Mini Review: Spore

Will Wright’s (of SimCity and The Sims fame) Spore was released on September 4th, a game I’ve been eagerly awaiting since seeing demonstration videos of the game back in 2005. I must admit I’ve kept myself out of the loop, so that the anticipation and inevitable long wait didn’t kill me. Unfortunately it wasn’t until after ‘completing’ the game that I learnt it was designed for the casual gamer (in other words, its an extremely shallow, cutesy and repetitive game). ‘Completing’ is something you can never do for Wright’s games it would seem (being all sandbox games essentially), but I use the term in sense of ‘done-anything-I-was-going-to-do-in-the-game-and-have-now-uninstalled-it’.

Most of my gripes are particularly with the Space Age, because that is where the majority of the game is situated (as it only took two hours to progress through spore, creature, tribal and civilisation stages combined). During the Space Age, the game tries to do too much and unfortunately it can’t pull it off with the shallow/basic gameplay route. If you can get past the tedious nature of being the universes defender against biological disasters and the occasional pirates which steal spice one unit at a time, Spore presents a very basic trading game. There is no way to tell who you’ve visited or sold to in the past, no way to predict what they’ll pay for your spices on the next trip, and the only way to see is to fly into their solar system and around their planet – urgh! Oh yes, you’re supposed to be wowed at the supreme power you wield to terraform a planet, but the only reason you do that is to generate more spice to trade. The excitement of terraforming a world and building a new slave factory colony is diminished when all you have to do is hold down the left mouse button after selecting the appropriate tool.

While you’re conquering the universe in the name of…well whatever you named your Empire, you’ll often get called back to ‘duty’ to prevent a planets ecological disaster. Oh dear, a nuclear accident? A planet hurtling dangerously close to a sun? A meteor on its way? No. Some animals mutated/got sick, they now have glowing tails, and you have to kill the five mutants (it always seems to be five) before they infect the rest of the species and they become extinct; failure to do so will repeat the process slowly eliminating all creatures from a planet. That’s the best they could come up with? It wouldn’t be too bad if you weren’t either asked to do that for your empire and all your allies or recalled thousands of light years away, through several worm holes away  during the middle of large scale battles.

Speaking of space battles, as you start off you are in an understandably weak vessel with limited weaponry, but as the game progresses you can buy new weapons as well as upgrade existing ones. The problem is, only one enemy race seems to have weapons that can approach or rival yours and even then its limited to their spacecrafts – their cities can be wiped out with a single bomb (MegaBomb, doesn’t cost anything to use) making combat quick and easy, you spend most of the time scrolling in and out of solar systems.

With the amount of grinding (eliminate this set of creatures, abduct that alien/plant, scan this surface) in the game, it just feels too much like a single player MMORPG. Perhaps I was just expecting too much from Spore, at the end of the day I really just wanted less Sims-in-Space, and more SimCity-on-a-universal-scale.

Dell Inspiron 1520 vs Asus G1S

Before our honeymoon, Chickz0r and I decided to buy her a laptop. It suits our lifestyle and medical needs, and if we got it before the honeymoon it meant we could play games (since I have an Asus G1S). Did I marry the right girl or what?

We decided on a Dell Inspiron 1520. They’re cheap, reasonable quality, and pack a lot of punch

* Both laptops are actually running Vista Ultimate (32bit version for now). I have licenses for this, so we downgraded the 1520 to save a dollar or two

On paper, the Dell laptop looks far superior value, and to some people this is certainly true. To me however, they are of about the same value.

My G1S was available before the 1520’s (both on paper, and terms of availability – Dell took awhile to actually ship any); and was imported from America (there are AU models now, but they weren’t available until 3->4 months afterwards); and is a "premium" laptop in the Asus lineup, compared to the ‘budget/workhorse’ line that Inspiron is to Dell, which means better build quality; thus the larger price. The AU model is available for ~$2300->2600 (I believe) today.

