GeekApproach

My poor little Netbook has been gathering dust since I picked up my shiny MacBook Pro back in April. Soon after receiving it I left it as a beta device for some random Linux installs I was trying out. I eventually settled on trying both MeeGo and Jolicloud for a bit which I last wrote about some months ago.

I decided to poke around and see if there were any new updates and tools out there for both OS’s. Unfortunately, MeeGo seems to be languishing with no new updates to it’s preview build but lots of announcements for new hardware formats that the OS will support such as BMW Group’s line of autos.

On the Jolicloud front I found that I longed for the OS to use some of my hardware in a more useful way. In its effort to provide a repeatable experience across a large slate of devices, they neglected to actually allow the OS to interact with the hardware in a more useful way. I had loads of web apps, shell based front-ends, but not a lot of actual useful applications. One of the more strange bugs was certain apps would be installed through the JoliCloud loader, but show up as slightly opaque even after a reboot. Dropbox was one of those apps that I couldn’t get to work properly no matter what I tried.

So I finally decided to wipe it. Ironically, I went back to an OS that was on the device when I first received it almost 2 years ago now: Ubuntu. Ubuntu is one of the nicer Linux distributions around and from what I’ve read about it, one of the most stable and easiest to use coming from a Windows environment. Aside from a horrible name for the most recent release, Maverick Meerkat, version 10.10 is very stable and runs fairly well on my aging Netbook.

Setup was a breeze– I did the USB stick install through Windows and was up and running in about 15 minutes. I did experience a bit a hiccup with proprietary wireless drivers (Broadcom) and had to hard connect over Ethernet in order to get new drivers. Once I did, everything was fairly straightforward.

As far as the Netbook build goes there’s a new UI called “Unity” that includes support for larger icons and some included service-like apps that make it easy to get back online and tapped into your social streams: Twitter, IM, Email, and other “broadcast” services are bundled in right out of the box.

So far its been very smooth sailing. I think my biggest realization is that I just don’t need a portable device this small and wimpy anymore. I can get by with my iPhone, and I guess I’m one of the few people left who don’t mind toting a 17″ laptop around everywhere. I’m expecting an iPad under the tree this year for myself so I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be fooling around with this thing.

Just a quick note to say that I just tried to play some Halo 3, local single-player mind you (I know my limits). Wow. What a frustrating mess. Controls aren’t like Call of Duty OR like Gears– I’m throwin shields and stuff out when I want to reload my guns. It sucks!

Not to mention that the game came out in 2007 and in 3 short years it has not held up…I’m disappointed!

Bah… Back to Assassin’s Creed II.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West gets my vote for “best game that no one will play in 2010″.  Its kinda sad to admit that a week and a half after its release but I think their publisher just didn’t put the marketing dollars behind a smart, beautiful and (most importantly) fun game.  I guess that sort of leaves me with the duty of writing about why it was so good.

The game is loosely based off of one of the “Four Great Classical Novels” of Chinese literature, Journey to the West. Judging from the brief synopsis at Wikipedia, I’m honestly not sure how “loose” loosely is aside from taking a few of the characters names and using them in the game.  Speaking of characters, there are only a few but they are very well-rounded.

You’ll play as Monkey, a fairly bad-ass drawin in the “I’m-ripped-like-Marcus-Fenix” style who wields a dual-edged lightsaber-like baton.  While escaping from a huge flying slave ship, Monkey crashes in a post-apocalyptic and (rather dystopian) New York.  He awakes to find himself fitted with some sort of slave control collar that makes his life inexplicably tied to Trip and her request that he take her back to her people some 300 miles distant.  This sets off an odd character dynamic that I’ll get into in a second here.

The last character, Pigsy makes his appearance in the final third of the game which is sad because its all over far too soon.

Considering that the main character is forced to make this long journey against his will, the interaction with Trip starts out pretty argumentative.  The story and script which were written by Alex Garland (of 28 Days Later, and The Beach fame) are smart and fast-paced.  The character model, voice and game direction are provided by Andy Serkis who played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies.  The combination of smart direction and a great story make for a great trip through New York and the lands beyond.

Combat is fast but a little lame.  All of your battles will be with mech units, turrets, and mini-bosses left from some long ago war.  Often your best path involves using Trip as a decoy, or strategically taking out certain mechs in order to move on.  There are a few environmental kills that can be made, but they almost exclusive to the first third of the game in New York.

Monkey’s staff/baton/lightsaber thing can be upgraded by grabbing orange tech orbs scattered about and given off by fallen enemies.  My first playthrough on medium I managed to nab about 85% of the orbs or higher per level and was able to max out a couple of the upgrade tracks in the process.  Mini-bosses provide a fun challenge the first time and while nothing made me throw a controller in frustration, I wish some of them were a bit more difficult.

