Archive

NIN Ghosts

Published
by
Cineris
on March 16, 2008
in Music
. 0 Comments

NINGhostsI

In case you haven’t heard, Nine Inch Nails has done a rather interesting thing with their latest album Ghosts I-IV. The first nine tracks (”Ghosts I”) is available for free online in high quality, DRM free MP3. For $5 you can get the whole thing as a digital download including a 40 page PDF. There are some other options as well for receiving actual physical media if you’re so inclined, the cheapest being $10, and the most expensive being a $300 limited edition package that’s already sold out (only 2,500 were produced).

The catch for a lot of people will probably be that Ghosts is totally instrumental. Ironically, that’s actually what makes me interested in the album. Lately my tastes in listening have turned into more often than not preferring ambient soundscapes to actual songs with instrumentation and vocals. That Ghosts is instrumental and not totally atmospheric is a bit of a concession for me to make, but not hugely so. On the other hand, an instrumental offering is a bit more accessible to people who aren’t normally interested in Nine Inch Nails’ music, so this might actually be quite a smart move. It won’t bring in the vapid Hip-Hop/Pop crowds, but what would, other than more of the same?

I got the free download version earlier this week but hadn’t had an opportunity to listen to it until now. Granted, I’ve only had one full sit-through of the the album, and I generally reserve judgement about music until I’ve heard it a good ten or so times. That said, I’m looking forward to listening to it again and have already put in my order for the complete album. I’d definitely recommend at least checking out the tracks that are freely available for download and make a decision for yourself. Personally, I can’t see a reason why I wouldn’t want to pay $5 for music I enjoy when it goes directly to the artist and supports their efforts to reform the industry.

Update: Trent Reznor is also announcing a “film festival” of sorts on YouTube for people to create their own visual accompaniments to tracks from Ghosts. A very cool move, and pretty indicative of how forward thinking he is.

Bleach

Published
by
Cineris
on March 7, 2008
in Anime
. 0 Comments

About a month or two ago my TiVo decided to record the television show Bleach off of Cartoon Network. This is a manga/anime that I’ve heard of, but I didn’t know anything about it and the name didn’t sound particularly appealing to me — What is it, a show about a kid with bleached hair?

I watched the one episode on my TiVo and actually found it somewhat interesting. There was some character who had come into possession of a parakeet that seemed to be cursed, causing accidents to happen all around it. Then there also seemed to be some characters who were part of something called the “Soul Society.” My impressions were sketchy, given that I was jumping in mid-stream to the show, but it seemed a little metaphysical and therefore interesting.

So a few weeks ago as I browsed PopURLs I came across a fansub of Bleach on YouTube. As it turns out, my impressions of the show were completely wrong. Instead of being some brain-stimulating show drawing you into a fantastic universe where the supernatural is a real element of day to day life and a mysterious organization called the Soul Society allows the viewer to explore the dimensions of this universe, it turns out that Bleach is just another Dragonball Z clone. How disappointing. Not really a surprise, as most of the non-fanservice, non-dating-drama, non-mecha animes out there seem to be this same formula of “Protagonist and his weaker compatriots fight opponents using glowing energy blasts and teleportation, usually justified as martial arts even though the characters rarely if ever actually have a legitimate fight without using anime conventions. During fights, protagonists and enemies “power up” and take on different forms.” The majority of anime is so formulaic that it’s a wonder to me why it’s so popular.

The funny thing I noticed when watching this Bleach show on YouTube was exactly how little “show” there was. Between the introduction song, the recap of previous episodes’ events, and a typically anime not-funny comedy sketch at the end of the episode, I think the total running time for the episode came in at about fifteen minutes. Factor in that a large portion of these shows typically involves: 1. Characters “powering up” attacks, 2. Characters standing-still as attacks bounce off of them, and 3. Characters standing around bragging about their “power level” or “skill” and it’s amazing how little content or actual animation must be involved in making a show like this.

I guess I should have remembered my general rule that any anime that appears on Cartoon Network, aside from Cowboy Bebop, must be tripe.