There are other niceties to the G1S, such as the OLED display above the keyboard. It is gimmicky, sure, but having a clock while in games is useful, or having WLM messages popup is handy. Another gimmick is a Lightscribe capable dvd-rw, but I’ve used it once or twice, and the end result is actually pretty nice.

On the less gimmicky front, the onboard sound is pretty good, and the addition of optical out (through the 3.5mm jack). Having eSATA will allow further expansion at decent performance when I fill this hard drive up (although Dell’s "counter" to this is to include a massive, relatively speaking, hard drive). Finally, while the Dell screen is pretty good, the G1S screen is the best I’ve seen on any laptop – colour and brightness wise (and that includes before I had the screen replaced due to a poor backlight!)

While I love my G1S, the 1520 is fantastic value. Huge (for laptop) HDD, a massive 4gb of ram, and very comparable specs to my G1S? It is just hard to say no. Throw in the ability to choose the colour of your laptop (and less "IM A l33t H4X0R" aesthetics of the G1S), and you’ve got a very ‘personal’ laptop.

They aren’t flawless, they both have varying problems. The 1520, for example, produces a high pitched noise through the headphone jack – however that was resolved when a tech came out and replaced the motherboard. My G1S had dull patches in the LCD panel (presumably inconsistent backlight?) as well an optical drive that sounded like it was preparing to destroy the world – thankfully both problems were solved by dropping my laptop back into Asus’ repair centre in Melbourne. They also both share the heat and noise issues associated with having the 8600M GT and 2.2ghz, which is solved (to some degree) by using an iXoft (or equivalent cooling device).

I’d be hard pressed to recommend one over the other. Those willing to pay the premium for a "more rounded" laptop, definitely go for the G1S, or those looking for best bang for buck, go for the Dell XPS 1530; its price has now dropped to about the 1520’s price.

Movie month

This post contains some spoilers (mainly about The Golden Compass), so if you intend to see these movies, it may be advisable to skip past this post.

This month my wife and I saw many films, and I’ll give a quick review on each of the ones we saw at the cinema. We’ve watched many more on TV/DVD, but those are less appropriately timed I guess.

Beowulf (3D)

The majority of movies we saw were at Village Jam Factory in South Yarra, who have one dedicated theatre to 3D films (RealD). I’ve been there before for Meet the Robbinsons, and when we saw any movie was also screening in 3D, we just had to go along to that. You get corny glasses to wear, but 3D films are just so much fun with the increased immersion.

Beowulf was presented in RealD, and to me enhanced the immersion into the story/movie, and made it all that much more enjoyable.

I could detail the story of Beowulf, but you’d be better to read the Wikipedia article on it.

Beowulf was definitely movie of the month, and is well worth seeing. IMAX apparently have it in 3D at their massive cinemas, or its in 3D in a few select cinemas, or be boring at see it in 2D.

Death at a Funeral

Death at a Funeral was an odd movie. It took awhile to get into, doesn’t really go anywhere (the movies timeframe is one day). I quiet enjoyed the film while we were watching it, but afterwards didn’t have the same sense of enjoyment as I do with other movies (such as Beowulf or Hitman), such as replaying scenes in my head or discussing the movie with others.

It’s not to say the acting, humour or story were poor, I guess the format of the movie just didn’t leave a lasting impression on me.

Hitman

Based on the game series by the same name, I can’t say I was expecting much of a movie, but being the geek I am I just had to go and watch it. To my surprise, it actually wasn’t a horrible movie. The plot follows the hitman Agent 47 (just as the games do), and his struggle to come to terms with the betrayal of ‘The Company’ that employed him. He sets out to finish the hit, but encounters a woman who changes everything.

The ending, in-fact the entire story, isn’t exactly hard to guess after the first five or so minutes, but it was nice to watch a movie that wasn’t trying to be much more than an action movie.

Bee Movie

Bee Movie was surprisingly good. The trailers certainly made it look like yet-another-3d-film-that-has-cutesy-characters, and while the film did play that card on more than a few occasions, it was still funny enough that my wife and I enjoyed it. If you go in looking for a riveting story, you’ll be disappointed but perhaps not too badly – it is the one line jokes that made it enjoyable.