I should also mention how great the artistic direction is– the world is beautiful.  The team seemed to have taken as much brown out of the palette as possible.  New York is green and lush, overgrown with foliage.  The mountain levels are reddish-gold; the mech factories, sludge levels, and trash levels are brilliant.  You’ll traverse via foot, bike, air, submarine, and mech before the game is over.  The engine uses Unreal technology so for better or worse, everything has that characteristic “individual glow” that reminds you very quickly of Gears of War.

Of the things I didn’t like: plastforming.  A large element is finding out the suitable path to advance, taking out mechs along the way.  It’s a lot like Prince of Persia, but with a magnetic object attachment.  Aiming with the stick and a button you’ll just move from handhold to handhold.  There’s rarely the question of what the next position is and most importantly: you’ll never fall.  Sadly, you’ll never fall off of anything!  Each time you need to leave a platform or an object you’ll have to jump, each and every time.  I found that really annoying, especially when you occasionally get caught on objects that appear to be flat or contiguous but aren’t.

Lastly the game length.  I finished all 14 chapters in about 11 hours. There is some light re-playability with orb collection.  I grabbed about 520/1000 Gamerscore on the first play-through too.  They all seem achievable and since it’s all single-player probably easy to pick up within 2 playthroughs.

I wish I could recommend the game at the $60 price point– It feels like a $40 game and given the lackluster push from Namco Bandai in marketing dollars I think it’ll hit that point very quickly.  Add to the glut of holiday titles in the next 10 weeks and I think you’ll see it in the bargain bin soon enough.  A darn shame considering how much time and solid effort went into this title. Here’s hoping Ninja Theory’s next game, a reboot of Devil May Cry will be enough to keep them going.

It seems over the past week I’ve taken a bit of a back seat on learning C and doing my development exercises.  For a while there I was on a roll– I was reading the books and studying, learning the API’s and other debugging tools.  Most importantly, I was starting to create my own exercises and coming up with solutions.

I received some contact from Seattle U on the status of my application earlier this week.  I figure I should get back to it.  So after taking a week off, I’m trying to get back on track.

For most of my recent learning I’ve leveraged Apress’ really awesome set of C/Obj-C/Cocoa development titles.  The so-called “fruit books”, each title features a different citrus fruit on its cover.  They offer a disounted e-book for each title on a limited time offer.  I don’t need more digital textbooks so I stick with the physical copies.  I highly recommend them for anyone doing Obj-C development on the Mac.  They are very clear, lots of source code (free I might add) and they dovetail very effectively into a cohesive set.

I should head back to it.  Maybe my next post will involve my bubble sort app that I’m writing.

The past couple of weeks or so I’ve been hunting for some sort of mobile hotspot device or at least a reliable connection while I’m out and about in the world.  Most of the time I seek the shelter and relatively tasty supply of caffeine offered at a coffee shop (with power to boot), but as I continue to remain unemployed I’ve found myself wanting to be out in a park somewhere and still get some stuff done.  Or, getting out of the city for the weekend and heading to the Pacific to hang out.

A big problem for me was cost: Every major wireless player offers a variant of a USB stick, or a MiFi device but they all require a new contract and ironically a “phone number” for that device because they’re all phone companies.  I was attracted to Clear’s devices because of their cheapness and a device that was meant to specifically get “Apple” devices on-line, the iSpot.  I’ll not here that I am a shareholder in Clear (CLWR) but I’m casual and while I want them to succeed, I’m not tethered so to speak to their devices.

The iSpot is an Apple-like MiFi spot designed to only let devices that match known MAC addresses of iPads, iPhones, and whatever “i” thing Apple will launch next.

Because these devices would sap less of the network than others, Clear offers their plans at a fantastic discout: $25/month to month and a $99 device fee.  Within days of its launch back in August some intrepid hackers figured out how to open it up and remove the MAC address restriction, disable OTA (over-the-air) updates, and enable USB tethering.  While I’m technically using Apple devices anyway, the MacBook Pro is not inclusive in the default MAC address settings: this is purely an iOS device device.

My largest problem is that out here in Ocean Shores, Clear does not offer 4G coverage.  Sprint, Clear’s partner offers 3G coverage but once-upon-a-time I owned a Sprint USB stick that didn’t work so great out here.  Also, when I went to pick one up in W.Seattle they were sold out and backordered for a few days.

In the end I went back to the simplest option: tethering my iPhone over ATT for an extra $15 a month.  Surprisingly, ATT has updated coverage over here and it’s not as bad as I would’ve thought– I pulled down 2 megs, .75 up at a relative ping of about 348 ms.

I’m not thrilled about losing my unlimited data plan in order to gain tethering but I gotta say this is fairly fast and useful for doing what I should be doing out here: checking the news, email, and letting Xcode fetch new defs out of the Apple respository.

The only thing to decide now is whether or not I really want to be spending my time away from the city and home online somewhere.  It has advantages but I’ll have to watch it.

The iSpot is an Apple-like MiFi spot designed to only let devices that match known MAC addresses of iPads, iPhones, and whatever “i” thing Apple will launch next.