A little bit of this and that...

Steam Annoyances

2011-12-17T20:54:00.004-05:00

So yeah, I’m still a bit undecided about Steam. On the one hand, it’s brilliant in that you can readily get new games and updates and such and everything magically happens in the background – the fact that you don’t have to install stuff is amazing. On the other hand, it’s a closed platform that could use a bit of opening up.
Even little things like opening up the chat client – allowing for chat logging etc. (which I’m sure would be handy for clans and such). But not so much that, my grief with Steam is that many times, the platform just doesn’t work. I can’t begin to count the number of times where:

Client updates get stuck at <random percentage>
Starting up the client, leaves me sitting at the “signing on to <account name> page” timeout
Double click on Steam shortcuts and sit perpetually at the <starting game> dialog
Updates come out. My client knows nothing about them.
My favorite: first time install onto some Win7 platforms: the install fails to actually copy files to the install path. That’s awesome. Nothing like missing half the install files! Yes, UAC is off, yes running as admin, yes tried 10x more with re-downloaded MSIs to make sure. I keep a copy of the virgin install folder from XP just for this reason.

Before I move on, it’s worth noting that when you download and install steam you’re not actually doing that. You’re downloading a download manager that may (or in some cases, may not) be able to actually finish downloading steam itself. It would be awesome if you know, you could actually download steam for offline install.

These aggravations aside, for the most part, Steam works. When it doesn’t, typically, a steam client update fixes things. Here is where the problem lies. not all the Steam servers will report that you have a steam update available. Not only does their installer/update suck, when you use the “check for client updates” functionality, you might not get an accurate answer.

Luckily, their main website hosts the steam update history which, thankfully, is up to date most of the time. Doing a comparison against the existing steam client can help you know real fast if you have a steam update that you need to get or not.

So, bored out of my mind, I made a quick little app to readily tell you if you have a pending steam update that you may not know about: SteamCheck.

You can run the application as a straight up WPF application (means you need .NET4 Client Profile or newer) and it will provide a reasonably clean interface to show you if you have a pending update or not as well as a dump of the update log for the last few versions. You can also run the application with a /mini switch to skip the UI and just get a dialog box that gives you the final answer.

Motorola XOOM: A Third Look

2011-12-17T01:12:00.001-05:00

So the big difference between then and now is that I bought a Samsung Galaxy S2 and wow does that purchase ever change things. The SGS2 makes almost every device on the market that isn’t a variant of the SGS2 look bad and this handedly includes the XOOM. Other than some very tablet-specific apps (like those that take advantage of fragments) and for applications where resolution changes everything, there’s almost nothing that the SGS2 can’t do better than my venerable “old” XOOM.

Other than the Iconia A500 (cheaper) and the newly released Transformer Prime (far more advanced), there isn’t a 10” tablet on the market for me. The Galaxy 10.1 is a nice tablet – gorgeous even, but I need my microSD. At 4-8GB a pop for 1080P movies, the built in storage fills up real fast! And while I don’t use my tablet on a daily basis anymore, for anything beyond alarm, bedtime music streaming, mileage tracking and the occasional tower defense, it still love it.

It still comes down to the accessories and in particular, the multimedia dock. While I dislike the fact that I have to line up three sets of connectors or how, whenever you have something plugged into the micro-HDMI port of the speaker dock, it autoroutes the audio to the micro-HDMI – even if your TV is turned off or how there is no connect-to-PC-via-dock option, the multimedia dock just plain works. Of course, how hard is it to create a chunk of plastic with some common ports…

That being said, I don’t particularly like the docks for the competition – they all seem to focus on keyboards and, outside of the Transformer Prime (which was built from the ground up around this keyboard dock), I don’t particularly care for the keyboard (I prefer Bluetooth keyboard) – to be frank, I do most of the typing from my phone anyways.

The tablet sees the most use (outside of a temporary movie-player and bedside audio-clock) as my in-car navigation and music. That leaves one gripe: the headphone jack and the power jack are on opposite sides of the device (like the SGS2) – which makes for a damn mess of cables in my car.

I should note that I’m not using the stock kernel for my XOOM and that I’ve had microSD card support since day one. Had I not had this functionality, I would probably hate this device a whole lot more. I was recently playing around with a Galaxy Tab where it had support for reading the microSD card but didn’t’ have support to write to it. So annoying.

One solid thing I like about my XOOM is the over/underclocking options available to it – and the tablet runs stable at 312/200 MHz which gives me a ludicrous battery life. On the other extreme, it’ll overclock to 1.6GHz (I’ve not tried 1.7GHz, just never get around to it) perfectly fine for hours on end. The flexibility I get from that is priceless.

Having used the SGS2, the XOOM is very lackluster (all Tegra2 devices are lackluster in comparison really), but I would still want to have a tablet because the phone form-factor, while nice, doesn’t lend itself well to many tasks that either require a bit more resolution or a bit more in terms of physical size.

The real question is whether or not, I would have wanted a 10” tablet or the current favorite, 7”. The 7” tablet world is a completely different animal as they are much more portrait friendly (to the point where it can be natural to have the device in portrait mode even, something unthinkable on a 10” tablet).

I guess when I get a 7” tablet, I’ll revisit this again but it’s very nice to see how much the industry has progressed since I bought my 10” tablet.

Fenix TK35 & TK70

2011-12-17T00:25:00.001-05:00

I bought a Fenix TK35 sometime around the beginning of this year and it is a magnificent and impressive light. Having the second toggle button takes some getting used to though (my previous lights being of the more compact, tactical variety), however, this is an exceptionally solid light that I can rely on when the zombie apocalypse comes.

Well a couple months ago, I bought the [then] new Fenix TK70 making it the most… everything light in my little collection. While I love the light, there are some gripes I have with it (and nothing to do with weight/size).

TK35

This is a wonderful light and I can’t reiterate that enough. For all intents and purposes, this is really about all that anyone really needs short of search & rescue haha. With a 12-lumen low-setting and an 820-lumen turbo-setting, this light pretty much has you covered for all sorts of “civilian problems” (power outage, flat tire etc.).

I only have one gripe about this flashlight: the use of a battery carrier – occasionally it will rattle. A very minor (nit-picky) annoyance really. I think the base of the light could stand to be a bit bigger as to be less slip-out-of-your-gloves but again, this is a super minor issue (as that’s what the lanyard is for!)

TK70

This light is definitely a thrower: 700m+ range – loads of fun to take out to the lake or in fog. Where many lights (the TK35 included) will (in heavy fog) get washed out in 100m, this light manages to punch 300m+ with ease. Turning the light on turbo definitely invokes a boyish giggle/cackle of delight as damn near everything gets washed out in light.

My problem with this light is that, unlike the TK35, I can’t count on this light. I’ll note that I’m currently running alkaline (Duracell) batteries, so when I make the switch to NiMh batteries, I’m sure (and hope) a good chunk of the reliability concerns will be addressed. The problem is essentially, whenever I press the power switch, I don’t know if the thing will light up!

There are two causes for this. Firstly, I’m not convinced there is good contact for the batteries: everything’s clean, all the batteries are fresh and everything is twisted tight but when I hit the power button, I get a flicker of light. Usually dismantling everything and putting it back together will solve the problem – but this isn’t something I should have to do (at least not in this class of light). When I shake the light, I can hear the sound of the batteries rattling. Granted this has only happened three times – that’s three times too many (especially for a light that doesn’t see very much in the way of ‘tough’ environments). I’ve examined the spring mechanism and verified that the contacts are clean… kind of at a loss at how to further diagnose.

The much more concerning issue is that the TK70 uses D-cell batteries to begin with. The supported batteries are:

1.2V NiMH
1.5V alkalines
1.5V lithium primaries

Well both the NiMH and alkalines get neutralized at -10ºC (meaning I can’t leave this in the car overnight during the winter). This leaves impossibly hard to find lithium primaries. This effectively nullifies the TK70’s effectiveness in the winter. Sure, the TK35 can handle all my lighting needs during the winter, but the point of this light was to have a no-compromise lighting solution (at the cost of size/weight, which is fine to me) and not being able to use the light in cold weather is something I should have thought of. Then again, it’s damn near half the price of the Olight SR90.

I will ultimately end up grabbing the NiMH batteries regardless of cold-weather performance simply because the Duracell batteries just can’t keep up: the light keeps having to kick down to Medium/High from turbo. I suspect that this is just due to them being alkalines, but I’ll find out when I get around to buying the batteries.

Ultimately, this isn’t that big of a deal: it’s more of a disappointment rather than a critical problem (as I have the TK35). I really like the size/length of the TK70 (the long battery tube/barrel gives it awesome weight balance) and I love the retarded amount of light that it puts out.

Looking Ahead

It would seem a little silly to buy a whole new light to replace the TK70 for 4-months and my original plan was to have the TK70 as a in-the-house light and the TK35 as my in-the-car light, so this inconvenience doesn’t really affect me per-se. But it can be fun to contemplate possibilities!

Olight SR90 Intimidator, SR91 Intimidator and SR92 Intimidator are clear alternatives. The SR91 seems to be the best fit fit for me though: it’s the smallest of the three and offers more of everything than the TK35. It also happens to be the cheapest of the three
JetBeam RRT3 XML and NiteCore TM11 These are just so neat! They pack an absurd amount of light into a tiny form factor. Ideally I would like to get away from the multiple LEDs and the Jetbeam unit has a smoother (and brighter) spill but the ridiculously tiny TM11 wins for sheer novelty and ludicrous factor. I do like the analog control mechanism for the RRT3 much much more than the digital tomfoolery used on the NiteCore.

Ultimately I see this going down between the RRT3 and the SR90. The SR90 is the superior light in every respect (size/weight into an issue for me) but the RRT3 is significantly cheaper and I don’t need the additional range provided by the SR90. The way things are going, I guess I’ll find out what light I’ll end with about this time next year!

Running Series: Little Tweaks, Tips and Apps (Part 4)

2011-10-03T06:53:00.004-04:00

It’s been awhile since the last post, this edition deals with a very simple problem of universally blocking domains. While this is something often handled by ad and popup blockers etc., I prefer the platform-independent and much more direct host-blocking.
The nice thing advantage here is that we can also block things like in-game advertisements and connection attempts that ad and popup blockers cant get to. The idea is to leverage the built in system’s HOSTS file. In lay terms, it means we can designate something like www.mybadlink.com to point to a black hole instead of directing us to the site.

Users can manually edit the HOSTS file (at your own risk of course), by opening the file using a text editor like notepad. Just run the following shortcut:

notepad %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc.\hosts

We can add additional mappings by scrolling to the bottom and adding them manually using the following template:

127.0.0.1 www.mybadlink.com

What this does is route the request to the bad link to the IP address 127.0.0.1 which represents the user’s current machine. In most cases, the user’s machine won’t be running a web server of any kind so the bug stops there. In the event that the user is running a web server, they [hopefully] won’t be hosting the malicious files that the bad link is trying to access. Some people prefer, instead of 127.0.0.1 to use 0.0.0.0 which literally points the bad link to a null black hole instead of the local server.

This is really tedious to manually kill domains and IPs. So I made a little tool to do this: HostKiller.

You can run this as an application or parametrically. When you run it as an application, you can opt to block multiple domains directly, one per line. If you run it from the parametrically, you can pass a single domain to block. It will automatically block the domain with and without the www. prefix. To use it parametrically simply put the executable (or a shortcut to it) in a location accessible to the system PATH and call:

hostkiller mybadlink.com

If you’ve opted to use a shortcut instead of the executable directly, then replace hostkiller with whatever name you’ve used (I use “hk” as it’s much shorter to type). I’ve thrown in the option to attempt to clean up the HOST file in the event that you have duplicate entries etc.. You shouldn’t need to use this very often (I would hope!). There’s also an app.config file that I’ve included for more advanced users to tinker with some of the available options.

Keep in mind that this won’t necessarily block the bad domain immediately – you’ll often have to close your browsing (or gaming or whatever) session and clear out temporary files for it to actually kick in – but when it does, it will be blocked across the board.

Hobbies

2011-09-26T00:54:00.001-04:00

Some food for thought: it’s a good idea to have [several] hobbies, interests and passions. This notion, most people can agree to. What follows is a bit curious: we are often intensely repulsed by each other’s hobbies, interests and passions. This isn’t a good thing or a bad thing – it’s just a thing. Of course, we are not obligated to take a similar interest in the hobbies, interests and passions of our colleagues. The speed at which we segment our peers based on their interests is astounding though.

Common to every hobby, interest, and passion are the reactions we get from our peers. Regardless of the specific subject domain, I think the overwhelming majority of interest-holders interact with (on a personal level) with more individuals that don’t share their passion. A sampling of some of the reactions:

Why do you need so many?
Why does it have to cost so much?
Why does it have to be so big, sharp, fast, flat, bright, strong, pointy, soft etc.?
I can get the same thing at <general store> for <less>!
What are you? (model? racer? chef? spy? etc.)

What this boils down to, amusingly enough is: why on earth do you care about this subject so much?

What I’ve said so far isn’t particularly eye-opening in any way but I close with two things to consider:

Would we think even less of our colleagues if they had no hobby at all? Oftentimes the popular sentiment is “better that than nothing at all” (implying the individual would then be “boring”).
Isn’t it a zillion times better than they are interested in knives, tools, cars, makeup, etc. instead of collecting toes? (“it put’s the lotion on it’s skin…”)

So maybe deep down all we want is to convince ourselves that our colleagues have something to do other than the reason we interact with them – friends and individuals we interact with on a personal level oftentimes share some common interests already.

Android Diaries, Part 6: Keeping everything safe

2011-09-14T23:45:00.002-04:00

I guess I got a bit ahead of myself with the rooting and custom ROMs. I mentioned briefly about how it’s strongly recommended to back everything up, but I guess I didn’t quite talk about how to exactly go about doing this! Never too late, read on.
For any serious backups, you’ll need root access and a custom recovery environment. Have a look here to see how to get started (yeah, I know, I warn you to backup stuff before you have the root access in order to actually back it up). Once you’ve got root, there are a few core tools:

Titanium backup. This application is crucial, it lets you save all the applications and their data (both user and system applications. If you use this application a lot, you should consider getting the Pro version to support them (and it’s faster and adds some more features too)
ROM Manager. While you don’t need this application to perform kernel level backups (you can do that directly from the custom recovery environment), it’s a bit easier to do it from here (and you can assign your own backup names!). Again, if you use this a lot, consider getting the Premium version.
SMS Backup & Restore. I’m pretty certain a brute-force backup using Titanium Backup will encompass your text messages (but I’ve not checked), having a separate backup for just your text messages can be handy. A Pro version removes the relatively unobtrusive ads in the application.
Call Logs Backup & Restore. If you need to keep track of your calls (say, for business reasons), you can backup the call history using this.

Make sure to keep some/all of the backups off of the phone! Something like DropBox (app) can help with that. Be aware that some applications may have their own built-in backup and restore options.
There’s a setting within Android as well which lets you backup many/all of the applications and their data to the Google cloud. I’ve never really, truly relied on this although it did restore many/all of the applications I had installed on my tablet when I wiped it. The setting is located in Settings > Privacy Settings:

Android Diaries, Part 5: Custom ROMS

2011-09-14T23:04:00.007-04:00

In my last look at SGS2, I overviewed getting root access and getting core utilities installed and in place. Now most people can call it a day and move on with their lives knowing they have proper admin privileges on their phone. For me, the phone was almost perfect… only a few things really outstanding that were bugging me – but they bugged me enough, so the default configuration had to go.
Annoyances

The lockscreen, while pretty and novel the first few times, was annoying after the novelty wore off. I missed the lockscreen options I had with my Milestone. There’s a lot of stuff you can do with a lockscreen, no point in wasting away the entire screen on a BAM! image and the time.
The autocorrect options that ship with the phone annoyed me to no end. In my world, at no point should autocorrect replace words I type without me opting for it to (hey, my spelling isn’t that bad!) Sure, offer the suggestions, but don’t go on replacing my words. I’ll have to look more thoroughly at the options on the virgin ROM when I get a chance, but I don’t think there was a way to make it do this.
Cleanup up the notification bar, notably the battery meter, having a different home screen manager. Neither of these really requires a full ROM replacement, but, having the additional options in the custom ROM was nice. Also, getting a newer OS build was nice too.

The options

No brainer, CyanogenMod. I came from using this on my Milestone, loving it and as such, I’m naturally pre-disposed to it. In general, I find it has a mature look and feel which is a nice touch. The “watch out” factor here is that it’s currently (at time of writing) not even in Alpha stage – still nightly builds.
Litening ROM. I was drawn to this ROM by the appeal of speed – after the extreme sluggishness of the Milestone as it got long in the tooth, anything emphasizing performance, lightness and speed is appreciated.
VillainROM. While Litening ROM was clean and quick, there was just a bit too much blue in the overall look and feel. Just a bit too much. There’s a lot in here that still feels “stock” (which isn’t a bad thing, they got rid of all the aggravating bits)

The LiteningROM was the first ROM I tried, I liked that it was a bit faster and got rid of the way-too-flashy graphics and look and feel of the stock OS… but immediately got bothered by the way-too-much-blue.
Moving over to VillainROM, this seemed to retain more of the stock components however, due to the way they reprocessed the browser, it was painfully slow (not that there’s much that can be done to avoid that). That and it didn’t feel distinctly different turned me off.

Most importantly, nether custom ROM presented me with the optimal auto-correct + auto-suggest options I wanted. I went, reluctantly to the CyanogenMod nightly build. There’s a huge drawback of not having proper support for Bluetooth audio and not supporting 2G/3G toggling (the main phone application loops force-closes) but it’s different, it’s clean and most importantly, offers me the desired autocorrect options. I use the nightly builds as my day-to-day ROM and am very happy with it

The process

Obviously, anything you do, you do at your own risk. While this is a pretty straightforward process, there are a zillion ways to screw things up and no set of instructions and experiences can cover everything. I strongly urge you do a backup (either from the recovery environment directly) or through ROM manager (you don’t need the premium version to do this, I recommend everyone with root access to do it regardless as a ‘just in case’). It’s just a matter of clicking the Backup Current ROM option in the menu and letting it run. It’s very easy. I wrote up an post on getting everything backed-up..

Purchase and install ROM Manager Premium. It’s a solid, first rate application and, for CyanogenMod nightlies, you need the premium version. I’ll assume you’ve already read through Part 4 in this series and have the alternate recovery environment setup.
Fire it up, click the Download ROM menu option. You’ll get a screen that looks a bit like this
Under the Premium section, select CyanogenMod nightlies, select the build you one, click download. You’ll get a popup for the the Google Applications (CyanogenMod was asked to remove the core Google Applications from their custom ROM), click ok and you’re good to go. It should look something like this:
When the download is finished, you’ll be presented with a screen like the following.
- If you haven’t done a backup yet (you should!), you have the option to perform a backup right here all in one go.
- If you are coming from a totally different ROM (whether it be the stock SGS2 ROM or a different custom ROM), make sure you check the second option, to wipe the data and cache – yeah this means you lose all your settings (which you did backup using Titanium right?).
- If you’re coming from a different version of CyanogenMod then you can leave the second checkbox unchecked. Always wipe the Dalvik though.When you click OK, there is an automagic process and when it finishes rebooting, you’re all done!
Getting updates for the CyanogenMod is just as simple as selecting the Check for ROM Updates option from the main menu (not all ROMs support this, CyanogenMod does) and running through a similar process as Steps 3 and 4, it’s ridiculously easy to stay on top of releases!

What if you're not using CyanogenMod?

Have a look through the Download ROM menu option in ROM Manager (you may not need the premium version even, depending on where certain ROMs are added to). If you're lucky and the ROM you want is available in that list, you can follow a similar process to the above to get your custom ROM installed and updated.

If you're not so lucky and the ROM you want to try isn't in the list (such as Litening ROM or VillainROM), go ahead and download the ROM from your source. Depending on where you get your ROM, you may need to extract it (typically you'll be working with a .zip or .md5 package). From the main menu of ROM Manager, select Install ROM from SD Card (after copying this file to the SD card), find the md5/zip file and you'll be presented with a screen similar to Step 4 above.

If that doesn't work, or if you prefer a "purer" approach, you can reboot into the recovery environment (there's an option for this in ROM Manager or you can use the adb reboot recovery command) or one of many other ways such as QuickBoot). Once you're in the recovery environment, navigate through the menu to perform the update (you may need/want to rename the file to update.zip to make use of the predefined action). Again, the customary 'do a backup' guideline applies. When it finishes flashing the ROM, restart the phone and you'll have your new ROM installed.

Android Diaries, Part 4: Fixing the SGS2

2011-08-24T16:08:00.006-04:00

The Samsung Galaxy S II is a wonderful device out of the box but the one thing that irks me is the TouchWiz UI skin. The plain simple Android experience is damn near perfect, I don’t understand why manufacturers need to add extra bloat and crap (MotoBlur, Sense, TouchWiz, etc.) to the user experience. This guide documents my attempts to get rid of all the excess crap.

Disclaimer:
If you decide to follow through with this stuff, do it at your own risk. If you screw up, you may potentially wreck your device and even if you don’t screw up, odds are you’ll have to reset all your data anyways. While I’ll try and make this newbie friendly, please recognize that this stuff is not necessarily for the digitally faint of heart. I wrote up a post to cover some basics of getting everything backed up..

Progression

Root access. This is the most basic step: here, we grant the user (i.e., you) full administrative privileges on your phone. This is akin to being a system administrator on a computer as opposed to a guest.
System utilities. Things like backing up your applications and data and such, require administrative rights.
Recovery environment. This is the next logical step, here we have tools that let us backup the entire OS and dabble in trying out new ROMS and such.
Custom ROMs. Here is the final stage where we tinker with custom ROMs. This will be covered in a separate article here.

If you don’t know what rooting is, you should read this before moving on. Should probably read this for good measure too. If you’re still antsy or asking “why do I want to root”, you should probably stop now. You should probably have a glance at the [potential] reasons not to root. People who root and people who don’t innately don’t see why the other party would do things that way haha. If you’re still unsure and uncertain about why you’d want to root, then it’s probably not for you.
There are a couple of ways that I’ve tried to root the SGS2. The difference between two ways is dependent on whether you want to go on and tinker with custom ROMs or not. I’ll try and break the progression down as simply as I can. I’ll also try and outline the amount of “risk” involved with each step. Let’s get started!

Part 1: Prep-work, Risk Free

Make sure you have the latest .NET Framework installed. You should have this on your computer regardless. This is required by a few tools.
Make sure you install the latest version of Samsung Kies. This package installs the driver so that the computer knows how to interact with your phone specifically.
Don’t remember if this is entirely optional or not, but you should (or probably will need/want to) install the Android SDK. At the very least, the only packages you need are
- Android SDK Tools <latest version>
- Android SDK Platform Tools <latest version>
- Google USB Driver Package <latest version>
Download ODIN. This is Samsung’s tool for performing flashing operations on your phone.
Figure out what your phone’s kernel version before we get started.
1. Open your phone’s settings
2. Go to ‘about’. You should see something similar to this
3. Scroll down and write down the following
  - Android version
  - Baseband Version
  - Kernel version
4. Look in the kernel version string in the above sample, see the I9100XXKG6 substring? The important bit here is the KG6. Remember this.
5. Visit here and download the appropriate insecure kernel. Using the above example, search for KG6 and download that appropriate file.
Plug your phone into the computer at least once, so the drivers can be initialized and such. If you’re running a stock, virgin setup, go ahead and fire up KIES and see if you can connect (you should be able to, you may need to reboot once beforehand though).
Make sure your phone has debugging enabled. (Settings > Applications > Development > Debugging Mode)
Proceed to Part 2

Part 2: Deciding, Risk-Free
Now you need to decide if you just want root access or if you want root access and clockworkmod (CWM). What clockworkmod is, is a custom recovery environment which lets you change the ROM on the phone (think of the ROM as the operating system of the phone).
For people who just want root access, that’s often enough. If you want to muck around with the OS, then you’ll need a working CWM. The reason I offer this choice is because one set of instructions won’t let you get access to CWM (meaning you can’t inadvertently break stuff).
If you choose “I just want root for now”, you can always come back later and dabble with CWM – just choose the other option when you get to this step.

For root only, proceed to Part 3
For root and the ability to mess with the ROM, proceed to Part 4

Part 3: Just Root, Risk-Free

Visit this and download the appropriate insecure kernel. Do a search for three letter/numbers I told you to remember in Part 1.
Proceed to Part 5 where you will make use of the file you downloaded.

Part 4: Root + CWM, Risk-Free

Visit this link. Read through the first link, scroll down to the section titled ‘Help! Which file do I use ?’ and read it.
You will find the downloads you need in post 3, 4 and 5 .
Proceed to Part 5 where you will make use of the file you downloaded.

Part 5: Flashing, Medium-High Risk

You may need to extract the file that you downloaded (in the step before you got here). Extract that file (if applicable) to the same directory.
Make sure the phone is unplugged from the computer (and has decent/full battery) and turn the phone off
Press VOLUME DOWN + HOME BUTTON + POWER for about 3 seconds. It will present you with the following warning screen. Press VOLUME UP.
It should now load a console looking screen
Plug the phone into the computer and start ODIN. This is what ODIN looks like when everything is detected and okay. If you are seeing this, then your phone hasn’t been detected by ODIN (meaning, most likely, you didn’t install the drivers or initialize them by plugging the phone in once beforehand).
Verify that only the “Auto Reboot” and “F. Reset Time” checkboxes are checked.
Click the PDA button and select the file (or the extracted file) from Step 1.
Hit START. When ODIN is done, it should reboot the phone for you and you should have two green boxes like this. During the phone’s boot-up, you should see a big yellow exclamation mark at the bottom.
If you came from Step 3, got to Part 8
If you came from Step 4 then go to Part 6

Part 6: Verifying root, Low-Risk
There are a few ways to verify root, here are some easy ones:

Verify the existence of the Superuser application. It’s application icon looks like this
Download Root Checker from the Android market and run it. You may be prompted with a Superuser permissions dialog which looks similar to this
If you have a Terminal application, start it up and run the command su. It should ask you for superuser permissions and then the next prompt should be a # symbol.

If you did Part 3, then you’re done! If you did Part 4, then proceed to Part 7.
Part 7: Verifying CWM, Low-Risk

Download and install ROM Manager from the Android Market. When you launch it, it should prompt you for Superuser rights (allow it) and you should see something like this.
If you are not currently running the latest version, click the Flash ClockworkMod Recovery option.
Click Reboot into Recovery
Since you did Part 4, you should see something like this. If you see something like this then something is wrong and we’ll have to fix/work-around it.
Select reboot device for now.

If you had problems with step 4 here and are seeing the stock recovery environment rather than the custom one, then we need to see if you can somehow get to it. Most of the time, if the stock environment loads, it will be because of a signature validation error or something similar. Now we need to see if we can get a workaround:

Plug the phone into the computer
Open command prompt and navigate to the folder you installed the Android SDK to (by default it should be C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\ or similar)
There should be a folder called platform-tools. Navigate to this.
Type adb reboot recovery and press enter

At this point, the phone should reboot into the recovery mode, now you should see the expected ClockworkMod (CWM) mode. At this point, we have a workaround to get to CWM by using adb. For a permanent fix, try a custom ROM with this properly built in (a separate article)
Part 8: Single Click Root, Low-Risk

Download the S2Root attachment from this post.
Run it, click Root Device. When it’s done it will reboot your device.
I’ve found that sometimes/often it doesn’t quite work the first time, so just repeat the process again.
Proceed to Part 6

Samsung Galaxy S II Review (9.5/10)

2011-08-24T12:14:00.002-04:00

Let’s just get this out of the way: this phone is about as perfect as it gets for now. There are only a few places things Samsung could have improved on (although I suspect by the time the next round of super phones come out, these issues will all be resolved). Until the next round of super phones comes out, it’s very difficult to see past the sheer awesome that is the Samsung Galaxy S II.
So let’s get the bad stuff out of the way:

Screen resolution is a generation behind and it’s particularly noticeable due to the relatively huge size of the screen. 480x800 is so last generation. To give some perspective, my previous phone. the Motorola Milestone (which is now at least two generations old) was packing 480x854. This is the foremost failure of the phone – especially since the major selling point of the phone is it’s [gorgeous] screen.
Lack of dual-LED flash. For most people, this is mostly just a marketing blip, although there is some real-world advantages to having dual-LED flash – again, something my Milestone had.
Lack of hot-swappable SD cards. Given how fast this sucker boots up and shuts down, this is more of a minor annoyance than anything close to a deal breaker: it would just be nice to have hot-swappable micro-SD that’s all :)
Nonstandard Android button layout. The SGS2 has eschewed the standard four button Android layout (back, home, alternate, search) in favor of two virtual buttons (alternate, back) and a physical home button. The back button is also on the right hand side, instead of the customary left-side. This is a bit annoying, but something I can get used to given how awesome the rest of the experience is. For some people, the power button on the right hand side is a bit of an annoyance although those coming from previous Samsung phones will find it standard fare
No LED indicator light. This is something that should have been included as it’s a standard Android feature that lets the user know at a glance if there’s a notification of some sort.
Some may find the all plastic body to be a downside, but that’s how they keep the weight down! For me, it’s not a big deal.
Camera doesn’t shoot as fast as on iPhone (even when the same camera settings are used). The iPhone definitely rattles off pictures way faster.
Personally, I dislike the TouchWiz skin. I find it aggravating: but thankfully the phone is easy enough to mod.