The story goes one young bee has just finished his intensive 9 days through education and is getting ready to choose the one job he’ll be stuck in for the rest of his life. He leaves the Hive with the Pollen Jocks, gets caught in the rain, but is saved by a human. He thanks her by breaking one of the Bee Laws: don’t talk to humans.

The Golden Compass

For me, this was easily the worst movie of the month. While it may have had a fairly highly acclaimed cast (Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Ian McKellen, Sam Elliott and Christopher Lee), the (what I feel is weak, having only watched the movie) story combined with cramming it into a short (113 minutes) film did not give a chance for any acting talent to come out at all. This is often a problem of movie adaptations of novels – its just too hard to get everything into 2 hours without diluting the story, events, and sense of time (which is why more successful book/movie adaptations opt for 3 hours…)

Every advertisement for it I saw suggested that the movie was aimed at children, and for a large section of the movie you could very well be mistaken for thinking that. It isn’t until a jaw is ripped off one of the Ice Bears that it starts to become much “darker”. It is undoubtably riding the “Harry Potter made fantasy cool for kids” wave, but that sort of reasonably graphic violence could disturb at least some of the children who were in the cinema with us.

The story seems to resemble (at least in the first part of the trilogy) much of the Star Wars story. The Magisterium (The Empire) is bent on controlling the world with any means possible, while a bunch of Gyptians (The Rebels) defy them and rescue Lyra (Luke + Leia Skywalker combined). Lyra can operate the last Golden Compass (The Force), and near the end, Mrs Coultard (Vader), an employee of the Magisterium declares the Golden Compass is actually hers, and that she is Lyra’s mother.

In short, unless you’ve read the book, skip this movie. It’s story, acting, and effects are all a bit nothingish. It’s not absolutely terrible, edging out daytime television, but it certainly isn’t stimulating.

My experience with Windows Home Server

Thanks to Nick, I’ve been able to get my hands on the Windows Home Server (WHS) 120 day Trial, although unlike Nick, I’ve gone for the “roll your own” approach to it, rather than buying one off the shelf (his experience with that side is certainly encouraging, if not fuzzy).

The test hardware I have at the moment is:

• AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (“Barton” core)
• 512mb (2×256mb) DDR333
• ATI 256mb 9600 Pro
• Abit NF7-S
• 1×80gb, 2×60gb IDE seagate hdds

Initially I only had the 2×60gb HDDs, so WHS wouldn’t install as it requires 80gb minimum. If I had an IDE RAID card, that would have fixed the problem, but alas, I didn’t and I had to wait till I returned from Chickz0rs place with our spare 80gb HDD.

Installation was smooth after getting over the storage prerequisite, select location, keyboard layout, it goes about its business, reboots a few times, and then asks for server name and password. There was a bit of a hickup in that it didn’t have drivers for all the onboard components of the motherboard….including the NIC. Given how well Vista has been at detecting drivers – even on that hardware – I’d just forgotten about installing drivers to get online. No matter, nvidia had all the nForce 2 Unified drivers still available, and after that it updated nicely.

After I installed the client software (WHS Connector), that was it – it was up and running, ready for backups. Being a geek, I didn’t leave it at that, but I really appreciate the lack of hours of configuration needed to get the box secure, and ready for its listed operations.

So far I’ve been really impressed with WHS – setting up remote access (https) was a breeze (two clicks!) and the remote access was responsive; backup and duplication happens very easily, as does adding extra drives to the “pool”. The extensibility of WHS looks pretty cool too, with a fair few addins coming out already (I particularly like the remote backup ones – if I was to continue to use WHS, I’d look at one for my Dreamhost account).

The thing to note about WHS is that there isn’t much to it. I don’t mean that in the sense that “its not worth it”, I mean that once you have the Connector software installed, things just work. WHS boxes from the likes of TranquilPC, Hewlett Packard, Intel and Medion (and many more) won’t require the installation but some very basic configuration (that’s IF you want to configure it). I’d like to say something was wrong with it, but given the functionality/features and its target market, there doesn’t seem to be much to complain about. It works, expandable, extensible, and its easy.

