June 2010

Alan Wake
Submitted Friday, June 25, 2010 - 3:57:49 PM by Klaitu

It says Alan Wake is a psychological action thriller, but that's not what it really is. It's Resident Evil with a flashlight mechanic.

That's not to say that Alan Wake is a bad game, it's not.. it's actually a pretty awesome game.

Alan Wake is visiting a small town when strange things start to happen. His wife gets kidnapped and he can't find her anywhere.. and in addition to that he starts being attacked by things called "taken" which are basically zombies.

Alan Wake has this theme of light and darkness going on. These "taken" are possessed by shadow, and in order to defeat them you have to burn away the shadows with light. It's a mechanic that works surprisingly well.

The plot to the game is also intelligently written. Chapters appear like episodes of a TV series, and it all fits together quite nicely.

Overall Score: 7 of 10
Quality Rating: 4 of 5
Rent it!

Knights of the Old Republic
Submitted Friday, June 25, 2010 - 3:48:26 PM by Klaitu

Long time readers may recall that I previously reviewed this game in 2003 and gave it a 4 of 10. That was for the PC version.. how does the xbox version stack up?

Many of the problems that existed in the PC version exist also in the xbox version.. the game is just a big, buggy, glitchtastic mess.. but despite all that, it's much more playable than the PC version.

Playing this now, the parallels to Mass Effect are quite glaring and obvious.. to the point where now I kind of wish that Mass Effect had been more original. I mean, KOTOR has a spacecraft which corrupts the people inside it to the dark side.. just like Mass Effect.

Overall, my previous score still stands.. 4 out of 10.

E3 Day 2
Submitted Tuesday, June 15, 2010 - 4:20:00 PM by Klaitu

Today rounded out E3 with Conferences from Nintendo and Sony. Are they any good?

1. Nintendo

Nintendo's theme this year was bringing back tons of old franchises. I don't really have an itemized list, but they did have a new Zelda game and a new Kid Icarus game on the list.

Nintendo was, actually, the one gaming company actually showing games!

2. Sony

Sony's conference was almost exclusively about Playstation Move, which is a motion controller. They also rehashed a lot of EA and Ubisoft games.

Probably the biggest firepower that Sony had was the announcement of Portal 2.

__________________________

So, with e3 rounded out, who won? It was a big loss everywhere. There are tons of FPS coming out this year, and a lot of motion control nonsense.

Here's hoping next year is better.

E3 Materia!
Submitted Monday, June 14, 2010 - 8:30:23 PM by Klaitu

You know how Materia is actually condensed Mako? Well, since I'm a nerd I'm going to condense all the E3 information down into a powerful pellet for you!

Ready? Here we go!

1. Microsoft

Microsoft's press conference was today, and it was lamer than last year. I'm sure you've heard of Project Natal, which is MS's attempt to do the Wii thing with a camera instead of a wand.

Well, it's now called "Kinect". It's still coming out, and still nobody wants it.

Microsoft is announcing a new version of the 360 which is said to be "whisper quiet". It's also smaller and has built in wireless support.. and presumably won't red ring like the current version of consoles. It's $299 with a 250GB hard drive. Here's a pic:

Communications Breakdown
Submitted Thursday, June 10, 2010 - 9:48:50 PM by Klaitu

How many of you have a home router these days? What's that? Every freakin one of you? Yeah, I'll bet! Routers are pretty commonplace, and the most commonplace router in use these days is known as the Linksys WRT54G.. perhaps you've seen it before!

That's pretty much my model in a nutshell, the WRT54G.. version 5. It has served me well for so long that I can't really remember when I got it.. maybe 2002 or 2003, it's hard to say.

For years my little buddy has been slinging packets around my LAN, and out onto the internet.. Tried and true, he kept chugging away. Then one day I plugged in a crazy long Ethernet cable.. like 100 feet long.. My little amigo wasn't able to keep up with that, so I had to do a firmware update, and then we were pals again!

And so things have been ever since, steady and true.. until recently. Linky the router began to get a little bit obnoxious, he started acting out. I'd try to access his web interface and he'd give me malformed HTML or garbled pages.. but he usually behaved after I rebooted him.

Then, he started being grumpy about where we put him. If we picked him up to pull his power plug and reset him, he would get all picky about which ethernet cords were in which ports. He eventually got to the point where if you touched him, one of his ports would just flat out stop working.. but still, my little buddy and I stuck together, and after some careful modifications we were back on the information superhighway.

Then, just last night.. my pal the Linksys WRT54G became diabolically evil! As if turned to the darkside by the Emperor himself, he staunchly refused to exchange DHCP packets with my ISP.

What's DHCP? DHCP is acronym talk for "the way your ISP gives you an internet IP address". So, Linky would connect to the ISP, exchange packets just fine, but would not request DHCP addresses.

How do I know this? Because I got clever and hooked up wireshark to his WAN port. Pings? no problem. Packet exchanging? no sweat. DHCP? totally missing.

