Shadowtwin – Page 5

Quick MMORPG reviews!

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Shadowtwin — No Comments ↓

So, armed with a fancy new PC, I set about to trying to find a good MMORPG to take advantage of it (because Guild Wars 2, Diablo 3, Torchlight 2, and Path of Exile are yet to be released [I am playing in the Path of Exile Beta, of course, but it gets boring after a while]) because WoW isn’t very graphics intense, and after leveling now 13 characters to level 80 (three of them to 85), it gets so damn repetitive. So a quick breakdown of what I’ve found so far:

Everquest II quick review: It sucks out loud, stay away from it.

And to elaborate on that just a touch… First off, the free to play your way thing is the biggest line of bullshit since you told your girlfriend you’d just stick in the tip and stop if she didn’t like it (or your boyfriend told you that if you’re a girl). You download an impressive 15 gigs of information, fire up the game, and find out that the your way in which you are free to play involves being limited to about 1/10th of the playable race/class combinations. If you want to play anything else it is $7.50 a pop (for each class. The races appear to come in three packs for $7.50 … but are exclusive of the class payment). So that was mildly irritating, but I figured what the hell, if the game was good enough maybe I wouldn’t mind spending a few extra bucks to unlock some additional race/class combos -it is free to play, after all.

Next up is the first impression when entering the game world: The graphics are terrible. I want to point out here that I played the original Everquest, starting very roughly in 2002. I remember the graphics being very chunky, but this was at the dawn of 3d games, so at the time it seemed pretty amazing. Now here we are a decade later, and the graphics haven’t improved much. Everything looks better for sure, but it just doesn’t seem like a decade worth of progression. This is especially true of the world itself; I can’t think of a single MMO I have played in the last 5 years that had worse environment detail and jutting polygons. I think the game engine was probably created in 2005 (first release) and they have just been adding expansions to it ever since. For all I know the game is so glorious that it looks like real life by the time you make it to whatever level max is, but I’ll certainly never know… Because…

Most of the reason I will never know is that I uninstalled the game within about twenty minutes of play. The major reason for this was the interface. Monitors haven’t really gotten that much larger over the last five years or so, but they have increased the resolution dramatically. As a result of that, I play games in 1920×1080, but on a monitor that is the same size as the one I was playing games at 1440×900 with just a couple of years ago -which is really only a couple of inches wider than the one I was playing games at 1024×768 a couple of years before that. This means that you need to be able to scale your UI or else the icons on the screen will be roughly the size of your mouse cursor. WoW has a feature right in there that will allow you to go in and scale the UI to any size you want to, thereby making it so you can see the game world in glorious 1920×1080, while the interface is still large enough to be seen by adult, human eyes. Everquest II does not have that option. Or, I should say, it has that option for the fonts in some of the dialogue boxes, and for some of the action bars, but not a broad and sweeping UI scale button that will do it all for you. Also, in order to get some of the text and buttons larger you actually have to download some add-ons, which is just not something you want to be doing within the first thirty seconds of gameplay. I mean seriously, the first thing a new player sees is the UI, it should be the most welcoming, most easily altered feature of the game, not something that requires you to learn how to program in order to fix. So I had to turn the resolution on this down to some 1024xsomething setting to be able to reasonably see the icons -which could have something to do with why the graphics seemed to suck so bad. But since that is entirely their fault, I am damn sure calling like I saw it.

The quests and combat in the game seemed pretty good actually, and if not for the shitty interface options and 1990’s graphics (when played at the ridiculously low resolution that allows for actually seeing your interface) I imagine the game could have been a lot of fun. Pity. But since there are so many MMORPG’s out there, I’m certainly not going to waste the time on this one when I can just download a different one.

Next up is Lord of the Rings Online. LotRO is one that used to be subscription based only, and I had fairly high expectations for it coming in. There are some things about this game that are really great -the Epic quest line being the biggest one that springs to mind- but there are also a lot of things that sour it.

This one is free to play only early on, then you simply have to pay to continue. I don’t mean that in a ‘it will be easier to progress with better stuff’ kind of way, I mean it in a very literal ‘once you reach a certain level, you no longer get experience from killing monsters and no quests will be available’ type of way. Shitty. I enjoyed it enough early on to go ahead and pay for a couple of the expansions (keep an eye on the store to catch these on sale and you can get them for a fairly reasonable price). I managed to keep entertained playing for a couple of months before eventually giving up completely.