So all in all, none of the flaws are particularly deal-breaking (other than, perhaps the relatively low resolution screen). The good stuff is pretty easy to rattle off:

Stupid light and thin. Think thin and light and it’s better than that. I don’t crap my pants for thin and light phones (having come from the Motorola way of doing things – big, chunky, industrial and jamming a massive 3600maH battery on my phone haha).
The phone is retardedly fast. It shuts down and reboots faster than some phones can load text messages or email. This phone is certainly faster than my XOOM in all respects (I think the only exception is that the XOOM renders the 3D view in Google Maps a bit faster)
The screen is gorgeous. It’s beautiful. It looks photoshopped in real life. I don’t entirely understand the inner workings of AMOLED technology, but this phone can be used in direct sunlight. Like, full-on sunlight. It’s crazy. Another benefit of the screen technology is that black pixels don’t use power (so you can boost battery life with darker/black wallpapers etc.)
The camera on the phone is pretty good (as far as non-real-cameras go).
The phone is one of the few that supports NFC. Sure, NFC isn’t really being used anywhere, but it’s nice to have some future tech in a flagship phone.
Novelties like an FM radio are a nice touch too.
Samsung has a portal application/service, Kies Air which allows the user to connect wirelessly to their phone. Motorola has a similar tool, Motorola Phone Portal, which is, in my opinion, easier to work with, but the Samsung tool is far more capable.

A quick Google search can reveal many more pros (and some cons probably) for the Samsung Galaxy S II, but those are the ones that stand out to me after a couple of weeks of having this phone. Final verdict: 9.5/10.

Motorola XOOM: A second look…

2011-08-24T11:39:00.002-04:00

Suffice it to say, I love my tablet. Sure it’s got tons of faults and it’s a very niche product, but I definitely love it. I’m not sure, however, if I would buy it again, now that I’ve had the chance to use it for a few months. Back when I got the XOOM, it was the premier Android tablet on the market (and the only Honeycomb one to date); now, the market has several other very worthy contenders and I’m not so sure I would go the XOOM route again.

The potential contenders

There are but a handful of tablets I would consider now and they are predominantly Android based. There’s no particular reason for it other than that the platform is [relatively] open and it doesn’t take too much work to get the tablet customized to the way you like it, down to changing the core UI. The contenders, in no particular order are:

The obvious three are the iPad2, the Galaxy Tab 10.1v and the Touchpad, all for totally different reasons.
iPad2
The iPad2 is a no-brainer: accessories galore, a mature hardware platform, plenty of market penetration, plenty of [potential] support via forums etc. This all stacks against a relatively closed platform (having not spent very much time with jail-breaking, I could be mistaken for how easy it actually is). From my experience with it though, the Apple experience is pre-defined: you work within the customization framework provided by iOS and you tweak within the options they provide you. Which, let’s be honest, isn’t a whole lot beyond skinning and rearranging some icons. From what I understand of the iOS tweaking side of things (which, admitedly isn’t a whole lot), there’s not a whole lot that can be done with over/under-clocking etc. (although, to their credit, it’s not often needed).
A big turn-off for me is that the iPad2 is, from a hardware perspective a compromise compared even to Apple’s own iPhone4. It just seems to me that the “big brother” product should pack better performance/specs across the board (to offset the fact that it’s bigger/heavier or whatnot) and the iPad2 simply doesn’t. Consider:

The iPhone4 packs a way superior pixel density (has almost the same resolution as the way-bigger iPad2). This isn’t such a big deal as it could be as consumers are tolerant of this.
The iPhone4 has a 5MP rear, 0.3MP front camera compared to the 0.7MP rear and 0.3MP front camera on the iPad2). Sure, people aren’t likely to use their tablet as a full out camera but that’s a hell of a drop). If anything, it should have packed a 3MP rear shooter like the majority of “budget smart-devices”. Lack of flash on the rear camera for the iPad2 as well.

Sure, the iPad2 packs more processing power (although not more RAM), but that’s assumed. It is worth noting that neither iPhone4 nor the iPad2 are performance slouches so the real-world observable improvement in performance isn’t exactly a night-and-day as the compromise on the camera. Do people use their tablets as shooters? Not really. But should there be a compromise going from a really portable device to a not-as-portable one? Definitely not.
TouchPad
This is another no-brainer. After the firesale, there’s no reason not to buy this tablet. There’s nothing particularly special about this tablet (I think it’s relatively elegant, contrary to most reviewers, but that’s just aesthetics). There are a few reasons not to get the tablet (at the pre-firesale price point):

No rear camera at all (although it’s worth noting that the 1.3MP front camera on the TouchPad out-pixels both cameras on the iPad2 put together).
Whether you like it or not, I just don’t think the tablet space has room for another OS. WebOS could have made a decent dent on the market – it just needed a lot of marketing/development commitment from HP (which was relatively lacking).

From my brief time with the TouchPad, it seemed to bring elements of the iPad2, PlayBook and common Honeycomb elements together. This isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, just an observation.
Galaxy Tab 10.1v
Not that this tablet is even available where I live, but it’s “popular” enough that I should consider why I don’t want this tablet. It’s thin. It’s light. It’s sexy. The screen is gorgeous. It packs an 8MP rear shooter. But ultimately, it lacks expandable memory, which is a serious oversight on a flagship product.
The Shortlist
Ruling out the popular three, this leaves the Iconia, XOOM and Transformer. Each brings a unique strength:

Motorola’s selling point has always been docks and accessories. While the XOOM doesn’t come with anywhere close to how many accessories that Apple products have, the ones that are available are fantastic. The XOOM launched with two available docks, two cases and a silicone sleeve – which works with the docks. As a big downside, the tablet uses a proprietary charger (ugh) and the speaker dock has too many plugs and connectors that have to line up which make it a bit of a pain to simply “drop it in and go”. Worth noting the volume buttons on the tablet, without the silicon sleeve are next to impossible to press.
Acer’s Iconia packs identical hardware to the XOOM – but is $50 to $100 cheaper. It even comes with a full size USB port directly on the tablet. The overall look and feel for the tablet is, in my opinion, much more elegant. In all honesty, this is probably the tablet I would recommend unless the specific strength of the other two have a calling for you.
The Transformer’s strength is clearly the laptop-dock which has an integrated battery. I don’t think a tablet should be used as a notebook/netbook (and vice versa) but I can see how it can be handy for travellers etc. I’d personally prefer a Bluetooth keyboard. Pricing for the base tablet falls between the Iconia and the XOOM however, the whole point of this tablet is to buy it with the keyboard dock – which then puts the pricepoint higher than the XOOM.

And then there was one…
For me, with my obsession with docks – which aren’t cheap ($50/$100 for the standard/speaker dock) are a major way I use my tablet/phone so the XOOM is still the obvious choice. The tablet has some pretty noticeable downsides though…

No out of the box SD card support. I’m not joking, you buy this tablet, you open it out of the box and although it has a microSD card slot, you can’t use it. From what I hear, the latest Honeycomb 3.2 update for the XOOM unlocked the SD card slot, but I don’t know: I’ve been running a custom ROM for a few months now which unlocked the SD card slot.
This device is heavy. Although to be fair, I don’t know whether to call it “heavy” or “sturdy”. When I first picked it up, I definitely get the feeling that the device is solid (rather than overweight). It weighs as much as the 3G iPad.
The volume up/down controls are atrocious. I don’t know who in QA needs to be sacked for this: the buttons are simply too small – which means they require a lot of force to trigger. Getting the gel case accessory for this resolves this problem and makes the buttons usable again.
The use of custom charging connector means that to connect this tablet to a dock requires lining up several pins – two on the standard dock, three on the speaker dock – which means, you can’t just slam it into the dock like you’d want to. Sometimes, there’s some wiggling to get the thing to drop in. The nice thing is that the docks work with the official gel case accessory (so you don’t have to take the tablet in and out of a case to dock it – brilliant!).
The down side of the docks is that they are “dumb” docks – just power (and in the case of the speaker dock, there is micro-HDMI output as well). There’s no way to connect to a computer via microUSB. Which is a shame because the microUSB port is covered up when the tablet is docked. Pain in the butt really.

That’s about all for the serious grievances I have with this tablet. Were I to buy another tablet now, it would be a serious consideration between the XOOM and the Iconia. While the Iconia has a dock, it’s just a basic dock (the speaker dock for the XOOM is pretty fantastic – and works with the gel case) but the Iconia is hands down cheaper all around. I’d probably lean towards the XOOM again though.

Motorola XOOM WiFi Review (9/10)

2011-05-21T18:46:00.004-04:00

So I got myself a tablet. There wasn’t a lot to choose from: the Apple iPad/iPad 2, Blackberry Playbook, Motorola XOOM WiFi and the Galaxy Tab. I think there may have been a few more but they didn’t catch my eye. Mind you, almost immediately after making my purchase, the ASUS Eee Transformer, Acer Iconia and new revised Galaxy Tab were announced/available. At the time the decision was down to iPad vs the XOOM. I ended up with the XOOM (the WiFi only version because [a] that’s what I want and [b] it’s the only model available in Canada at this time and [c] it’s expensive enough as is)
Why the iPad and not the iPad2? Well it’s cheaper, has the base functionality that I would want (big screen, document typing capability, basic web browsing, chat, etc.) and as a feature, it doesn’t have a camera. Wait, what? Yeah, the selling point for me is that the iPad in fact, doesn’t have a camera of any sort. One of the companies I do work for has a strict no-cameras-of-any-kind-on-site policy.

Let’s rewind: so why exactly did I even get a tablet? For a guy who used to cycle in a new [high-end] video card every week, locking myself into a platform – a seriously limited platform at that seems so, out of character. What do they mean only 1GHz dual-core tablet? Where’s my hexa-core tablet running dual video processors and a retarded amount of memory? Battery-life? Battery life be damned, performance first! What happened that that? I don’t know haha. Don’t get me wrong, while my tablet is wonderful, I wish it was packing at least twice as many processing cores, had triple the pixel count and eight times as much memory. The performance junkie in me will never die – but the tablet does have it’s benefits: I can keep it on all day and thus, avoid boot-up and shut-downs that I would have to put up with were I to carry a high-performance laptop everywhere (which, to be honest, I wouldn’t mind doing haha … the boot and shutdown times are what kill me).

It’s like going to the doctors office – you spend 15 minutes in the waiting room, and you see the doc for a whole two minutes (and now you know one of the reasons I don’t go to the doctors!). With a tablet, I get the instant-on that I am used to with the phone but much more processing capability than one could with a traditional smart phone (even if it were a bleeding edge new phone).
In the end, I chose the XOOM – it was really down to "the ability to take the iPad on-site versus having to deal with iOS” – and I didn’t need connectivity that badly.

What do I use it for?

Bedside clock, video-player, RSS, quick-email, notes, social-networking and weather etc. – the email client is really quite wonderful (even coming from the already decent pre-honeycomb Gmail experience)
At work I use it as an independent chat client and note taker and collaboration tool.
It’s also great as a planning tool (like the Gmail client, the calendar is pretty wonderful too). It also serves as my main portable music device.
Pretty much I use it for anything I would use a netbook for – except without having to worry that the device would run out of power and/or having to shutdown/boot-up.

The Good

Honeycomb (3.0). The tablet-centric way of doing things is so very well done. If there was one standout feature of Honeycomb, it’s fragments. This really begins to blur the line between desktop and mobile – there’s a long ways to go before I abandon my desktop powerhouse, but features like this go a long ways towards making that transition much more tolerable.
Having more of everything! Maybe it’s a by-product of getting tired of my Milestone’s limited processing resources and limited internal memory and locked-down bootloader, but the tablet is a pleasure to use: it fires up relatively quickly and consistently (no more waiting 45 seconds for the home screen to load because the phone was empty on available memory!)
The XOOM has a unlockable-relockable bootloader! An open device is a wonderful device! This is particularly impressive for Motorola as they seem to be the most Apple-esque (at least with their high end products like the Milestone and recently the Atrix).
The screen resolution is one I can tolerate! Granted this is a huge subjective thing but I only work really well with 16:10 aspect ratios – none of this 16:9 business!
While we’re on the notion of screens: the XOOM is clearly designed with landscape mode in mind – because portrait mode is retarded haha (I’m looking at you iPad!)
Typical of high-end Motorola products, there are tons of different accessories available. Being a dock-centric person, I got a few of the docks (a standard dock for the office, one for downstairs and a speaker dock for upstairs). They all work wonderfully, they have a good solid feel (at least Motorola has got their packaging department in-line and they have a great in-hand feel) and they work as advertised (although the speaker dock does take a bit getting used to – trying to line up all the connectors in the dark can be a bit tricky.
It’s a neat thing, a novelty really, but the XOOM does pack a barometer.

The So-So

For as fast as the tablet is, it still hiccups from time to time. Load time for more advanced games like Dungeon Defenders still takes a long time (20 seconds maybe). Perhaps it’s not a long time compared to some PC games but I certainly don’t see PhysX or HDR running at least 60fps either. It’s a relatively minor gripe which could have been easily addressed perhaps with packing 2GB of RAM instead of just 1GB.
While not particularly Motorola’s or Google’s fault, there jut aren’t any applications really able to take advantage of the Honeycomb/tablet capability which is a shame. This will improve in time.
While the XOOM does have a respectable battery life (advertised as 10hrs of video playback), I wish there was some form of user replaceable battery. Not because I have a concern about the battery – but because I want an extended battery! My Milestone runs full-out (screen-on, 100% brightness, gps, videos) for 23 hrs.+ (on Android 2.2.1, there was a drop going to 2.3.4). It would have been really nice, for the people who don’t give a crap about slimness to be able to shove a giant honking battery in there – so that I could eat least match my phone’s battery life running full out.
The unit is pretty expensive: $600. Sure I recognize that it’s a premium product and competes with the iPad/iPad2 which aren’t exactly known for their affordability, but I think the XOOM would have a much better time selling were to to price at $500.

The Terrible

You will find this on every review of the XOOM: the volume control buttons are retarded. They require way too much pressure to trigger. In fact, to put this in perspective, you need two hands to change the volume (or you need to press down really hard with your thumb… either way you look at it, this is a huge design flaw). You need two hands because you have to press with such force that if you didn’t have the other hand stabilizing the XOOM, it would tip/slide.
Not having the SD card (and for the American customers, the 4G support) is a big no-no. They literally shipped an incomplete product. It’s a good thing this tablet was relatively open so I could readily flash a firmware with working SD card support, otherwise that would be retarded. Having 32GB of built-in is nice though.
Proprietary power cable. I can understand that tablets require more power than USB can put out and I can understand the need for an external power cable – but they should have gone for the laptop style connector rather than the oh-crap-the-pin-broke type.
The lack of a PC dock. This is particularly bad as the Milestone/Droid had this functionality well over a year ago. Sure the XOOM has docks too (and the speaker dock is particularly awesome), but they don’t let you connect your phone to the computer with the dock -- and since the USB connector is on the side that jacks into the dock, you can’t dock (in order to charge) and connect to the computer at the same time!
While on the topic of docks, the Speaker Dock for the XOOM uses a different (also proprietary) connector! At least the Standard Dock uses the same connector as the XOOM itself. The dock itself is a bit trickier to work with than the slam-it-in type that I am used to with the Milestone.

Bottom Line

If I were buying again, the final draw would go down to XOOM vs Galaxy Tab 10.1v (or maybe the Eee Transformer), I suspect the new Galaxy would win out from a hardware perspective – however, the lack of readily available accessories is a deal breaker for me. The Transformer, if there was a docking station available, would win out.

End of the day, I love this device, it needs a bit of tweaking (like any gadget really, unless you have thoroughly adopted the Apple mantra/doctrine of you-do-it-this-way-only) but when you’re done with it, it’s a hell of a platform.

Android Diaries, Part 3: Gingerbread

2011-05-21T14:03:00.003-04:00

I’ve been pretty happy with my cleaned up Milestone and I was content with running a rooted and slightly modded Android 2.2.1. Then I stumbled upon an article outlining a serious data vulnerability affecting Android versions up to and including 2.3.3. This gave me the final push I needed to take the next step with my phone.

Vulnerability Scenarios:

Are you connecting to unsecured wireless connections? So long as your answer is NO, then you are safe from this particular exploit. The remaining scenarios assume that you have/are/plan-to connect to unsecured wireless connection at some point. I would still recommend exploring options to update to the latest operating system build.
Do you use Picasa Web Albums? If YES, then you are affected by this vulnerability. The remaining scenarios assume that you are not using Picasa Web Albums.
Are you using Android 2.3.4 or later? Is your don’t know how to determine your Android version have a look at this). If you ARE, then you are safe from this vulnerability (with the exclusion of Picasa from the scenario). If you are not using Android 2.3.4 or later, then you are vulnerable.

What’s the deal with Picasa?

While the latest Android 2.3.4 update fixes the problem for the majority of Google related services (Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar etc.), the Picasa Web Albums service (and possibly others) are still vulnerable. I’m not sure but I think other services like Twitter and Facebook are also vulnerable if you use the built in app (accessing through the web-browser, using https should protect you).
A quick way to mitigate this vulnerability is to disable the automatic synchronization for these services. Depending on how often you plan on connecting to unsecured wireless connections, you may opt to do this on a case by case disable/re-enable or global disable/re-enable.

You can disable synchronization entirely. You can find this under Settings > Accounts & Sync Settings. Disable the background-data and auto-sync.
You can disable specific services (say, Picasa Web Album synchronization). You can find this under Settings > Accounts & Sync Settings > Your Gmail Options > Sync Picasa Web Albums

For both of those options, you may find a little applet/shortcut like Sync Settings to be a real time saver.

The Move to Gingerbread

This was the push I needed to sit down and see if I could force a newer build of operating system on my phone. The fact that it’s not a simple “click and go” experience like it is with iOS is due to there being three bottlenecks:

Google needs to make updates (this, naturally, takes time).
Individual manufacturers that have additional crapware, sorry, features (like HTC Sense or Motorola MotoBlur) on their phones need to add their bloat to the base OS. This takes a stupid amount of time and often many products are just forgotten.
The carriers need to push these updates to the phones themselves. This takes forever.

The bottom line is my phone just got Android 2.2.1 – well over a year since it was released. This is just plain stupid and does nothing to reinforce the value of a product or the carrier. Mind you, when all the manufacturers and carriers are equally inept, there’s no much one can do through official channels. Google is trying to encourage vendors to get on the damn ball, but time will tell how effective this turns out.
The difference between hacking my Milestone versus hacking the XOOM was night and day. The core difference being that the Milestone has a locked bootloader (essentially Motorola is pulling an Apple and saying “yes, you bought our hardware, but we still decide what you can or cannot do”).
After a few tries of trying to get remote flashing to work (note to self: Windows 7 users, you may want to find a Vista/XP machine to do this first step – the application compatibility settings do nothing for this). There were a few times I thought I’d totally bricked my device (not that it would be exactly possible considering the bootloader is locked) but in the end, I got the device to play by rules.
After the dust settled, I’m running Android 2.3.4 with CyanogenMod 7.1.0 RC3 (May 15).

Gingerbread Impressions

I love it! I’m not sure if it’s the changes to the core OS or the changes brought by the CyanogenMod (I was already running LauncherPro before) but everything is ridiculously fast. I’m running the same 1GHz overclock as per before but there isn’t a 15 second load time for the home screens.
I suspect a large part of this is due to the fact that I actually have RAM available – before, with 2.2.1, I struggled to maintain 20MB of free internal storage and 5MB of RAM (applications would be shutting down all the damn time). Now that all the Motorola bloatware is no longer there, I have an easy 100MB+ free internal memory and 40MB of RAM.
On the downside, I did lose the built in Motorola Phone Portal which is quite possibly one of the coolest features ever. I also have hit and miss functionality accessing the internal memory or SD card from Explorer but thankfully I know my way around adb.
All in all, I’m ecstatic that my phone is finally usable again, it’s still not as smooth of an experience as my tablet (which is to be expected) nor the iPhone (which wasn’t expected and frankly, kind of pathetic on Motorola’s part).

Android Diaries, Part 2: Tools

2011-04-02T20:10:00.002-04:00

The nice thing about smartphones, and more so, getting knee deep into the smartphone world is that your experience is exactly how you want it. You can use it plain vanilla out of the box, you can tear it down and rebuild every little detail (depending on the limitations of the device etc.) or you can settle in somewhere in the middle.
This post (which I will update as I discover more wonderful tools etc.) is an attempt to share my experiences with some of Android’s system tool type of applets, widgets and such. For reference sake, I run a Motorola Milestone on Canada’s Telus network. As such, I don’t have access to customized ROMs and such due to the restriction on the Milestone’s boot loader where all ROMs must be signed by Motorola.
Here are some of the applets, utilities and such on my phone that I’ve found to be handy.

Shortcuts & Widgets

Various widgets from the “OnOff” series by CurveFish. These are wonderful. Which ones you need/want will vary by user as a lot of this will be handled by the built in Power Control widget that comes with the phone (which includes WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, AutoSync, Brightness). I like the independent brightness widget as it’s sometimes more convenient to simply set the brightness I want rather than to cycle through presets.
Sync Settings. For when setting up contacts manually or doing some trickery with the calendar, this home screen shortcut makes it easy to quickly get to the central account sync settings. Sure we can get this functionality half a dozen ways, but this is prepackaged for us, so I found it very convenient.
Data Counter Widget. I have a substantial enough data plan that I don’t constantly need the data usage information in front of me, but for those with lesser data plans may find this widget handy.

Applications

Adobe Reader. The official Adobe Acrobat reader applet.
Adobe Flash Player 10.2. Full flash player – keep in mind that this applet does not, by default, move to the SD card, you’ll need to perform a minor system tweak to move it.
Adobe Photoshop Express. A very limited version of Photoshop, allows for basic image tweaking

System

BTMono and BTMono Premium. I wear a standard (one-ear) Bluetooth earpiece and when I listen to audio, I want to have the audio stream to my ear – not play from the speakerphone. This applet reroutes all the audio to the Bluetooth device.
BusyBox and BusyBox Donate. A collection of GNU Core utilities and Unix tools needed by many lower-level applets.
Root Checker. An applet to quickly check if your phone is rooted and has a correctly setup BusyBox.
Milestone Overclock. A software overclocking applet that works with OMAP3 phones.
CPU Benchmark, Linpack, Linpack Pro. A simple and easy to use CPU benchmark applet, useful if you’re going to overclock.
EasyRoot. The v2.2.1 update wiped out a lot of the one-click roots for the Milestone, this one was simple and worked.
Home Switcher for Froyo. Simple applet to switch between different home screen handlers.
LauncherPro. A different home screen handler, provides lots of functionality
LockMenu. A different home screen handler, this one focuses more on extending the lock screen functionality.
myLock Utilities and NoLock. Utility to skip the lockscreen when turning the screen on.

Camera/Media

MobileTag. Scans every kind of QR and bar tag. The latest version also adds NFC scanning.
PicMe and ShootMe. Two applets for capturing images from your phone’s, PicMe provides capture directly to the PC via remote server while ShootMe dumps the image to the phone.
Floating Images. A neat interpretation of the image gallery.
MPC Remote. Applet to turn the phone into a remote that connects to the web-access for Media Player Classic

Entertainment

Movies. Awesome applet for looking up movies that are playing near you
IMDB. An applet for the IMDB movie site.
xkcdViewer. A custom viewer for the xkcd comic.
OpenTable. A custom applet for managing reservations etc for OpenTable restaurants.

Social Networking/Blogging/Messaging/Sharing

Blogger. The official blogger applet!
Twitter. The official twitter applet!
Facebook. The official Facebook applet!
Skype. The official Skype applet!
Voice. The official Google Voice applet!
Google Buzz. The official Buzz applet!
LinkedIn. The official LinkedIn applet! This is actually quite a pain in the butt to get to as you need to navigate here on your Android browser.
Trillian. I use Trillian as my desktop/cloud chat client so this is perfect, my conversations follow me no matter which client/system I connect to.
Share More. This system tool adds more options to the built in ‘Share’ functionality.
Share Apps. A quick and easy way to send an Android Market applet link to a friend.

Automotive/Navigation

GasBuddy. The applet to go with the site, this applet is pretty handy for getting a quick feel for how much gas is at a particular location. Your experience with how accurate it is will vary although I’ve had pretty good luck. You can also submit gas prices through this app.
Car Care. This app might be hard to get now, but it’s a pretty handy Google-maps car oriented applet that lets you search for almost any car related service (brakes, oil-change, wrecking, towing, etc.)
aCar. A really comprehensive car management applet that lets you track maintenance, mileage etc.
Car Home. My phone came with a custom car docking mode but for those without such thing, this is the generic mode that it is based on.
Google Maps and Navigation and StreetView. Wonderfully integrated into the operating system, this GPS/mapping combo is top-notch. When you have StreetView installed as well, the navigation automatically kicks into StreeView mode when you get close to your destination.
Open Spot. Google’s search-for-parking applet.

Alarms

Countdown Alarm. It’s simple and gets the job done, great as a naptime alarm.

Applet Management

App2Sd Free and App2Sd Pro. This applet is mostly just a timesaver: it identifies and categorizes all the apps on your phone based on whether or not they can be moved to your SD card or not (it also triggers whenever you install something new, so you get an alert right away). For info on how to move stubborn applets, have a look here.

Network Management

Ping & DNS and Ping Simple network connectivity applet to test connections: handy if you’re running servers off the phone and you can’t connect and you’re trying to isolate whether or not the automatic background task manager is terminating the service or if you have a legitimate network connectivity problem.
WhatIsMyIp?. Exactly what it says, this applet tells you your WiFi IP as well as your cellular IP
Speedtest.net Speed Test. An Android applet of the famous bandwidth test, this will test both your wireless connection as well as your cellular connection.
NetCounter. A totally awesome applet for tracking how much data you’ve used. The applet breaks it down into days, weeks, months etc. as well as distinguishing between WiFi and mobile data. It also has the ability to generate alerts when crossing the certain thresholds. Great for those without unlimited data plans.

Battery

Battery Left and Battery Left Pro. Both of these widgets provide at a straightforward “how much battery time do I have left”.
Battery Indicator and Battery Indicator Pro. This applet adds an entry in the application tray which gives you the remaining battery life as a numeric percentage. Unfortunately for my phone, the resolution is only in 10% gradients, but it’s handy to be able to see how much life left at a glance. By firing up the applet, it provides a breakdown of how much runtime is estimated to be remaining.

SMS/Call Management

Call Filter and Call Filter Pro. I’m pretty sure there are better applets out there, but these are decent at getting the job done. I don’t block that many people so the quirks I can live with (mostly that while it prevents the call from going through, it does so by essentially picking up and handing up – which still results in the initial phone ring)
Not Call Log Classic, Not Call Log 2 Free, Not Call Log 2 Paid. A necessity on the stock Milestone – after every call, it would dump you out to the call history (which, by itself, is ok) … but due to the input lag of the device, if you accidentally touched the screen, it would (after finally loading the call history), register that touch on a call history entry – resulting in you dialing that number. So aggravating. With an overclocked phone, it’s not so much of an issue, but it’s nice to have regardless.
Dial 0. This is sort of a specialty applet but it’s handy to have sometimes. This applet is a dictionary of ways to skip through automated call systems. If you find yourself having to step through dozens of automated messages on a regular basis, this may be what you need.
Say My Name Dessert. Applet to announce the name of the caller
SMS Popup. An applet to display messages the same was iPhones do.

File Management

ES File Explorer. A wonderful applet that makes it ridiculously easy to work with files on the phone. It’s free, it’s straightforward and it delivers what it suggests it will.
DropBox. The one and same DropBox as we all know, DropBox, in conjunction with ES File Explorer, makes it really simple to copy files between the desktop and the mobile without having to dig for cables or much setup. Just copy the files to the DropBox directory and presto, you’re done!

Android Diaries, Part 1: Froyo

2011-04-02T18:11:00.004-04:00

Welcome to the first of a totally new series about my experiences with Android. My first Android phone, the (at the time) flagship Motorola Milestone (the Canadian/Global interpretation of the Motorola Droid) is a pretty awesome out-of-the-box phone as is. When I bought my phone, it shipped with Éclair (2.0) and was shortly updated (2.1).
While these updates were nice and all, the overall feet dragging and slow time-to-market for the Google updates are a big turnoff. Hopefully Google steps in to take some form of stance for forcing the allowing-of updates to propagate through the market somehow.
Thankfully, Telus just recently released the long overdue update to the Android mobile operating system, finally my Motorola Milestone has Froyo (2.2.1) – and I’ve been knee deep in the sheer awesome that it brings.
The night-and-day addition that came with Froyo was the ability to move applications to external storage, freeing up precious internal memory (which, the Milestone only has a paltry 256MB of). This means, I can actually install applets to the SD card instead (technically, the application still installed to the internal memory, but it’s a reference to the SD card really). This means I can finally install more than three applets before the dreaded ‘low memory space’ warning popped up (which, you can’t get rid of).

How To
Go to your Settings and find the Applications menu and select Manage Applications. This gives you a list of all your applications. Each application will have a button that says Move to SD Card (and if you’ve already moved the applet to your SD card it will say Move to Phone). Click on the move to SD card and you’re done!

There are a few caveats to this wonderful feature:

The Froyo update only adds API/OS support for this wonderful feature – to actually be able to move applets to your SD card, the developers have to enable support for it in their applications! Not all developers are quick on the ball in this department! Thus, you’ll find that, right off the bat, how many applets you are able to move to your SD card will vary (even big ticket items like Adobe Flash Player 10.2 doesn’t have this flag enabled – and it’s a massive applet, typical of Adobe products really, weighing in at 10MB+! Shame on you Adobe).
In addition to applets where the developers haven’t enabled support for this functionality, you can’t/shouldn’t move. In addition You can’t/shouldn’t' move "core system” applets (for obvious reasons) and additionally, don’t move widgets! If you do, widgets won’t work.
You need to do this manually! It’s really tedious the first time, especially so if you have zillions of applets and such. My guess for this is because you don’t necessarily want to ‘move all’ as that may move things like widgets (which you are allowed to, but will cease to function if you do).

There are a whole bunch of tools that you can make use of such as App2Sd. This This applet helps simplify the process of identifying the applets that can be moved to the SD car for you.

Of course, remember that this applet will only help you with applets that are marked as being able allowed to be moved to the SD card. This naturally leads to the next problem – what to do about the applets that cannot be moved to the SD card? For this, you’ll need a bit more trickery.
For that you’ll need the ADB which is a part of the Android SDK. It’s no longer directly apart of the direct download, but you can grab a version from my direct link here (version 1.0.26). Using the ADB, you can manually override the allowed location for any/all applets on your phone.

