Meh. Time goes by so fast if you have a lot of work to do all week and a lot of your weekdays evenings are spent online in Azeroth. October last year was the last time I posted here. Phew that’s been some time. Anyway,

I bought Call of Duty - World at War today, and played some time into the singleplayer campaign. While some loading screen was showing up after a perticular intense battle scene, I had this here thought:

“Damn. This really is intense; and horribly frightening if you imagined this would be real, this would be you on some remote japanese isle fighting for your life, (for what you believe in?), probably not really knowing why the hell you’re even here. The same was probably true for your enemy. Why did you have to go through hell, not knowing if 5 minutes later you would still be alive, all because of the doings of some fucked up dudes like Hitler and all the others…”

probably because of Hitler and a whole lot of others. One man cannot start a world war. But if he has the power you might call it charisma in a strange sense to sway the opinions of others… well if enough mindless people follow one lunatic… nah this is already too much of an aside, back to the main Gedankenexperiment -

Millions of ordinarly people had to die because some few who thought of themselves as primus inter pares basically ordered them to with no right to order them in the first place.

“There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell.”

Now this is basically the emotion… the thought… I get out of playing something like the Call of Duty series (especially the last 2) .
Now this is basically the emotion… the thought… I get out of watching something Platoon, and especially Full Metal Jacket.

Yet, especially in germany, my neighboring country, there is this whole “Killerspiele” (murderer games [sic]) discussion. Some big bosses say that they (the games) are - pardon the tactless and geeky analogy - what would basically amount to the emperor [violent video games] luring luring Luke [adolescents and/or video game players in general] to the dark side.

While at the same time anti-war movies like the ones above are hailed as what they truly are - anti-war movies. Those movies don’t show you how awesome it is to be in war. To shoot someone. To be shot at. Those movies show you that you never, under any circumstance, would want to experience those things.

So why are (certain?) anti-war movies hailed, while such games are looked down upon, when one gets the same feeling from experienceing both?

The only ones who are allowed to shoot are those who are prepared to be shot themselves.

Lelouch Lamperouge, Code Geass

Hello, Hola, Konnichiwa and Grüß Gott!

It’s been quite some time since I last posted something here on my little blog. There were various things that I did or had to do besides blogging. I’m gonna tell you a few of these things here:

Age of Conan
I longed for so long for this game. It was hailed as the true alternative to World of Warcraft. It had stunning graphics and an innovative combat system (at least on paper). It had storytelling (at least for the first 20 out of 80 levels). It had a PVP focus with sieges and mounted combat and whatnot (at least it was planned). But what truly happened was this:

May - the game comes out and 1 million players subscribe. Magazines give it the highest rankings. It is a blast to play the first 20 levels, with voice acting for every quest. As players realize that after level 20 all the voice acting is gone they are really disappointed though they cope with it. I for one didn’t really expect to have voice acting after the “tutorial” that was the first 20 levels.

June - players have to grind a lot, an aweful lot to get to the maximum level of 80. From level 50 onwards there were practically 5-10 quests per 10 levels that would give you 2, maybe 3 levels. The rest was pure, unfun, grinding.
Players at or close to level 80 want to do what Age of Conan was focused on: PVP. Yet there is no reward, no nothing, for doing PVP. Plus sieges are buggy as hell, world PVP is practially dead with every zone being instanced. Funcom says “dudes, we will get the big PVP patch out in june!”. Players wait.

July - while at the start healers seemed completely imbalanced, with having high dps and survivability through heals and tank classes couldn’t kill anything because of low dps, things changed when players discovered gems. Soldiers who socketed only +damage gems could one-to-two-shot everything in the game bar other soldiers. I had fun with my soldier for a few days doing this but it got boring pretty fast. PVP patch is still to be seen. Funcom says, early August is the new release date.

August - no PVP patch, no fix for the completely unbalanced gems. Players start to cancel their accounts. I do so too.

September - I only read the forums for this one but it seems sieges are still buggy as hell, PVP is unbalanced for healers again with gems being completely nerfed, all damage cut by 40% in pvp, but heals stayed the same. Plus raids are broken because tanks needed the gems to survive.