While I haven’t read the books since High School, the Epic quest chain (that is what it is called in game, not my assessment of its relative size, scope, or coolness) seems to follow the story fairly well. That is absolutely necessary, as there isn’t really a lot else to tie this to the Lord of the Rings franchise, and without that it would just be another free MMO with relatively good graphics and relatively lackluster execution of pretty much everything. As with the previous game, I can’t comment on endgame content (assuming it exists) because it didn’t hold my interest long enough to get there. If I had to pin down a single element to cite as the reason I just gave up, it would actually be two elements (because, evidently, I suck at math), which would be these:

1) Travel. Much like vanilla WoW, they are making up for a lack of early game content by making everything as difficult as possible. Travel time is how they achieve that. If you want to go from one zone to the next you have to walk there (or ride if you’ve purchased a mount. There is a taxi service to some places as well, but it goes at the same speed). Professions can only be advanced while at a profession trainer -of which are there are many conveniently spread out across the fucking globe. You want to learn the next level of weapon crafting? Be prepared for thirty minutes (real time) of running to get to the trainer, learn them, and get back to what you were doing. So why not wait and just do it every ten character levels? Because your bags can hold roughly 5% of what they would need to be capable of holding in order to pull that off. And that is if you have paid for the bag upgrades (with real money). As near as I can tell, the professions never get any easier to level. And one thing I have learned from every MMO I have ever played is that you really must level them as you go or you will regret it later. And that leads nicely into the second biggest thing that sours me to the game:

2)There is no attempt to group things by zone. By that I mean quests -or any other reasonable means to level your character. Depending on which expansions you have purchased (and again, you must purchase expansions to level beyond 20 [I think]), you may have half a dozen quests that you can do in one zone, then another half a dozen that you can do in another zone -some fifteen minute ride away. Don’t get me wrong, you will have other quests in those zones, but they will either be 5 levels higher than what you can reasonably do, or they will require a group to complete unless you are ridiculously over-leveled, and thus worth no experience. Add to that that the Epic quest line will invariably either send you to a zone you’ve already completed, or one that you won’t be reasonably questing in for another several levels, and the overall effect is just maddening.

I really wanted to like LotRO, and I kind of do, but when you add the mindlessly boring travel in with the fact that you frequently have to buy another expansion to be able to fill in quests from level x-x, the thirty minutes round trips to learn a couple of points in you professions, and that’s not even mentioning the horribly executed auction house interface, I just couldn’t do it long term.

Next up is Runes of Magic. This is AFAIK the largest free MMORPG out there in terms of player base. This one, unfortunately, falls into the free to play: Pay to win category, and instantly loses points for that. You could theoretically make it to end game without paying for anything (slow as it may be due to travel without a mount) then you would be totally fucked. There are those who will argue that it is possible to get geared for endgame without ever spending a penny, but even they will say that it is impractical to do so -and that it would take thousands of hours of farming for currency to even attempt. Of course if your credit line is big enough, you can just pop right out of the gates leveling with speed and ease, be geared and ready for endgame in a couple of weeks.

The graphics in this one are really quite good (certainly the best I’ve seen in any F2P game), and the gameplay is very similar to WoW. The professions are slow to go -and I’m not just talking about leveling them here; it very literally seems to take 3x longer of channeling to farm a node than in WoW. The quests are much better than LotRO for staying around the same area though, so leveling can actually be done fairly quickly. If you shell out a bit of cash for a mount, this one will keep you entertained for a while. I’ve actually installed and played this one a couple of times. It will hold my interest for a few weeks before I invariably go back to WoW. The idea is that I was trying to find a F2P replacement for WoW, and this just isn’t it. An annual WoW subscription costs about $160 bucks (bought in six month increments), which unlocks all available content for as many as 50 characters. To get one character to endgame content in Runes of Magic would cost at least 33% more than that. And that is just the sticker price; you need to continue spending money to keep your gear and goodies current or else you’ll quickly fall behind. Hardly seems like a free alternative.