Gaming Costs

Published
by
Cineris
on March 5, 2008
in Games and Technology
. 0 Comments

Unfortunately I’ve been a bit neglectful of the blog of late. This isn’t due to lack of desire or ideas, just the complete lack of time in the face of a hundred other tasks that are demanding my attention lately.

On the other hand, when I read a comment over at Shamus’ blog the other day, I got rather irritated to the point that I had to vent.

What people don’t consider is playability (over restrictive DRM measures inhibit this) and graphics (yes, you’re game looks great and all, but unfortunately I won’t buy it because I can’t run it!) I love the PC as a platform, it allows for so many possibilities, but when I could shell out $400 for a console and some games, or $1500 for a decent mid-range computer that might play the games I want, I think I’ll go for the console.

A good gaming machine that will run all current games (and the generation after), not to mention most past-generation games (”backwards compatability”) will run you about $1000 these days. Considering that the comment was probably written and posted to Shamus’ blog from a computer, which, lets be generous, probably cost a few hundred dollars itself — Where exactly are these big savings with consoles coming in?

For me this is pretty much a no-brainer comparison. I can purchase a high quality machine for work and personal use, plus add on the additional expenses of a console, the restrictions of a console, and ridiculous expenses like XBox Live, or I can purchase a marginally higher quality machine and also play games on it when so inclined.

I suppose for Joe Consumer who uses his Dell or other branded computer for nothing more than checking email and looking at porn, it might be a good deal to buy a $400 gaming machine. For those of us who actually use our computers for work, which I assume should include most of Shamus’ readership, having a computer that doubles as a gaming platform is almost certainly the cheaper option. Particularly for people who do not own televisions, a niche group surely, but a growing one especially among reasonably intelligent people.

The only caveat here is that you can’t simply walk into Best Buy and say, “Give me your best $1000 gaming computer.” All of the retailers selling gaming computers do so at 100% or more markup, so you have to be willing to build it yourself. I know I personally hate dealing with hardware, as I prefer to have my computers just work, but when you’re talking about getting superior computer using experience in general — Yeah, I’m willing to put in a little bit of work for that. Obviously most people are reluctant to do this because they have no knowledge of hardware and are technophobic. We all have to start somewhere.

Guild Wars: Canthan New Year, part 2

Published
by
Cineris
on February 27, 2008
in Games and Guild Wars
. 0 Comments

Followup on some of the other things at the Canthan New Year’s weekend…

The big one for me was Dragon Arena, shown in the screenshots below.

Dragon Arena is sort of like instagib for Guild Wars. Every player is reduced to 100 health maximum, something like 20 energy, and all skillbars are set to 3 skills: Dragon Blast, which is a fiery projectile that deals 100 damage, some other skill (Imperial Majesty?) which is a melee-range attack that deals 80 damage and knocks the targeted player down, and a skill (Trade Winds?) that increases your run speed for a few seconds.

Despite the apparent simplicity of Dragon Arena, it’s actually quite a fun gametype. The irritating thing about typical Guild Wars PvP for me is that there’s such a variety of skills, with 8 skills per teammate and 8 teammates per team, that the combinations are effectively infinite. You’ll never know what you’ll face, and if you happen to be playing a specific build there’s no way to adapt to counter another team’s build mid-game. Dragon Arena puts everyone on equal footing, and reduces the number of things you need to think about in Guild Wars PvP from infinite things, to merely: Movement, enemy positioning, team positioning, and appropriate timing of skill usage.

To me, that in itself is quite enough. It boils down the elements of PvP to the most skill-based elements, like seeing your teammate about to get Dragon Blasted and putting Trade Winds on him so he can dodge out of the way, and so on, rather than emphasizing the memorization and metaknowledge that are important in typical Guild Wars PvP (not to mention the sheer randomness factor of running up against a build that is a gimmick solely designed to shut down whatever build you are running).

Aside from Dragon Arena, there was Rollerbeetle Arena, which I’ve done before but didn’t get a chance to do that weekend — I’ve gotten discouraged from doing it anyway because I regularly get pings of about 300-500 to ArenaNet’s servers, which means constant “rubberbanding” that makes it impossible to reliably navigate a race course when your client and the server keep disagreeing about where you’re located. Not to mention many people suspect the top racers to be cheating (given that all of the top 100 scores seemed to be held by 2 people, this would not surprise me).