The interesting thing is that between the many reboots during install, it goes into ‘Text Mode’ installer, with the label “Windows 2003 Small Business Server” (W2K3). It’s not just during installation that you see that WHS is in many ways “on top of” W2K3.

• The default screen saver is called ‘Windows 2003 server’
• There is the ‘Windows 2003′ background
• When you add certain Windows Components (through Control Panel -> Add/Remove Software), it asks for Service Pack 2 Disc
• You can install/run DHCP/DNS services
• IIS6 is installed, and you can use it to run other websites – great for those like me who want/need a local webserver for development

The upshot of it being based on Windows 2003 is that its pretty damn stable and secure, and that if any vulnerabilities are found with the operating system, they’re Win2K3 vulnerabilities and Win2k3 patches (through Windows Update), rather than waiting for the WHS team themselves to fix the insecurity (not that they’d do a bad job, just size of each team effects response times)

As much as I enjoyed my WHS experience, I won’t be using this iteration of it on a fulltime basis. Yes it was fast, yes it was stable, yes it was easy, but I want a single “always on” box – something to handle both HPTC duties and centralised storage. While there are many HTPC packages that will run under Win2K3, they don’t seem to have the same features, or lack a decent UI (or require waaay too much configuration) when compared against as Media Center (Vista or MCE2005). This problem may be solved in vNext of WHS, but I’m not holding my breath for it – I’d be better off waiting for virtualisation software which works with Direct X 9 :)

Creative Zen Vision:M

For my birthday, I bought myself a Creative Zen Vision:M (30gb) , a mp3 player – although these days its cooler to call them DAP’s (Digital Audio Player), since they do more than just mp3’s.

This thing is a direct competitor to Apple’s iPod, so there are some comparison’s to be made.

Looks/Feel

It looks like an iPod. At least, the white version does, which is sadly, the version I have (I wanted green :().
So, just like an iPod, it looks nice. The front is half screen, half controls, the back is a magnesium shell, which is fairly different from the ipods polished metal (aka, finger print magnet)

Its a little heavier and bulkier than an iPod, but it still fits comfortably in my pocket along side my mobile phone.

The controls….the controls take awhile to get used to. They’re ‘okay’, but the iPod’s click wheel probably wins out here.
The middle strip is touch sensative (and acts as ‘up, down & confirm’), while clicking to its sides will give you next/previous

Audio

Audio on the ZVM is the best I’ve heard from a DAP, but my exposure has been fairly limited.
My sisters iPod Mini (1st gen) had very very poor audio quality with a fair bit of distortion if turning the volume up above 40%!
Quality is great, customisable EQ is cool, but the included earbuds are junk. I’ve bought some Koss KSC-75’s (‘clip on’ headphones) and they match it well.
I’ve also hooked them up to my Z-5400’s, and my Sennheiser HD 497’s – the quality was still pretty darn good for those speakers/headphones.

Video

Again, like the latest iPod’s, the Zen plays video.
I never thought I’d be a person who’d watch video on such a small screen, but the Zen has convinced me otherwise.
I’m told the screen is brighter and faster than the iPod’s, but I don’t really know. The screen is very colourful (enough to watch, say…Transformers), and is an okay size if you’re on the train and holding it in your hand.

XVid/DivX are supported, but its not a “DivX Certified” device, so all files won’t (like, say, the Transformers Movie). Key is to make sure its stereo (or mono) MP3 audio, with XVid or DivX specific video codecs.

WMP10/11 will transcode it for you (if it detects an incompatilibity), but that may take awhile.

Functionality

The best thing about the really crappy mp3 players from ebay is that they all use the internal filestructure (sometimes enhanced with id3 metadata) to sort your mp3’s, meaning you can just drag and drop because they are “mass storage devices”.

Just like the iPod, you can’t do this with the Zen – not exactly anyway.