That said, when I invariably give up WoW again, this is probably the game I’ll go back to -unless something else grabs my attention.

Next up is Requiem: Memento Mori. I happened across this one while looking for something more vampire-y. This one was pretty fun to play just for being different than the MMOs I am used to… At least it seemed like it was. When you break it down, though, its really just the same 8 or so Archetypes from every other MMO ever. They aren’t afraid to throw around some gore in this one though (something that has been all but cleansed from WoW over the years) and that alone was enough to keep me playing for a while.

This game has a nightmare mode that they tout as unique- but it is really a direct ripoff from Everquest (who probably ripped it off from someone else). The basic gist being that a zone will have like level 12 cats in it in the daytime, but at night the same area will be populated with level 60 elite dragons. What a great selling point, eh? Not paying close enough attention to your clock while questing and you go from 6/10 dog tails collected to getting one-shot by the meanest dragon you’ve ever seen. Wouldn’t that be a fun thing to apply to some real life stuff? Say you’re shaving before you go to bed and don’t see the clock hit 9pm -BAM! your electric shaver just turned into a chainsaw and cut off half your face. Try it again tomorrow, sucka!

Overall the game wasn’t different enough to be unique, and it suffered from many of the same issues that seems to plague all of these F2P games. This one, though, offers the ultimate fuck you in that you rent mounts for 30 (or 1 or 10) days at a time. Way to hook us!

Seriously though. If you are looking to start the next big MMORPG, what you need to do is 1)make mounts free and achievable through normal questing. 2)make professions at low level easy to learn, easy to progress, and easy to research (in game) so you get a sense that you are choosing the right profession for the right class but won’t feel attached to it at level 30 if something else seems like a better idea. 3)make questing/leveling quick and easy by zone; no one enjoys having to spend 30 minutes of their two hours of game time riding across fifty zones to bang out the three quests you have available to their level. 4)make your pay items fall into a couple of very clearly defined categories like A)cosmetic only. This could be different spell animations, different skins for existing items, non combat pets, different mounts, dyes for armor, character look editing etc. B)time savers not game breakers. Consumables for quick travel from town to town, increased experience gain for a limited time, increased profession experience for a limited time, etc. C) Useless junk. A great example of this is something in WoW (though I can’t remember exactly what it was) that does an emote where the character will equip an electric guitar for a couple of seconds and play a few notes. It has no value whatsoever, but is just the type of thing that a F2P’er wouldn’t mind seeing since it makes no difference whatsoever to gameplay.

There were a couple of other games that I had intended to put in here, but this has already gone much longer than expected. I may add a couple more at some time later as time/my fuzzy memory permits. If you are a big fan of any of these games and think I have missed the mark, please do drop a comment to let me know why.

Movie Review: Lucky! (redux)

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Shadowtwin — No Comments ↓

The (redux) is because out of the dozen or so movie reviews I have bothered to throw up on the site over the years (I assure you the preceding wordplay is totally intentional), there was another movie titled Lucky. It’s not that I seek out movies with that title or anything, I just happened to be intrigued by the cover synopsis on each of them and decided to give them a shot.

This particular Lucky was released in 2011 and has a fairly impressive (depressive?) 23% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes. I didn’t actually know that at the time, but I would have been more eager to watch it if I had simply because I like to watch movies the critics pan and generally enjoy them despite -or possibly because- they are so hated. In the case of this particular movie I can definitely understand that rating; I would probably rate it right around a 1.1 out of 10 if I were into using arbitrary numbering systems to gauge my enjoyment of cinema -which I’m not (although it does make more sense than the one goose head and three rabbit paws out of a possible seven goats and two sheep rating I had in mind).

This movie, with its current soundtrack and editing, is hardly worth watching. It is an interesting enough concept to rope you in, but it is so terribly executed in every way that it is very disappointing to actually watch. Yet I continued to watch, hoping that perhaps things would improve as the story moved along. Things did not improve. I really can’t give any detail without spoiling what little plot they decided to use so, before I move on to the spoilers, my recommendation is to watch it if you’re bored and have some imagination just to marvel at how poorly they executed what could have been a brilliant movie. If, on the other hand, you aren’t into watching shitty movies just to pick them apart for how good they could have been, probably best to stay away.