How to

Open your command prompt
Navigate to the path with the ADB.
Connect to your phone using the command abd.exe shell
To allow moving of all elements to the SD card, type the following command, pm setInstallLocation 2
To restore the defaults, type the following command, pm setInstallLocation 0

To disconnect from your phone, press CTRL+C. For me, I prefer having the default (0 = default/auto, 1 = install to internal, 2 = install to SD card) during day to day use and, when necessary, I’ll switch the mode on a case-by-case basis.

Boys and their Toys: Flashlights

2011-03-31T20:14:00.003-04:00

I caught the flashlight bug a couple of years ago when a buddy of mine bought me a Surefire 6P LED tactical light for Christmas. This was a replacement for the 2AA Mini Maglite LED which died so prematurely (one of the bits of metal in the base cap which formed the electrical circuit snapped, kind of a pathetic way to go to be honest).
The sheer amount of win that the Surefire light was totally hooked me. I also got a FM35 Red Filter cap which was pretty neat – particularly so as I had a misconception about how “red light” was created. Sure it’s just a colored lens, but the difference between the FM35 and your run of the mill $5 “we can do red too” flash light is astounding.

There was a sale at the Canadian Tire so I bought a 3D Maglite LED, which, although I was a bit apprehensive after my recent loss of what I had thought to be a decent flashlight, was pleasantly surprised. Mind you, had I paid the full price for the 3D MagLite LED, I would have been underwhelmed. It was time for me to migrate from my “starter tactical” to a more focused light. For what I was using it for (inspections in tight quarters e.g. basements, computers etc.), I had a need for “sheer brightness”. Digging into the pre-purchase research was like stepping into a whole new world.

Quick Buyer’s Summary

Wattage is irrelevant. I think this is the biggest load of marketing crap ever. The wattage ratings on flashlights are totally meaningless – it simply expresses how much power is being “spent”. As far as the user is concerned, this just means a flashlight with a higher wattage rating will just heat up faster (remember, brightness isn’t measured in watts, contrary to what your kitchen/bedroom light bulb might suggest!). That being said, with all things being relatively equal, a light with a higher wattage rating is likely to be brighter, although this isn’t always the case. If you want to read more into this subject, have a look here.
The terms “rugged” and “tactical” are excessively exploited by marketing types. These terms are usually presented to express the abstract concept of “toughness” (although the latter may apply to any product that happens to be black).
- Short version: for plastic/rubber “consumer/civilian” looking flashlights, your gut instinct is probably correct: pick it up, feel it, open it up, check if there is one (or more) O-rings. Most of the time, you can tell pretty easily which lights will live up to a bit of consumer rough-and-tumble.
- Detailed Analysis: Generally if you’re looking for a real worklight that can take abuse you’re going to be interested in the IP Rating for the lights and possibly the IK Ratings. I don’t use my flashlights as portable mini-battering rams so I’ve not done a whole lot of research into IK ratings, so my uninformed advice here is to use your gut – if it feels solid, it’s likely to be. For the IP rating, only the water protection is of any significant concern (and often, there is no rating given for physical protection). Keep in mind that even a water protection of 8 does not mean the light is dive-rated. Also worth having a look at the FL1 Standard. Also it is strongly advised that you take the water rating with a large grain of salt (your gut will often spot the difference between should-be-submersion-proof and is-submersion-proof) – the difference between the lab and the real world are things like static versus dynamic water pressure, how exposed the O-rings are etc.)
Lighting technology. You can get traditional bulbs, LEDs, HIDs etc. For the most part, the market and need for traditional bulbs has been replaced by LEDs – they offer cleaner, more consistent light and don’t have impact concerns that filament bulbs do. I’ve not personally used a HID unit that isn’t built into a car, but from what I understand, the “filament” is actually pressurized gas, so there also isn’t the concern there. You will often find HID “tactical lights” in much higher intensity (approaching spot/search light level) applications.
Don’t forget to take into consideration factors like how far the beam will reach, battery life, the spread of the beam etc.

My collection & Thoughts

Power Regulation. All the below lights, with the exception of the Generic/Noma/Garrison entry are regulated. A regulated power source/delivery ensures that, no matter how fresh the batteries are, the light output is consistent (obviously, within a very small tolerance). In short, the lights will run full bore until the batteries die. Flashlights that are non-regulated will have their brightness wane as the batteries drain.
Body Construction. You’ll find there are three common types of body materials: cheapo-plastic, ABS/nylon and “metal”. The first two are pretty straight forward. The metal bodies are anodized (to give it color and/or protection). In the spectrum of flashlight products you will see Types I, II and III anodizing – representing progressively higher build qualities. You can read more here.

Water-resistance. I mentioned it above but it’s worth mentioning again: just because a device is IPX8 rated, does not mean you should be reckless around water. It’s a good rule of thumb to treat IPX8 as “oops I dropped the flashlight in a bucket of water, but it’s ok”. This is particularly true if you are needing a light to go on serious dives. The higher quality tactical flashlights will almost certainly perform fine for snorkel dives but anything serious/longer you should consider dive-rated lights. Lastly, if you are going to subject your light to serious water treatment (and also as a general rule), make sure to take care of the seals! Have a look here for some suggestions on lube.

2AA Mini MagLite LED [Pic]

Bulb Technology: LED, unknown manufacturer (probably Mag International)
Body Technology: Type II Anodized
Power Source: 2x AA
Projection: 101m (at 0.25 lux)
Lumens: unspecified sadly, the current (improved) generation pushes 69 lumens however
Drop Test: 1m
IP: unspecified (Mag International is a registered IP-X8 manufacturer however)

I wouldn’t buy this again unless it was $15 or less and even then it would be delegated as a gift-light or a secondary-spare-drawer light. Just looking at the design of the light (now, in hind-sight) I can see the issue of the tail end of the light: the battery cap section is simply too small. Mag had to cram, water sealing, a spring, power connectors etc. in there. Bottom line: 4/10

3D MagLite LED [Pic]

Bulb Technology: LED, unknown manufacturer (probably Mag International)
Body Technology: Type II Anodized
Power Source: 3x D
Projection: 289m (at 0.25 lux)
Lumens: 104
Drop Test: 1m
IP: unspecified (Mag International is a registered IP-X8 manufacturer however)

It’s a bit amusing, the 2D version of this light offers superior lighting performance (slightly increased range and candela output) however the 3D completely blows it away in lifespan (8x longer lifespan). This is a pretty solid flashlight all around. I consider this light to represent my ‘minimum requirements’ for light output: it’s not going to necessarily dazzle someone senseless but it’s enough to work with. Note that, as the unit has an entirely metal construction, it’s ridiculously cold to hold onto bare in extreme cold. I remedied this by wrapping a layer or two of black duct tape over the grippy area (a standard width duct tape covers about 40% of the grip area). Bottom line: 6.5/10.

Generic/Noma/Garrison Rugged Light [Pic]

Bulb Technology: LED, Cree XRE
Body Technology: ABS/Nylon + Rubber
Power Source: 3x AAA (Non-regulated)
Projection: 115m (at 0.25 lux)
Lumens: 140
Drop Test: Unspecified
IP: Unspecified (by feel, this has got to be at the very least, IP-X4, probably closer to IP-X6)

I cannot, for the light of me, find a company website for this product. This is retarded. I think this light is a generic one that is rebranded by a half a dozen companies (NOMA, Garrison, Brinkman are three that I’m aware of). See the attached picture if you want to see what I’m talking about, this is definitively the best bang for buck flashlight out there, bar none. The non-regulated power delivery means that the light intensity will deteriorate as the batteries drain, and the raw intensity of the light output coupled with the 3AA power source are things to consider). I don’t use my flashlights for durations exceeding 20 minutes at a time very often (and when I do, I generally make use of my more intense flashlights). But for a price of $25, it’s a no-brainer. Bottom line: 7.5/10.

Surefire 6P LED [Pic]

Bulb Technology: LED, Cree
Body Technology: Type III Anodized (I’m guessing, this product tier tends to be of this type)
Power Source: 2x CR123A
Projection: Unspecified, I’d conservatively estimate 90m (at 0.25 lux)
Lumens: 80
Drop Test: Unspecified
IP: Unspecified (I’m guessing IP-X6 or IP-X7, Surefire’s comments explicitly stating it is weatherproof and not waterproof)

I’m a bit disappointed they couldn’t get an IP-X8 rating – even if that rating needs to be taken with a grain of salt. From my personal experience, this flashlight can handle a quick drop in a bucket of water, a shower, rainstorm, etc. without a problem. Note that, the stock housing does not feature one-click on, just tactical-on. To turn on the light without having to hold the button down, you need to twist the cap. Bottom line: 7.5/10.

Fenix TK11 [Pic]

Bulb Technology: LED, Cree XP-G R5
Body Technology: Type III Anodized
Power Source: 2x CR123A or 1x 18650
Projection: 188m (at 0.25 lux)
Lumens: 258
Drop Test: 1.5m
IP: IPX8, 2m submersion

This is a phenomenal flashlight, then and even now, as I consider moving on. This is my go-to flashlight for when I need a light I can count on. My only gripe about it is toggling between turbo and general mode is done by twisting the head slightly – which can be difficult in colder weather as the grease becomes more viscous. Also, for my non-military use of the light, the tactical grip is more of a slight annoyance than a feature (and for some reason, my light didn’t come with the usual ring you can swap with the tactical grip). Oh well. Bottom line: 9/10.

Looking Ahead

I definitely want to switch to 18650 batteries and rechargeable too! I might get a collection of non-rechargeable for real emergency use. CR12/CR123A batteries are expensive to buy at the run of the mill electronics store.

I might consider getting a Surefire SC1 holder. This way, I can keep the red lens filter with the batteries all in one spot.

Fenix HP10 Headlamp. Don’t quite have a use for this, but it’s so damn neat….
Fenix TK35. Pushing over 800 lumens over 330 meters on two batteries on a flashlight a bit bigger than my current, is just so damn wonderful. That and surprisingly enough, there have been scenarios where the 250 lumens on my TK11 just doesn’t cut it (gasp)
Fenix TK15. The successor to my TK11, this pushes 330 lumens is a nice jump over what I have now for what is essentially the same form-factor.

Who am I kidding, I’ll probably buy the TK35 first then the TK15.

Logitech G510 Review (8/10)

2011-03-06T12:39:00.000-05:00

I just recently migrated (I'm going to avoid the word "upgrade" until I'm sure it is, in fact, an upgrade), to the Logitech G510 keyboard as my primary keyboard (home & work). Before I can really dig into this review, I need to touch on my previous keyboard that I've been using for the last half-decade, the Logitech G15. I've been a very big fan of the original Logitech G15 and definitely not a fan of the revised Logitech G15 v2. I simply didn't really understand the reasoning behind the nerfing of what was a pretty damn good keyboard to begin with.

Preamble
The three core changes were:

The reduction of 18 G-keys down to a measly 6.
The removal of the wonderful rotary scroll dial to be replaced with two buttons for volume-up and volume-down.
The replacement of an adjustable screen with a fixed angle one.

The general argument for the reduction of the 18 macro keys down to 6 was because the original keyboard was too large and wouldn't readily fit into keyboard drawers. While this is probably technically true, the keyboard was (at the time) positioned as a flagship gaming keyboard. With the original launch price of $120 (which was sky high for a keyboard at the time), it was an all out gaming keyboard and there was no mistaking it for anything else. Which begs the question - what gamer uses a keyboard drawer? The keyboard drawer argument can be applied to business keyboards sure, but a gaming keyboard is a peripheral that supersedes any importance of a drawer. As a gamer, the mindset is 'if it doesn't fit into the keyboard drawer, the drawer has to go'. Sure, Logitech released the G13 Gameboard a few years later to address the need to replace those missing G-keys -- I'll get to that review soon. While I'm sure MMO players bemoaned the loss of the multitude of these keys (notice the use of the word player as opposed to gamer), as a power-user, the loss of 67% of the available keys made the v2 simply unacceptable -- especially since it commanded the same price point.

They opted to replace the rotary dial with a pair of digital buttons - so now it takes longer to change the volume and the usefulness for non-media related uses is nerfed (I used the dial to scroll through chat history/UI which was displayed in the built in screen). A much more trivial issue in comparison: the buttons no longer had any separation making it more difficult to confidently press the button.

Lastly, the change to a fixed screen is a bit of a nuisance: now you have to sit at a specific angle to the screen in order to maximize it's use. Sure gamers don't really make use of the the screen, it's more for power users. In comparison to the loss of the 2/3 of the available macro buttons, this is a trivial concern.

With the replacement keyboard being wholly unacceptable, I've been making do with a stockpile of G15 v1 that I've collected over the years. I did recognize however that over time, I would exhaust this supply (I only had three spares) and I had to look for a replacement. Since I make extensive use of the screen, the G11 and G110 weren't suitable replacements and the G19 was simply too expensive (knowing that I have to stockpile a few of whatever keyboard I happen to decide on). This left the G510 as the only real contender (at least from Logitech).

It is worth compiling a comparison list against the great G15 v1:

G11

Last generation keyboard (still $80)
Loses the screen (thus disqualifying it)

G110

Lack of screen
Built-in USB audio
Loses a USB port
Loses one column of G-keys (12 keys total)

G510

Fixed screen
Built-in USB audio
Loses both USB ports

G19

Twice the cost
Color, high[er]-resolution screen
Built in USB audio
Built in powered 2 USB ports
Keyboard requires independent power
Gains additional screen-related controls
Loses one column of G-keys (12 keys total)

Ultimately, the G510 won out in the cost benefit (picked up two, one for work and one for home). The keyboard chassis offers a satiny feel and the buttons are soft (even in comparison to the already soft G15 buttons). This will take some getting used to -- the trend for soft keys may make sense for business keyboards but for gamers, we want a real tactile feel (would be nice to have mechanical keys too Logitech, hint-hint). To their credit, the dome-circuit keyboard technology has been implemented relatively cleanly and I don't have any serious complaints about key input performance.

The first thing I noticed right off the bat -- they moved the Escape key. No, really. They moved it. Have a closer look. They moved the button 3/4 of key-width over so now it's left aligned with the main block. So much fail. Just like the change in keyboards to have a giant delete key, the main keyboard design is done - stop messing with it. The shape of the buttons has changed subtly too - they are a bit more scooped out. This isn't so much a of a plus or a minus, just something worth noting.

What is worth noting is, like most premium Logitech products - the hardware is generally executed well, the failure is the drivers. They are bloated, gimmicky and otherwise unstable or offer a retarded functionality. The drivers for this G510 is no different. Logitech offers two sets of drivers (*facepalm*), a current set (v7.x) and a legacy set (v3.x). The current drivers are very pretty and the majority of the experience is very smooth and well executed -- except the function button on the keyboard doesn't work.

In the driver configuration there is an option to set the function button to either [a] swap to the next application or [b] show the list of applications. In the current revision, the first option does not function correctly on 64bit operating systems. Luckily this functionality works fine on the legacy drivers. Just goes to reinforce the lack of complete confidence in the driver team (or at least whoever thought it would be a good idea to branch the drivers).

The last complaint (also driver related) is when you have multiple game-panel devices connected at once (I happen to have a G13 connected for review purposes as well). The Game Panel applets (clock, media, Trillian, FRAPS, stopwatch etc) are not instanced per device. For something like the chat and clock, this is fine, but I expected the stopwatch and countdown to be instanced e.g. each gamepanel device would have it's own countdown and stopwatch. This isn't the case. The colors are also synchronized across devices. Gah. I'll give this the benefit of a doubt that the legacy drivers aren't property configured to instance the applets and I'll wait for the drivers to fix the main function button before I come back to this.

All in all, the hardware is well executed and the [legacy] drivers are acceptable in their functionality and quality. If you absolutely need a screen and don't want to pay the stupid price for the G19, this is a solid keyboard. If you're just looking for a quality baseline keyboard, it's a tossup between the G110 and the G510 -- sure the G110 is cheaper and you trade a column of G-keys for a USB port, the in-the-stores price difference may not be worth stepping down to the G110 (where I grabbed my G510, the price difference was $20).

Final verdict 8/10.

Logitech G930 vs G35: A second look

2011-03-06T00:33:00.002-05:00

It's been a few months since I went out and bought these two. Initially thought the only real difference between the two was that one was wireless and the other wasn't. While this is still the only essential difference, there are several nuances between the two that stand out.

I've been using the G930 at home as my primary audio connection for gaming, music, movies you name it. As I noted in my G930 review, the benchmark by which all headphones must pass for minimum acceptance was the very impressive (and sadly, discontinued Razer Barracuda HP-1). The G930 doesn't disappoint on sound quality nor intensity. It also scores really well for connection speed (provided the appropriate device has been initialized at least once on that given USB port) - drivers load faster than some mice and the wireless pairing is near instantaneous. Of course, the downside to this is that the wireless connectivity is hard-paired -- meaning if you lose your USB transmitter, be prepared to buy a new set. The other aggravating downside is that, when you plug in the headphones (to recharge them), they are still wirelessly connected. Instead sending power and audio signal over USB, it just charged over USB.

The G35 I use as a secondary headphone set at home (mostly for connecting the laptop upstairs when I'm too lazy to bring the G930 up and down the stairs or when it's charging). The audio quality is probably identical (no reason they wouldn't be, I'm almost positive they use the same underlying architecture) but the user experience is different.

My initial gut reaction (from the first few seconds I wore the G35), was that it simply wasn't as comfortable. I don't look forward to putting it on. As I briefly touched in my initial review, the flexible headband thing is just retarded. The end result is that the headphones either don't stay on your head or they certainly give that impression. I'm constantly subtly adjusting my head-bobbing and even find myself adjusting how far I lean back in my chair. In short, it's a damn distracting experience, I find myself putting them on and taking them off very shortly after. For awhile, I took to removing the leather padded cushion and just having the straight velcro against my scalp - took a bit getting used to but at least the headphones weren't sliding around all over! For the G35's role as my in-bed headphones, it performs wonderfully and it's an enjoyable experience (mostly because the I don't have to worry about the damn unit sliding off my head).

I've ranted a bit about the flexible band on the G35 vs the solid band on the G930. I can't rant enough about it (although I will, for the sake of being academically thorough, accept the possibility that my head is just that weirdly shaped). A few more nuances:

Using TeamSpeak on either of these headphones only plays incoming audio on the right headphone. You can hack this to play on both sides by toggling the DolbySurround switch but [a] that's a dumb idea and [b] it sounds terrible. Skype also used to have this problem, but I'm pretty certain one of the recent driver updates fixed it up (for reference sake, I use v1.00.358 for the G930 and v1.01.178 for the G35).
The drivers on the G35 are less functional than those on the G930. It's a minor thing that the overwhelming majority of users will never encounter but it just makes me sit back and think - why couldn't they just use the same damn drivers? In addition to a slightly different look and feel, the G35 lacks the ability to adjust the individual channel volumes.
The G-keys on the headphones? They aren't G-keys in the standard Logitech sense. You can only really use them for custom media related actions. If you were expecting to be able to bind a push-to-talk option for, say, TeamSpeak, you're out of luck. It does, however, support Ventrillo right out of the box. To shed some light on why this was even an issue: consider I was hoping to VoIP using the G930 -- while in a different room. An extension of this: the headphones lack a mute button -- and you can't even bind one of the fancy G-keys to mute the audio.
Both headphones have a fake-surround-sound switch that, when you trigger it, adjusts the tray icon for the G930/G35 from black (real audio) to red (fake surround sound). With the G35, when you come out of hibernate with the headphones plugged in (I leave the G35 permanently plugged into the docking station at work), there is a third color - "orange-red". This is regardless of whether the headphones are running real or fake mode. To fix this, just toggle back and forth to what you need. Is this a breaking issue? Not really, but it does highlight the issue of the failing point of most Logitech products being their drivers. The G930 doesn't have this problem (perhaps due to the inherent considerations for designing drivers for a wireless product)
The G930, being a wireless product, has a battery life. The actual battery life is somewhere in the ballpark of more-than-six hours, likely eight or more. But there is a caveat. If you're not using the headphones (i.e., transmitting audio), a battery saver algorithm will kick in and switch your headphones off. There's a workaround tool for this. And while we're on the topic of batteries, you can buy replacement batteries! (Thank god). Just hit up the Replacement Parts section (selection will vary by region though)
Thinking about the power saver thing makes me think of an annoyance with the G930 -- the power/pair button is like the buttons on Bluetooth headsets - you get one button that does half-a-dozen things depending on how long you press it and how you press it and what day of the week it is. While the button on the G930 simply handles on-off (with the pairing being automatic when you turn the unit on), the button is kind of retarded. You long-press to turn it off - this makes sense. But sometimes you have to long-press to turn on and sometimes you only have to short-press to turn on.
Although I mentioned it above, this is annoying enough to bring up again: the G930 is a wireless-only product. Unlike some wireless mice that, when charging via USB cable, act as a wired-USB mouse, when you plug your G930 in for charging it's still connected via wireless (so, you really don't have a fall-back in the event that you use that dongle).

Ultimately the recommendation comes down to a compromise

G930. The unit is more comfortable and offers wireless but at the cost of having to deal with the stupidity that comes with wireless technology (power saving and awkward power button). See addendum.
G35. None of the complexities of wireless, but doesn't necessarily stay on your head.

Don't forget the G930 costs about $50 more. My pick, if I were to buy another? G930 hands down.

Addendum

While searching for the info on the replacement battery, I noticed that you can get a Receiver for the Wireless G930. This sounds like a replacement USB dongle, however, since there is no "initiate pairing" button (or maybe we just have to press a special combination of long-press and short-presses on the single button to initiate pairing).

Addendum

Apparently, my suspicion re: being able to somewhat readily pair a replacement dongle with your existing headset isn't as convoluted as I'd have thought, (from the comments below):
The headset does not hard pair with the dongle, replacement dongles can be orderd easily. and Pairing your new usb dongle to your headset is simple. all so you have to do, is get a pin or somthign small enough to press the little hole on the dongle itself, and at the same time, Press and hold down the power button ont he headset for 10 seconds until reapeated flashing occures. Pairing a new USB dongle to the headset is fairly easy,,, so if you happen to break or lose your dongle dont fret you will not have to buy a new headset lol.

Logitech G35 Review (7/10)

2010-11-21T12:25:00.000-05:00

Well I've had the Logitech G930 for a few days now and there was an opportunity to get a second headset. I debated on getting the Razer Megalodon to do a proper head-to-head comparison with the very impressive wireless unit from Logitech. Alas today is not that day (one day!), today I've got the Logitech G35. When I went to buy the G930 a few days previous, I had hoped to snag a G35 but they were out of stock. I was originally enamoured with the prospect of commuting witha wireless headset and while it was a decent concept - the risk of losing the relatively small dongle (and thus wiping out the value of the headset -- as they are permenantly paired) wasn't worth it. I needed a no-compromise wired headset. In my previous review of the G930 I commented that the G35 was a wired version of the G930. Oh how wrong I was....

I commented that I thought the G35 was a wired version of the G930 and the latter traded comfort (in the form of switchable pads) for mobility. I didn't realize how right and how wrong I was. Soundwise, I am pretty certain the two units are equivalent: that is, the mechanics behind the speakers etc are identical. There are some common elements between these two top-tier headsets:

They both require drivers to be installed in order to unlock 7.1 mode. Out of the box, they only give stereo
They both have the same sound-dampening cushions, auto-muting flexible mic, adjustable headband, hardware volume and mute options, G-buttons and a physical button to toggle the "surround sound upmixing"

So why didn't I like the G35?

While not a fault of the G35 (technically I should blame the G930 as it was released after) but in a fit of stupidity, Logitech decided to have separate software drivers for the G35 and the G930. Why couldn't they just have one interface that toggled functionality depending on the detected hardware? Their SetPoint drivers have been doing that for ages.
That being said, while I thought the G35 and the G930 were essentially identical after driver installation, the G35 lacks the ability to tune the individual volume channels. While the majority of users will not have a need for this, [a] it's a software setting and as such, costs nothing to implement and [b] there are legitimate scenarios where you may need to do this (i.e., background noise in movie drowning out a center voice channel). For something so easily implemented, tsk!
One of the selling points of the G35 is the user-swappable head-cushions. This is great -- however, the design of the headset means the headband part (the chassis that goes over your head) is a flexible rubber material. In English, this means the headset fails to stay on your head. The slippery nature of the cushion paths means if you tilt your head forward (say, to look at your keyboard), the headset begins to slip! The easy counter solution to this is to simply remove the damn cushy pads (meaning you have velcro on your head which may be discomforting to some). This is by far and large the biggest aggravation of the unit. Had they used the hard plastic chassis used in the G930 the user could have both the swappable pads and not have to worry about the headset slipping off their head.

The latest drivers for the G35 seem to be a bit more polished and responsive. This could be because they have had more development/polish time or just because the available controls are much simpler. The bottom line however, is that I wouldn't reccomend buying the G35 - the G930 is a much, much more capable product. Having a solid 40 foot wireless range (naturally, your milage may vary) and a headset that doesnt slip off my head are, to me, worth the extra 30-40 dollar premium. Final verdict for the G35: 7/10.

Logitech G500 Review (9/10)

2010-11-03T21:53:00.000-04:00

I've had a host of Logitech mice (and Logitech products in general) over the last long time. My recent history of fulltime mice has been: Logitech Elite Mouse, MX1000, MX510, MX518, G5 v1, G5 v2 and currently the G500. While I'm very satisfied with this mouse (for now), I can look back on my history of mice and tell you the Logitech design team needs a solid smack on the rear-end... what?

I've been very happy with each of my mice there's always been some compromise. The Elite mouse chewed through batteries, the MX1000 didnt have swappable batteries, the MX510 wasnt sensitive enough, the MX518 didn't have enough buttons, the G5 v1 didnt have enough buttons, the G5 v2 wasn't sensitive enough and didnt have enough buttons and the G500 lacks DarkField technology. I admit - the MX518 was essentially perfect (although not as competative as it could have been against some of Razer's offerings at the time) but relatively speaking it was an awesome value.

Sure I might be pushing the bounds of reasonable featureset with my complaint about DarkField (almost serious gamers and power users eventually move to a high performance mousepad xor dont complain about glass) but what I'm getting at is, these mice are intended to be (and certainly priced as) a flagship product - and flagship products are supposed to have the best of everything.

And that's where Logitech's mice have failed over the last few generations -- there's always something left out - sure it works and it keeps me coming back for more but it'd be nice to for once have a definitive "go to" mouse. Realistically the G1000 was pretty damn perfect they just need to jack the sensor and add a plug-in option to charge via USB cable and it'd be set! It's still the best grip/layout of a mouse I've used ever.

I was mostly happy with the Logitech G5 v2 (that additional button is ridiculously useful) - the extra button the G500 gives me I dont really use in non-gaming scenarios (the others are bound to maximizing and tossing application windows between my monitors etc). But simply put, I was getting tired of the low-sensitivity of the G5s -- when you have almost six-thousand pixels to navigate, 2000dpi doesnt really cut it! Thankfully the G500 gives me a whopping 5700 dpi. I've had the mouse for a few months and I've not acclimatized to the full sensitivity yet (sitting at around 4200 dpi - so I've got a bit of life in this mouse left).

So the egronomics and technical merit of the mouse score Logitech lots of points but their failing lies in the driver team. The drivers are very poorly planned out and buggy.

They have a branded product 'SetPoint' which represents their mouse/keyboard drivers -- and up to the launch of the G500/G9/G9x mice, SetPoint (which was v4) worked with all their mice. With these mice, their marketing team talked someone into making the v5 drivers exclusive to certain mice. I think they've reversed this stupidity with the current v6 drivers but that was one of the dumbest decisions to make it to the final product
One of the big features of SetPoint was the ability to assign actions (whether they be macros, actions in the traditional sense of the word or keystroks etc) to the various extra buttons on the mouse. This would tie in with application detection and so you could have specific button profiles activate when certain games fired up -- unfortunately the drivers were unable to detect the game firing up and even when you manually set the profile -- you had to restart the game to get the profiles to work. This was ridiculously aggravating.

But yeah, just in general, the hardware is solid; it's just the crazy bloated drivers that needed work.

Oh and on a separate rant, does anyone ever, really use the hyperscrolling wheel? Ever? I cant every think of a scenario where I could ever really make use of that -- in order to know when you need to stop scrolling you'd have to get some idea of where you are -- and that requires two things [1] your eyes need to be able to scan fast enough and [b] the computer needs to be able to render fast enough. Depending on what I'm scrolling through, I can scan fast enough -- but I've never seen a 500 page PDF render fast enough at 20 pages/sec scroll rate. Such a gimmicky feature. I'm glad it's toggleable but really, I'd much rather have the [irrelevant but possibly more practical] DarkField on my mouse.

But if they keep the feature-set reasonably updated and just fix the damn drivers so they're not so buggy and bloated, I'd settle for that! Final verdict 9/10

A fourth look at Global Agenda (v1.3.8.5)

2010-11-03T20:36:00.000-04:00

This game has come a long way and a few hundred hours later (I think I ticked over 1000 hours a month or so ago) my impression of the game evened out and more importantly, I've had a chance to poke around with Hirez's development/interaction approach. And I'm afraid.

I'm afraid this game will go the way of Hellgate London. Every single good game I've played in the last long time has either gone under or has caved into the needs of the more mainstream gamer: just imagine for a second if Modern Warfare 2 gameplay was Rainbow6-esque -- you know, the way the game was marketed based on the promo-videos. There's not a chance that such a blockbuster title (read: expensive development budget) would survive if the gameplay featured acceptably realistic gameplay. This isn't a slight on MW2 but rather, more of a eyeopener. Even epic arcady games like UT2K4 went the way of the casual gamer (have you seen how slow UT3 gameplay is in comparison?).