October: I am back to playing World of Warcraft and enjoy it a lot. Although I don’t want to raid anymore, I now focus on having fun with reallife friends in the game, doing the occasional 5 man instance, and a lot of PVP.

Work
Got a lot of programming to do with the new project. About 2 weeks every month I work for 50 instead of the normal 40 hours. Although that is most of the time only because I go home early most of the time in the first 2 weeks of each month, so I have to do the minus hours on the last two weeks so I will be at +/- 0 hours at the end of each month. The joy and pain of flextime.

Anime
I have been watching a freaking lot of anime in the last half year. Too much to count actually. Lucky Star, the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Ergo Proxy, Code Geass, Monster and some I forgot to mention (damn short term memory!). Especially Code Geass is the best thing since… a freaking long time. The storytelling is at the same level as Lord of the Rings and Babylon 5. I will write a post about the anime next probably.

Other stuff
I have been reviewing anime for Anifreak for some time now also.

You can count on more (more or less) interesting posts from now on again on this blog.

Sayonara!

Last week I finally got Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 for the PlayStation 2. Alas, my PS3 doesn’t have the backwards compatibility that the first models had, so I had to dust off the old PS2 for the game.
But what an awesome game it is.

Today a lot of games are entitled RPGs, Roleplaying games, but few really deserve it. Morrowind was a true roleplaying game, where you only controled your alter ego, and saw everything through his eyes alone.

But almost every so-called “Japano-RPG” (like the Final Fantasy franchise) lets you take full control over a whole party of characters. I don’t see much roleplaying in that. In the same vein, one could call StarCraft a roleplaying game, because you order a few heros around in it. Nothing could be further from the truth though.

So back to Persona 3: It’s the first true RPG I have played since ages, and the first truly astonishing one since Morrowind. While the combat system is fast but tactical and there are around 100 different monsters (Personae) you can summon to your aid, the game truly shines with its storytelling and atmosphere. It’s the little details that (at least to me) make this a true roleplaying game:
Not only do you not control your whole party during combat, but to equip them, and see their status, etc. you have to talk to them and ask them how they feel. If you want them to only concentrate on healing in battle, you tell them again through dialog. While other games have cascaded menus for such things, being able to talk to a party member and tell him/her what to do, makes the game so much more realistic.
Another detail is, why do I, as the player, always hear music in the game? Simple, because the main character has a Portable Music Player equipped which even shows up as an item.

Little details such as this, combined with an awesome and fresh combat system, make this game truly a Milestone in “Japano-RPGs”.

Matching my last post about those annoying anti piracy ads, I’ve found this gem in the depths of the web. A short AMV by Doki Doki Productions. It’s called Plunder Propaganda and it’s a hilarious spoof of the usual ads:

A high quality version is available at AnimeMusicVideos.org (after a free registration you can download each and every AMV on the site, which are tens of thousands).

Another spoof was done by the IT Crowd:

And last but not least, as a reference the original annoying ad™:

Yesterday I rented another movie from my local videostore and planned to have a nice evening watching it. But I didn’t. Because, as all movies nowadays, it had one of those annoying anti-piracy ads before the main menu turned up. Usually they don’t let you hit the (top-)menu button while those ads are playing so you cannot skip them. Annoying enough. But the last one I’ve seen even topped that annoyance - you couldn’t even fast forward it, that button was locked out too. What. The. Hell?

I can understand the notion of putting those ads on rental disks, because franky, those are probably the disks that are copied the most (leaving bootlegs and camera recordings of movies not even on DVD out of the picture, because those don’t have those ads in front of them anyway). What I don’t quite get is why they have to lock out all of the buttons to forward/skip the ad. I mean seriously, is that going to stop anyone who wants to copy the disk anyway? Not at all.

Which leads me to my next and more important point:
Why in [whatever-you-believe-in]’s name do they put those annoying ads on every buyable DVD? Of the about 200 DVDs I own I’d say 190 have the ads, 180 have unskippable-but-fast-forwardable ads, and 10 have ads that can’t even be fast-forwarded.