To the spoilers!

The story is supposed to be this: A serial killer wins the lottery and uses his new found fortune to win over the love of his life. When she discovers his secret, plot ensues. Unfortunately that is not at all what happens. To digress for a moment, movies (tv shows, plays, books, anything fictional really) are absolutely reliant on your ability to suspend disbelief for the duration. My inability to do so really cripples my movie-going experience. Once I have seen an actor in a couple of films I can no longer suspend my disbelief. So, for instance, I know that I won’t be able to see any movie with Nicolas Cage in it as anything other than Nicolas Cage pretending to be the character. I can’t believe any of the situations, can’t sympathize with the character, it’s all just people acting. If I watch the same movie with people I’ve never heard of, I can enjoy the movie and sympathize with the characters because I don’t know them as that punk Charlie Bodell from Peggy Sue Got Married. That is more a reflection of me than of their abilities though, and just used to illustrate the point: If you can’t suspend your disbelief, you won’t enjoy the movie.

In the case of Lucky, I was watching two lead actors that had left so little impression on me that, until I just looked them up, I had no idea this wasn’t their first movie. I was totally prepared to believe, but the movie fucked me out of that possibility within the first two minutes. You see, the serial killer doesn’t buy the lottery ticket, one of his victims does. Now if that person had bought the lottery ticket at a store that didn’t have a camera facing the register (if such a place still exists), I could reasonably assume that he would be able to cash it in without much hassle. Unfortunately, the place she bought the ticket has time-stamped video of every register transaction -and the girl who bought the ticket is dead before the lottery is drawn. Now I don’t claim to know a great deal about state-run lottery systems, but I will guarantee you that before any state goes to paying out 36 million dollar jackpots they are going to verify where the ticket was purchased and do their best to verify who purchased it -and I DO know that the lottery knows exactly what location sold the ticket and the precise time it was sold. And even if the lottery wasn’t verifying this information, certainly the retailer would be for the purposes of advertising that the winning ticket was sold there. The movie tells you straight away that this video exists -hell, it is being used by what can only be a mentally incompetent detective that can’t seem to put the pieces together when it’s a woman buying the ticket but a man cashing it. So really the movie lost me right there. It’s the same type of thing that takes me completely out of all the tv crime dramas, C.S.I. for example, where they find a spot of black powder on the taillight of a 2002 Honda, then parlay that into an airtight case against the pizza delivery guy who made a delivery next door to the owner of that car four days ago. It’s such utter bullshit that I just can’t watch it. But in the case of Lucky, I soldiered on.

That digression aside, this movie really had potential. The main problem is that it doesn’t seem like they were entirely sure if they wanted to make a black comedy or a nail-biting, horror/thriller. The acting was really quite good, especially in the case of the female lead, Lucy St. Marten (ari Graynor). She actually looked quite pretty in the beginning, in kind of a girl-next-door way, and had a slightly too upbeat, mall girl demeanor. By the end of the movie she really looked defeated, with any hint of beauty destroyed, and she was quite believably going a bit crazy. But that progression from mall girl to mental patient was done with a musical score that seemed to completely randomly switch between ominous and outtakes from Killer Clowns from Outer Space. I really think that just a bit of editing (and I mean cutting room stuff that that could be done now) and changing the score to embrace either the ominous or the campy and they could have come up with a good black comedy or a great horror/suspense film. Instead you get a bunch of horrible events (theoretically, since nearly all of the actual killing takes place off screen) taking place that are extremely difficult to take seriously because of the music, but just a bit too terrible to find humor in.

Oh yeah, the movie. So some serial killer dude wins the lottery. When Lucy, his gradeschool crush, finds out about it, she throws herself at him -despite treating him like the scum of the earth for twenty years prior. They say money can’t buy love, but in this case it certainly can buy sex and marriage and that’s practically the same thing. When Lucy first finds out her new husband’s secret (when she witnesses him murdering a maid on their honeymoon), she freaks out only for a few seconds, but then does her wifely duty: she doesn’t tell him about it, but disposes of the body. I will give the movie a bit of credit here for not insulting our intelligence by explaining why (the payout is in annuities, so she has to stay with him to get the checks). She later finds a few more of his victims buried at his house, and takes it upon herself to move the bodies to their new house (no idea why. I thought she was trying to find them less likely to be found. Dumb bitch), but she starts going a little bit crazy from the stress of it all. So when the bodies are discovered at the end of the movie, her DNA is all over them. Of course she is the one that goes to jail for it, while he walks away. He does still come to visit the now apparently schizophrenic woman in jail though. And that’s about it.