I went through his little brains with a fine-toothed comb in order to spot any discrepancies in DHCP settings, but they were all correct. I even went so far as to clear out any and all configuration settings and return him to default status, and that didn't work either.

So then I got really, really clever. I thought that maybe there was something wrong with his software, so I overwrote his firmware with custom DD-WRT firmware.. and the update went off without a hitch.. and even though DD-WRT is awesome, and once again the DHCP settings were correct, same problem.

While I was experimenting with my lobotomozed Linksys, his WAN port just gave up and died altogether. It would light up like it was connected, but no data was coming from him anymore.. however, his other ports still seemed to be alive and kicking.

So, I remapped his ports in order to change one of his LAN ports into a WAN port, and it worked! Well, except he still didn't want to do the DHCP thing anymore.

At this point, I had done all I could do and there was no choice but to say goodbye to my friend, the Linksys WRT54G v5 and I pulled out his power cord for the last time.. and then I went to Wal-Mart.

And when I returned, I brought with me the CISCO e2000, which looks like a spaceship!

Yeah, that's him, the e2000.. sleek like a racecar with soothing blue lights that let you know "It's okay, there's data going through me right now."

Unlike his predecessor, Captain Cisco (his official router designation) doesn't complain when I tell him to do things. The Cap'n can do dual-band wireless-N and gigabit wired connections too!

Imagine my suprise when I was not able to establish a Gigabit connection from my PC! As it turns out, apparently nVidia's nForce has some kind of problem doing gigabit on 64 bit operating systems. A shame, although technically I don't have any other devices new enough to witness the power of this fully armed and operational data station.

So anyway, that's the story of how my Cisco knowledge was put into action!

Now if only someone would pay me to do this...

LOST Final Season
Submitted Sunday, June 6, 2010 - 6:41:03 PM by Klaitu

Sometimes I'm a little behind, and such is the case with LOST. I like LOST alright, but I found that I just couldn't work up any energy to see it until the summer, when all the good TV goes on hiatus.

*spoiler alert* for all those of you who care.

so.. previously on lost, there was a magnetic hole in the ground sucking everything in, including a nuke. The idea being that destroying this EM pocket would alter history and people would never get cast onto the island.

Did it work?

um.. Well they sort of decided to ignore the whole nuke thing entirely. Instead we are presented with two realities, one in which the island sunk under the ocean, and another where nukes apparently don't kill people.. and now, instead of flashforwards or flashbacks, we have "sideflashes" which depict the alternate reality.

Unfortunately, sideflashing has the same problem as the other flashes in that what happens in them is completely boring and irrelevant, which turns each hour long episode into 15 to 20 minutes of content that is actually worth watching.. but with LOST this is to be expected.

The show spends the first part of the season trying to trick you into thinking that some of the castaways are good, and some are evil.. but you already know where they stand because they've been playing that card since the show began. They also like to put the characters in old locations that you've seen before, like the hydra cages and the caves that they haven't bothered showing since the first season.. I guess because of nostalgia.

The show has the guts to kill off main characters, which I have always respected.. and this season is no different, there are many characters who die.. some of them in more stupid ways than others.

In the end, the plot did resolve a lot of unanswered questions, but also raised other ones, and really seemed quite a bit like an abrupt ending.

Here are the problems that I had:

1. The Ajira Airplane

Aside from representing the biggest problem with LOST (they got off the island before the final episode) the characters took this airplane back to the island, where it experienced problems and CRASH landed.

In the final episode, several survivors escape aboard this plane, despite the fact that the thing was INCAPABLE OF FLYING. After all, that's why they landed the plane in the first place, right? Half of the season's plot involves the smoke monster trying to escape the island aboard the plane.

2. Desmond Fanservice

I like Desmond, too.. but what is the purpose of his being on the island, anyway? They claim that Desmond is the only guy who can go into the magical cave of wonders(tm) and pull the plug out of the Islands.. thing. Which, of course, Desmond does because he has watched Star Trek and believes he will reset the timeline by doing so.

But really, it doesn't seem to matter, because Jack climbs on down, replugs the hole, and escapes from the cave despite being mortally wounded the entire time. I guess Desmond wasn't actually needed after all.

3. The Ambiguity of Dead People

On LOST island, dead people frequently return to the living, but only certain people can see them. Sometimes everyone can see them. There doesn't seem to be any rules regarding when dead people can show up, or who they can talk to, or why they come back.. it completely destroyed much of the plot to me, because it was obvious the the writers were just pulling things straight out of their butts in order to advance the plot.

Anyways, I feel like the final season of LOST was a complete and total mess. It was all over the place, and had serious continuity problems with itself.. of course, this is all standard place for LOST, but since this was teh final season, I sort of hoped it would stop throwing BS at us and start resolving some of the problems that it had.. but that apparently wasn't a major concern.

In the end, the doctor guy dies, which we already knew would happen, and the remaining survivors escape the island (which isn't a big deal because they did it once before).

The mysterious island is still there, still disobeying the natural laws of physics, and still not making any sense whatsoever.

My money is on the Island being the Garden of Eden. I guess now we'll never know.