So why the hell is it like that? I take pride in my collection, and if I like a movie I will gladly spend the few bucks to own it and all the specials that come with it on the disk. But I’d rather pay 5$ more to skip that damn anti-piracy ad. Not only are they awefully bad most of the time, they also really insult the paying customer which has to spend his or her time watching the ad all the time the DVD is put into the player.
Do they really think that some rediculous ad is going to stop anyone who wants to burn a disk, to do it? If they burn it, you can be sure that they will remove the ad from the disk anyway, so it really serves no purpose at all. Well maybe its purpose is just to be damn annoying.

The following image sums up my opinion on that pretty much:

Just found that masterpiece of cabaret linked in a forum and couldn’t help but post it here. That’s the german cabaret artist Volker Pispers and his program “History of the USA and terrorism”. The audio is german but someone very thoughtful subtitled it in english:

Johnny Chung Lee has made some very interesting experiments with the Wii Remote and Sensor Bar, and all the infrared tracking that those two do. While the second video I’m gonna show you is actually the lastest he posted on his Wii projects site (and shows off some cool Minority Report like interactions), it is another one that really made me go wow: Headtracking on the Wii and therefore maybe the first possibilty of real Virtual Reality displays.

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote

Tracking your fingers with the Wiimote

Also very impressive: a low-cost interactive whiteboard

I planned on installing Linux on my PS3 some weeks ago, but only in the christmas holidays did I find the time to do the task. And I intended to journal my experience and write a guide so other users can have the joy of Linux on the big screen too, and don’t have to work a whole night to get everything working.

Note: For this guide I will assume you have the latest PS3 firmware upgrade installed, which changed some wifi stuff so all the updateing at the end of the guide is nessecary.

You can install Linux on your regular PS3 harddrive, or you can opt to first upgrade the harddisk.

Things needed for the hdd upgrade:

• Phillips head screwdriver
• Flathead screwdriver (a fingernail or knife or other sharp object will do too)
• 2,5″ SATA harddrive with either 5400rpm or 7200rpm

• A PC with internet connection
• CD-Rs to burn the image files
• Storage media with a few hundred megabytes space, formated with FAT32 (a regular USB stick works best)
• USB keyboard and mouse (wireless ones with a receiver so they only need 1 USB port together work best for the PS3 versions with only 2 USB ports)

• Some time

Note: Before you change harddrives on the PS3 you should back up all data you want on the new disk to an USB stick or external drive. Backup can be done via the built-in backup utility to backup the contents of the whole disk. If you don’t have enough external storage space, you can back up individual game saves and data via the XMB in the game menu, under the entry Game Data Utility and/or Game Save Utility.
Also, of course, the PS3 should be powered down full via the switch on the back before you attempt to change the drive.

The first step is to remove the plastic cover from the hdd tray located on the left side of the system. Use a flathead screwdriver, your fingernails, or something else which is flat for this:

Next you have to remove the blue screw which holds the tray in the case:

After that flip up the metal handle on the caddy and move the it to the front of the PS3 with the handle to dislodge it. Then you can remove the caddy with the drive in it:

Use your Phillips screwdriver to remove the 4 screws holding the harddisk in the tray, and exchange the old one for the new one:

After that just put the 4 screws back in, slide the caddy into the PS3 and move it back with the handle to connect it, put the blue screw back in and finally put the plastic cover back on.
You’re now ready to boot with your new disk!
The system will ask you to format the drive, just use quickformat for this.

Now you are ready to begin with the Linux installation steps!

First things first: Download the XUbuntu PowerPC LiveCD iso file and burn the iso to a CD-R using your favourite burning program (if you don’t know how to burn iso images, refer to the Ubuntu Help forums).
In the PS3 menu navigate to the system settings and start the Format Utility, and choose “allot 10GB to the OtherOS”. After that insert the XUbuntu disk and choose “Install OtherOS” in the system settings menu. Confirm to restart the PS3 and you will be greeted by the kboot boot loader.