The ZVM uses the “Media Transport Protocol“, which is introduced in Windows Media Player 10 (or 11) for Windows XP (and is natively supported in Windows Vista, since WMP11 is installed. Hrm, I wonder if MTP works under the Vista ‘N’ – European versions without WMP).

This means you can sync your WMP10/11 libraries straight to your Zen. Which would be fantastic, if I didn’t use a decent audio player like WinAMP (there are plugins for WinAMP, which ship will the latest versions of WinAMP, that will sync playlists/libraries to the ZVM). Alternatively, MTP sets up a ‘psuedo’ drive in Windows Explorer where you can just drag & drop music and video onto your Zen

(two views of how a MTP device in Vista looks)

For those using Linux or Mac OS X, there are MTP implementations, but I’m not sure I’d count on it to work the greatest.

The ZVM also has a “Removable Disk” mode, where you can partition your ZVM into 4, 8 or 16gb. Files dumped on here can be accessed by any OS that can read FAT32 (so you’ll treat your ZVM as a large USB flash stick, I guess), but sadly, files on that portion cannot be accessed from your ZVM.

Conclusion

Personally, I find this a great player, it does everything I want, has great quality, plenty of storage, and the battery life is pretty damn good.
There are a few quirks – none of which are deal breakers – but I still love it.

Between this and an iPod? I’d probably choose things because I’m a little anti-mac. If you use/like iTunes, this probably isn’t the player for you. If you value FM Radio, maybe it is time to switch to a new Media Player.

I bought mine for $350, but the ‘real’ price is $350 + $70 for a decent pair of headphones.

Lord of the Rings: Online

As Will mentioned, I’m in the Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) beta.

Mini-Review

LOTRO is a MMORPG, and as the name suggests, is based on the works of Tolkien, created by Turbine. Turbine are well known in the MMORPG arena, as they created Asheron’s Call 1 & 2, as well as Dungeons and Dragons Online. I haven’t played their games before, infact, the only MMORPG I’ve played for much time at all has been the juggernaut known as World of Warcraft (WoW), so most of my comparisons will be that.

The game is set at the time of the war of the ring, so the events of the books unfold around you.

Gameplay

(Mechanics and whatnot)

Combat
Combat is like any non turnbased MMORPG, so there are no problems there, unless you’re looking for something new and exciting.

I suppose you could note the differences in the naming of attributes, such as health is actually ‘morale’. As a ministril (healer) class, I was confused that I didn’t have any ‘restores health‘ spell.

Crafting
Crafting feels decent, there are many ’schools’ of crafting, and when you learn one, you have three different trade skills, such as tailoring, forestry and prospecting. One feeds the other which feeds the other, or something like that.

Achievements
LOTRO has ‘achievments’, which are…interesting. You work towards an achievement throughout the game, and at the end you get a reward.
For example, slaying X amount of spiders in Breeland gave me the title ‘Spider-foe’. The interesting part is some of the achievements are how many times you use a skill (or family of skills). I only have about 970 heals left before I get a healing achievement.

Questing
Quests are very much a case of ‘kill X amount of these‘, ‘gather Y amount of those‘, but the story to go along with a few of them are interesting with the ‘epic’ (as in, the Epic of the Lord of the Rings) quests unfolding the story around the Fellowship of the Ring.

Graphics

The graphics certainly set this game apart from WoW. Even lowering the detail to low or medium, the world has a lot more detail than WoW. However, to be fair, the world presented by Blizzard is much more vibrant, and seems more bursting with life (graphically), because of the cartoon-ish appearance of the game.
Brett argues that comparing WoW to LOTRO is unfair (at least graphically), because of the age of the game. I argue that WoW’s graphics were outdated before it was released (as are many of Blizzards games), and that if they wanted it to be pretty, they could have released a graphical update with The Burning Crusade.
Many ‘pretty’ games were released in 2004 (Game Rankings, select PC, 2004, and list it to uh, 20->200), both of MMORPG and other genres, so I declare his argument invalid.
Those who argue with me are silly.