It's easy to dismiss the unpopular voice. Even on the Global Agenda forums where you have a minority whining "why don't you have headshots??" - they are often dismissed by armchair-sharpshooters who claim that "well then it would be too easy, everyone would just have to move their cursors up a little bit". Seriously, these armchair-sharpshooters should consider trying out for profesional target-shooting or even the services...

I digress. There are certain elements of the game mechanics that bother me and there are aspects that are ridiculously awesome. Now that I've really had a chance to burn through all the aspects of the various classes, I can give a very important and eyeopening perspective for those looking to know about the game...

Global Agenda is not an RPG-shooter. Seriously. That's the key to appreciating the game. Stop thinking about a rpg where loot matters. Even Borderlands is more of an RPG-shooter than Global Agena (discounting the fact that Borderlands has zone-damage). The critical difference here is that in an rpg, your gear determines your effectiveness. Sure I wouldnt trade my kickass epic Global Agenda gear for the base gear ... but even if I did, the difference isnt life shattering.

Once you accept that loot is mostly irrelevant and that you can freely reset your skillpoints you see the game in a different view: what separates you from your teammate (or opponent) is often a couple stat-letters but more so it's real-experience. After all, the gear he/she has, you can, eventually get, the only thing separating you is how much play time you've had. So what's the endgame appeal of the game? Flair.

No seriously. It's really the only thing left for me to shoot for (not that I dont already have a crapton of it). My characters are all essentially tricked out. Thats the massive downside of a game that doesnt revolve around loot -- after awhile you run out of a reason to play over and over because sooner or later you're going to get that epic item you're lusting after. Then it's just a matter of grinding through it a bit to get the materials (or credits) required to craft (or buy) a mod to perfect your perfect item.

Sure there's AvA and PvP. But when you get to the late-game stuff, everyone sort of fits into one or two (or three) different archtypes of their class (afterall, skills are freely resetable) and each of those archtypes has a cookie-cutter gear loadout and you're all looking for the last percentage of damage or cooldown-reduction or whatnot. Sure there's community and there are always crafters/economy-whores but I end up saying 'that's about it' alot.

What I Love about Global Agenda

There are some special game modes (raids, double-agent etc) that happen on a schedule throughout the day. After doing dozens of these events, you find that their major appeal is either [a] it's one of the most efficient mechanisms for farming or [b] it's just different and helps to break up the monotany.
It's brainless. Sure this can be seen as a bad thing. But part of me likes my PvE to be ridiculously brainless: sure there's a degree of randomness but for the most part there's a loose "right way" to do things. Sure makes winning/farming easy if everyone is on board. But obviously kinda makes it lame.
It's free to play. Thank god. there's not a chance I'd pay a monthly fee to play a non-loot based game. Or I might until I run out of the need for any better gear or whatnot.
The interactiveness: the devs regularly pop on and play with the population -- and special events like our recent Halloween themed raids are loads of fun (if only for the break in monotany).
Hirez, for the most part, gets their act together with balance and bugfixes. As a software developer, I understand this isn't a quick thing to move along but the updates and fixes are reliable enough that, as a player, I can expect a fix sooner rather than later.

What I hate about Global Agenda

Forced teaming and/or ridiculously silly spawns sometimes. Sure I understand ultra-max difficulty is intended to be bloody hard but more often than not, a good team doesnt fail because of the innate difficulty (which is there), but rather someone gets dragged off by a spider's tractor beam (which there is no hard counter for -- a wall is not a hard counter) or walking around a corner and having 20 grenades go off in ½ second in your face.
Craptastic instancing. You spend 10% of your time actually in game -- the rest of the time you spend waiting in the queue. And when a mission cycles up, you have to all agree (or you have to start over). I dont understand this notion at all. So much better just to preinstantiate everyone and as teams form, merge the instances. Hellgate did this wonderfully.
Nonexistant scaling. This is a standard concept present in damn near any multiplayer capable RPG every -- the more teammates you have, the stronger the baddies get. In Global Agenda you have "solo" and "team" modes which I guess is a half-assed attempt at implementing this except: the solo gameplay is nothing like teamplay (you dont get the same baddies -- possibly because they recognize there's forced teaming) but the teampplay experience is the same whether you have 2, 3 or 4 players on your team.
Having a hard-defined "right way" to do things. Sure there's more than one way to do things (i.e., 2x robos and 2x recons or one of each class etc). But there are guaranteed-fail team builds (4 medics, 3 recons and 1 assault). Sure you can argue that this is "because it's designed as a team game" to which I would say "why is there solo mode?" This all leads to...
There's no real solo play. There's really no reason they cant have autoscaling instances -- in fact it makes even more sense here because loot doesnt make all that much of a difference (in general, with any game, by the time you get to soloing epic/ultimate bosses yourself easily enough to farm, are probably at the top of your game and just looking for that tiny last percentage).

As an endgame player, there is very much a great sense of aggravation with the hate-list. It's really not so bad with a good or fun team. But the game isnt anywhere near the jump-in-and-go that Hellgate endgame was. And that's all due to the fact Global Agenda is not even remotely an RPG. Sure you have loot. Sure you have skillpoints. Sure, you have progression. But an RPG this does not make.

If you instead, think of all the fancy gear us top-tier endgame players have as just an "unlock". Since you cant sell your gear (reinforcing the this-isnt-about-gear aspect) it's just a matter of playing the grind missions until the item you're looking for rolls up. It's a much more enjoyable game when you forget about the fact that your hear is 98.5% perfect and just find that good/fun team to play with and if you're lucky the random-generator will give you that 100% perfect item sooner than later ;)

For the low price of the game (and I have 30% discount coupons if anyone needs 'emm just leave me a message and I'll get you a code) and the lack of a monthly fee (they opted for the Guild Wars 'pay-for-expansions' approach), it's a nobrainer. It makes for a decent middleground between tab-targeting MMOs and more shooter type games. Think of it as Borderlands without the zone-damage and if Borderlands only ever had green items that dropped every 1000 kills :P Then again, considering I've put in 1000+ hours, I think it's safe to say it's pretty fun.

Worth noting though, if Hellgate was out (still waiting on that revival), I'd stop playing Global Agenda so fast... That being said, there's a free, no-time-limit demo. Give it a shot! For better or worse, it's certainly better than anything else remotely like it out there :)

Related

Running Series: Little Tweaks, Tips and Apps (Part 3)

2010-11-02T22:27:00.019-04:00

Contents

[Back to series]

I have had the luxury of working with multiple monitors for, well.... forever. The OS support for multiple monitors has come a long way over the last 15 years and even non-geeks can be found running dual-monitors these days. Regardless of whether your background is in graphics design, software development, day-trading, marketing there is a tick about a power user when they are setup with multiple monitors. Their secret is in their stash of shortcuts, tools and hacks. Keep in mind that although the focus for many of these tools is for multi-monitor setups, some of them apply even to single monitor users!

The tools fall into a few general categories

Hotkeys. These tools do tasks like move a window from one monitor to another or to minimize/maximize a window etc. To me, this is the most crucial aspect of any multimonitor tool.
Start bar, wallpaper & screensaver hacks. Generically these tools allow users to have different screensavers and/or wallpapers on each monitor. The start menu hacks usually allow either the start bar to replicated on the secondary monitors and/or to have only the applications that are currently on a given monitor show up on that monitor's start bar.
Secondary monitor management. These tools allow a user to enable and disable their secondary monitor with as few clicks as possible.
Virtual desktops. Much more common in the Linux environment, these tools allow users to organize their desktop clutter.
Icon Management & Position Hacks. When you move from different monitor configurations your desktop icons and window positions may get all frazzled. These tools let you manage them.
KVM. While not technically a multi-monitor thing, there are tools that allow the user to share a single keyboard/mouse to another computer

The Tools at a Glance
If you just want to jump in and have a look at the tools, here they are:

I'll be going through the various tools from a per-task perspective (rather than per-tool) and I'll cover which tools will get the job done.

Hotkeys
Some of the most common tasks a user will do with application windows are: minimizing/maximizing and moving an application-window from one monitor to the other. There are other tasks like tiling/cascading that we do from time to time but they are much less common. This is probably one of the most subtle but important ticks that separate a power user from the average user (generally speaking, power users prefer keyboard shortcuts over mousing around as they are [relatively] instantaneous).

If you're looking for a list of built-in shortcuts, you can start here; I've glanced through it and it seems fairly comprehensive. For the application-window related shortcuts, look under 'Windows Logo key keyboard shortcuts'.

Of the above tools, Swap Screen, a tool in the Dual Monitor Tools suite is the absolute quickest way to get this functionality. The tool is open source and free so feel free to install it on work machines. There's no installer required so this is very clean way to do things and I strongly reccomend this as the primary solution if you're just looking for hotkey support. Another free solution is WinSplit Revolution.

If you have more complicated hotkey needs (i.e., locking cursors, toggling displays etc), DisplayFusion and UltraMon both provide more extensive hotkey support (and other functionality too!). I use UltraMon myself as I occasionally have need for the more extensive functionality. UltraMon has an available 30-day-trial and DisplayFusion has a limited, free (non-commercial) version available so definitely give them a spin if your hotkey needs exceed what Swap Screen can handle.

Taking this a step further.... (aka the Mantra of a Power User)
To really build some integration into the way you use your computer/monitors, you can take the next step and integrate it into your mouse/keyboard-macro -- this way you can press one button/key and the window will minimize/maximize.

Start Bar, WallPaper & Screensaver Hacks
If you want to have a task-bar per monitor you'll need to decide if you want/need to see all the applications on the second/third task-bars or if you are ok if that task bar only shows the applications that are currently being displayed with that monitor (personally, I dont mess with this, I keep one task-bar). If you are content with just the applications that appear on a monitor being on that monitor's task bar, MultiMonitor can get the job done for free (I should note that I am uncertain as to whether or not the Pro version allows you to mirror all the task-bar or not).

If you need/want your task-bar to be mirrored (i.e., all the applications currently running show up on all the monitors), then you'll need to use DisplayFusion (Pro -- the free version doesnt support this) or UltraMon.

If you're looking to have multiple wallpapers on your monitors (whether it's a different image per monitor or a single large image), look no further than the Dual Wallpaper utility from the Dual Monitor Tools suite. Again this is a free, open source solution without any installation need. Again, DisplayFusion and UltraMon can provide this functionality as well.

Similarly, if you want to have either different screensavers or a spanned/duplicated screensaver, you'll have to grab DisplayFusion (Pro as the Free version doesn't provide this functionality) or UltraMon.

Secondary Monitor Management
Some games dont play well with multiple monitors -- for some reason or another, the mouse cursor just doesnt play nice with your second monitor! You can use mouse-related tools like MouseJail to try and lock the mouse to the primary monitor (where your game is) but sometimes this tool doesnt work so well (usually when you are working with different resolutions on the monitors).

Sometimes you just want to disable that pesky secondary monitor. The DisMon utility from the Dual Monitor Tools suite is again, your free, open source solution. It lets you disable the secondary monitors via a GUI or it can do so automatically when a specific application is run. Alternatively, UltraMon can also provide this functionality (although, not as elegantly).

Icon and Positioning Tools
Let's suppose you have a laptop: at work you connect to one resolution and at home you connect to another -- and your icons are all over the place! On my laptop, I use the free FSL Icon Restorer to handle saving and restoring icon positions. You can keep multiple icon profiles and a quick description to them to help you sort them out. A fantastic little gem.

Tools like SwapScreen, WinSplit Revolution, DisplayFusion and UltraMon can provide limited/awkward support for positioning windows - limited to moving application windows between windows. But what happens if you get a window that opens in the middle of both monitors? What happens if, for some reason or another, that second monitor was physically turned off when this happened? Or you moved the logical placement of the secondary monitor to the opposite side of the primary monitor -- and an application fired up in it's previous location - which is now offscreen?!

Well, you can use the age-old [ALT],[SPACE],[M],[ARROW KEY],[MOUSE MOVEMENT] to rapidly move the window. This is where SheepDog comes in. It's free, it's open source and it gets your window back to the primary monitor pronto.

Virtual Desktops
Users coming from Unix/Linux are familiar with virtual desktops/workspaces -- and they get used to it! For everyone else, a virtual desktop is just a way of decluttering your task tray. So if you have 15 browser windows open because you are researching something, you can whisk them all out of the way (without closing them) so you can focus.

There are a few tools available to get this job done but VirtuaWin is my go-to: it's free, it's open-source and it's easy to use. The nice thing about keeping your "clutter" on a different workspace is that this also cleans up your [ALT]+[TAB] options -- just dont forget those windows when restarting/shutting-down! Contrary to the name, the desktop is the same (i.e., so if you change the position of an icon on virtual-desktop2, it will be reflected on virtual-desktop1 etc).

KVM
I saved the best for last - and it's the best by a large margin. Power users often have their own little network (really, it's just a matter of time :P). In the effort to declutter our already cluttered workdesks, we'll often stow away the keyboard/mouse for the secondary machine until we really need to use it. So what happens if you just need to use that secondary machine real quick? It's a pain to unpack the keyboard/mouse etc.

Or how about, if you're a software developer and you use your two monitors as many do.... and suppose you need to have a remote desktop (or two) open ... you rapidly run out of desktop space on your active machine! Heaven forbid if you have power/hardware issues on your primary machine! By doing all this extra crap on the secondary machine, you keep the primary machine decluttered (both from an applications-windows perspective and a CPU cycle perspective).

If you think about it, the scenarios where this can come in are really extraordinary - suppose there are two of you working on a project, you on one computer, your partner on the other. Now suppose he or she doesnt know how to do something -- you could swap seats, you could explain it to them -- or you could hijack their keyboard/mouse and they can watch you do it. Yes I've done that. It also has very funny implications during LAN gaming when you can suddenly mess with the other player's view :P

The tool to get all this magic going is free and open sourced. It's Synergy+ (formally called Synergy). This here is a really slow video that outlines pretty much all you need to get rolling. The big selling points are that you [can] share one [text] clipboard between multiple computers (which can be running different operating systems) and the transition between the various computers is absolutely, magically, seamless.

ISSUES TO KNOW BEFORE JUMPING IN
UltraMon crashing on Startup
I believe it's been fixed as of now but older versions of UltraMon would crash on first startup in Windows Vista and Windows 7. This was due to the change in the file format for the visual styles. Silly enough, the utility would load a pair of "power tools" the first time it starts up -- and these tools would choke on the visual style and crash. If you're here because you're looking to get UltraMon working on Windows Vista or Windows7, all you have to do is:

Navigate to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Realtime Soft\UltraMon\<versionNumber>\Window Buttons]
Set the following keys to '0' (zero)
"Move Window Button"
"Maximize to Desktop Button"

Configuring Synergy
At the time of writing, this is not the most intuitive process, I'll make a guide & review to do this shortly and link it here.

Logitech G930 Review (9/10)

2010-10-26T23:51:00.010-04:00

I've had the Logitech G930 for a few days and I'm totally smitten by it. Sure it's got it's faults but for the targeted demographic it promises lots and delivers on almost all accounts. Having spent the last few months (actually, now that I think about it, it's probably a year and a half) with the very impressive Razer Barracuda HP-1 (particularly so being my first Razer product), my expectations were very high. I wanted a headset that delivered no-excuse audio performance (I'm no audiophile but I definitely pick up on distortion, line noise, crackling etc.), an equally high-quality mic (again, not looking for studio level stuff, but more so for ingame voip) and in a package I could stand wearing for hours (10+) at a time.

Given that a large portion of my music collection is 5.1 (and almost all my gaming happens in 5.1), there was a strong desire for 5.1 (or better) headphones although I was open to taking a stereo setup if the price worked out. Additional points for being wireless and/or no-nonsense wiring that I could use them at work (bringing them to/from work daily). Additional points if I could find a set that would pair through Bluetooth to my phone. The headsets that made the final shortlist were no slouches:

Considering how I hold the Barracuda in such high regard, I think it's worth outlining why it wasn't the clear front-runner. The Barracuda delivers absolutely fantastic sound (both quality and ability to dish out sheer volume - I can't stress this enough) and has a detatchable high-quality mic. It delivers genuine 5.1 analog audio (I'm not a big fan of USB soundcards) and hardware volume controls. It has a little bit of bling in the way of toggleable lights. It has a ridiculously long cord. Where it fails is in extended comfort (wearing it for 10hrs+ results in the tips of my ears being a bit sore) and a vinyl-wrapped cord (which, after a year+, gets more than a bit tangled). The wireframe construction on my Barracuda also has started to come apart (I wouldn't fault the design per se, I'm not exactly dainty). The tangly nature of the cord and the inability to collapse in any way meant this didn't meet my needs as a commuter headset.

The Carcharias was eliminated due to price. It's a fantastic stereo headset for it's cost but for just a bit more I could have the G35 which offers surround sound (and a bunch more features). My brief experience with the Carcharias did not inspire me for it's ability to deliver comfort over extended durations. The Megalodon was eliminated in the same way as it uses the same/similar ear cushions. As such the decision came down to the G35 or the G930.

Originally I read that the G930 could be recharged using the cable (while still in use). I thought this meant that I could use it as a wired headset. As such I could leave the wireless adapter connected to my home machine and use the USB at work. I did a comparison between the two on the Logitech site and from how I read it, the G35 seemed to be a superior product, lacking only the wireless "advantage". It seemed very much like the G7 vs G5 mouse (with the G5 being a superior product but the G7 being wireless). Translation: the feature-comparison is crap. For better or worse, the store was out of stock of the G35.

Read my comments at the end re: G35 vs G930

What's great

It's really comfortable. While the Razor Barracuda was epically comfortable in all but the most extreme spans, the G930 is comfortable at that extreme. Having physically smaller and having a much snugger fit, it's quite possible to go to bed with them on. Overall the headband and the ear cushions are ridiculously comfortable.
The sound quality is surprisingly good. I thought the Barracuda set an unreachable bar in terms of clarity. It did. I still get the feeling the Razer was/is better, but I cant complain about the G930. If there is a quality difference, it's too close to tell. You get the occasional bit of squelching and or static at the limit of the wireless-range, but that's fair and to be expected. It handles the THX Bass test track I threw at it at the maximum volume and settings. Not many speakers/headphones can do that.
The battery-life is pretty good. I'm generally good for keeping things charged up but it certainly has a good amount of battery-life. It lasts all day at work (mind you I'm not necessarily listening to music during the workday but when I get home, I do stream audio for 4-5 hours before going to bed). I've not been caught without power yet. Being able to use the headset (essentialled as a wired headset) while it's charging is an awesome bonus. It charges via micro-USB (the connector on the right)
The wireless is pretty solid. Paired with Windows 7 which has automagic audio-stream switching, I can seamlessly switch around between my speakers and headset simply by disconnecting/unplugging the headset. When I reconnect the headset, audio automatically streams back to the headset. The range is pretty good (your mileage will obviously vary). There arent many hiccups or much noise until you reach the limit of the wireless. When you move back into wireless range, the audio seamlessly reconnects.
There is a volume control dial directly on the headset. This is awesome when I want to turn something up/down and I'm not sitting directly in front of my computer. There are also buttons on the headset that can be programmed for various applications. Default actions like next/previous track and play/pause are ingenious.
Having a mute button for the mic is handy; it's a bit of a moot point as the microphone automatically mutes when you stow it away. In either case, a little indicator light lets you know it's muted.
When I bought this, I didn't realize how much passive noise cancelling it came with. It's absolutely magnificant. While you can still make out what people around you are saying, it goes miles towards isolating you in your own little acoustic environment. The noise-cancelling is advertised to be 26db.

What's So-So

For those that care, there is a switch to enable Dolby Pro Logic IIx. In short, this takes a stereo audio stream and upmixes it to 7.1. Given the majority of my audio (music/movies/games) are real surround-sound, this is kind of a gimmicky feature. Even for stereo audio sources (say streaming music), it's kind of gimmicky. I do like that it's a physical switch that you can toggle at a hardware level; it's also nice that the audio icon readily identifies whether or not you are running the upmixing or not (the tray icon is red for on, black for off).
It comes with built-in voice morphing technology that lets you sound like a robot or a chipmunk or whatnot. It's fun to play with here and there but ultimately it's kinda dumb.
The G930 comes with an adjustable microphone. Normally I think of this as being "you can fold it up out of the way when you're not using it". Not only can I do that, I can twist and bend the mic to whatever shape I need. Kind useless as a whole.
Keep in mind the bulk of the chassis of the headset is hard plastic -- so if you drop it or whatnot, it will probably crack. Compared to the wireframe chassis of the Barracuda, the G930 doesnt give me the bang-it-around confidence.
Given that this is a wireless headset and there's no way to "bind" one headset to a specific transmitter, I think there may be issues with having multiple headsets in a locale. Now the flip side is that if the headsets are paired to the individual transmitters as suggested here, if you lose your transmitter you're SOL. This also means you cant just go to a friends house and connect to his/her transmitter -- you'll have to bring your own. Sometimes analog just wins out (just get a splitter and you're good to go).
The headset comes with programmable G-buttons. Unlike the G-keys on their gaming keyboards, the buttons on the headset are more limited/gimmicky. You can bind them to "expected" things like play/pause/stop/next/previous etc as well as specific things such as toggling specific voice morphing routines etc. There is a SDK available to make plugins for the headset.

What's Not Good

The drivers. They're terrible. While they arent the worst that Logitech's made, they certainyl could use a lot more refinement. They definitely have periods of instability (running 64bit Windows 7 here). The estimated battery gauge doesnt always work nor does it update reliably. You can see a screenshot of the interface here with the battery gauge in the bottom left -- not working. Hopefully this improves over time; Logitech usually gets their act together after a generation or so.
Compared to the venerable Barracuda, the G930 offers noise cancelling however the Barracuda wins in sheer volume output (no seriously, the Barracuda didnt need noise cancelling... if you were being bothered by external noises, simply crank the volume). The G930's volume output is decent, but definitely about half of what the Barracuda can do. Can you hear it on your desk? Yes. Will you mistake it for small-speakers (like you could with the Barracuda)? Not a chance. There's no deafness-inducing volume output here.
Given that the G930 is a usb-audio device, you cant use it with, say, an ipod. It also means that the surround sound functionality is unavailable if you dont install the drivers! In fact, damn near nothing works without the drivers. If you just plug it in, you get a basic stereo headset. This means you'll get limited use in non-windows-PC setups.
In case anyone encounters crackling/static/noise with their G930 (or the G35 or any USB headset for that matter) -- try connecting it to the PC directly and/or to a powered USB hub. This often clears out a lot of the issues.
While I've not had problems with the battery life, there's no hardware indicator to inform me that I am low on battery (and the drivers are too unreliable that they might as well not even bother reporting battery life). So if you do do a wireless marathon, it will simply cut out on you. Thankfully you can just plug in and continue on your way.

Closing
All in all, I'm very happy with this headset. Was it worth $160? Yes. Considering how often I'm hooked up to my headset, the seemingly high investment for a peripheral is definitely worth it. It has high-quality audio output and a high-quality/decent microphone. Additional points for having a hardware Dolby toggle switch, a hardware volume control and being somewhat foldable (to be more commuter friendly) make this an awesome deal. Final verdict: 9/10

Addendum: G930 vs G35
For all intents and purposes the G35 is just a wired version of the G930. Given the wired-nature of the headset it's more geared towards comfort (i.e., adjustable headstrap in case you dont find the default one good enough). Both offer the same core feature-set (i.e., USB audio, 7.1, Dolby upmixing, G-buttons, volume controls, mute indicator light). The G35 comes with a 10-foot woven cord (think Logitech G5 mouse). According to the specifications, there seems to be a minor discrepancy between the microphones on these headsets although for the target demographic (non-recording studios) this is probably insignificant.

So the decision as to which to get depends on how much wireless is worth to you. Generally, the G930 will come out on top as [a] the single pad that comes with the G930 is pretty dang comfortable, it's the same as the default pad that comes preinstalled with the G35 and [b] you can always plug the USB in. If the price premium for the G930 isn't objectionable to you, I would reccomend it over the G35.

'Motorola Milestone' Review (9/10)

2010-07-08T21:47:00.001-04:00

I've had the Motorola Milestone (the Canadian take on the 'Droid') for a few months now having migrated from my HTC Touch Diamond (CDMA). I've used several Motorola phones in the past - some good (V3, Q9c) and a few not so great (V9, KRZR) so it was a little bit of a gamble (although it is not often that a flagship product is tragically flawed). The switch to the Milestone represents not only a change in hardware but an entire shift in paradigm. You see, the Milestone is powered by Google's Android operating system.

With my only other smartphone exposure being Windows Mobile based, I didn't quite know what to expect . In fact, I was kind of worried -- I had just started dabbling with little development projects with Windows Mobile. While I've not had the opportunity to start developing for Android, my experience so far suggests that it won't be a painful learning curve. In short: I'm (very) impressed.

The single biggest thing that stood out was the battery life. I've never seen such a night-and-day difference between flagship products (comparing to the Touch Diamond). I think it is worth mentioning illustrating how poor the battery was for me on the Diamond. With the Diamond plugged into the charger (screen/gps/wifi off, talking via bluetooth) -- I would get 2 hours talk time. This meant that the phone was being drained faster than the charger to recharge it. This happened from day one (and yes I got the battery and phone replaced). Throw in the atrocious gps-connect time (from instant to 15 minute, usually 10 minutes and upwards), it was really time to move on. While these are major faults, I think the real cause is the fact that the CDMA Touch Diamond was really just an afterthought to the GSM model.

Moving to the Milestone, I get 6 hrs+ talktime (and thats with the GPS running intermitantly in the background to synchronize with Latitude and the data connection, also intermitantly, synchronizing). If I just have the phone with me 'out and about', I can expect 10 hrs+ no sweat. It should be noted that should I forget to disengage the Google Navigation and the GPS is actively running, I can easily chew out 80% of the battery life in an hour.

What's great

The exceptional resolution (480x854). Everytime I try to explain to a "mainstream" user that resolution matters, they always quip back with "what's the point, it's got a such a small screen [compared to a tv], the difference [in video quality] wont matter" or "what's the point, it's not like you can read such small letters". The catch is I can read those "small letters" (which, really, arent that small) and I can read the entire contents of the majority of postings/emails/etc on a single 'page' without having to scroll (ironically, it's this crowd that tends to preach about their 1080p television sets without understanding that such things are commonplace for anyone with a computer background). I can't really stress enough how awesome having a useful amount of resolution real estate is.
The Milestone runs on the HSPA+ network, making it a 3.5G device. In the real world, this translates to me being able to chat via Skype over the data connection. Sure, it drops a few words every few minutes but by far and large, conversations can be had.
Non-gimmicky wifi. The transition between the data connection and the wifi (802.11b/g with n-spec being available when Android 2.2 rolls around) is exceptionally seamless. The device does the swich intelligently. I should note that for fringe scenarios i.e., I'm in my car about to pull out (and away from the wifi), there is just enough of a wifi connection that the phone stays in wifi mode but in all practicality, there isnt enough signal strength for that connection to be meaningful -- I wish it would give the option to switch to the then-faster data connection.
The 16GB SDHC storage. While I'm not one to put music, video, games etc on my phone (I have dedicated devices for those things), being able to use my phone as a hack USB key is exceptionally handy. The slot comes ready for 32GB SDHC memory as well.
The dedicated "portals". This might be a Motorola specific feature, but it's absolutely wonderful. When you connect the phone into one of the available docks, it automagically switches to the custom homescreen for that dock. In the link, the top example is the when the phone is plugged into the car dock and the bottom is when it is plugged into the multimedia dock. I think the determination is via rfid but I'm not entirely sure. In either case, it's absolutely awesome (the multimedia makes charging the phone a snap)
I cant write enough about the sheer capability of the phone/OS with regards to "daily use". All this is with just the base operating system and included applications. When you consider additional apps, I can't begin to describe all the things the phone could do. Sure the iPhone has a metric crapton more apps than is available for Android but the iPhone was an inheirently inferior platform (from a hardware and OS standpoint) to begin with so I imagine many of the useful (i.e., non games/trivialties) apps are there to add 'common sense' functionality to the platform. Mind you, when I bought the Milestone, the latest Apple product was the 3GS and while I think the 4th generation iPhone has caught up hardware-wise, the OS is still much more restrictive.
Being able to use the data connection while talking on the phone is absolutely wonderful. It was something I couldn't do with the Diamond and surprisingly enough, I use this functionality often enough (i.e., reading a briefing email while on the phone with someone etc). It's fantastic.
Google contacts are so awesome. I can create a contact for, say, Facebook Notifications and have all the "phone numbers" that Facebook uses to send you text messages assigned to this one contact (so the message appears as "Facebook Notification" rather than a garble of numbers).
There is a proper clippy-holster!!! I've not had a proper clipholster since I used by Q9c -- one that you could pop the phone off reliably with one hand in <½sec. Mind you I broke mine (sat on it :P). It's definitely not as good as the one for the Q9c but it's the first decent holster I've seen/used in long time.