Protheus wrote an extremly detailed installation guide in the PSUbuntu forums so I’m gonna skip the whole procedure here. Just do what he does in the guide step-by-step (although you could and should skip the “compile your own kernel”) and you will be fine. The guide also details how to update your kernel so the wifi which broke with PS3 firmware 2.0 will work again in Linux.

But another problem arrived with the 2.10 firmware - Ubuntu wouldn’t boot anymore. So after you upgrade the kernel as described in Protheus’ post, follow the instructions in the next guide.
AliasXNeo wrote a detailed guide how to update your kernel once more so it works with the 2.10 firmware again, again, follow the guide step-by-step.

Once that is finished you will be able to boot into your newly installed Linux system on the PS3! Now you will have to configure your wifi or use a regular LAN cable so you have net access on the box. Firefox comes preinstalled with Ubuntu so once you have your network configured you can surf the web. You’ll probably want to play sound files and movies now, so just install VLC media player using the command sudo apt-get install vlc from the terminal.

So there you have it, a working Ubuntu Linux on your PS3. You can play movies, dvds, mp3s, surf the web with a real browser opposed to the PS3 one, and do everything that you can in Linux that doesn’t need more than 256MB RAM (so SNES emulators and the likes will run fine, but 3D apps probably won’t).

And to finish this guide, a screenshot from my working system (don’t mind the crappy quality of the movie in VLC, that’s normal when screencapping movies, windows media player shows just a black window on screencaps), click the image for a better quality one:

Further reading:

• PSUbuntu.com, home of the distribution
• PS3 board: Linux 101, general questions and answers about Linux
• PS3 board: Flash in Linux, because the normal flash plugin won’t work on the PPC64 architecture

While browsing one of my favorite webcomics, xkcd (a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language) I stumbled upon a sideproject of its author. The project are 3 minimalistic (in terms of design, not content!) websites which have only one goal: to find out The Funniest, The Cutest, and The Fairest pictures of all the internet.
A noble goal you might say, but what on these sites is different than all the other countless funny-picture-websites? Well first of all there are no comments, and not much design around the site. On all three sites you get a white page with a little introduction text and then 2 pictures at random, and you click the one you think the funniest, cutest, fairest. A system in the background registers all clicks and makes a ranking out of them.
And even if you are not particulary interested in the ranking of certain pictures, the sites still offer longtime fun and amazement in those boring hours. And while I really got good laughs out of The Funniest the pictures I adore most are from The Fairest because it shows absolutely awe-inspiring nature pictures.

While you can argue if this is funny…

…you can’t really argue that this is an really fair picture:

No one can deny that first person shooters (FPS for short) have evolved greatly from their ancestors like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. Of course graphics get better from year to year and the gameplay changes depending on the focus of the title (e.g. Hero-against-everyone-else or a tactical team shooter). But for a long time, the story told, and especially how it is told, was stagnant.

At the start, Doom had only a few screens of text mentioning why you were thrown onto a demon-infested Mars. Then came prerendered cutscenes and around the same time, ingame cutscenes that the 3D engine rendered. But if you wanted to tell a story good, back then you had to use cutscenes because the graphics engine couldn’t handle things like lip-syncing, detailed models and animations.
Half-Life was the first game to use ingame cutscenes, and to not change the viewpoint in them. Before that in most cutscenes you would see your own character through a camera, like on film. But Half-Life changed the way a story in an FPS was told. I think there was not a single moment in the game where you would see your character through others eyes. That was really an experience, to see the whole story through the protagonists eyes, without a cut.

Flash forwards a few years and the change of a century. First Person cutscenes are pretty much given now in shooters to let you identify more with your character. For me, there were 2 games in the last year that really stood out with their story telling: BioShock and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Warning: huge spoilers for BioShock and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare up ahead!
If you haven’t played one or both of these, and plan to do so… then read on if you like but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

While both of them are excellent games on their own, BioShock had a more fascinating story and Call of Duty was more of your regular War-Against-Terror story, there were two points in those games that made me, even as an old school gamer, take a breath and ponder what just happened:

In BioShock it was the scene where Ryan makes you kill him by using the phrase “Would you kindly?”. It’s not that I havent killed countless thugs and bosses in first person, but the intensity of the scene - first you cannot do anything about it because you are brainwashed to respond to that particular phrase. And second it is a really gruesome death being strangled. After that scene I was vexed.

