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I also ended up playing God of War for the PS2 quite a bit over the weekend and I’ve come to the conclusion that I really don’t like the genre of platform 3rd person games with fixed cameras for a variety of reasons which I’ll get to but I wanted to cover GoW first. The story of GoW is actually quite enjoyable, the graphics are awesome, the art direction and theming greatly remind me of the Time Bandits movie. The part that is completely putting me off is the incessant, and repetitive fighting, pointless puzzles, fighting *during* pointless puzzles and the horrible preplaced camera angles. I had the same likes and dislikes with Prince of Persia, and Prince of Persia 2 too (heh, i just said tutu) though I did enjoy it’s puzzles quite a bit more because they made it more naturally flwo with the game. For the large majority of playtime in GoW, that I’ve experienced, there’s just a steady dribble of monsters who come at you in the game within formulaic ambushing, pointless, plot interrupting “pen” fights (where they errect magic red barriers within an area so you can’t skip these fights) with enemies who just appear out of the ground. Now, the game depends upon you “leveling up” your abilities, like swordfighting, through the acquisition of these “red orbs” which you get by killing monsters, or causing proptery damage (breaking pots, baskets, statues) which when enough are acquired unlock bigger and better ways to smash and kill. So they’ve given you an incentive to mindless kill things (and you’ll need to kill alot of stuff to get the really cool special effects too). This is like many games in many genres, for example, like practically every MMORPG out there, although they typically have a weaker main story and a stronger and more diversified power set. One of the other problem I have with platformers in general is the more linear nature of the game. All games have to be linear in some respect through a main story arc, but platformers tend to be the worse about it. And finally the fixed camera. This is nearly inexcusable to me. The game has such beautiful graphics but I don’t get to see enough of it because the stupid camera will not move. The game designers then took advantage of their craptacular design flaw and hide stuff in relatively easy places to reach, like above you on a rafter, but you’d never know it’s there becase again, you can’t move the stupid point of view. You can’t even switch into first person and just look around! Argh!

In retrospect, I think if they had made this game into an RPG, it would have been one of the greats. It had the potential with it’s story and the world they created to be an excellent RPG experience. It could have easily beaten Fable, even Morrowind, or even the KoTOR series, but perhaps that’s too optimistic.

Well, I’ll probably just play a bit further in the game, become more frustrated, and turn it back into Gamefly and move on to the next game, Jade Empire.

Homunculus’s Corner

Originally uploaded by emrainey.

I got my Dell 2005FPW monitor in over the long weekend and I am gratified with it. It might not have the casing of the Apple Cinema Display but at half of the price tag (and I got it off Dell for nearly 40% off that price) it’s probably the best money for an LCD I’ve spent. I would have monitored switched this with my game machine, an AMD64 3200 powered yellow monster, but the aspect ratio is not what most games use, so it would look odd. Although windowed games like Guild Wars would look really tight, since you can dynamically resize the window. This is not true for most games. Scott also turned me onto Sherlock, a understated little Mac OSX app that basically conglomerates many web services into a single, consistent interface which is highly integrated with the System. See Scott’s glowing reviews for more details.

Dual Head plus Laptop

Originally uploaded by emrainey.

Behold my glorious new work space! Kneel before it’s mighty 3 displays of ultimate power! Seriously though, I brought in an old LCD that I had laying around unused, and an old video card, a Matrox Mystique.
This is much like my old setup at Motorola where I had 2 CRT’s in a multihead setup. As they laid people off I got more and better monitors. Eventually I had 3 monitors tied to a single machine. It was pure gluttony. I loved it. My desk though was completely crowd and my productivity plummeted and the office closed.

Oh, Dual Head, how I pine for thee. Let me count the ways…

1. Oh how you make coding easy… editor on the one, spec on the other.
2. Multi-page document view is divine.
3. 4+ terminal windows open at once, all visible, all spewing debug.
4. Dozens of IM sessions… wait, that’s counter-productive.
5. Countless efficiency improvements over alt-tab.
6. Combine with Virtual Desktops for Super-OK Mutliplier! Pow!
7. The ladies really dig it….so i hear.

I just got my Verve Remixed 1 & 2 CD’s in the mail today. Quite nice. I highly recommend them. It’s a fusion of jazz/soul/electronica, but good. You can pick them up off Amazon.

I’m level 11 now in Guild Wars. If you manage to get the game and want to meet up to play my main character is named “Feyna Thorvald”. She’s a Warrior/Mesmer, who enjoys reading maps, long walks in idyllic pastures, and beating the living hell out of Charr.

There are no “servers” per se, in Guild Wars, everyone gets dropped into the same towns, there’s just like 80 instances of them. Think of it as a dynamic number of servers per city, where you can jump servers quite easily in the interface.

Scott and I went to Tower Record on Friday to browse the CD collection. Now normally I would finish that statement with a glib remark or a jab at archaic business models but I found out something that I didn’t know about. Dual Discs. Scott pointed them out to when he picked up the new Bens Fold CD, Songs for Silverman, which features the CD on one side (which may not play on all CD/CDROMs) and a DVD on the other side, which featured the enitre album in 5.1 sound along with a video! Now I like to think of myself as current in the scene but this caught me off guard. How did I miss something this startling in the CD store business? I mean, it’s not like I read the trade journals or keep up with whatever the most recent vomit band out of LA is but I should have seen, no known that they were going to do this. It’s quite a neat concept and a great way to keep me going back to the place that I thought was headed for the crapper, a retail store… that is, until amazon carries these.

Also, I picked up a copy of Verve Remixes 3 which I really dug while listening to it at a listening station. We couldn’t find the volumes 2 and 1 at the store, so of course I checked on line. Amazon carries both. We’ll one less of each now . Basically, the album is a series of old Verve label recordings by what would be considered “classical” (read 50’s/60’s/70’s) artists which have been remixed by modern DJ’s to be phat. While not fresh, per se they are still funky.

I’m liking Guild Wars. It’s fast, simple and I can see that it’ll be quite complex once you get up into the PVP battlefield. If you’re interested, head over to their site. You can also track all the sites that I have put in my del.icio.us bookmarks for Guild Wars here.

So it’s time to pimp out the Mini and convert it to a full time machine. To do this I have purchased a wireless keyboard (Apple brand), a D-Link Bluetooth USB Adapter, and wireless mouse (logitech; I require more than 1 butan). I am comtemplating buying a new internal disc and as well as more memory and an external disc upon which my Media may be backed up.

I just have to say, Guild Wars looks really tight on my system. Full screen, 2x anti-aliased creamy goodness. I’d add some “color” to that statement but my mom might read this.