LOTRO appears very ‘realistic’ (about as ‘realistic’ as any SciFi/Fantasy game can really be I guess)

The Good
The water looks fantastic.

The character models are pretty good too.

You cannot compare MMORPG’s to single-player RPG’s like Dark Messiah or Oblivion, due to the ‘other’ loads in MMORPG’s, so I simply won’t.
I will, however, compare WoW to LOTRO.
WoW certainly doesn’t come close to matching, let alone beating these graphics, however I still prefer LOTRO’s graphics over other pretty games such as Guild Wars.
The following images compare the character models (facial), and the second image compares a water scene, both shots are at highest detail that the game allowed for each game (LOTRO may not have been at ‘ultra’ everything, I can’t recall).

(Click for full size)

(Click for full size)

As you can see, WoW is no competition in either scene. You might think ‘oh, but that WoW screenshot is taken in Ratchet, a port, where there wouldn’t be any reflection anyway’, but you’d be wrong. The water is the same no matter where you are.

The Bad
There are a few down points the graphics, which may or may not be fixed up by the time this is out of beta. The first is the animations. While there is a wide range of animations, and many of them look rather good, the more common animations, such as running, seem to be a little…sucky.
I mean, I’m not trying to discriminate against puppets – they have a right to work too – they just shouldn’t be used for motion tracking.

Performance is also another issue, but given I’m running it on Vista (meaning nVidia drivers really suck), and it is a beta, I’m not too critical of this.

Overall

I haven’t touched on the sound (music/effects, which are rather good), or on the pricing structure (founders club is…interesting, it seems like USD$199 upfront for a life time (products lifetime, not yours) account), because they don’t effect me too much (beta is free, and I haven’t had speakers on too much due to my headaches).

Overall, this game has potential, however I’m not far enough into it to say how long it could really last, without having ‘world PvP’.
Without the constant threat and competition of the Dark Forces, it is hard to say how many people will take up this game.

However, if you’re a big LOTR or RPG fan who enjoys PvE rather than PvP, this game is certainly one to keep your eye on.
That being said, many MMORPG fans have called it a WoW clone and are disappointed with the ’slaughter’ of Tolkien’s world.
Me? I like it. Enough to buy it? I’m not sure. Its quirks make it interesting, its pretty. It feels a little slow in combat, but every time I play it, I become further sucked into it.

I won’t get to play it much because I signed up the account for Chickz0r, who loves LOTR, and her ADSL will be active by the end of the week ;)

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

Ubisoft’s Dark Messiah of Might and Magic looks like a fantastic game. When the demo was rolled out, I eagerly watched the bits fly to my hard drive.
“Finally“, I thought, “a game to quench my evil desires. Or at the very least, tickle them.“.
The demo provided that. Oh how fun it was to kick Orcs into a bottomless pit. Or you could use arrows to push them into it, or heck, magic!
I replayed that part of the demo over and over.
I should point out, in reality, I was after an RPG where being evil was encouraged, as well as ’shooter’. Dark Messiah seemed to be a good blend of the two.

A few months later, Dark Messiah launched, to some mediocre reviews, although I didn’t read them, as I’ve found a lot of the ‘big’ review sites tend to have opinions different to mine.

Continue Reading »

Wii will, wii will rock you

The Wii rocks, okay?

First Andrew came around with his on launch day – I still thought it was fantastic. My sister played just one game of tennis, and she was trying to encourage me to go down and pickup my pre-order.
A few days later (the Sunday after), Ryan comes around with his Wii, and we played on it from ~3pm->11pm.
My mother got a shot.
Despite adamantly telling me I was not to get my Wii before Christmas, after that, she told me I could. The Wii is so fun it had my mother in hysterics while playing.

I only have WiiPlay and WiiSports, but they are some of the most enjoyable ‘multiplayer’ games around.

Wii will, wil will rock you indeed.

Crumpler Review

I’ve written a review up for my crumpler laptop bag, because I think its amazing. And I like verbal diarrhoeaing.