Minor gripes

The physical keyboard. While I've had the chance to adapt to touch screen keyboards, my girlfriend hasn't quite had the day-in-day-out exposure I have: having that physical keyboard is a good migration tool for me. However, truthfully, the touch keyboard is utter crap. Not a fault with the Motorola product but the complaint is directed at all physical keyboards on smartphones. There's no value to having a physical keyboard if all the keys are the same size and have no useful amount of travel (the travel i.e., the physical displacement that occurs when the button is pressed is ~1mm). In all practicality, having the physical keyboard is great as more of a nanny-migration bonus (sort of like how the Touch Diamond had a styus) but I've never really used the physical key.
Not being able to swap out the memory card without popping the battery is kind of dumb. I imagine there is a sensical technical reason for this restriction (akin to removing a drive while it's in use... even though the phone functions fine without the memory card). This is really more of an annoyance than anything.
The boot time. It's horrendous. I don't want to time my boot time because once I know, I'll be sitting there counting the seconds that go by (yeah, I have such a hard life :P). Without the memory card, I'd say it's about 15 seconds and with the memory card, probably 20 seconds. Really just an annoyance -- but in my (spoiled perhaps) world, anything taking more than 15seconds better come with multiple cores, a crapton of RAM and a dedicated videocard ;)
The Googleification of everything. While the tight integration is very nice and there are some features I really like, the fact that the phone/OS doesnt readily work with Outlook (the de-facto leader) is kind of dissapointing. In fact, you cant really get your contacts to sync with Outlook (that I know of) - you have to convert your Outlook contacts into Google contacts (not that it's necessarily a bad thing).
The phone comes with up to nine homescreens (the original 2.0 Android only had three) and while that's enough for me to get all the shortcuts and widgets I need, it might not be enough for everyone. I dont see why you cant raise the limit to "unlimited".
There are "live wallpapers" which for the most part are just animated backgrounds but some of them are pretty nifty, like the one for Google Maps that updates the map based on where the GPS says you are. Gimmicky yes but definitely cool.
While the OS supports Flash, it doesnt really as you can't visit Flash enabled sites (youtube is done via something separate) and when you go to install Flash, Adobe tells you that it cant install for your browser.
Motorola has since switched to the micro-USB connector (same as for their RAZR2 and their H12 headsets) which means it's more of a pain in the butt to plug in (but the multimedia dock thankfully removes that hassle so really it's just the car kit that's a pain for me). This is kind of sad as one of the reasons I like/liked Motorola so much in the past was their use of the standard mini-USB connector.

Serious Aggravations

The light proximity sensor (LPS). This is one case where the Windows Mobile phone had it way better. How the LPS works is by having a light sensor near the top of the phone (where you would put your heard if you were not using BlueTooth). When there isnt very much light (i.e., you might have the phone to your head), it turns the screen off (presumably to save battery). It magically turns the screen back on when there is more light (presumably, the only reason you would have more light is because you moved the phone from your head -- and the only reason you would do that during a phone call is to look at something etc). This is all fine and dandy. There are scenarios (thankfully not often) where, the phone, for lack of a better word teases me. This is how it goes down:
1. I move the phone from my head, the screen switches to screen-on
2. Before I can do anything, it switches to screen-off
3. I press the power button
4. It turns the screen on
5. Go to Step 2
The only way to get the screen to stay on is to activate the slider on the phone (and since they removed the slider on the successor to this phone, I hope to god they fixed this!). The Diamond had this perfected. The power button turns the screen on or off as an override (i.e., when you turn it on, it turns on ... the power savings countdown might be activated but you had at least 30seconds of inactivity before the screen shutoff -- with the Milestone, I have less than 1 second of activity or inactivity before the screen shuts off). Sure there are apps to force the screen on while I'm on the phone -- but this would then apply to all my phone calls and not just the every-so-often-when-I-want-to-look-something-up.
Speaking of power buttons, the slider is ridiculous. I think all the iPhone users ruined it for the rest of us (and again the Touch Diamond got this dead on). When you press the power button (to turn the screen back on), you should be able to use the phone -- not have to do a "slide to unlock" gimmick (because really, if I didnt want to turn the screen on, I wouldnt have pressed the button). Sure if the power button is dead smack in the middle of the phone I could the argument for the slide to unlock gimmick (although the Milestone does have a bit more tolerance since it can be unlocked via the slider function) but the power button is a pain in the butt the press. Realistically this should be a user customizeable option that we can opt out of without having to use 3rd party apps. Unfortunately, it seems that Android 2.2 is removing the ability to bypass the lockscreen. Ugh.
Again, with the buttons... the camera button takes forever to activate (presumably to prevent accidentally switching into camera mode). You pretty much have to hold the button down for about 3 seconds (until you hear the beep and the wirring of the camera bits). Often, its faster to navigate to the widget/application directly. Honestly, the phone would be so much better without the camera button

Lastly, the multitasking on the phone is awesome. It's great that the task manager magically handles the running tasks to balance my intents and battery life. For the most part, it gets the intent right however I wish it would ship with a task manager of some sort so we wouldnt have to rely on 3rd party apps for this basic functionality. The other aggravation of multitasking is working with the "back" and "home" buttons. When your turn your screen back on (say it went into powersave mode), you are (sometimes) presented with one of the previous applications you were running. Now, to get to the homescreen (where you have a good chance of wanting to go) you can either click the home button or press the back button (which should hide the current window).

The catch is that the home screen button takes about 2seconds to trigger and in that time you could have pressed the back button five times. This is where the multittasking comes back to bite you. If Android has more than 5 screens worth of stuff to toggle through .. because although you would think that when you go "back" from the current application it takes you to the home screen ... no, it takes you to the next application on the stack ... and the next after that ... and the next after that. Sure, you eventually get to the home screen, but if you have more than 5 screens worth of stuff, you're faster with the home button. Mind you there's no way to know how many apps are running because the mechanics of the task manager are hidden away. Bah.

Closing
Am I happy with this phone? Definitely. Am I impressed with Android? Definitely (although I wish to hell they'd have some form of backward/forward compatability plan and that they'd let us upgrade/downgrade the phone's OS just like we do for our computers). Would I reccomend anyone fork over the $700 price tag for one? Not a chance. For most people the older Android 1.6 found on some of the HTCs is plenty enough (HTC adds tons of their own brilliant UI innovations as well). If you absolutely must have the flagship, then at least I would strongly advise getting a plan/discount of some sort to help with the price tag. Final verdict: 9/10. This would have scored 9.5 but too many OS gripes to ignore.

A second look at Borderlands...

2010-07-03T10:44:00.001-04:00

I've been playing Borderlands a bit lately and although all of my complaints in my initial review still stand, I think the game's three DLCs have subtly brought some polish with them. Dont get me wrong, the game is still chock full of console-itis -- that's a bad thing. By far and large that is still the overwhelming impression from start to finish. However, if you overlook this aspect, it's actually very enjoyable. While this game will never be a totally rockin' FPS-RPG and even though I will always have more complaints than praises for it, it still can be a total blast to play. Now that I've got the three DLC packs, let's have a look again...

Console-itis.
Let's get this out of the way. The total experience wouldn't be so much of a damn pain in the butt if the developers bothered to test it with actual PC gamers (seriously, Borderlands has PC support for an Xbox controller -- who in their right mind plays an actual fps with anything by keyboard+mouse?). That being said, this wiki is your friend and will help you sort out many of aggravations. Of note:

'Show hidden weapon/module stats'. While the wiki says this has been fixed, it certainly has not been for the Steam version. That and it's worth noting that some weapons can have well in excess of five stats -- and no matter how small you make the font, the game is hardcoded to limit displaying only five stats. Yeah. Hardcoded. Bad form.
'Disable ALL movies'. None of the movies are worth watching more than once really; that and even with this tweak, there are still (hardcoded no doubt) movies left in the game (that you can't skip). Thankfully the remaining movies are all exceptionally short and relevant. If you really want to watch the movies grab the Rad Game Tools player (which all serious multimedia power users should have anyways) and watch them independant of the game.
'Disable mouse smoothing' A definite must, the game's interface is so totally broken and inconsistant when it comes to mouse sensitivity in the in-game and in-menu elements that you'd think there was something wrong with your mouse. While your cursor will still feel like it's wading through mud, it will be much more bearable.
'Enable VSync' If you're getting a headache while playing Borderlands, this may help lots.

While these fixes go a long way towards making the game playable, several outstanding aggravations remain:

The game has a display limit of seven digits for money values. This means that, for all money values, the maximum is 9,999,999 -- even though the player can carry more and even though actual items may cost more! This is just another case of hardcoding. I don't know if it was laziness on the part of the developers or that the developers think with a console mindset (not a good thing) but little things like this aggravate the developer and gamer in me.
The movement/physics mechanics (jumping, vehicles etc) is very consoley. Jumping is very floaty and the collision models are primative at best. Vehicular steering via mouse is also lame. You can find a partial fix for the floaty jumping here.
If you have the Steam version and you launch the game directly (i.e., via the exe) -- the game fails to save your character or settings! You have to launch the game via the steam interface for the game to initialize. After you've launched it via Steam (and suffered through the unskippable videos) you can go back to launching the game directly.
Players have to stick together. Nothing says 'console' quite like having a game force you to teleport to different zones when one player teleports (and on the same note, having the teleport not work because one player is in menu is so 1990). For a game built on unreal engine 3, this is an embarassment.
Not having a shared stash, ability to drop money, or a mechanism for trading is so pathetic, I cant think of an RPG pre-1995 that didnt have at least two of these three features.
The Mad Moxxi DLC is a grindfest. You simply play three different levels 125 times each. /fail

So what's good?
Well there are three DLCs for now, and the individuall have quite a bit of polish and flavor to them. This begs the question of whether or not I would enjoy the game this second run without the DLC.... probably not. Regardless, the DLC is relatively a blast:

'The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned' takes place in essentially Halloween-town. It's very well themed and storywise is very polished. I am a bit sad that there isn't so much of a zombie-hoarde mode as that truly would have been a total crate of win.
'Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot'. This is essentially Oblivion's Arena (times 3). There are three different arenas you can play in. You have to survive 5 wave in each arena (each wave having 5 rounds for a total of 75 rounds) to unlock the "second pass". For the second pass you have to survive 20 waves (again, each wave having 5 rounds for an epic total of 300). If there wasn't a bank (aka "item storage chest"), this DLC would be an utter waste. Playing through this, I cant help but think the developers were rushed to get a product out the door (accounting for the sheer repeatededededdednes)
'The Secret Armory of General Knoxx'. Like Zombie Island, this DLC adds lots of content -- and if it wasnt for the bank storage, it'd be the first DLC I would have gotten. The story is a bit less polished than Zombie Island but it certainly makes up for it in the sheer variety of badguys and new environments (and the new skillpoints help too!) Definitely worth the money simply for the farming opportunities that exist.

Conclusion?
I started this post by suggesting that perhaps my initial review of Borderlands was a bit harsh. Thinking about it now, I don't really think so -- the console-itis is that bad but the fun factor (when playing with friends) generally overcomes those aggravations. I think I'd up the score to 7.5/10.

Related

Borderlands Initial Impressions

A third look at Global Agenda (v1.3)

2010-06-14T11:23:00.003-04:00

Ok so I was a bit harsh with my first impressions of the v1.3 patch. I guess that was to be expected, coming from a quick stint in Killing Floor (a more 'proper' FPS... you know, where headshots count for something). Now that I've had a few days to settle into it, let's a have another go at it.

The Good

Solo mode is available. This is not to say you can solo, but at least the option is there. In reality, soloing in Global Agenda isn't a feasible/practical option. Sure there may be fewer baddies and they may be squishier but it's just has too much of a ugh, slow feel to it. It's nice that it's at least an option.
What I do love is the ability to launch with limited team size - no longer do we have to wait for three other people to be ready (which is, for reasons unknown, much more challenging than you might think). The upside is that it is feasible to play with teams of two and three and the loot/experience is boosted to reflect the handicap of not having the fourth player.
The revamp of the device handling is awesome. No longer do I have to juggle 20 device points worth of items (five devices each ranging in tier 1-4) into an available 15 points. With this patch, all the devices (i.e., weapons and such) automatically are upgraded to tier4 and we can carry all five. The differentiating factor is now handled by suffixes that give micro stat boosts etc. Different/better devices/items are acquired as loot now. Awesome! I should disclaim that by opinions might be a bit biased because I already have pretty much the best gear I can for my class... if I had to grind for it, it might not be so favorable. That being said, the difference between plain and uber isn't really all that big.
Game/Map tweaks: always a good thing. Generally speaking, they've fixed all the major map exploits and such. In-town, to accommodate the new inventory/loot system, there are class specific stores where players can buy gear for that specific class.
The new uncommon baddie: a robotics guy! This is absolutely awesome: he's got a sweet (read: very annoying) gun, he puts down buff stations (50% damage reduction) and spawns lockdown drones (slows your movement + causes minor damage). If you're busy with a boss/mob it's absolutely lethal. It'd be even more challenging if, on the harder difficulties, instead of the drone, he put up a gun turret
All the special gear they added for each class is a very nice touch!

The Bad

Connectivity, stability and performance are atrocious still. Whenever a window pops up (i.e. you want to go to the in-town store to buy something ... a good chunk of the time the window will pop up empty -- leaving you to wonder if [a] you've been disconnected or [b] it's just loading the store really slowly).
There still needs to be balance fixes (IMO). While none of these are absolutely critical fixes, they fall under the "this should really probably be done" category (Support spiders/guardian does ridiculous amounts of damage for the amount of skittering/health they have)
I guess there's the growing pains of the massive content release -- so many players have no clue how all the new toys work and what can be done with them.
You still have to queue up. Seriously. Even if you have a premade team (hell, even if you solo), you still have to wait for a mission slot to be available. In 2010, this is ridiculous. Maybe I was spoiled by Hellgate's "get up and go" system where everyone was individually instanced (and when you grouped up the instances just merged) . While one could say "well they need to manage server load", I would counter with "this isn't a console game -- so don't give me console-esque limitations).
They still kick you for idling in town after say 20 minutes. Which again comes down to a "we dont have enough computing power to handle so many idlers" versus "get a bigger server". For something so trivial, it's pretty annoying to be kicked (after all, I *could* buy the game *just* to sit in town, sure it's not normal, but it's a legitimate activity - sit in town and read the intown chat or something). For consoles it makes sense, with limited server capacity etc, but for serious PC gaming, this is silly. Get a bigger server (lol it'd be like Google search denying you a search if you took too long typing out what you wanted to search for)
For a game that is so PVP-centric, to not have headshots... (especially running on UnrealEngine3) is kind of pathetic. I think the bottom line for these last three points are: get a better server - you expect players to run with relatively decent machines, you (as the gameserver) should run a datacenter capable of supporting your playerbase.

All in all I'm happy with the update (although I wish they would change it so that headshots matter and get the stability/performance down pat). As a patch: it's a definite 9.5/10 (a few additional balance bugs were introduced) but the game as a whole needs to be more. There are simply too many ugh moments for it to be a blockbuster.

Related

A second look at Global Agenda (v1.3)...

2010-06-03T21:18:00.003-04:00

Well the monolithic v1.3 update came out today and I am happy to say, I'm finally getting [quite] sick of the game. The update is really what the game should have launched as really. A quick summary:

An interface that (usually) saves settings as you go. No more having all your options and such reset because you didnt click a "Apply" button. Welcome to proper UI design and how everything else works (sure, there are interfaces that dont save changes .. but those interfaces have Ok, Cancel, Apply not Apply and Reset).
More variety for jetpacks and boosts and such. Now you can fly and shoot at the same time... but not really because remember, energy powers your jetpack and your gun.
No more having to wait for people to accept. You can finally solo. But not really. This game isnt like Hellgate (no, it's not that good) -- they force grouping on you. Sure it's an MMO you say... but so long as it has soft aim, it's clearly not a gamers game. Sure you can solo, but it's not going to be fun. This arises from a few (good and bad) things

They've added a new special baddy, the rough equivalent of a Robotics specialist. He fires an amped up Rumbleblaster and spawns drones and power stations. This is awesome. Now baddies will properly reinforce each other. Horrah for legitimate difficulty.
The fancy rumble blaster he has (just like the various other opponent-wielded rumbleblasters) has magical detonation properties. Sure, it's a splash-damage weapon, I totally get that. But splash weapons ... by their very nature, need to explode to do splash damage (duh) ... and to explode, they have to hit something. Not here. You think that rumbleblaster shot that's clearly zinging past your head is gonna zing past your head? Think again. It magically explodes as it comes near you. This isnt a fancy proximity rocket launcher folks. It's a friggen ball of electrical energy (that bounces no less).
They still haven't got the Recon class's stealth down right. I wish the developers would just decide on how the mechanics for cloaking work. Common sense indicates that when you activate cloak, you should be bloody invisible unless [a] you are within range of a detector [b] you are within range of a special baddie or boss [c] or you get hit. In Global Agenda there is a fourth scenario: random.

This all stacks onto the two base issues I have with the game (the lack of soloing is partially addressed, not without caveats of course): the exceptionally slow pace of the game and the artificial difficulty.

I cant stand games with artificial difficulty - regardless of wheather the ultimate [artificial] product is actually hard (like Global Agenda) or easy (like Left4Dead). If you dont want to artificial difficulty, then it's a giant plot/common-sense hole. Consider this: my assault rifle does ~100 dmg/hit. The assault rifle that the basic bad guy has, does 800dmg/hit with the same range and fire rate. So either [a] this is artificial difficulty or [b] a plot hole that skips over the fact that any common sense soldier would, after killing his first baddie, immediately pick up the rifle and use that instead....

Global Agenda is a different genre of game. It's got some aspect of FPS/TPS and some elements of RPG (and some strategic elements but those are relatively minor/indirect). It's clearly not a real RPG as there simply isnt any loot, and once you settle into your basic gear families, there's not a whole lot of need to expand into the more specialized loot (perhaps in PVP, but i'll get to that). It certaintly isnt an FPS/TPS -- there's no body zone damage -- a shot in the toe does the same as a shot to the head.

Now you can argue that this game is primarily PvP and PvE was tacked on as an afterthought (which, based on the feel of things, is probably true), then I would suggest that it fails as a PvP game as well. No body zone damage in a PvP game? Seriously? How is that supposed to be competitive when neither party even has to hit the target (it's actually got soft aim).

For all this criticism, you'd think I hate the Global Agenda. To be honest, I'm not sure at how I stand: the 1.3 patch definitively makes the game what it should have been at launch. No doubt about that -- as a patch, this is phenomenal (and from a developer's perspective, it's an assload of stuff they've done in a relatively short time period). I'm just not sold on the underlying game itself.

Forced teaming, lack of hard aim (or even something resembling zone damage) and artificial difficulty -- makes me feel this is a casual gamer's game (but it certainly isnt). I cant quite put my finger on it, but it's a hell of a turn off. Do I regret buying the game? Nah. Would I buy it again knowing what I know? Probably. But it certainly doesnt have the attractive power that it could have had. All I know is I'm crossing my fingers for Hellgate Resurrection...

Related

Running Series: Little Tweaks, Tips and Apps (Part 2)

2010-06-03T14:14:00.004-04:00

Contents

Automated System Cleaning

[Back to series]

Automated System Cleaning
So I do a lot of ASP.NET development on my personal system. I have bursts of going through online videos. This results in a lot of garbage showing up on my system, both in the system's Temp folder as well as the Temporary Internet folder (my primary/only browser is IE). There are guides out there to show you how to Clear IE's cache and even to clear the cache for a specific domain (i.e., site) but there are a bunch of drawbacks and concerns:

It takes damn near forever (depending on how much junk you have accumulated)
Does it really clear your temporary browsing cache? (after all, your browser is still open and as a general principle, you cant delete files while applications using them are open...)
What if you use multiple browsers?
There's no easy convenient way to empty you system's temporary folders

This is where a neat little free application call CCleaner ('C' for 'crap) comes in. It's handles the deletion of temporary files, browsing cache (of multiple browsers) and general removal of "crap". It has a built in whitelist system to let you mark certain cookies you want to keep (say, your Facebook login cookie). It's pretty straightforward to run too - you just click 'analyze' then 'clean' and wait (depending on how much crap you've accumulated) and poof it's done!

It's pretty easy: double-click (to launch), click (analyze) and click (clean) and click (to close) and you're done! Normally this is something I run every so often manually (i.e., during development, when I really want to wipe cookies etc or after a particularly long session of Youtubing, or 'just because'). Being the lazy old fart I am, I figured there's got to be a better way to do things with less work. Turns out there is.

A quick little investigation yielded command line parameters for CCleaner. Turns out '/AUTO' (without the quotes) runs CCleaner in the tray with the current settings and exits when finished. Brilliant! Now just make a shortcut with the auto parameter and double-click and you're done!

There are two issues still outstanding:

It still takes damn near forever (depending on the amount of crap accumulated) and
What about all the cookies I do want to save? (i.e., login cookies and such)

Well there's not a whole lot you can do about the latter (you have to manually fire up CCleaner and whitelist the cookies yourself... so you'll still have to do work every so often). As for the former, common sense suggests that if you run CCleaner more often, the individual cleanings should be a relative breeze. So I thought: why not have the automated cleaning happen on a regular basis .. sure it would 'accidentally' wipe out cookies every so often, but in time, my cookie whitelist would get longer and longer and it would be less of a hassle. Worth a shot!

Here's how to make your life simpler and cleaner:

Fire up Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc) .. you can find it under Administrative Tools
On the right hand side, click 'Create Task'. A window pops up [sample]
Setup your trigger to determine how often you want to clean your system [sample]. When you're done, it will list all your triggers [sample]
Now setup what your want this automated event to actually do [sample]. When you're done it will list all the actions [sample]. For my system, I have the cleaning done every two hours.
Determine the scenarios you want the cleaning to run [sample]. This will realistically only affect notebook users and those who put their system to sleep often.
Set the various misc settings for the automated task [sample]. For my case, I have the system force-close if there is a crash/lock.

And that's it!

You can test the task simply by right clicking on the task in the task scheduler and selecting 'Run'. You'll see a little CCleaner icon in your system tray as it runs and it'll automagically go away when it's done it's thing. I would suggest, while you're in the Task Scheduler window, to export the task so that you dont have to do all this if you decide to format the system!

'Global Agenda' (7.5/10)

2010-04-21T12:26:00.002-04:00

Ah Global Agenda. After the disaster that was me being an early adopter of Fallen Earth and me almost tried the failure that was Aion (thankfully my caution after Fallen Earth saved me from that). I swore off all MMOs (other than Hellgate) without first trying the game out via a demo or something (to ensure the game doesnt have magical aim). Global Agenda seemed neat in that it was an attempt at mashing together several different genres:

HUB based MMO
Shooter (First and Third person)
RTS
RPG

For those familiar with Hellgate, it can be summarized as a mashup of the Hunter and Templar classes shoved into a post-modern espionage environment. The player assumes the role of a genetically engineered agent working against the government entity, 'The Commonwealth'. (insert standard totalitarian/repressive government backstory here). For those interested in the actual backstory, there is a whole lot of it.

The player choses from one of four classes: medic (healer/poision), assault (heavy weapons/tanking), recon (stealth/sniper) and robotics (turrets and drones). The game splits into three portions: PvE, PvP and AvA. The first two are pretty standard staples of MMOs. The last, Agency vs Agency is the attempt to blend a persistant world and long term strategy i.e., you and your Agency (the equivalent of a Guild), try to capture/control/own territory which in turn, gives resources/research for better equipment etc.

The game has free-to-play and subscription modes (although for now, all content is free to play). I dont think I'll be paying for it anytime soon though: it's a bit too hollow/mechanical to be worth monthly fees (I play mostly PvE). That being said, I quite enjoy the light-RPG elements and the greater emphasis on tactical awareness than your usual MMO/RPG where it comes down to either [a] better gear or skills or [b] just having a higher level number (aka Borderlands).

Both-ways-points:

Armor is entirely cosmetic and has no stats or anything. This is slated to change in the upcoming patch with the introduction of statted armour but for the time being it's a nice change from having to worry about loot and it's more of a player-skill thing. Of course, it kind of saps away the appeal of playing the game if there is no loot to farm or get excited over. The game does have an independant upgrade element (conveyed in the form of neural implants and such) which lets the user have upgraded stats and such independent of the armour (so no more worrying about picking better vs prettier armour)
Skill points can be freely reset. This is nice if you play both PvP and PvE and it's great for beginners looking to try different builds and different skills and such. Down the road though it kind of takes away from the attatchment the player might have with the character if it's so brainless to respec.

Strong Points

Unreal Engine 3. The game looks fantastic. The aiming mechanics are decent (sniping is a bain in the butt as bullets arent hit-scan ... the delay is about 400ms give or take)
In addition to the standard guns and such, each class has melee weaponry -- and the game encourages you to use it as it doesnt drain energy/ammo, generates morale boost twice as fast (the equivalent of Limit Breaks) etc. Definitely adds a different take to the game
Get up and go. Gameplay is very straightforward (on paper). Since the elements are mostly cosmetic, there's not as much of a need to sit around and choose gear etc (although different gear options are available, the player is aware of all of them at the very start so they can be ready for it)
Self-healing is a very conscious decision. Each class has the ability to self-heal. When triggered, the player will (over a brief period), recover all hitpoints but at the cost of a much slower movespeed and no energy/ammo regeneration. Makes players think before mashing the heal button (which also has a cooldown).
Jetpacks. The ability to fly is awesome -- doubly so when it has tactical merit and isnt just for show (ahem, Aion).
Class distincion. The classes are exceptionally well thought out: each class has it's own very specific role to play in the group. There isnt the problem of one class ninjaing everything, because it's just not doable.

Weak Points

No loot! This totally takes away from gameplay as there's much less of a reason to come back again and again on quests
Quest queing. It's somethign I dont understand - you cant just go and play solo (in fact, you have to play with 3 other people... ugh... humans). A friend of mine tried to explain it to me: the reason for queuing is because the servers cant handle thousands of concurrent instances firing up (which I guess is also why you have to play with 3 other people - it drops the server load by 75%). Ugh. Get a bigger server.
Little UI bugs and issues: so many of them to name, while the overall look and feel is done up well and the glitches are minor, they really chip away at the overall polish
Stupid players. Nuff said.

All in all, a damn fine start. Needs some work to polish it up but worth the money. If you were on the fence, go try the trial out. Bottom line: 7.5/10.

Related

'Torchlight' Review (8/10)

2010-03-29T19:08:00.003-04:00

I had no idea Torchlight was going to be so much fun. Then again, if we disect the game, it's really a rehash of the very tried and true Diablo formula. I bought the Steam version and so, it's got some nuances to get used to but at the end of the day, it's a hoot to play. There is, however, one absolutely unforgiveable failure of the game -- no multiplayer! For a game that so faithfully reproduces the tried and true Diablo formula (albeit with a brighter and cheery outlook on things), it's very dissapointing to not be able to fire the game up for some good old fashioned LAN partying.

The game mechanics (and the game as a whole) are, very much a retake on Diablo II. Players familiar with the franchise will recognize numerous elements from olde. For the benefit of those who were unfortunate enough not to have experienced the fun that was D2,

Gambling. You pay a not-insignificant (but not prohibitively expensive) fee for a random item that has not been identified. Upon purchasing said item, it becomes identified as either totally epic, a waste of money or somewhere in between.
Three classes (as per the original Diablo). They've been reinterpreted slightly, but the mechanics are pretty standard fare: a melee fighter, a ranged fighter and a pet summoner/caster.
The need to identify almost everything (although sadly there is no Deckard Cain to autoidentify stuff for you).
Socketing and enchanting are back however the mechanics for handling enchangement are, in my opinion, superior.

Large portions of Torchlight have a very heavy Diablo feel to them -- because it's development was led by the team in charge of Diablo/DiabloII. The 'twist' on the dark and gloomy feel of the Diablo universe comes from the infusion from the team that was responsible for Mythos. Funny enough, this was also the same group from Hellgate London. It's a small [developer] world after all.

By far and large Torchlight's strengths draw from it's tried and true roots:

Simplicity. It is ridiculously easy to get up and going with the game. If you've ever spent any amount of time in gaming and a-RPG gaming in particular, then you probably already know all that you need to know to play the game.
Endlessness. I've played the game now for flatout 35hours. And while I've mastered several mechanics of the games, the quests, the baddies, the exploration just goes on and on. Sure sign of a good game.
Oddities. The inclusion of a permenant cat/dog pet that you start the game with - that can carry loot, go back to town and sell on your behalf, fight and even cast spells and transform ... an amazing addon to what could have been a really silly trivialty. The inclusion of 'fishing' as a farmable activity that is totally unnecessary but is a totally risk-free and potentially beneficial activity allows for a nice break from the hectic in-your-face hack-and-slash.
Enchantments. The mechanics for enchanting items is awesome: you pay a fee to get something enchanted and with every successful enchantment, you the chances of a failed enchancement go up (by 2%) ... and when it fails, you lose all of the enchantments (even the ones that came with the item!) Makes for some good addition studies!

Torchlight isnt perfect though: while the click interface is relatively straightforward, you get the feeling that (even totally zoomed out at 1920x1200), every thing is just too cartoonized-big which makes it hard to click on discrete elements. The lack of a rotatable camera is kind of a sore point (it is, after all, 2010) but with the simplicity of how the game works, it's not as necessary as others. The big downer is, of course, lack of any kind of multiplayer.

For a game to spawn from the people who made Diablo/DiabloII - to not have multiplayer is a damn shame. Especially when you sit down and you play the game for a dozen hours and you realize how smooth the experience is (in general). It just feels that the lack of multiplayer totally saps what could have been an absolute blast of mayhem. There are reports that there is a free-to-play MMO in the pipes, so I guess I'll cross my fingers but it's still a major dissapointment.

Would I pay the $20 regular price for this game? Without multiplayer, not a chance. I probably would have valued it at $15 but lucky me, scored it on a $5 Steam sale. For that kind of a discount, it's a positive no brainer. Bottom line? 8/10.

Addendum
This game has a neat "feature" of being synchronized with the Steam Cloud (SC). While I'm sure the SC is wonderfully intended and useful for certain games, there are many issues with getting the SC to "just work". I will rant about this later, with more vigor. For the time being, the issues with Torchlight and the SC fall into four general categories:

Problem. The SC copy is obsolete but it keeps downloading and overwriting my 'live' character. How do I update the SC copy so it doesn't keep doing this?

Find your runic data folder (see below)
Backup everything. Just in case.
Navigate to the "save" subfolder (so, runic games\torchlight\save). This folder will have a sharedstash.bin file (for your shared stash) and at least one .svt file (one per character, so 0.svt, 1.svt, 2.svt etc). There may be a backup.tmp file as well.
Find yourself a file date changing application. Here are some options: [A], [B], [C].
Modify the 'last-modified' date for all the files you want to move to the Steam Cloud. Pick a date that is newer than the date from the files in the SC. If you don't know how to figure this out, start the game, run around for a second or two then exit. This will cause the datestamp on the SC to be updated to 'now'. Now restore the backup you made above and rename the files with a date newer than that on the SC.
Start the game normally. You will get a popup indicating that the files you have are newer than that on the SC and whether or not you want to update the SC.
The SC is now updated with the files from your local instance

Problem. I want to enable/disable the SC.