Another event taking place during the Canthan New Year was the opening of the Shing Jea Boardwalk, which houses a couple of games — Nine Rings and another ring-based game, both of which are simple chance-based gambling, as well as a “Tag” game of sorts with worms, where players that tag worms earn points to win.

One of the big things for me was that I wanted to get a Celestial Rat minipet — You may have seen one in some of my previous screenshots. Supposedly this item had around a .04 chance to be obtained from Lunar Fortunes. Lunar Fortunes could be traded for using Lunar Tokens, and Lunar Tokens could be gotten by participating in the Dragon Arena, Rollerbeetle Arena, some of the Board games … But the most lucrative way to get the tokens seemed to be doing the festival-related quests.

So I set out to complete all of the festival quests. A couple involved simply taking materials to craftsmen to make fireworks. But my main quests had me travelling to one of the villages on Shing Jea Island to scare off fearsome “Nian” creatures with sparklers and bottle rockets …

Above we have some pictures of the village that was going to be attacked by Nian…

Once I had scared off the Nian I set out to fight the Knights who Say Nian, notorious for attempting to spoil each Canthan New Years’ celebration. Some of the screenshots I took as I searched for the Knights are below…

Eventually the Knights were defeated (it was a tough battle indeed because I was travelling totally alone, with no henchmen or heroes), and the festival went off with a bang. Looking forward to see what else ArenaNet cooks up for these things.

Guild Wars: Canthan New Year, part 1

Published
by
Cineris
on February 24, 2008
in Games and Guild Wars
. 0 Comments

With how busy I’ve been lately, it tends to take something a little bit more special to pull me into playing Guild Wars. Fortunately, it is one of those games which I can put aside for weeks or months and not really feel like I’ve been left behind. So when I heard the Canthan New Year was coming around again this year, I installed my recently-bought copied of Guild Wars: Factions and went to go pay a visit.

Arriving in Cantha on the outskirts of Kaineng.

One of the flame altars inside Kaineng city.

I knew I needed to get to Shing Jea Monastery for the festival, but I didn’t really know where that was. I knew Shing Jea was on an island, and the world map had a couple of islands to the southeast direction, so I headed out south through Kaineng’s slums to get there.

I spent about an hour travelling through the slums. One of the biggest hindrances I had was that I used a Lunar Fortune, an item associated with the event, that can cause a couple of random effects. Most are good, like granting you 100 gold, increasing all your attributes by +1, or giving you festive items like bottle rockets and sparklers. However, I seem to have the worst luck with these fortunes, and got “Possessed” by an evil spirit. This is a condition that causes your screen to turn red and hazy. The worst thing about this condition is that you can’t get rid of it except by leaving the area you’re in. It’s pretty annoying when you’re halfway through an area and then all of a sudden your view becomes hugely obscured so you can barely tell where you’re going. I didn’t want to abandon my progress towards Shing Jea, but the condition made it really hard to play.

After a little bit of travel I found myself at a marketplace with a port. Shown is the statue of Melandru there.

Taking a boat left me at the port on Shing Jea island. Here I am meeting one of the mystical beasts presiding over Shing Jea.

The port of Shing Jea.

As I wandered the island looking for the monastery, I came across this fantastic piece of art.

Have I found the monastery?

Yes!

A headmistress of the monastery.

Another headmistress.

Another character at the monastery. I think she’s a fortune teller.

Festival decor.

The festival at Shing Jea monastery actually consists of a number of different things. Above is the main gathering place, where a number of Canthan chefs await the yearly arrival of a celestial animal to feast on their preparations. Some of their meals require obscure animal parts that players may have to hunt down for them elsewhere. Depending on how pleased the celestial being is with the meal, they may give out varying prizes.

Last year the celestial being was a pig, who gave out miniature pigs. This year the celestial being was a rat, who gave out presents and fireworks.

Some pictures of the event…

At the main gathering area…

Standing by one of the Canthan chefs…

Some joker lets off a string of festival items from Wintersday…

The celestial rat arrives!

Waiting as the rat samples the different meals…

He liked them!

