'Freelancer' Review (9/10)

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.

A second look at zombie games...

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.

'Nation Red' Review (9/10)

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

'Killing Floor' Review (9/10)

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.

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

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!

'Borderlands' Review (6.5/10)

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.

Revolutionary concepts in MMO Gaming: AION

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.

'Risen' Review (8/10)

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).

'Fallen Earth' Review (5/10)

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.

I hate programming

Ok so that's a bit of a lie. I don't hate programming. I just hate web-programming. Or maybe it's me hating reality, that might be it. Ok, well when we learned how to design software, we were all (or should have been) taught a series of core principles. It's these principles that separate 'our' clean, efficient, meticulous code from that of a hack (who may or may not be brilliant in and of her/her own right -- just not capable of working on a team etc). Whatever. One particular principle that stands out to me relates to hardcoding.


Don't hardcode. Sure there are cases where hardcoding is acceptable/ideal but for the most part (i.e. the majority of web and client applications), there's not a whole lot of need for hardcoding and in fact, hardcoding can get you into a world of pain down the road. Sure, you might think you just finished coding whatever it was you were doing and it's perfect -- until someone comes along and says "hey, can you change to ? thanks!" -- that's when you realize you were dumb and you now have to do do a search/replace-all. Naturally it gets more complicated/tedious if it's not longer a case of search/replace-all. So yeah, hardcoding is generally, non-ideal (besides, it's far more elegant to have a universal algorithm that handles a wide range of scenarios than to be stuck in the box of only one scenario).

Trillian Automation + Too much time on my hands...

Preface
While the majority of my friends and colleagues have reasonably reliable internet, there are a few that, for whatever reason, have a hard time maintaining their connections. While most of them know that their connections are unreliable at best (either due to their ISP, bandwidth usage, equipment failure or that they are wardriving) a few have no idea that their connections are stuttering.


A connection is said to be stuttering when the connection drops but for such a short period that, based on how they use their connection, there is no glaring indication of what just happened (I imagine most users don't run perpetual ping-tests). Microsoft's 'Live Messenger' (and the various other chatting services) is a major culprit here - particularly so with the advent of offline messaging.

MSN (and other chatting services) operate by having a user sign on. This sets the client's state as being 'connected' (this is independant from the user's actual status i.e., available, away, invisible etc). The client checks back with this central messaging server every so often to make sure that the user is still connected. With the official MSN client, (empirically), it looks like this check is made every eight seconds or so. This is just when the client is sitting there, doing nothing. During active conversations, I would estimate the check to be four seconds or so.

When the client software [successfully] checks in with the central server, the software is "reassured" that it is still connected. The software (and thus, the user) is only made aware of  a problem in the event that this check fails. What this means, is that if the user's connection drops and is subsequently restored during the 7.9 seconds window between checks (3.9 seconds for active chats), the user has no idea that they were, in fact, offline for a very small window. From the end user's (the one with the dodgy connection), there is no reason to care -- they aren't aware of the disconnect and thanks to the luxury of offline messages, most of the time, they don't miss anything from the conversation.

It is important to note that offline messaging is not bullet proof. I don't quite know how the various offline messaging system work but I from time to time, we've all recieved the "such and such message failed to be delivered" error message even when both users in the conversation might be using client software that supports offline messaging.