Part 1 - Getting the game to ignore steam cloud

Find your runic data folder (see below)
Find the local_settings.txt file (located in runic games\torchlight\)
Look for a value IGNORE STEAM CLOUD
If you want to enable the SC, set this to 0. If you want to disable the SC, set this to 1.

Part 2 - Deleting the cached copy of the steam cloud download

Now navigate to your Steam folder.
Inside the steam folder, navigate to the userdata subfolder. You will see some numbered folders. Each folder represents a distinct user account that has logged onto steam from your computer. You can tinker through the cfg files to try and figure out which folder goes with which users although an easier solution would be to get another computer, install steam and login once.
Once you've found the steam folder for your account, look for a subfolder 41500. This is the game ID for Torchlight. You can make a backup of this if you'd like and then delete it. If you dont have this subfolder, then you dont have to worry!

Problem. I've disconnected from the internet, I'm running steam in offline mode and I've deleted my save games, but I the savegames are still being loaded from thin air!

See part 2 of the previous problem. Steam caches the save games (for some retarded reason). If you delete these saves then you wont have to suffer from this stupidity.

Finding your 'runic games' folder.

XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Runic Games
Vista/7: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Runic Games
There's a simpler way to get here, open a run-console (WIN+R) and type %APPDATA%

Running Series: Little Tweaks, Tips and Apps (Part 1)

2010-03-14T21:46:00.013-04:00

Welcome to the first of a new series of mine where I talk about various tweaks, optimizations for Windows power users. I can't stress enough that this is targeted at power users. For the benefit of random Googlers that get to this blog who may not be full out power users, I'll try to keep the description, instructions or whatnot as complete as possible (which is my style anyways). In this opener, I'll share one very useful app I've built out and a couple nifty tricks.

Contents

[Back to series]

System Path Tweaking
If you don't know how to alter the system path on your machine, look here. The exact same steps are taken for Vista/7. This little tweak will be referenced in a lot of my pointers: set aside a folder somewhere that is referenced in the system path (say, C:\MyQuickShortCuts). Now put all your shortcuts that you might need regularly in this folder. It's probably beneficial to rename the shortcuts to be shorter than the original name. Some example shortcuts I have in mine:

"ie" references "c:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"
"ie32" references "c:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"
"gm" references "ie www.gmail.com"
"g" references "ie www.google.com"
"yt" references "ie32 www.youtube.com"

As you can see, the limits are endless as to how you can reduce your type/click load.

Process Termination
Skip to the downloads here.

We Windows users (and possibly more likely, us power users) tend to get hung applications a lot. Whether it's because we're trying out the latest and greatest beta build of a some new fandangled application or we're tinkering with driver revisions, it happens. So we are all familiar with the CTRL+ALT+DEL, right-click, end-process. While it get's the job done, it's far too much work for me (on Vista/Win7 the process get's extended with an 'alt-t').

So I wrote up an application to reduce the amount of 'hands-moving-across-the-keyboard in non-optimal patterns'. I dubbed it "process killer". One of the nice benefits of it was that it was also a really clean way to kill all the various IE/Notepad windows open at once. That app, I wrote way back in the VB6 days.

Something missing from the original process-killer's functionality was the ability to kill select instances of an application. The difference here is that, if I've got 20 instances of Explorer running, running the original tool would kill all 20 instances whereas I might have only wanted to kill the one. So I set about to re-write the code (this time around in C#). The new version is smaller, lighter, faster, and has added functionality. I've kept the old version around for tech-support purposes - not everyone has .NET installed -- hell, I avoided it like the plague up until the waning days of XP, mostly due to the resulting systemwide 0.001% slowdown (although now with it's integration into the core OS and exponentially faster hardware, it's simply a non-issue for me at least).

Using the application is pretty straightforward. Simply call the application and pass the task-name of the offending application as a parameter (rewrite/legacy)

processkiller.exe notepad or pk.exe notepad
processkiller.exe firefox or pk.exe firefox
processkiller.exe iexplore or pk.exe iexplore
processkiller.exe devenv or pk.exe devenv

With the re-write, I've added the ability to kill processes based on their process ID

processkiller.exe 5449
processkiller.exe 2407

Of course, this is kind of clunky so, I would reccomend setting aside a folder (say, "C:\MyQuickShortcuts") and making a shortcut to the process killing application there. I renamed the shortcut to "pk" to reduce the amount of typing required. The second step would be to add this folder to the system path. See the 'System Path Tweaking' point if you don't know how to do this. Now you can kill processes with WIN+R, pk <processName>. Short and sweet.

Downloads

Legacy version (VB6, for systems without .NET). This will not be updated anymore. The file hashes are included in the zip. [Link]
Current version (.NET required, you can download it here if you need to). As I think of things to add to this, I'll add them (although to be honest, there's not a whole lot to be added to such a bare bones utility). The file hashes are included in the zip. [Link]
If either of the links are broken, feel free to leave a comment and I'll get back to you.

CD Image Ejection
I'm lazy. That being said, the less I have to use the mouse, the better as mousing around is notably slower than to-the-point shortcuts. I use Daemon Tools Pro Standard on my main machine and Daemon Tools Lite on various other machines. The one central irk is the amount of mousing required to eject an image from the virtual drive. The folks that make Daemon Tools have this documented but it's a timesaver worth repeating. While you can opt to eject individual drives (see the documentation link), I mostly run only one or two drives.

To implement this little trick,

Goto the location you installed Daemon Tools. If you are using DaemonTools lite then make a shortcut for DTLite.exe, if you are using the full version, make a shortcut to DTProAgent.exe.
Add the parameter unmount_all to the shortcut's target. Screenshots: [Lite] [Standard]
Put that shortcut in special folder that is in your system path. I would reccomend renaming it to something shorter like "ej". See the 'System Path Tweaking' point if you don't know how to do this.
Now to eject your cd images, simply WIN+R, ej

Note: you'll need to have command line parameters enabled! [Screenshot]

'Freelancer' Review (9/10)

2010-02-26T15:36:00.000-05:00

One of the best games ever. Freelancer is one of those games that comes around only a handful of times each decade. The sequel to StarLancer, Freelancer is a space-based flightsim-rpg (I use the term rpg loosely). While the story isn't exactly groundbreaking, the visuals and combat mechanics are relatively top notch. Even now, in the age of advanced shaders and physics engines, Freelancer still looks great and plays great.

The game introduces us to two factions, the Alliance and the Coalition which, for some reason or another, were locked into a stalemate stellar-war. At one point the Coalition gets a lucky break and deals a deathblow to the Alliance -- but not before the Alliance is able to launch several sleeper ships (think big transport ships built for the purpose of repopulating a system) to a far off galaxy in an attempt to 'start over' free of the petty war. The game starts about 2000 years after the sleeper ships make it to the far off galaxy.

In this world, you are a one Mr. Edison Trent (the guy on the cover) and you are one of the few survivors of an attack on a remote spacestation by an unknown force from [presumably] beyond the story's universe. Having been rescued from the wreckage, you are taken to another planet to start your life over again. Cue player.

The story's first few levels introduce you to the basic combat and interface mechanics. You are provided with a startership and basic funds and set loose in a sandbox-style universe. If you opt to play the storyline (i didnt) you attempt to unravel the nature of the attackers that attacked your spacestation in the pre-game and that's that. The sandbox multiplayer is much, much more entertaining. It simply amounts to the very simple formula of

Do quests to get money
Use money to upgrade ship/guns
Blow stuff up

Sure it's simple but it's elegant and, with the basics that simple, you cant really go wrong. The quests fall into the standard set of archtypes:

Blow up a bunch of ships
Assassinate a specific ship (on the higher levels, the marked ship doesnt show up until you grind through the first wave of escorts)
Retrieve something - similar to the assassination mission except you have to survive all the way back to the ship/station you got the quest from
Blow up a station - exactly like assassination missions except your target is a small space station

The game has a few more subtle/advanced mechanics like a trade route system where you can move goods from one planet to another (each planet has a predefined price it will buy/sell a good for, so maximizing profits involves going to and from specific systems with specific goods). Some goods are considered contraband and if you get scanned by police/military forces they will confiscate it (or you can refuse and they will open fire) while others are perishable meaning you have to haul ass.

Graphics and physics-wise, this game is absolutely top notch -- even compared against modern games. The backdrop worlds are positively gorgeous (something about coronas and space dust that's so soothing). It's also one of the first flightsims to offer newtonian physics (i.e. if you cut engine power in space, you should still continue along your initial flight path -- and with the use of maneuvering thrusters, you should be able to do so and turn around, presumably to fire at targets behind you). Anomolies such as radiation zones (which damage your "health" directly - bypassing shields), mine fields (both military and naturally occuring phenomena) and most obviously, stars are subtle elements of combat and gameworld that set this title apart.

This all comes to a pinnacle for the input mechanics -- this is a keyboard and mouse flightsim. No joysticks needed (and after you've played it, no joystick support wanted). The mechanics for handling spaceflight with a keyboard and mouse are absolutely butter-smooth and while it does take a little bit of getting to (possibly more if you're spatially challenged), that's what the training levels and starting zones are for!

Being able to scale to 128 players, the game is effectively a mini-mmo with dedicated servers - perfect for clan gaming. The entire freelancer world is bustling -- transports go to and fro on their trade routes, police/military ships patrol tradelanes (think of them as space highways), junk ships rummage through shipwrecks and various faction ships engage in combat with their enemy factions -- all of this happening regardless of whether there is a player in the area or not. In short, the game world is very much alive.

That being said, the game isnt without it's flaws. While the initial game universe is relatively massive for it's original launch time (2003) and it's passable for a 2010 title, there is the feeling that there could be so much more. That is largely dealt with by user mods such as Discovery and Crossfire. These mods and others like it add dozens of worlds, new ships, weapons and missions as well as graphical updates (I personally play Discovery). They dont however, do much to fix the glaring problem of the underlying engine -- it's boring! You have pretty much two major routes for playing this game

Do quests and get money (as mentioned above). With this route, after a few hundred quests you recognize that they will all be of one of the major archtypes and this gets very tedious. The game scales with your "level". Your level is a somewhat intangible measurement of your combat power (ship, weapons etc) as well as how much money you have (presumably money is a measure of 'potential combat power'). The game scales the missions to around your level, so as you level up, you'll find yourself fighting light-fighters, then heavy-fighters, then very-heavy fighters and lastly you'll be slugging it out with frigates and destroyers. The additional ship classes and ships from the various mods help to alleviate this a bit by providing more variety, but it ultimately boils down to the same formula.
Go sandbox and just blow stuff up, chaotic-pirate style. This works well too but there is a reputation system in the game so if you go around blowing up too many things, those factions will declare war with you (and factions at war with them will ally with you). This faction system is pretty subtle and simple but very well executed. Again, this is pretty tedious.

All the tedium isnt a bad thing per-se, if you happen to be a loot-collector. While Freelancer (even with the mods) doesnt boast the millions of items that, say, Boarderlands has -- Freelancer is vastly superior on [a] differenting between the weapons and [b] giving the user incentive to actually go farming and loot-hunting.

The last game flaw in the game revolves around some of the game mechanics. While it's a fairly advanced element (beyond the scope of this minireview), suffice it to say

Enemy AI is pretty darn predictable
Enemy AI aims really, really good. At the later levels, you're literally getting hosed by weapons fire and not just because there's 40 of them and one of you (sometimes the odds are worse) but because they all aim right where you're gonna be
Aggro-mechanics are a little broken. Definitely beyond the scope of this review, but sometimes it works against you (with regards to accidental shootings).

As for Vista/Windows7 support -- you can fully play the single player elements flawlessly without any work, however to work with multiplayer, you need to go and disable IPv6 before you can do anything. Scorewise I'd put this title at 9-9.5 out of 10 simply for the sheer fun and loot-appeal (particularly with the mods) but I'll round down due to the relatively blandness of the of the vanilla game and enemy AI -- the elements which you'll be interacting with the most!

A second look at zombie games...

2010-02-18T19:30:00.002-05:00

It's been some time since my Left 4 Dead 2 and Killing Floor reviews. While I didnt get around to making a Left 4 Dead review (I suppose for completeness sake, that'll be coming), many of the points for it were raised with my review of the sequel. Something I have noticed though (and I am definitely guilty of this) is a certain amount of bias and animosity that the two camps have. At the end of the day, both are solid games regardless of what 'professional' reviews conclude. They just happen to target two totally different market segments (something that, as you get more and more engrossed, you forget about). Here's to a second take.

Left 4 Dead / Left 4 Dead 2
The heavyweight, blockbuster titles from Valve, they definitely get some serious credit for bringing coop gameplay to the masses. It's definitely something that has been sorely missed since the days of Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. A smattering of games here and there have popped up (most noteably the Serious Sam franchise) but for the most part, co-op gameplay has been a niche market. The majority of coop gameplay up until L4D mostly boiled down to team deathmatch or control-point games such as the Battlefield and Call of Duty franchises.

So a big thank-you to Valve for reintroducing coop gameplay as a mainstream thing. Being a mainstream title the game (independent of the players) has some outstanding strong points:

With Boomers, players are [re]introduced to a multi-approach suicidal monster. While suicidal monsters are nothing new to the genre, they have mostly appeared as baddies that simply blind-charge you or ambush you in a one-time-use suicide attack. The Boomer's ability to [repeatedly] cause damage (assuming successful ambush-and-escape) is a fantastic re-take on the archtype of suicidal monster.
The genuine need for teamwork. While it is possible for an exceptionally skilled (and lucky) player to ninja their way to the end of a campaign/level, it is especially challenging in L4D/L4D2 as the special infected are specifically designed to require intervention from another player.
Modular, themed gameplay. A subtle re-take on the notion of "levels" and "maps", each level (a "chapter") is a part of a larger campaign which is delivered as a 'movie'. The ultimate AI controller, the 'Director' continues the overal cinematic theme. Even something as bland as the end-game score is delivered as closing credits. All in all, these are trivial things, but a very nice, cohesive touch.
Versus mode, provided a unique take and a twist on the competitive gameplay common with the Battlefield/Call of Duty genre. With infected-players having the ability to follow the survivors around in a ghost-form and then controlling when and where they can spawn (read: ambush), versus gameplay is very challenging (against a good team).
Most of all, the dynamic gameplay, courtesty of the Director is a very big selling point for the franchise and it adds a huge amount of value to the game in terms of re-playability.

Of course, a lot of these strengths can be readily twisted into really negative points about the franchise:

Boomers clip through walls allowing survivors to shoot them through the wall/door. Sure it's a minor thing and can generally be avoided by standing a bit further away from said wall/door -- but seriously, clipping? The first game was released in November 2008 -- clipping should have long been dealt with. While this isn't a fault specific to the franchise, it'still kind of sad as a whole, gamers are still dealing with issues like this.
With the sequel, a new special infected, the Spitter is introduced. It's fullfills a siege role in that it fires a blob of acid goop at an area on the ground, forcing the survivors to split up. Sure no big deal, it makes sense that you take ridiculous amounts of damage while standing goop. You do still, however, take damage if you are on a ladder and the spit is beneath you. While we can get into the details of arguing that it's vapor based damage (which then would lead to discussions about why you dont take more damage/sec while standing directly in it), it would have been so much easier for the game mechanics to properly handle this in a logical manner (i.e., if you are physically standing in, or get spat on by goop, you take damage, otherwise, you don't).
While the gameplay is fantastically fun and an overall, all-around challenge, there game is a bit too obsessed with teamwork. With hunters, smokers, chargers, jockeys and witches single handedly being able to take the player out of the fight, it seems a bit over the top. I guess if the AI (or average player) wasn't so retarded, it would kind of balance it out but alas that's too much to ask for (too many instances of being smokered ~3 feet from a survivor and having them unable to get to to me -- even though nothing is obstructing them).
The previous point leads to this: there is no way to play solo. Sure the game is marketed as a "coop shooter" but what if we just want to have a quick solo round during lunch break? In every other fps there is a mechanism for scaling the game to suit the number of players present. Yet the AI/system in the Left 4 Dead franchise is unable -- more like unwilling to do so. You are forced to play with teammates (whether they be humans or AI mates) and not doing so (i.e. shooting them or kicking them via the console), does not result in the Director (which is supposedly credited with being so flexible) scaling the game for anything other than four players.
Depending on which end of the technical spectrum you hail from, the gameplay graphics are either really good, passable or piss-poor. Overall, I would probably say the game has average graphics (leaning towards the lower end), particularly considering the often well-praised graphical capabilities of the Source Engine

This all leads to my ultimate complaints for the franchise: forced linear gameplay with artificial difficulty. Regarding the former, while I accept the need for crescendo events and can accept a general path from start to finish of a given level, the game forces the linear gameplay onto you as if it was still 2002. Sure the Director varies the maps a little here and there to make the game harder/easier based on how well you're doing, the ultimate result is very cookie cutter. With several hundred runs through each of the campaigns in Left 4 Dead and probably close to a hundred runs per campaign in Left 4 Dead 2, I can say pretty confidently that you can sort of zone-out and just muscle-memory large portions of the campaign -- after all, there's no [path] decision making to be had.

For the artificial difficulty complaint, it's not any given one thing, but the cumulative effect of dozens of little aggravations:

The spitter complaint above
Chargers being immune to shove attacks -- you can kill an expert-tank by shoving it to death, why cant you kill a Charger? (sure it takes damn near forever, but it should be doable)
Riot zombies being relatively invincible from the front -- even though we know full well the in-game weapons are quite capable of piercing police armor and that blunt damage is still highly effective against armor designed for to protect against piercing. While I recognize that this is getting a bit technical - especially when I had to lookup ballistic vests and armor piercing capabilities of M16s ([1], [2], [3] and [4] lol - hey, at least I'm thorough).
Not being able to shoot down smoker tongues mid-air (even though you can melee them)
Boomer bile dissapearing (midair) if you manage to kill the Boomer before it completes the attack
Why do the special infected have to make so much damn noise (or that often)? It almost takes away from the whole surprise-factor. While we can argue about making it a fair and balanced game (more of a concern in versus mode), the whole point of being a survivor is that you survived despite the odds. Perhaps if the harder diffficulty modes (or even Realism Mode in Left 4 Dead 2) removed/reduced the telltale noises, it would be more of a challenge.
An extension of the Boomer complaint above -- the game is rife with clipping issues. Released in 2008/2009, clipping should really be a thing of the past -- or at least it shouldnt be so rampant as it.

I am not entirely sure how many of these complaints are 'genuine' in that they are a fault of the core game itself or because support had to be made for consoles (I can't for the life of me, envision console players sniping out smoker-tongues midair). I imagine that some concessions were made on the graphics and physics front (although I am particularly amused at how they marketed last-generation graphics as a style-feature).

Lastly, setting up any kind of functional private dedicated server is a serious pain in the ass. Sure you can get the GUI dedicated server and be up and runnin inside of 5 minutes. But getting any kind of "tinker and experiment" server (often meaning you need cheats) is a serious pain of having to deal with generic counterstrike-server elements. As someone used to Unreal Tournament style servers (both listen and dedicated), it astounds me how complicated it is to setup a Left 4 Dead 2 server for you and a specific friend to play with cheats (to test stuff out) in expert with realism mode enabled. While there's no reason to do so in the UT universe (namely, loading up cheats for spawning etc), setting up the equivalent server on UT2K3/UT2K4/UT3 is an absolute cakewalk consisting of a few mouse clicks.

I guess, if I had to psycho-analyze my pros and cons, the Left 4 Dead franchise's top points are

[+] The [re]introduction of co-op gameplay to mainstream
[+] Modular gameplay: players can jump in and out of games, also games are relatively short (perfect for lunch break matches)
[+] Having the Director present to make [small] tweaks to the gameplay is a very nice feature and even though, after several hundred runs through, the changes aren't so noticeable, it's a lot better than playing through static campaigns
[-] Very linear gameplay
[-] Underneath the hood the game is way too damn easy and it tries to hide it by artificially ramping up difficulty (see spitter/smoker complaints for some examples) and giving you retarded AI
[-] Dedicated servers are a serious pain the ass the setup and the game doesnt scale for the number of players

Would I reccomend Left 4 Dead? Absolutely. Would I reccomend Left 4 Dead 2? Absolutely. Would I advocate owning both? Probably. For me, if I hadn't gotten Left 4 Dead 2 for free (as a gift), I probably would regret spending $50 to buy it. While I had a blast playing through L4D2, it wasn't anywhere near the fun I had with the original (think matches scaling to 30,000+ zombies :P)

Killing Floor
I started playing Killing Floor after taking a short break from Left 4 Dead - roughly around the point when Expert mode was getting too easy, due to [a] having done probably close to 1500 runs through the campaigns from start to finish and [b] having gone through the configuration files with a fine tooth comb (with a keen eye for the spawn interval, placement percentages and stats for everything).

When you get to the point of having timers setup on your keyboard (Logitech G15 v1) to keep track of special infected spawns, you've probably spent too much time on the game ;) Even though I found the game lacking (perhaps I found the players lacking, rather than the game itself, although the playerbase and the game are somewhat tied together). In either case, I took a break and bought Killing Floor and didn't expect a whole lot from it.

Killing Floor started out as a mod for UT2004 back in 2005 and was released in 2009 as a standalone game. So from the get-go it's not a big-budget deal like the Left 4 Dead franchise was. I thought L4D had a simple store, background-lore and character personalites, Killing Floor practically throws any semblence of story out the window. Just as well, KF is much more about the combat mechanics. Built on Unreal Engine 2.5, the combat mechanics are practically above reproach. And until I had logged dozens of hours on KF, I had previously extended L4D's Source engine the same benefit.

Killing Floor is wave-based with specific downtime in between waves for you to catch your breath and stock-up on weapons and ammunition. Specifically, between waves, a trader is available to the players where they can make purchases (armour, grenades, weapons, ammo). Money is earned by killing zombies and the trader's location moves around the map through a predetermined set of locations. This means that, as the wave draws to a close, you should begin to find your way towards the location where the trade will appear next (the location is indicated on your HUD as an arrow and distance gauge).

Before we get into the pros and cons, one thing is noticeable immediately: there is no notion of "common" infected. Everything is a special infected (or in Left 4 Dead 2 parlance, a split of uncommon and special infected).

Common infected are represented with Clots, singular zombies that have the ability to hold you down and keep you from moving (effectively performing the task of the mob of common infected in Left 4 Dead).
Boomers are represented by Bloats, which, instead of attracting the hoard with the bile, cause acid damage (which ultimately is much more threatening)
The Tank is represented by the Fleshpound, which (like the Tank), until you realize the trick to killing them, is much, much more threatening.
The role of the Spitter is represented by the Siren - she does an area of effect attack that distorts the players vision/aim and directly affects their health (ignoring armour)

While there arent really direct translations for the rest of the monster-cast between the two franchises, Killing Floor features all the requisite arch-types: heavy hitter, team-splitter-upper, suicide-bomber, generic filler monsters etc. The philosophy behind the monster designs is different between the two franchises. Whereas Left 4 Dead emphasizes splitting the team up and the player being helplessly killed, Killing Floor emphasizes killing the player directly.

This has two side effects: on the one hand, you are no longer outright dependant on the your teammates for survival but on the otherhand, balance is very important. This leads to the second aspect of Killing Floor: perks. There are several different classes available, each with specific strengths. As you play the game, you progress through various levels of the perks and get better bonuses. In short, the game gives you an incentive to continue the player (the downside being, 'what do you do when you have maxed out your perks'). The perks themselves fall within standard archtypes (sniper, melee, defence, support etc) so nothing too fancy there. Of course, with perks there comes the issue of balance.

But before that, the combat and core mechanics for the game very readily impress

Iron sights! No more aiming recticule where your bullet magically and randomly goes somewhere within the crosshairs, now you know exactly where your shots are going.
While each baddie has it's own sound, it isn't overbearing and forces you to pay attention to the audio cues (including footsteps) as to not be ambushed. Furthermore, the range at which you hear the audio is relatively short as to keep your on your toes
Sandbox gameplay. They dont make a lame attempt at stories or quests or missions, in fact they dont make any attempt. Just lock and load. This means of course, there are numerous ways to finish a level (you can camp, move around constantly, leap-frog etc).
The enemy is aggravating. Sure the enemies might just make a be making a beeline for whomever was closest to them when they were in target-aquisition mode, but the various subtle properties of the individual enemies make the difference (like how Gorefasts will charge you when they get close enough, or how Scrakes will be totally docile until you do a certain amount of damage, or how Fleshpounds will do the same but will also charge you after a certain amount of time anyways). Tie all this in with the basic lowly Clot being able to grab a hold of you and keep you from moving. Now add close quarters combat and you have a proper challenge.
As a whole the game is markedly harder (even in comparison to Left 4 Dead 2's Realism mode, it's significantly harder), largely due to the mechanics of the individual baddies, but also to the lack of unlimited ammo and lack of "shove".
Visually, although the UE2.5 is definitely showing it's age, it's significantly more graphic. Giblets flying every which way, slow motion effects (which, to be honest are kinda gimmicky), smoke, fire-glow. Sure it's an older engine but it certainly looks good for it. Things like [bad] visual clipping do happen but they are not as game-changing as they are in L4D.
Teamplay is encouraged and there are benefits to playing as a team (more efficient healing and welding being the only notable benefits) and running off alone is lightly discouraged (due to the increased difficulty) but it's not outright prevented by the game engine itself.
The game will scale for the number of players present (at the start of the wave). While the default is 6 players maximum, it is possible to run servers with player counts into the 100+ range. Setting up a quick server is very easy (even with mods and custom settings).
Being Unreal Engine based, there is a large community of modders and mappers already established. New maps are easy to come by (and the lack of need for 'story' means you can spend your entire time making the map, not worrying about scripted triggers etc)

Now these very strengths directly lead to the weak points about the game:

Sandbox play can be kinda dull. It's nice to have an objective more substanstial than 'survive'. This is a huge gripe from players transitioning from the Left 4 Dead franchise. I think is largely due to the thematic take Valve has done with the whole 'movie' thing.
On a related note, whiel the Left 4 Dead franchise doesn't exactly have 'story', a lot of that is overlooked by the character personalities - the character personalities in Killing Floor are bland as hell.
The game, being notedly harder than Left 4 Dead (although for anyone coming from a CS/UT background it's not particularly challenging). This is a combination of both Killing Floor being somewhat challenging and Left 4 Dead being easy. The default map that fires up the very first time you play the game (Biotics Lab) is not beginner friendly and consists almost entirely of close quarters combat.
On a similar note, iron-sight aiming escapes most beginners, having been spoiled with aiming recticles.
While Killing Floor doesnt have unlimited ammo, it has unlimited healing capabilities (there is a recharge time involved, mitigated if you play Medic class). In my opinion, having unlimited ammo in Left 4 Dead makes thigns a lot easier than having unlimited healing in Killing Floor
Smoke (from grenades) and fire (from flamethrower) obscures vision. This by itself is not a bad thing (lack of vision obscuration would be), but coupled with beginner players who spam both can be a bad thing
Being perk-based, the game is very dependant on the balance of perks.
Even though it is open-sandbox gameplay, each wave spawn is identical (assuming same game mode, difficulty and number of players), can get a bit dry.
There is no versus mode, this is purely a co-op title

In the end, Killing Floor is $20 (with sales dropping it down to $10 and $5 relatively often), and it is definitely worth that price tag.

Closing Thoughts

A lot of my comments sound like I consider the Left 4 Dead to be the [significantly] easier of the two franchises. That's because it is. To make the two franchises roughly equal we would have to either [a] in L4D, remove the ability of special infected to completely gimp a player and decrease the spawn interval for special infected from 45sec to 10 sec or [b] in KF, add the ability of some of the zombies to pin the player but reduce the spawn count by a factor of 2 or 3. Even with either of these changes, KF is still the more challanging of the two (hell, having done option A while still allowing the specials to incap).

So is it a big deal that L4D/L4D2 is [versus aside], appreciably easier than KF? It depends what type of gamer you are. As much fun as I had with L4D, having played KF, it's very hard to take L4D seriously, with all the little tidbits of artificial difficulty popping up. At the same time I can definitely say KF's wave-based combat can be a bit dry (would be a lot more fun if the waves didnt stop while the trader was open).

I think a large part of my personal bias against Left 4 Dead is the player-base. While I'm not saying the Killing Floor player base is any better, although, (a) being less off a block buster and (b) being a PC only game, it's probably true that the player base has better twitch aim (particularly since Left 4 Dead's aiming model is a 'softer').

While the advanced players for both games are, in my opinion, equal (L4D players having to rely on noobs to rescue them on the off chance and carry the team simultaneously and KF players having to carry the team against much harder opponents with less ammo), it's the beginner/normal players that get to me.

In KF, when you have a noob playing on a difficulty they shouldnt be playing on, they simply die and stay out of your way. Because no single opponent can incap you, it is quite possible to ninja your way through to the next wave. In L4D - if you have a noob playing, then you better hope that the AI players are still alive to rescue you when you get incapped. In short, multiplayer is fun and teamwork is fun, but not when it's shoved down your throat as a game mechanic.

Let's examine my experience with L4D/L4D2. The maps are linear -- there is only one way to progress from stage to stage (glitches and exploits aside). With the minor tweaks (and they are pretty minor) made by the Director, any given run through a campaign will be roughly identical in terms of spawn timings, quantity and make-up. Now assuming beginners play the map on Easy, why is it, that, when I'm playing on Advanced/Expert, I find other players getting lost? (seriously. If you're getting lost every which way, why are you playing on a public server on advanced/expert?). Second thing is the player that stops to kill everything and explore every side path. Sure it's fine if you're playing with friends or you are playing in a somewhat story-style 'move and clear' but if you're playing online (whether or not it is coop or versus), it just boils down to getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible (after all, the longer you sit there, the more time there is for stuff to spawn). That being said, every one should be within about 10-15 feet of each other. Not so. I'd look back and see at least two players about 200 feet back. Two hundred. No joke. I don't know how it's possible - maybe their foward-key broke and they had to run down to the store and buy a new keyboard? It's not like my character (Francis/Ellis) runs notably faster than any of the other characters lol!