As a bit of a silly end to the celebration, the celestial rat summoned a bunch of rats and went on a running-of-the-rats around the monastery.

Someone commented that it was like the reverse of the Pied Piper, with all the people following the rats around.

Attending players were also given Lion masks provided by the Canthan emperor, although I’m a bit jealous as last year’s masks, Dragon masks, were much better than this years’. The only thing I’m disappointed in is that I didn’t manage to get a celestial rat mini pet.

I’ve got some more nice screenshots from other things, so I guess I am going to break this up into two parts.

Assisted Suicide for [PC] Gaming

Published
by
Cineris
on February 5, 2008
in Games and Technology
. 0 Comments

I ran across this article a couple of days ago, which is essentially musings on the state of PC gaming, lending a bit of a skeptical eye towards the claims that PC gaming is dying off in the face of consoles.

This is a topic of relevance to me, since I do pretty much all my gaming via the computer, and I don’t have a heck of a lot of interest in consoles. In particular, I’m a bit concerned because one of the games I’m big on at the moment, Unreal Tournament 3, hasn’t been doing quite so well on the PC side of things. And naturally, people like Mark Rein or the bean-counters at Epic can say that PC gaming is dying, and that it’s piracy, and this and that, but looking at Unreal Tournament 3 — The menus in that game are clearly designed to be used on the console. Literally thousands of complaints have been made about the menus of the game, and I can’t say that I’m particularly surprised. You only have one chance to make a first impression, and when that first impression is horrible, then you’re going to turn people off.

Even though I think the game itself is excellent, and overall the best Unreal Tournament to date, there’s absolutely no excuse for shipping a computer game with a user interface that bad. In many ways, this experience sort of confirms the skepticism of the article’s author — He suggests that game developers are pushing for the death of gaming on the PC, because gaming on the PC is freedom compared to the locked-down force-fed consumeristic model that modern gaming consoles have become. Yes, you’ll probably have hardware problems at some point, but at least you can usually do something about it.

But it’s not PCs that will have died, and it’s not consoles that will have won. Consoles are just the tool most convenient for the purpose - locked down systems that can prevent outside innovation without significant initial investment. It’s gaming that will have died, and a single corporate monolith that won. The same rehashed game sold eight different ways - that will be consumer “choice.”

Now that is a scary vision. And it’s one that we can glimpse on the horizon too if things don’t change. With ever-increasing budgets for games to support ever-more crazy graphics, putting A-list titles above the reach of indie developers, a relative lack of improvement in development tools, and movement towards these locked-in console systems, or ridiculous garbage like Microsoft Live… It’s hard to see where else things can go except towards more centralization, which in turn means more ability to exert influence to encourage people to give up their gaming freedoms, starting a snowball effect right to hell.

Sunshine

Published
by
Cineris
on February 3, 2008
in Culture and Visual
. 2 Comments

Sunshine1

After reading and hearing a bit about this movie, I finally decided it was time to check it out this weekend.

The film has been talked up as one of the better Science Fiction movies in recent memory, so I came to it with rather high expectations. Perhaps that was a mistake, because when I think of films like 2001, Solaris, Stalker, and so on, it’s almost setting myself up to be disappointed.

The first two-thirds of this movie were good. Unfortunately, you can tell that a lot of it is quite derivative. But the film is knowingly an homage to a variety of other movies and sources, so that isn’t a fatal flaw. We have a commanding officer, Kaneda, most likely a reference to the Kaneda character in the Akira manga. We’ve got a seemingly esoteric psychologist named Searle, possibly named after the philosopher, visuals that are highly reminiscent of 2001, and the list goes on.

The fault I found with this film is in not going anywhere. Here we have an epic plot, the death of our Sun, tied in with human struggles and some thought provoking ideas. But it doesn’t go anywhere thematically. It’s inconsistent, and even though everything we see might make narrative sense, there’s no closure, nor even a thought-provoking open-endedness. Instead what we’re left with is a jumble of pieces that could have made something amazing, but instead merely make something passable.

Spoilers.

Continue reading ‘Sunshine’

Anonymous vs. Scientology

Published
by
Cineris
on January 29, 2008
in Culture, Politics and Technology
. 1 Comment

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, you probably haven’t heard of the declaration of war that the internet entity “Anonymous” has declared against Scientology.

