as (duh) Alan Wake an author who takes a brief vacation with his wife Alice to a fictional place called Bright Falls, WA. Alan is suffering from writers block and hasn’t written a page in a few years. His wife find a specialist in the city who could potentially help Alan, but then weird shit starts happening. Alice is kidnapped and Alan keeps waking up in the dark having to fight some mean nasties with the only tools at his disposal: photons. I’m not kidding: the primary weapons are flashlights, road flares, and other lights. Guns play a big part too, but the light-dark thing is the key game component here. The game is episodic in nature and plays out a bit like a TV show which really works for it.

See? Photons.

Other folks have drawn comparisons to The X-Files or Twin Peaks– personally it feels quirky like those with a healty dose of The Outer Limits thrown in. In fact the in-game meta-media (my term for the media assets you’ll actively engage in the game: radio, TV, posters, other messaging) has a TV show called Night Falls. I’ve actually watched a couple of episodes in game. It’s nifty.

Here’s what else you need to know: It’s third-person, smooth, fluid and fun. The story is not exactly a surprise but its still very tense. Audio design is excellent and I really benefited from experiencing it in 5.1. Visual design is somewhat striking but I’m not sure if I enjoy it because I’m from the Pacific Northwest and they seemed to get a fair amount correct. The flora and fauna are very accurate, and the small details are what I like to experience in a game. Something about walking through the forest and noting, really noting that the ferns are the same as the species in your backyard is kind of cool. The woods manages to feel like a tangled place without a path and a led path at the same time. Great cuing. The engine itself specializes in the day/night cycle and things really do look beautiful. Draw distance is quite nice, and I’ve only seen the engine shortcut while drawing fog (super-scaled down res and masive pixelation).

Engine rendering of times of day.

As you might’ve surmised there are a great deal of real-time lights and you can generate gobo effects with Alan’s flashlight and shadows from other objects in path.

Where I’m yanked out rather quickly are the cutscenes. Wooden character animations, and that awful chuck-tooth mouth open close maneuver that reminds me of marionettes. The voice acting is ok, but we’re down here in zombie character land and it shows. It’s a shame really because its about the only negative thing I can find so far.

I’m currently about 40% through the game and my decision is pretty well made up. Alan Wake is worth your time. For a game that’s been in development for 5 years it shows some attentiveness to vision.

I’ve now had my MBP for one week of semi-active use. My primary machine at work has been a 4-year old Dell 17″ Insipron loaded with Windows7 x 64. Over the past week I’ve found a lot to love about my new Mac, notwithstanding the abiliity to actually run the iPhone Simulator in a resolution that actually fits it on the screen. I’ve loaded Parallels 5 and it’s really taken care of the necessary evil of running PC apps on my Mac. It’s seamless, reasonably fast (once the VM is running in my session) and it totally took the Win7 install perfectly.

I’ve also loaded some of the Pro Apps, lamely Logic. I’d like to spend a bit more time with it but I just haven’t had the time. I’ve cheked out some of the tutorials over at macprovideo.com, but I haven’t purchased anything yet. Some big changes are coming in my career that should allow me the time to do some of those things. For now I’m settling for ramping back up in the iPhone SDK (OS4 baby!) and following along with the StanfordU classes. Now that I’ve got a legit machine hopefully I’ll be submitting something to the App Store soon.