So I guess that's the ultimate downturn of L4D for me - being stuck with crummy players that decided it was time to play multiplayer on public servers (in modes other than easy/normal) who [a] didnt know the map layout and/or [b] couldnt keep up with the leader/rest-of-the-group. Do players like this in KF exist? Absolutely. So many times I see level 0-2 players joining Hard difficulty servers.... the difference is they die right away (and usually rage-quit, resulting in the next wave autoscaling to account for one less player). In short, KF is much more naturally selective.

Are there good teams for L4D/L4D2? Absolutely. Is it possible to find them on random public servers? Probably. However, are you more likely to have to work with lost/confused ones? Definitely.

So I guess my ultimate issue is that L4D is more forgiving than I would like (and I'm certainly not the best player out there - not even close!) . And while it's still loads of fun as a lan party game where you are all figuring out a map or whatnot and dying over and over again, I think, it's a courtesy thing to not continue to play on a difficulty level that is beyond you.

'Nation Red' Review (9/10)

2010-02-17T17:15:00.000-05:00

One of the most entertaining games I've played as of late, Nation Red is fast-paced, arcade action game. It implements a tried and true formula of holding-out against the hoarde of creeps (in this case, zombies). To me, it is a modern take on Crimsonland, a classic shoot-em-up game. The multi-directional shoot-em-up genre is pretty well defined and there's not a whole lot that any given game of the genre can do to improve the formula. Thankfully, Nation Red sticks to the formula and simply offers a simple premise (zombies) and a fantastic graphical overhaul.

When I fired up Nation Red for the first time, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, the screenshots I saw on the Steam store were pretty impressive for what I thought to be a simple arcade game. The screenshots aren't touched up -- the game's ingame graphics match. The basic gameplay is pretty simple: you spawn in a zone (which you cannot leave) and zombies start to flood into the zone (presumably in an attempt to mash your face). The zombies fall into roughly five different subtypes:

Plain, simple zombies. These are the simple zombie's we're all familar with.
Plain zombies armed with basic melee weapons like axes and machets etc
Fat zombies. Just as the description says, presumably, they have more hit-points.
Suicide zombies. Similar to fat zombies, except they self-detonate when they close in on you.
Boss zombies. Tons of hitpoints and a weapon of some sort.

As you kill the zombies they may drop various powerups ranging from different weapons (both melee and ranged) to temporary boosts (such as spawning an auto gun turret for a short duration). You also gain experience which you can invest the subsequent skillpoints into permenant perks (such as improved accuracy, increased ammo etc).

In addition to 'missions' and freeplay modes (with the difference being that freeplay has an unlimited number of zombies coming for you), there is a barricade mode, were you need to prevent the (also unlimited) zombie waves from reaching a certain point.

While the environments are pretty plain and limited (really, they all boil down to a relatively small recatangle with some doodads for decoration/atmosphere), the sheer combination of different perks (there's about 50 of them!) and weapons and powerups (probably another 50 here too) means that each play will be a different experience.

On the whole Nation Red is a superb game however there are a few weakpoints (most of which stem from the subgenre as a whole):

Performance in the later waves will hurt. While the graphics engine is relatively lightweight and efficient, facing down 1000+ ragdoll-physics-enabled zombies can be relatively streneous.
It would be nice to have maps that didnt reduce to simple empty rectangles. It'd be nice to have doodads to run around for cover or even a couple natural chokepoints thrown in.
There is a noticeable delay between when you select a perk and when you con resume shooting again. While this is a trival non-issue for quite some time at the beginning, later on, when you're surrounded by a few hundred zombies, it can be a bit 'exciting' as you mash the shoot button in an attempt to make the guns fire again!
While I appreciate the attempt at co-op/multiplayer, it is very weak. Co-op multiplayer is supported on a single-machine (presumably with one person using a controller, the other using a keyboard mouse). It'd be nice to have real-multiplayer, as this is definitely a game that would play very well.

The game is definitely good fun. It's a bit expensive at $20 (a $10 price tag would be more appropriate), but I wouldn't (and don't) regret buying it at all. All in all, 9/10.

PS.
On a parting note, I think the #2 guy was thinking he was pretty cushy, having doubled the #3 guy. Then I come along and quadrouple him. Can't imagine he's too amused with me!

Some Steam titles to keep an eye our for...

2010-02-08T23:02:00.001-05:00

A few of the titles I'll be keeping an eye out for price drops for! With the exception of Perimeter 2 and STALKER Clear Sky, I think I've played through (and beaten) all of these games (some of them excessively so), but for some reason or another, they just dont strike that sense of worth for the asking price. But that's what random sales (and the Christmas sales) are for!

Risen. (launch price $50, currently $50). A positively wonderful game all around (read my take on it here), I cant see myself shelling out $50 for it. Ideally I'd be waiting until $20-25 but the quality and experience is good enough for me to consider it at $30.
Prototype (launch price $50, currently $30). Loads of fun, but never was this ever even close to a $50 title. Pricing it at $50 is just a side effect of being an EA blockbuster title. The current price tag is a bit easier to swallow but I'll be waiting until it's closer to $15.
FEAR2 Project Origin (launch price $50, currently $50) and FEAR2 Reborn DLC (launch price $10, currently $10). A solid game for sure (particularly the DLC), but I'd be hard pressed to value it at $50. Compared to the original, FEAR2 definitely comes up lacking in terms of draw-you-in gameplay and horror-mechanics. While the title has it's moments (when you're first introduced to the crawlers or the puppetmasters), the charm wears off more quickly and you're left with a brainless shooter. I'll be waiting for this to drop to $25 for the combo.
Crysis (launch price $50, currently $30) and Crysis WarHead (launch price $40, currently $30). There was a Christmas sale for both of these for $25 I think, I guess I should have nabbed it then. Then again, having played through both games, I wouldn't say they are worth the $25 bundle price. At least not from a gameplay perspective. From a benchmark/stresstesting perspective, definitely worth it. There's always next Christmas
Perimeter 2 (launch price $30, currently $30). While this is a totally wonderful and genuinely challenging game (at least based on by experience with the first one), for such a niche title, I wouldn't say it's worth the $30. I'll be waiting for this to be in the $10-15 range.
Sacred 2 Fallen Angel (launch price $50, currently, $30). I already own this, but it's a relatively good price for what you're getting. To be frank, the price could probably use a reduction as Ascaron went bankrupt! (t'is a real shame).
Fallout 3 GOTY (launch price $50, currently $50). Solid game and as much as I hated the blending of diceroll and fps combat mechanics, was pretty good. For better or for worse this game was built on the oblivion engine -- and having spent countless hours (or days) on that engine, Fallout3 is somewhat of a cakewalk. The downside is that F3 is noticeably less action-oriented, which left me feeling bored. To me, this should be priced at $30, but I'll be waiting for it to drop to $25 before I consider it.
Serious Sam HD (launch price $20, currently $20). I already own it (read my review on it here) but this is loads of fun and the refreshed engine is gorgeous. Is it overpriced what amounts of a [major] cosmetic overhaul? Perhaps. but I never really played the original. I will, however, be waiting for the sequel. While I'd consider this game at $20, it's probably better suited to the $15 segment.
Killing Floor (launch price $20, currently $20). For the sheer amount of time I've put into this game (800hrs+), I've gotten my fair share of value from it (read my review here). This game regularly has price drops down to $10 or $5 so definitely a title to keep your eye out for.
STALKER - Shadow of Chernobyl (launch price $50, currently $20) and STALKER Clear Sky (launch price $20, currently $10). While the original was not $50 worth of gameplay, their current prices definitely reflect some serious bang for buck.
Dark Messiah Might and Magic (launch price $50, currently $10) Pretty tempted by this pricewise, but I dont really care to play it any time soon (and I dont expect the price to go up), so I'll be waiting for that random price drop.

Last updated: Feb 8 2010

Running Series: Win 7/Vista Aggravations (Part 2)

2010-01-27T10:59:00.007-05:00

Welcome back, this is the second edition of my running series on Windows 7/Vista aggravations. In this segment, I'll address the nagging automagic updates and excessive collection of crash dumps.

Contents

[Back to series]

Problem 1 - One of the really nice things about the "Automatic Updates" initiative from Microsoft is that it [correctly] assumes most users don't care to (or have the time to) constantly update their operating system (even if this means that there are large, gaping holes in functionality and/or security). All in all, this update system is pretty swell and by itself, it's a totally wonderful thing. However, problems arise when updates need to reboot the system in order to be completely installed.

Sure, that's understandable -- you can't update critical files while they are still "live" and we all understand that. It's just that we are usually in the middle of something and the damn update window pops up. At best, it's a curse-inducing annoyance and at worse, you'll be in the middle of doing something fullscreen, then next thing you know your full screen environment is gone and you've managed to press space (and magically the 'restart now' button was default-selected) to be pressed. We've all seen it...

For some users, depending on your update settings, you may be get even more annoyed because you can only postpone it either once or the update system ignores your postpone request and just goes ahead and reboots the system anyways.

Solutions
Some or all of these may be of help. Some of the solutions involve accessing the group security policy. This is done by running "gpedit.msc" from an administrative run-window. Here's a screenshot for gpedit if you need it.

When this pops up the first time, run the following, bolded text from an administrative command prompt net stop "windows update" (yes, with the double quotes). This will kill the nag window. You need to run this as an administrator. You can make a shortcut to this if you'd like to streamline the process. This is the least invasive 'fix' so if you're not comfortable messing around with core system settings, this should alleviate all the symptoms.
Fire up gpedit.msc from a run-window and navigate to Local Computer Policy >> Computer configuration >> Administrative Templates >> Windows Components >> Windows Update.

Now if you're one of the unlucky ones where you can postpone it once and after that the system reboots itself (or worse, the system ignores you and reboots itself anyways). Then you can try this. Loo k for the entry "No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations". If you set this value to "Enabled" then, it should prevent the forced reboot (although it won't get rid of the prompt).
If you don't mind the prompt so much (because, the prompt itself is not evil, it just happens to be that we are busy when it wants to reboot) then look for the entry "Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations". By setting the value to "Enabled" and setting the delay to 1440 minutes, you'll only get prompted once per day.

Keep in mind, you need to manually restart your computer to actually have the updates finish their installation.

Problem 2 - Crash dumps are handy when you're trying to help a developer track downa bug (or you are the developer!) but more often than not, they simply take up space. Having the last crash dump is handy (in case you are inclined to try and figure out the problem), but Vista/7 keeps 50 of them! This is just a waste of space!

Solution.

Fire up regedit. If you don't know how, here is a pointer to get you started.
Navigate to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl (FYI, HKML is an abbreviation for 'HKLM, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE')
Edit the MinidumpsCount value to whatever you want. The default value is hex-32 (or dec-50). I reccomend 1, maybe 2. Here's a screenshot if you need it.

Running Series: Win 7/Vista Aggravations (Part 1)

2010-01-11T13:38:00.011-05:00

Welcome to the first part of a running series where I rant about problems specific to high-performance Windows 7 installations and provide some insight into addressing them (and ultimately, the solution). Due to the close similarities, the problems encountered here and the solutions provided wiill almost certainly be extendable to Windows Vista and possibly, other Microsoft technologies.

Contents

[Back to series]

Problem 1 - Creating a new tab in IE7 and IE8 takes forever. This has bugged me for the longest time and I only recently had the time to stop and take a look at this. For the most part, I've used Internet Explorer faithfully (since version 3) and almost exclusively. From time to time I may run FireFox or Chrome on a temporary basis although to be honest, the only alternative browser I can stand for long term use might be Opera.

Regardless, my performance standard was IE6 and it will forever hold a very dear spot in my IT-heart for it's absolute sheer performance. When I say performance, I don't mean page-load times (because, almost no matter how inefficient the browser is, your connection will offer several order of mangitudes more latency) and I certainly am not referring to the memory usage or cpu usage. What I am referring to is how fast I can [a] open IE6 and [b] open a new instance of IE6 (since IE6 doesn't have tabbed browsing).

In IE6, you simply snap CTRL+N, AL+D and you start typing your new url. No matter how fast you execute that (provided your system isn't bogged down with something else of course), your keystrokes are executed as you type them. Try that in FireFox and you have about half-a-second of delay for the new tab or the new window to fire up. Sure the half-second latency isn't a big deal in and of itself except your keystrokes arent buffered for that time. This results in only the second half of the url being entered into the address bar. Fail. Before anyone complains that IE6 was "cheating" because it was already loaded into the system on startup .. too bad. Like a good little end-user, I am only concerned about the results. If there was an option to install the browser engine for an alternative browser to reduce new-tab/new-window launch time to < 200ms, than I'd be all over it -- provided the ALT+D shortcut was preserved (early versions of FireFox didn't have this shortcut).

In any case, this couldn't last. With the obsession with tabbed browsing and the introduction of IE7 and later, IE8, the transition resulted in massive load times for new tabs (oddly enough, the load time for a new window was still manageable. By long load times, I am talking about 5-10 seconds to fire up a new tab as it sat there with the "Connecting..." page title. Quick search through Google results suggests disabling addons although it doesn't seem to help everyone (myself included).

Solutions
Some or all of these may be of help:

Disable third party extensions (i.e. Skype addon, Google search bar etc). I don't use these anyways so it's of no loss to me (likewise, it also does nothing to boost new-tab load times). If you need specific addons, you can manually disable/remove addons via the Manage Addons manager.
Switch to a blank page. By default IE shows you the about:tabs page which takes a long time to load. For me this offered the biggest improvement. While it doesn't match IE6's new-window loadtime, it's definitely in the realm of tolerable.
Use 64bit IE where possible. Personally, the only time I use 32bit IE is when I need to work with Flash (as it doesn't support 64bit) and then, I have greatly reduced expectations (as Flash is terrible in terms of efficiency and performance).
You may need to re-register some DLLs. For most people, this won't make a difference as it's only really the systems where the settings are in a serious state of disrepair that this will actually be the case.

Problem 2 - Windows Live Messenger (aka MSN) doesn't show up in the system tray. This is a wierd problem to track down in terms of generalities. I have multiple Windows 7 and Windows Vista setups and this problem, so far, has only cropped up once. Essentially, when you close/minimize MSN, it simply minimizes to the "quick launch" bar and doesn't give you an icon in the system tray which we've all gotten used to.

Solution
It's not really elegant and you may have to reapply the fix when MSN gets updated and this issue may ultimately be fixed and not require this workaround, but you just have to run MSN in compatability mode. From the list of available modes, try the options from most-recent to least-recent until you find one that works. For me, the 'Windows Vista (Service Pack 2)' option (which is the latest available compatability mode at the time of writing) gets the icon in the for me.

Problem 3 - Synergy tray icon doesn't show up and the "test" functionality works but the "actual" functionality doesn't. A little background summary, Synergy is a utility that allows for mouse and keyboard commands to be transmitted through the network so that you can control another machine's mouse/keyboard with your own. It differs from remote-desktop in that the other computer doesnt need to be signed-out (this effectively means the other computer can be controlled both via the mouse/keyboard that is physically hooked up to it or via Synergy). This video pretty much shows what Synergy is all about.

Now about the problems: the system tray problem is similar to that for the Windows Live Messenger (MSN) problem listed above however the issue of the test-functionality is a bit more perplexing. For this issue, when you have finished setting up Synergy and you click the test functionality, everything works. So then you start your server/client and, even though the tray icon indicates that it is connected, nothing works (i.e., your mouse/keyboard commands are not transmitted).

Solutions

To fix the tray-icon problem, you need to run the synergy application (synergy.exe) in compatability mode. Again, try the different compatability modes from most-recent to least-recent. For me, 'Windows Vista (Service Pack 1)' was the most recent compatability mode that worked.
The other issue is related to the auto-start functionality. If you set Synergy to start 'When Computer Starts', you will have this problem however if you use 'When You Log In', the problem goes away. This has to do with how Windows 7/Vista handles services. For a quick workaround, you have have the system automatically logon for you and Synergy will fire up as soon as the automatic login is complete. I'm not entirely sure about how to fix this issue for those users that need synergy to work on the login page (i.e. to type in your credentials over the network). It's possible that Vista Syn or Fire Daemon may be of help.

'Defense Grid - The Awakening' Review (7.5/10)

2009-12-25T23:07:00.000-05:00

Defense Grid - The Awwakening is a very fresh take on the time consuming 'tower defense' genre. The genre itself is not very deep: you have a set starting budget, a set number of towers (or defenders, guns or whatnot) and a set number of upgrades available to the towers/defenders/guns. Income is obtained by killing the inbound creeps. Overall, a very fun game to sink a few hours into (much more if you want to hunt down achievements or leaderboard). While it lacks the outright variety that the community-made Flash counterparts have, it makes up for it with polish and eye candy.

What does set DG aside is that it's a very polished game. Sure there are bugs, sure there are aggravating interface designs, but compared to the popular alternative -- Flash based games, it's a godsend. Flash based games while fun and all, invariably suffer from three flaws:

Flash won't run on 64bit browsers (at least at the time of this writing).
Flash results in massive memory leaks over time. With 8GB of system memory, I've got quite the cushion of memory to fall back on so the leaks themselves (on the order of 100-800MB of memory -- depending on how long I play for) don't bother me per se, but the whole experience gets outright boggy.
Flash input detection is horrendous. This isn't a fault of Flash per se, but rather that it simply wasn't designed to deal with pixel-perfect mouseclicks. For some reason, it also prioritizes user-input (i.e. mouseclicks) lower than users would normally expect - you see this when you're bogged down with enemies and you need to build a tower but it just won't register your mouseclick.

While Flash based tower defense games are awesome and I love them for their ability to waste time, the switch to a 'real' (i.e. application) tower defense is friggen amazing. The gameworld is rendered gorgeously (not only compared to it's Flash based brethren but on it's own). It won't win any awards for graphics or anything but for it is, it's quite pretty. It's not just that:

You have a fast-forward function! For those of us who build our guns at the exit and work our ways towards the entrance (or just for faster gameplay), this now means we no longer have to wait for the lumbering enemies to get to us. After awhile you find yourself playing with the 'f' key permeanently pressed.
Checkpoints! Every few levels (10 or so), the game makes a checkpoint so if you need to or want to, you can go back and try again (or try a different strategy). I'm not a fan of checkpoints in most games, but this - this is the perfect genre to implement checkpoints.
Achievements, leaderboards and stats. Sure this is more a byproduct of the integration with Steam than anything else but it's a very subtle - but ince feature. The stats and leaderboards aren't really a new thing for tower defense games - the Flash tower defense maps have had them since the beginning but the achievements, while silly, do add some value (and replayability) to the game.

It's not all smooth sailing unfortunately. I think the biggest letdown is the lack of a map-editor and/or multiplayer mode. Both are available in WarCraft III based tower defense games. Of course the WarCraft III tower defense maps lack a consistant look-and-feel that DG has and the maps, being fan-made, can suffer from playability issues too. DG has a few flaws that you notice both right away and way down the road

There is a medals system that awards you gold-silver-bronze depending on your score. Yet there is no score indicator present when you are playing (the score is calculated based o the number of cores present, your current cash and the total value of your towers). It's such a small thing but very aggravating when you're trying to go for a score (either for the leaderboard or to obtain the gold medal) and you can't see your score until it's over.
You can't zoom out anymore and you can't rotate the camera. The former is the far more aggravating -- you have to scroll around and figure out what path connects with what. The latter doesnt matter too much on most of the maps - it's really only an issue with the maps with lots and lots of elevations.

Not major grievences really, in the end, the game is a damn good fun. I don't quite think it's $20 worth of fun, but at $10 it's a nobrainer. Overall score 7.5/10.

'Left 4 Dead 2' Review (8/10)

2009-12-01T18:17:00.000-05:00

Well I got a copy of Left 4 Dead 2, again. Sure I had the game before it was out and sure I beat the snot out of the game then. Sure, we engaged in tank juggling and shove-killed tanks. I could have wrote up a review on the game then but there would always be the air of "it wasn't legit" and "what if Valve patched up this issue or that problem" or whatnot. Was it worth me getting a copy? I guess it depends a lot on your group of friends and whether or not you enjoyed the first game in the series. All the strengths of the original are carried through here and amplified -- as are all the failings. My impressions of this game vary from 7 to 9 out of 10 and so, it gets the middleground of 8/10.

L4D2 is, like it's predecessor, is set in post-apocalyptic America however this time it's down south in Louisiana. The underlying mechanics are vastly improved from the original in addition to the 'surface-level' changes like the addition of the numerous new creeps and weapons and such. There is also the addition of two game modes: scavage and realism. The former amounts to a simplified (and improved) take on the 'control points' game play that populates (or plagues) the online FPS sector (i.e., Battlefield 2) while the later is a subtle but very refreshing take on the "how" of killing zombies.

Realism mode (RM) can be summarized as "headshots only" and "no stupid glow outlines" and it's a setting which you initially think is either brilliant or stupid (usually dependant on skill level) and after awhile playing it, you cant quite see how you played before (or you cant wait to go back, again, depending). Even though it sounds very daunting, it's actually almost no different than playing without it - provided you're not playing with a group of idiots.

This all said, the game is still functionally identical to it's predecessor: you move from point A to point B via a predetermined path in the gameworld and at regular intervals, an almost preset number of infected attack you with special and uncommon infected sprinkled in for good measure. Everything is perfect with only a few fail-points:

AI is retarded. There have been countless times where I've been pounced by a Hunter or snared by a Smoker with the AI player(s) literally feet away from me and yet they stand there. Doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. They stand. Only after I die, do they move on (and subsequently also get pounced or snared). This usually happens when the game surface is 'different' (i.e. roof or involving obstacles that the pathing cant seem to navigate). Given that L4D2 is just L4D with some cosmetic changes, this is something that should have been worked out a long, long time ago. Another thing that we still see is the sticky-AI characters -- they insist on following you around. Sure it's great when you're leading them around and such but really aggravating when you just wanted to go back one room to pick up something and they follow you back. Oh and to aggravate this, they move so damn slow.
Players are retarded. Totally not Valve's fault but when the AI sucks, your first bet is to turn to human players. Yet so many of them insist on playing without mics, not understanding the mechanics of "don't cross in front of other players where possible" and "don't panic shoot when there are friendlies". Again, totally not Valve's fault, but it totally destroys the fun-rating of the game. It should be noted that while I complained about this very thing in Killing Floor, it doesn't have nearly as much of a bearing there as it does here because in KF has a innate scaling mechanism both for baseline difficulty (i.e., the difficulty levels) and for microlevels of difficulty (number of players and perks). This means that retarded players, while aggravating, have virtually zero chance of survival (unless they get with the program)
Consoleitis. There's a lot of consoleitis in L4D2 and it's not just that subtle feel where all your movement feels smoothed out, no that's not really a major problem. It's the lack of a proper aim model. For a game that should trace it's roots back to the venerable Source engine, this is really pathetic. I'm not talking about physics or lighting or any of that stuff that would be really bad if they screwed up on, but i'm talking about hit-boxes. When you fire a bullet past an infected's ear, it should result in the infected recieving a headshot! A headshot means you have to hit them in the head. Not close to their head. Of course, to make things exciting, special infected have their own unique hitboxes. I wont talk about achievements that dont trigger correctly.
Lack of customization. Again, problems from the first have just been dragged along: you can't put passwords on listen servers, you can't set realism mode for singleplayer, you can't do scavage or versus mode as solo. The latter ones sound silly but what if you don't give a rat's ass about the story (it's weak at best -- the game is about go-go-go, not ooh-story) and you just simply want to jump into the meat of it without having to deal with humans... you cant.

The last point of note: is L4D2 worth it? It depends. I can say for a fact, if you enjoyed the first one, you will definitely enjoy the second. Is it worth $40-50 bucks? If you already own the original then hells no. Otherwise, it's definitely worth it - so long as you expect it to be arcady. Now if you're looking at the L4D + L4D2 bundle... that's a tougher call because if you have the latter, there is no reason to play the former at all. For those that own the original, if this expansion - err, sequel was [regularly] priced at $25-30, it'd be an instant reccomend (and a 9/10). That being said, L4D2 scores 8/10.

'Killing Floor' Review (9/10)

2009-11-25T05:15:00.001-05:00

It was just a matter of time before I got around to doing a Killing Floor review. This game clearly has it's roots spawned back to the good old days of co-op multiplayer mayhem a la Serious Sam mixed in with a healthy dose of class-based fun thrown in for good measure. The game is definitely not without it's upsets and faults but for the most part, I'm too busy playing it to be bothered.

Immediately, comparisons of Killing Floor to the highly successful blockbuster title, Left 4 Dead will come to light although it's worth noting that KF's roots started back in 2005 as a mod for UT2004. The formula is dirt simple and builds upon the not-as-well-implemented 'Invasion' game mode. Simply put, it pits the players together to deal with wave after wave of baddies (the stock Invasion game mode was either too easy, or too aggravating and the maps were designed with DM/TDM in mind rather than co-operative play). While this is nice in and of itself, what sets KF apart is the persistant perk system - the more you player, naturally the better you get - but now it isnt reflected just in real-world gaming ability but also in-game as well via a leveling system: "perks"

You can make the argument that a good player doesnt need to have perks to beat a game but the game mechanics of KF already deal with that in a somewhat elegant manner. Here's the jist of a KF game:

Players spawn with a knife and pistol and some starting money
As they kill creeps, they earn 'money'
At the end of each wave, an inventory store is available so that players can restock on ammo and buy/sell weapons and armor etc
Players also make some money for surviving the wave

So far, pretty straightforward. But when you increase the difficulty (either by adding more players or by increasing the difficulty mode, or both), naturally the creeps get harder (they move faster, hit harder and are more resiliant). Without any perks and such, you eventually run into a vertical wall of impossibility (on suicide difficulty, the creeps get a 75% bonus damage and hitpoints and move 30% faster ... not to mention there's more of them). I guess the argument could be made that good players can beat it without any help from perks (and if you really want that, you can also deactivate perks on your private games) but it's just not practical.

The other thing is, without perks, there's nothing that particularly makes KF different from Invasion. Perks, also, by their nature, help to promote teamwork and delegation. From a gameplay perspective, on the harder difficulties, you make less money per-kill and per-wave and yet you need to spend more ammo to kill things (because they have more health) and there are less items spawning in the game world (and less often too), so the perks - which give you discounts for your class's specific weaponry and ultimately, spawns you with items, is a necessity.

Killing Floor isnt without it's flaws and catching-issues mind you (although hearing me rave about it might lead you to think otherwise).

It's too damn slow. This is a common complaint and is usually voiced by noobs and/or during the first few waves where, for veterans, it is slow. Although, wily and/or more organized players will realize that these first few slow waves are made of pure awesome. Mind you, stuff like this doesn't happen in "real world" games involving randoms simply because - like every other multiplayer game - the intelligence and forethought of an [random] internet gamer is extremely lacking.
It's too hard. I hear this a lot from beginners (understandably). The game does have one bad point of starting having the default I-just-installed-the-game-first-time-playing map to 'Biotics Lab' which is definitely not beginner-friendly (think tight quarters corridor combat). This aside, the majority of the difficulty complaints are probably due to players choosing the wrong difficulty (read: not playing on 'beginner' when they are in fact, beginners).
It's too easy. I hear this a lot from veteran L4D player with the usual complaint being "there's so few zombies, how is this supposed to be challenging". These complaints usually go away when you play 6-man games on Suicide. It's then that they realize that 4-man L4D doesnt really differ that much from 1-man L4D.
It's too unbalanced. A mix of all theee previous complaints: there is a feeling that the first five or so waves (of a 10 wave match) are in fact too easy. Once you get to wave six or seven though, there is a dramatic increase in difficulty due to the introduction of the Scrake and the Fleshpound. This can, for the ill-prepared, result in a team wipe and complaints of "too hard" or, for beginners observing how specialized players can single handedly wipe out these threats in one shot, complain about how the game is unbalanced.
There's no friendly fire. Sure it's an option that can be toggled on but even then, even 100% friendly fire isnt close to what you get from Expert mode in L4D. Which kind of sucks (would be nice if there was an easier way to readily set the friendly fire percentage). Would also be nice if the friendly fire wasnt so "arcady" (i.e. one or two bullets should incap the player). Mind you, just like in L4D, over 90% of players don't know how to deal with friendly fire.