The scene in Call of Duty, while on a grander scale, felt even more personal to me: After heroically rescuing a female pilot from a downed Apache, you fly out with her and your crew, the city behind you. Then the unspeakable happens - a big missile explodes in the middle of the city, and the mushroom cloud it leaves makes it clear that it was a nuclear head. Your helicopter goes down and the screen goes black.
While the nuclear explosion surely was shocking, so far it didn’t me bother too much. The debriefing of the mission showed a board with dead and missing Marines, and listed your name on it. It wasn’t so much irritating that your character died because so far in the story you played 3 characters so you still had the others.
But when I started the next mission I was vexed again, and at the end of it, disgusted: The screen fades in from black, and you find yourself in the downed helicopter. Corpses around you. You cannot walk you can only crawl or kneel. You get out of the helicopter and look at your devastated surroundings, everything is reddish still, and on the horizon you can still se the big mushroom cloud. And then finally, after a few minutes in the debris, you fall to the ground, everything goes white, and you die.

Gulp.

That realy took me by surprise. A whole level just so you can experience your own last few minutes. As far as I know that is a game-first and has not been done before. And while it is shocking, disgusting and irritating, it is non the less - superb storytelling. After that scene I played through the rest of the game in one fell swoop because I was so pissed at the Terrorist who planted that bomb and I just wanted to get rid of him.

And that’s what good stories do: They move you.

I hope we will see much more bravely and oddly told stories in the future. Because a really good gameplay also deserves a really good story.

There’s good promotion. There’s epic promotion. And then there’s promotion that sways you to take initiative yourself.
The last kind is probably the best one, because when you talk about and think actively about a product, whatever it may be, you are more inclined to remember it than if you just saw an ad on TV while zapping. And “thinking about” brings me back to the topic at hand:

The Thinking Blog is holding a big giveaway to celebrate its first anniverary. The price is a sparkling new, completely waterproof Laptop from RuffPC.

I can’t imagine a better promotion for a blog. Because what do bloggers need? Computers. Better yet, Laptops so they can blog wherever they are at the moment. And if the Laptop is shock resistent and weatherproof that is just a huge bonus.

The only thing you have to do to have a shot at the price is blog about the contest. And even if you don’t win, you get a free link back to your blog from the Thinking Blog, which has according to the site, more than 1600 subscribers and I-don’t-know-how-much daily visits. So it’s a win-win situation!

What are you waiting for?


P.S. The line “a winner is you”, which was voted fifth worst video game line ever, is from Pro Wrestling on the NES.

This seriously has to be the best (and geekiest) marching band ever:

Although the video is filmed upside down, I still watched in awe at their formations. And to do all this at a football game (where I imagine there aren’t too much video game players in the crowd) makes the spectacle even better.

Video games they march to:

• Pong (at the very start, looks like some guys running around aimlessly, but it’s definately Pong)
• Tetris (with the music everybody knows so well)
• Mortal Kombat (you can even hear a feint Mortal Kombat scream when the music starts)
• Pokemon (they even have a little Pikachu-ish dude fighting, probably the team’s mascot)
• Zelda (complete with Tri-Force and the Master Sword)
• Mario Bros. (the ending especially rocks, with the castle and flag like in the game)

This commercial shows just one of the many reasons why everyone should learn english as a second language. It’s just established as the language of the world. Although the french still want to speak french even in business relations…

Anyway I’ve never seen that commercial on german television, although it is supposedly a german production. They only show the worst commercials on TV here nowadays.

So without further ado here is the brilliant ad (I’m still laughing after watching it 5 times in a row):

And for you non-german speaking folk out there, the translation what the old guy says:

“Das hier ist mein Sektor” - “This here is my sector”
“Das hier ist das wichtigste Gerät des Küstenwächters” - “This here is the most important device of the Coast Guard”
“Das Gerät und das Gerät” - “That device and that device”
“Überlebens… Radar” - “Survival… Radar”