This was the first video to hit the interwaves:

A new one has recently come out, though similar in content. There have been some threads on social news sites following the release of these videos. One comment in particular in this Reddit thread struck me as quite interesting. User notany says: “Anonymous might be the first real Stand Alone Complex.”

Spoiler-ish description of Stand Alone Complex behind the cut.

Continue reading ‘Anonymous vs. Scientology’

More Massed Effect

Published
by
Cineris
on January 23, 2008
in Culture, Games and Politics
. 1 Comment

Here we go again folks! More media controversy over Mass Effect’s raunchy, primetime-TV-watchable sex scenes.

This video found via Kotaku. I actually felt like Keighley really dominated the interview segment, but when we went to the panel all that progress was lost. Instead we got a bunch of people who have never played a videogame since Pong(!), commenting on something they know nothing about, and a news anchor pontificating on how difficult it is to be a parent and control childrens’ access to entertainment systems that costs hundreds of dollars, and games that cost half a hundred bucks each.

BuyCooperLawrenceNow

SearchInsideCooperLawrence

Funnily enough, the so-called expert called in on this Fox News segment, Cooper Lawrence, whose entire useful contribution to the segment was admitting that she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, is experiencing a mass effect of her own as her book is flooded by poor reviews on Amazon.

Anyone else think the pictures shown with her book are a little distasteful and “objectifying” of women? I mean, “Buy Now” and “Search Inside?” That seems a little inappropriate for children.

I am absolutely loving some of the reviews she’s been getting. Unfortunately, Amazon has already closed one-star reviews and will probably start removing some of the better reviews. A bit ridiculous considering Cooper Lawrence’s own uninformed opining on national television. A couple of samples from Amazon…

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful
Absolutely wonderful book! It is both an incredible sexual aid but is also quite useful for cleaning up messes that my dog has created.

1.0 out of 5 stars Oh look, a misinformed review, January 23, 2008
By Farzad Mesbahi “Z” (Bethlehem, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
I’m just here to bash a form of entertainment I’ve never read (your book) after you bashed a form of entertainment you’ve never played (Mass Effect.)

Oh how much it sucks, doesn’t it?

1.0 out of 5 stars Ignorant, January 23, 2008
By Patricia R. Rossetti - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
If she feels that she is professionally qualified to bash a video game that she has never played, then she should have no problem with me bashing her book that I have never read.

2.0 out of 5 stars Concerned Parent, January 23, 2008
By S. Roegge - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
I am Deeply appalled by this book and the availibility of it to my children.
I took my child for a nice outing last saturday to the local library and i was frightened for society as a whole when i saw this book being displayed. The sexual tones given off by just the cover of this book alone was enough for my daughter to ask “mommy why is that lady making opinions about things she knows nothing about because she has not done minimal reasearch to even understand the basics of her opinion?”
As you may guess the car ride home was very interesting.

1.0 out of 5 stars Promotes underage sex!, January 23, 2008
By Richard Nast.e (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This book is filled with pictures of naked women and depictions of graphic sex. Worst of all, it’s marketed to children!

1.0 out of 5 stars Not Good, January 23, 2008
By T. Goldman - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
I’m sorry, but this book is just not good. It’s not well written, the author has no credibility, and she apparently has no real knowledge on any subject. Reading this book is as helpful and interesting as staring at your wall for 8 hours. The cover is creepy too.

1.0 out of 5 stars An utterly abysmal read, January 23, 2008
By Mr. J. Bain “totalbiscuit” (Leicester, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
Be warned, for within these pages you will find one of the biggest collections of pseudo-intellectual drivel in the history of the written word. But don’t fret, if you can’t get past the truck-loads of assertions, broken logic, terrible arguments and outright overly feministic intellectual terrorism of this book, you’ll still have the front-cover to pin up on your wall. After all, good looks are all you need to be taken seriously as a psychologist these days apparently.

Turnabout and irony, so delicious… So bad, immature, and probably counterproductive but yet hilarious and devilishly satisfying nonetheless.

Update: EA steps in to demand corrections.