To be honest, these four complaints often disappear as players give it a chance and take the game seriously. Like any game where "leveling" is available, KF is a long-haul game and it's something the majority of gamers simply dont grasp. This isn't to say KF isnt without genuine flaws though:

Limited gameplay. Every serious match eventually results in pigeon holeing or turtleing. Sure, if you know the map layout and you know how to play (and with a tiny but of luck), you can run around solo/ninja for the first bunch of waves. After that, everyone huddles up and turtles down. Sure it works (in theory), sure, it's always interesting playing with people who don't know how to play as a squad or for that matter, know how to play their class, but after tens of thousands of kills, it kind of gets boring. There are maps where you can, instead, kite but that now just means there are two different playstyles that are polar opposites. (This being said, I cant think of another playstyle that I would want to add, but I at least recognize the [theoretical] limitation)
Overpowered/Underpowered Patriarch. We know he's supposed to be over-the-top and we know that he's supposed to be 'damn near unbeatable' but the complaint is there nonetheless. Depending on your class, preparedness and playstyle, the Patriarch can be anything from "zomg save me" to "yawn. next." I guess it would be nice to have an option of tweaking the difficulty of the Patriarch without resorting to HP/damage vertical-walls -- perhaps something along the lines of having the Patriarch spawn with a full wave's worth of creeps as well, that would go a long way towards jacking up the difficulty. As for thinking the Patriarch is overpowered, this often comes from simply playing the wrong class (like Firebug)
Too long/too short time between intervals. It would be nice if we could readily set the time in between waves to whatever we wanted. I totally understand why it is the way it is (to promote strategic planning and possibly to reducing camping) but it would definitely be nice if there was an option to [readily] run a specific settings for LAN parties or RP matches and such.
Crappy players. The universal complaint of co-op multiplayer. There are so many damn bad players out there. Ok, I can totally accept being bad on Beginner difficulty and maybe Normal, but the problem is when you get crappy players on Hard/Suicidal matches where they simply don't belong. Every single match, there's one or more retarded players that can't get with the program and die right off the bat. Just like in L4D, it's the crappy players that make for a crappy experience since, as the waves get harder and harder (and as they struggle/fail to keep up), it becomes increasingly impossible to carry them through the wave (usually with them complaining about how long it takes lol)

That being said, there's a few specific player-types that you'll always encounter

The ping pong player. In maps where there are tight corridors (think Offices), there's always some moron strafing left-right. This now means that everyone else can't get a clear line of sight on the oncoming hoarde but also that players using explosives (which are brilliant for tight corridors) are nullified (as they risk self-damage for hitting this ping pong player)
The stupid firebug. Firebug's are great at softening large masses of creeps but more often than not, they tend to just cover everything in fire (thus obscuring other player's line of sight) -- for single targets and such -- something that other classes are better suited towards.
The slow poke. In KF, your run-speed varies depending on your class, loadout and equipped weapon. Of the these three parameters, the only one you can really control is your equipped weapon -- but so often you see players not running with the knife. Meaning you have to wait for their dumb ass before you weld the door shut or you have to go back and rescue them from a mob that spawned. On maps like Foundry, it's crucial that you get to where you need to get to between waves (getting caught in the open is pretty lethal on that map) and there's always some straggler who drags everyone down.
I need money. Sure, we get that you need money for weapons/ammo/etc. But every game, theres some moron begging for money on wave 2. Firstly, you dont need money on wave two because everything can be killed with the starting knife and pistol and secondly, the amount of money you spawn with is enough to buy weapons that are more than adequate for the first FIVE waves. Lastly, it's wave 1, nobody has money!
The low-level. Higher leveled perks in KF, get bigger discounts on weapons (and thus dont need so much money), but on Hard/Suicide, there's almost always a low level (0-2) who joins, begs for money (instead of asking for a higher level to buy the weapon at a lower price directly) and then promptly dies because they have no idea how to play the game. This is usually followed by immediately quitting.
The wannabe-ninja. Many/all of the classes can, to some degree or another, operate independantly of the group for some/all of the match. But this isn't always ideal, especially with the later waves. But if you can do it successfully, then by all means. It's just usually the case that players run off and die in remote parts of the map (and then quit).

A lot of player!fails can be summarized into two root causes: naivete and pride. The former can be corrected with experience while the latter cant. It just happens to be that the majority of online KF matches are populated with one or two of the latter which wrecks the experience for the rest.

Enough ranting though -- the crappy players are not the fault of this game. The underlying mechanics are absolutely rock solid and KF offers a different take on the zombie apocolypse than it's more blockbuster brethen, L4D (to sum it up in a single phrase: fewer, much tougher baddies). Solid support for good solo and team-play with well thought out official maps, classes, weapons and baddies (ok maybe some of the classes/weapons are under/overpowered but that's a different rant which I try to avoid). On the whole, KF is definitely refreshing to play as it's definitely the more pure-shooter of the two (L4D has limited consoleitis as is, on the whole, an arguably easier game). Bottom line, 9/10.

'Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter' Review (9/10)

2009-11-24T18:51:00.002-05:00

Seriously! The Serious franchise is, in my opinion, one of the absolute best (FPSes) for LAN parties hands down. Sure there will always be room for CS/UT but there's always been love for multiplayer co-op and Serious Sam HD does not disappoint! As a virtual remake of the absolutely fantastic first game in the series (circa 1999), the remake had quite a high bar to live up to. But thankfully, Croteam didn't mess with the formula -- they just upgraded the graphics and so, it's pure brilliance!

There's not a whole lot to say about the game or the franchise that couldn't be quickly gleamed from the wiki. It may very well be that current co-op multiplayer games like Left4Dead and Killing Floor have their ancestry traced back to Serious. Mind you, neither L4D nor KF come close to the sheer chaos and ruckus that is Serious Sam. To be fair I've not played through enough of 'Serious Sam: The First Encounter' (the original release) nor the (content-wise) identical 'Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter' but from my time playing through 'Serious Sam II: The Second Encounter' and the bit of this most recent release if any measure, it's going to be an absolute riot!

The remake however is both gorgeous and humbling. The Serious franchise has always been about crazy draw distances (ok maybe not quite to Oblivion levels but that's no small order) and having crazy numbers of baddies on the screen at any given moment. I'm running a relatively new/old 8800GT at the moment and the performance is exactly where I expect: [seriously] awesome. With all the settings cranked to 'ultra' the game fluctuates between 15 and 50 fps but with a little tweaking I'm at a solid 50+.

The game isn't without it's downers though

There's a bit of consoleitis with respect to interacting with the menus and such but it's definitely tolerable (and to be honest, it might only be noticeable because my system is starting to show age).
There's a third person view, but it's a fixed distance (i.e.., no zoom). Granted, when you get close to walls, it automatically switches (intelligently) to first person view.
The game - like Prototype - doesnt support audio sampling rates above 44.1kHz. Attempting to start the game up results in a nice XAudio2 error (clicking Cancel, results in no audio in-game). It's more of an annoyance rather than a problem as the workaround is easy and they appear to be working on it.

Although it's not a problem per se, I do wish the game had less "story" and more "omg monsters go go go" to it, but I imagine it'll grow on me. That being said, the "problem" with the game really fall under "minor and/or nitpicky" so all is good!

Bottom line: a solid 9 out of 10 and for the price, a definite steal!

'Borderlands' Review (6.5/10)

2009-11-17T20:05:00.003-05:00

I tried Borderlands a few weeks ago when it was released with some mixed impressions - with the ultimate first impression being 6.5/10. The underlying core concept for the game is well deserving of praise however several really major elements bring the game down from what could have easily been an 8.5 or 9 out of 10.

The very, very first thing you notice when you start up Borderlands is an overwhelming sensation of console-itis. Lots of [PC] games nowadays are developed either concurrently with their console ports or are, as evident with Borderlands, a direct port of a console games. Let there be no mistake that console-itis is bad. Now whether it was poor coding (usually because of insufficient programming resources) or it's simply poor management (usually thinking it's not a big deal). For the most part, they're right as the majority of games nowadays only have a minor amount of console-itis. The usual (tolerable) symptoms are:

One or two short movies at the startup: usually the publisher's video is unskippable and everything else is
Softer aim and possibly the inclusion of autoaim and/or having autoaim enabled by default
Input smoothing and/or very poor aiming/movement mechanics
Checkpoints and loading screens

I wont mention lower quality graphics as I believe this to be an independant issue and hopefully, as consoles catch up (or rather their displays i.e., televisions) this will become less and less of an issue. So, regardless of what positive points the game has, this is the first - and lasting impression. It just seems that, every good point of the game seems to be brought down by an equal or worse negative point.

[±] Expansive world. The game world is pretty huge. I've read around that it dwarfs Oblivion's game world. This is pretty great however (and you knew there was going to be a catch), before one can begin to compare to the benchmark that Oblivion has set down, it should be mentioned that Oblivion's "smaller" world is, well, populated. Borderlands is, for the most part, a vast expanse of plain old wasteland. There's the occasional doodad here and there but no roving bands of marauders, no forests (I suppose that's befitting) but it just gives the impression of a great expanse of nothing. It should also be noted that in many areas, the edge of the gameworld (where you die if you cross), just kinda happens.
[+] Very well detailed settlements. It's important to note that while the spaces in between "zones" in Borderlands is, for all intents and purposes, barren, their zones/cites and such are meticulously designed with all sorts of stuff. It very much gives you the feel of a rustic old world. Is there more detail in the towns than Oblivion? That's a tough call: it's pretty close.
[-] Checkpoints. Checkpoints (used as respawn points) can be a mixed bag: too many and you remove any need for caution or skill however, too few and it becomes a pointless novelty. Borderlands gets the number (and for the most part, placement) just bang on. That being said, their mechanism for fast-travel is kind of dumb. I can understand making the fast travel a quest line (you don't start off with the ability to fast travel, it's a quest) however if they simply had a non-barren world, there wouldn't nearly be so much need for fast-travel as the old-fashioned route can often be more entertaining. Worth mentioning is that you dont reall have fast-travel per-se as you still need to go to "warp nodes".
[±] Combat mechanics. The combat in Borderlands is sort of a mixed bag. On the one hand, there is a reasonably reliable means of scoring critical hit after critical hit (i.e. headshots) and there is a great degree of variance (i.e. not all creeps have a vulnerable head). This aspect of the game is absolutely awesome. Also, seeing the numbers (indicating damage) rain down around a target as you light them up with a SMG is both awesome and amusing. There are two downers, the first being that rocket launchers are absolutely and utterly useless (unless you're being a Medic soldier and healing friendlies), I've not seen a single creep go down from taking 3-10 rockets. They have tiny magazines, obscene reload/launch times, their hit detection is a cointoss (many times, the animation shows the rockets going through the target with no explosion or damage) but the aggravating one is how rockets dont really kill anything. The second and much more aggravating problem is that combat virtually revolves around levels with no [usefully] visible indicator. So if you're level X and you're attacking a level X+10 creep -- that creep looks identical to the level X and level X-10 creep. The only difference is that the level X+10 creep can take shot after shot of sniper rifle fire to the face and not die .... oh and he can probably one-shot you too. As much as people ragged on the Oblivion scaled-monster levels, at least it doesnt suffer from failures like this (i.e. the higher level versions of lower level creeps look different and have different gear, name etc).
[+] Respawns. When you inevitably die, you get to respawn and there is a fee. It appears that the fee is a percentage of how much money you might have on you at the time, so fret not for the scenario where you cant afford to respawn!
[-] No replayability. Sure the game comes with a second play through (think of it as nightmare difficulty in more traditional rpg environments). But this aside, there is no boss farming, no reason to play the game again, once you've played through the maximum 8 times (2 difficulty levels, 4 classes). No reason at all. The basic creeps respawn but by the time you've done the first pass of the game, you've seen everything you're going to see.
[±] Loot. There's tons of loot. They advertise millions of different weapons. This isnt even close to the truth. Sure, we all knew that the "millions and millions" would just be variations on templated guns and such but two things detract from this. The first being that bosses don't respawn and as such, either there's no point in getting better weapons once you've played through and secondly, it's just stat variances here and there -- and theres like 15 or so different stats for a weapon that can be modified.... so really, it doesnt take a lot of true variance to get "millions" of different weapons. As for loot, there's physically lots of it but due to the cripplingly small inventory size and lack of fast travel, it's kind of useless.
[-] Vehicles. So much fail. For a game that advertises four player co-op, the vehicles have two slots and your buddies cant even jump on a stationary vehicle for the highground advantage. It should be pointed out that in a vehicle, you can fire rockets/bullets at a level X+10 baddie all day to no avail but you can run him over and instakill him. There is lack of keyboard steering meaning you can't drive one direction and shoot in another (I suppose that this forces teamwork etc and that's fine, but you should still be able to LOOK somewhere else).
[-] Interface. Mouse smoothing. Really? Really???. The retarded amounts of mouse-smoothing contribute to a "why is my mouse moving like im pushing it through tar?" feeling. The overwhelming amount of consoleitis rears it's head as you try and sort through your inventory and realize that scrolling the mousewheel doesnt do anything, you have to use the scroll buttons and you cant drag to equip/unequip, there is no 1-click option to equip to empty slot. You also cant use a medkit via hotkey (you have to open your interface in combat).
[-] Widescreen Support. The game runs a 70 degree field of view. This is abysmal even for nonwidescreen users (which default to 90) and worse for widescreen gamers (who are used to 100-110). Gives a whole new meaning to "I didnt see them coming"
[±] Shared everything. On the plus side, you can sit in town/safe spot as a level 1 while your level 50 buddy runs off killing things -- you get shared experience and shared money -- no matter how far away they are. On the downside, it also means you're stuck together as a pair: when one player leaves a zone, they drag the other one with them. Now this is something I expect from a splitscreen console game, not a game in a day and age where multiplayer has been well established.

So yeah, the majority of this simply falls under console-itis with the remaining issues being minor without the console-itis. End verdict: fun game to play once you've decided to commit to playing. But definitely not worth the $40+ price tag (value-wise, I'd peg it at $25).

Related

Borderlands Round 2 (DLC1,2,3)

Revolutionary concepts in MMO Gaming: AION

2009-10-20T16:00:00.004-04:00

Well it's not like AION really needs an introduction per se but there were some interesting things worth mentioning in a recent little review-of-sorts I read. In the article/blog/review, it mentioned about how you can pair movement during combat to give yourself bonuses. What kind of bonuses? Well, moving forward will give you a slight damage bonus, backwards will give you a defence bonus and strafing will give you an evasion bonus! Amazing! Except that it's not and just goes to illustrate how... pathetic -- for lack of a better word to come to mind, our current and "oooh next generation" [MMO] games are.

Disclaimer: I've not actually played AION in any capacity. And from the videos illustrating my complaints, I dont ever intend to.

So why is it pathetic? Many (some 11-million plus strong) would argue that this addition of motion-related combat boosts would be a pretty neat thing indeed. I however, would like to bring to light, three 'problems'.

Problem 1: Additional damage/defence
Sure, if you're hefting a sword or axe and you 'lean into' your attack, the extra shift in weight will undoubtably give you more forward/downward force giving your more damage. But thats not with the W/Up-cursor button does -- it moves you forward. As in your whole body. As in point mass. As in, there's no additional force/momentum being applied to/along the weapon. As in, there shouldn't be any additional damage.

Bonus Question 1: If you're using a longbow, if you jerk forward when you release your arrow, should it do more damage because, in this case, validly, your arrow will have a greater launch velocity?
Bonus Question 2: What if you're attacking a target above you? After all, AION does allow for personal-flight. So what if you're on foot and you're fighting an airborne opponent directly above you? I'd love to hear the explaination of weight-shifting here.

Now what about backing up? Initially this makes sense and we think we've seen things like this in well-established games such as Oblivion or whatnot. But not quite. You see it makes sense before combat -- if you think the monster is too powerful, you back off and try to avoid it or whatnot. However to get a damage bonus by moving backwards during combat is a bit silly -- especially if you're expected to do this as you make an attack. It makes sense if you are, say, blocking with a shield and backing up, bracing for a hit that you should get a slight defense boost.

It becomes more laudable the more we look at it: suppose we have a sword that has an attack range of 2 units and that each combatant has movement speed of ½ unit/sec and that the opponents start off outside each other's reach (say, 3 units). Let's play through this:

0:01. Opponents are 2m apart.
0:02. Combatant A attacks while simultaneously going backwards. Combatant B doesn't move and attacks. This now has two scenarios

If combatant B attacked first than combatant A receives damage and does no damage in return (out of range).
Otherwise, both combatants miss each other as they are both out of range (2.5m)

Now let's humor the mechanics of this for a moment - let's assume that by backing up, instead of receiving a 100% hit from your opponent, you only receive an 80% hit. Sure. This can be represented by a 20% defense bonus. And correspondingly, a 97% hit translates to a 3% armor bonus and 92.17% hit becomes a 7.83% armour bonus etc.

So now we have two options

You cannot have a damage bonus by moving forward as there is no physics-valid or plausibly-physics-valid scenario where that can happen (arrows, spears, lances and direct-forward-thrusting weapons aside, as those should have a bonus).
Yet while backing up, we can get a defense bonus if we take the 'glancing blow' interpretation.

But apprently, in AION, we can have our cake and eat it too. But don't get too excited -- I have a sneaking feeling that:

The damage bonuses are not restricted to arrows and forward impalement weapons like spears and pikes and such but rather, you can get a damage bonus for moving forward while swinging a slashing weapon like a classical longsword.
The combat timing does not take into acount when players press backwards -- and so, even if a player should miss a target because they have moved out of weapon range, they won't (more on this later).
The amount of defense bonus does not accurately (or remotely) represent the difference between the "full hit" that the player would have receieved standing still versus the "lesser" hit by moving back i.e. it's a static buff.

And because of this, it is epic fail.

Problem 2: Evasion Bonus.
If an opponent performs a line attack on you (spear, arrow, forward thrust with short sword etc), strafing should give you a chance to evade the attack. But what if the user performed a slashing attack with a halbard or axe? It's very easy to see the multitude of scenarios where the evasion bonus fails. In fact, this whole concept of "evasion bonus" is, itself, fail. What exactly is this [combat] bonus supposed to do? If you dodge something, you dodge it. If you failed to dodge it (due to ineptitude, lack of experience, surprise attacks etc) then that's your own fault and you get hit.

I can see passive scenarios where the evasion statistic may apply i.e., character is walking in a field and narrowly evades a bear-trap -- something the player would not have an opportunity to dodge themselves. But combat? Please. Evasion is so passé. If you can't dodge something, there's a few characters for you: L2P.

Don't get me wrong, I can handle the dice-roll gameplay dynamics -- but the majority of MMOs -- AION included don't quite live up with the Dungeons and Dragon level of dice-roll mechanics. It is worth noting that with Dungeon and Dragons Online none of this ever really rears it's head as a problem as evasion and hit-chances are well built into the framework of both the game and the universe.

Problem 2.5. A thought experiment
Clearly we know that the combat mechanics of AION/MMORPGs does not properly take into account order of execution and such. Now what would happen if someone decided to make a macro for up-down-strafe + attack in such a way that all the commands would be delivered concurrently? ;)

Problem 3. Sticky Targeting
A classic problem of most (save the now-officially-defunct Hellgate London) MMORPGs suffer from magical sticky targeting that does silly damage. The idea here is, if trigger an attack from a monster, then no matter what, you will take damage -- even if the attack was melee and you teleported 10meters out of melee range or if the attack was ranged and you hid behind a rock.

There is no grasp of the concept of cover, proper evasion or tactics. Instead, you tank your characters up as much as possible and invest in this magical "evasion" stat and just tank your way through everything. This is why you often see melee-only MMO trailer videos -- because it's a bit ridiculous to see players take damage when projectiles clearly missed them.

Of all the problems with MMOs (be it grinding, boring repetitive quests, having to go through normal difficulty before being allowed to play hard etc), this is probably the most critical. Of course, now that we have a generation of millions of players utterly incapable of aiming, dodging or otherwise handling hand-eye-virtualspace-coordination, it might be a bit too late to redeem the MMORPG segment.

Apparently this is all justified. Wait for it. The premise for the justification is that without this magical hit system, you could just kite larger monsters all day and get better loot/experience than you would "properly deserve". There are two problems with this:

They could have just solved that by limiting the amount of experience and quality of loot you get from killing mobs of a higher level past a threshold (say 3 level tolerance before dropoff).
In the spirit of keeping things "even" -- why does the game then send monsters that are stronger
than you at you?

What does this mean?

Remember back a few years ago when those highschool shootings started? Everyone got their panties in a knot over video game violence? (Doom, Counterstrike etc). They were all ranting about how impressionable the gamers were and how these videogames were shaping us (in this case, to be desensitized violent shooters)? I guess with millions upon millions of MMOers now, we have a new problem -- people that have no spatial awareness -- because they're used to not having to aim. So not only do we have to worry that these people cannot drive in straight lines -- we also have to worry that they expect their cars to 'evade' for them.

Not all is lost
But MMORPGs aren't the be-all-end-all. Games like Hellgate, Dust 514, Killing Floor, Borderlands and Huxley -- MMOFPSes essentially with varying levels of 'role-playing' elements (mostly limited to 'classes'). Sure it's not as engaging as the storyline of a proper RPG, but it certainly gets away from the dull "macro driven" combat. That's enough ranting from me, time for some Risen.

'Risen' Review (8/10)

2009-10-05T00:34:00.002-04:00

I don't quite know what to make of this game. This isn't a bad thing per se. I guess I could sum Risen up by simplifying it to Oblivion + loot tweaks + combat tweaks. I'm sitting here, struggling to come up with a better way to describe the game in a short, succinct manner (which, is soooo, not me).

As much as my first reaction to the game was "Oblivion, but not quite", it was the the not-quite elements that got me hooked long enough to give the game a chance. I've not gone through a lot of the game (I don't think), but it's definitely entertaining albeit a bit easy once you've figured out the game mechanics. Speaking of game-mechanics, Risen differs from Oblivion in a few ways

Mortaring arrows at targets is moderatly harder in terms of accuracy (at least with a long-bow, I've not tried it with a crossbow yet)
There's not concept of weapon degradation and coupled with invincible parrying/blocking, once you figure out the timing for your character's equipped weapon, it's damn near impossible to die (mind you, it is possible to break a parry/block, but aside from heavy axes/hammers, the right-mouse button is your god-mode friend.
There is no concept of line of sight. With the exception of mortaring arrows from a kazillion miles away, as soon as you attack something (say, a wolf), the rest of the wolf-pack will come rushing towards you. Mortaring arrows gives you a chance to prevent the rest of the pack from homing in on you, but only sometimes. By extension of this, if you sneak-kill someone in a dark corner in town, everyone knows. Same goes for opening chests/closests -- even if there's no line of sight, as soon as you open that chest/closet, they'll come rushing in.
You can't interact with the environment while brandishing a weapon (i.e. you cannot pickup loot) and conversely, you cannot hope to defend yourself without pulling out your weapon (i.e., when you go to grab the loot -- there's no way to defend against the impending ambush). Furthermore, NPCs may, depending on their disposition towards you, autoattack you just for walking around with your weapons drawn, you know, looking for trouble and all.
There doesn't appear to be a wieght/capacity limit! Yay for loot-whores. Also yay for carrying the billion and a half arrows needed for long range mortaring.
It is possible to engage multiple targets in melee in a single stroke if your weapon is physically long enough (and provided it clips through their unfortunate bodies).
Lock picking is much more straightforward, as is pickpocketing. As for pick pocketing, while it's a lot less tedious than it is in Oblivion, it's also more time consuming in between pick pocket attempts (I've not ironed out the mechanics here but there seems to be a recharge time between pick pocketing the same individual)
In Oblivion, there were dozens of 'critical NPCs' which were granted god-mode by the game engine, in Risen, definitely not so many ... so you have to be careful (or careless) before going on a murderous rampage. That being said, I'm glad I made a hard-save before going and killing everything in the second town I encountered...
Speaking of killing, it's incredibly satisfying. In combat, you fight until one party gets knocked down (i.e. 'loses'). If it's you that gets knocked down due to a 'monster' or 'animal' or 'baddie out in the wild', it's over, you gotta reload. If you get knocked down by a humanoid NPC in town (say, for starting a brawl), they simply take your weapons that you were using for that fight and some gold and you simply get back up (hopefully with some backup weapons). Now if you piss off someone really bad (say, by killing their comrade), they'll outright kill you. How do they do this? Impalement of sword through your spine/chest. And before you ask ... yes you can do all of this to them too.
If you're not interested in exploits stop reading this point. An extension of the previous line of thought.... if you decide not to kill the NPC and the NPC has a "role" to play (say, cook, metalworker, farmer etc), the NPC will simply get back up and resume their tasks. Now this leads to a very interesting sequence of events involving, for example, a metalsmith/blacksmith. There are 4 steps to this [1] wait for the smith to start working on a sword/axe/etc [2] knock him down, this causes him to drop the steel blank [3] pickup the steel blank and, if you have the blacksmith skill ... finish making the weapon [4] repeat steps 1-3 until you have a sufficient number of weapons and then go sell them for retarded amounts of money because each time the smith gets up, he magically has another steel blank. Win.
There are factions, proper support for factions in terms of aggro and mutually exclusive questlines. Yes it's possible to break quest chains by allying the opposing faction etc.
You can COOK. I'm not kidding. Sure, in Oblivion, you can use a mortar and pestle to make some potions (there's Alchemy in Risen too, along with Blacksmithing, Prospecting, Gemcraft etc) ... but cooking. Yeah, you can friggen fry your food over a fire or mess with a couldron and make soup and shit. Gimicky as hell, but surprisingly, it's significantly less tedious than Oblivion's equivalent.
There's a brothel. Nuff said.

The story seems decent although I find myself skipping through the dialog for now as I'm blitz learning the game. Just like in Oblivion, there's a retarded amount of stuff lying in random bits of forest etc and so, it definitely pays to take the less beaten path and to explore everything.

Is it worth $50? Hard to say at this point, $30? Definitely but from what I've seen, $50 is a bit much. I guess I'll find out over the course of the next month or so if the story is up to scratch. I'm not entirely convinced of the replayability factor though because there appears (at least for now), to not have a random spawn system which means there is little way of grinding and in my opinion, severely limits the 'openess' nature of both the game and of RPGs in general. Hopefully I'm wrong but for those that enjoyed Oblivion, Risen is definitely worth a look.

'Fallen Earth' Review (5/10)

2009-09-28T14:13:00.006-04:00

Well, I was sick of pixies, faries, orcs and elves. I gave Fallen Earth a shot. Seemed like a riot

There was first-person/third-person gameplay (Hellgate +1)
There was melee and ranged combat -- with proper guns (Hellgate +1)
Open world concept (Oblivion +1)
The Earth was devastated by a deadly virus and there's so few of us left (Fallout +1)
The graphics are great (Hellgate +1)
There's support for PhysX technology (Coolness +1)

And then I played it.

Right off the bat there were problems - grievious problems

The registration application crashed -- after taking my game serial number but before taking my credit card info -- stupid on their part. Shitty for me beause I had to wait a few days for them to sort it out as my serial number was marked as 'used'. Whey they couldn't just do a activation like Sacred2 (or hell, like all the other Steam games), I dont understand. And even at that, what is the point of needing a serial number activation on a per-machine basis when it's a damn MMO. But this aside, the tech support people got this sorted out decently fast enough so no complaints for them. It should be noted that buying the game nets you 30 days free play -- except you have to signup for a subscription before you get your first 30 days. Stupid. (the payments start on the 31st day and then, monthly or whatnot)
As for the game itself... it uses a Freelancer style mousing interface (i.e., toggling between having the cursor on the screen to click on screen elements versus having the mouse handle mouselook). The difference being that Freelancer's implementation of this mousing UI was phenomenal and utterly impeccable. Fallen Earth's ... not so much. Outside from combat sequences (where mouseview mode is a given), there was no clear indication of which mode to use for what sometimes (i.e., activate this switch, open that door). Maybe it was lag (resulting in the switch not firing or the door not opening) but I ended up having to press the use-key, then toggle the mousemode then press the use-key again just to be sure. And on top of that, there were times when buttons wouldnt work resulting in my character standing at a doorway trying to open a door and not having anything happen)
Ok, so I kill my character and start over again -- skipping the broken tutorial this time. Now I get to experience the failure of localized keybinding -- all my custom keybinds which were on my deleted character -- didnt transfer to the new character. Wow. Stupidity. Way to have keybinding local to a character and not a game. I suppose I could see an argument for per-character keybinding but that would only really be for internet cafe type of establishments -- not the average MMOer who may be making multiple characters -- and thus, have to bind keys multiple times.
Ignoring the need to have to rebind for a second, the first thing I really notice is the Guild Wars style camera. This is not a compliment. Not in the least. The gaming community has this fancy thing called a mouse -- use it to look around -- dont use the damn keyboard. That is so 1980. Thankfully there is a hack-solution: I can tape the right mouse button down (RMB is for mouseview -- when you're not dual wielding) and my mouse is perma-mouseviewed ... except when I'm dual wielding, at which point I'm back to retarded camera-mode plus I'm running around flailing a rusty shiv like a retard. I meekly post a question on the newbie chat and some helpful fella tells me about pressing Tab to toggle between mouseview and mouse-on-screen. What a load of fail ... and I've not even gotten to the gameplay!
As for gameplay, it's like someone took Guild Wars (read: brutally painful grinding) and attempted to add a first/third person view to it (with the above camera failings). End result? Dry. There's crafting (couldn't quite figure out how that works, but I'll give it the benefit of a doubt of not being an utter failure), their harvesting, there's cooking, shooting, meleeing etc. But don't get me wrong, it's definitely no World of Warcrap. Defintiely closer to Guild Wars.... especially with the broken camera model and all. But gameplay is sort of a subjective thing, so I can see the fun in the game once you get past the first grinding stage and can do stuff without dying left and right. Which brings me to two last utter failings...
You cannot jump and mouse-look! What non-multitasking numbskull thought that would be a good idea? Virtually every single game in the damn world that's featured jumping and mouselook has allowed for both to happen at once. Ok fine. So you can't jump and mouselook, we can work around that right? Nope. The critters/NPCs can!
No regarding the NPCs/critters, so far all of the once I've encountered are melee based ... and their melee range is 3-5m. That's friggen right. Three to five meters. Sure I can understand giving melee characters a bit of an exaggerated range (1.5-2.5m) as to keep the pace of action up (i.e. Oblivion managed to get this right, Hellgate managed to get this right). But 3-5 meters means that me, as a ranged character, had better kill whatever it is I'm killing at a bazillion miles away or it's gonna come charging at me -- all the while bouncing left and right because unlike us, they can jump and mouselook. Brilliant.
Oh and one more. Going toe-to-toe with NPC/critters in melee = death. They hit twice as fast and do twice the damage. Like I have never seen a game with a melee weapon where the melee weapon swung that slowly (and generally, melee weapons artificially swing fast as to make it somewhat fun for the player). I was fighting a single dude with a dinky knife (think 5" blade) with my rusty shiv (think 7" blade). Ok so my blade is longer = heavier = swings slower right? Sure. It takes me a full 1.5 seconds in between swings. You'd think I was beating him to death with a shotput ball. Dont even ask about two handed weapons. Dual wielding a knife and pipe = 3 seconds at a time per attack. Lets not forget that the badguy can outkite your ass any day of the week. Oh ... and you dont have a 3-5m melee range, you get to go in point blank.

Needless to say, that's one canceled subscription.