This movie was just so disappointing for how poorly they handled everything. Every step of the way I found myself thinking “why the hell did they do that”, but there was never a time when subsequent events justified previous actions. When the credits rolled I really hated myself for sticking through it that long thinking that eventually something had to pay off when I knew that it probably wasn’t going to. I don’t know that I’ve ever used the phrase “Sucked out loud”, but it certainly seems fitting for this film in its current state.

How long does it take to get a digital download from BestBuy.com?

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Shadowtwin — No Comments ↓

The wife has been interested in checking out Skyrim for a while now, and I have to admit that I was a little bit too. I intended to purchase her a copy of it yesterday for digital download, thinking that if it looked good and had reasonable controls on the PC ported version of it, I might get it for myself as well. So I started looking for places that had the digital download available. GameFly had it available, but I haven’t ordered anything from them since I used to get the downloads from Direct2Drive, and I was afraid that this fact could delay the download, so I looked elsewhere. Then I saw that BestBuy.com had it available.

Now, I have a BestBuy Rewards mastercard. I haven’t used it in over a year though, because it is issued by Swindler’s Bank and Trust, who have been slapped with so many class action lawsuits over the last few years that, frankly, I just typed “hsbc class action lawsuit” in the search bar and picked a random one for that link -the bank was directly involved in the Madoff scandal, as well as being sued for selling bogus credit protection plans, being sued for harassing phone calls, being sued for intentionally not mailing credit card statements and then charging late fees on them; in short, if Satan ran a credit card company, he would be envious of their business practices. But I did earn some reward points with Best Buy for using it.

That was a whole other issue. When you start your rewards account they have it set to automatically print out reward certificates at some ridiculously low number, and while I don’t remember what that amount is, let’s say it’s $5. So every time you earn $5 in rewards they send you a certificate that is good for a couple of months and expires if you don’t use it. Obviously you aren’t going to plan major purchases around having a $5 off certificate laying around, so mine all expired. I navigated my way through the maze of a website for the rewards card though, and was able to change it so that my rewards would accumulate and only print out when the value of it was $500 (although when I look at it now, it is still set at that, but the only options you can now set it for are 5, 10, or 20 bucks, so maybe it has changed). At any rate, even though I haven’t used the card in over a year, I had $70 in rewards certificates stacked up in there, so I figured why not use them to get not one, but two copies of Skyrim for less than the price of one!

Dumbass.

So I placed the order for two digital copies of Skyrim from BestBuy.com expecting the download to be available instantly. I was basing that on the following information, which is readily available on their website:

For your digital products delivered by Best Buy pc app: You’ll receive another e-mail when your game or software is available in My Downloads in pc app. It usually takes just a few minutes.

Please note: It may take up to 15 minutes for new orders to show up in your account.

So based on the information available on their website it should take no longer than 15 minutes for the digital download to be available… 12 hours later I called customer service to see what was up with the order -fearing that the rewards points I used were going to be disallowed for some reason or another. Here are some direct quotes from the representative with my (paraphrased) questions and responses:

Me: I just ordered some digital software and have been waiting on it for a while, how long should the process take?

Rep: “The credit card verification process can take up to four hours. After that your games will be available.”

Me: Alright, it’s been twelve hours.

Rep: “One moment.” (here she placed me on hold) “I just spoke to my supervisor and he said that since the system upgrades on the weekend, this could take a little longer than normal. Please allow up to 48 hours.”

Me: “Is 48 hours within BestBuy’s definition of the scope of “just a few minutes”? (this one is a direct quote, I had planned to ask that about the 12 hours I had already been waiting, but changed it on the fly. Go improv!)

Rep: “Our website suggests that as a possible time frame, but does not guarantee it.”

Me: Can I have my money back so I can just buy it from a reputable company?

Rep: “We can process a return for you, however the funds will not be returned to you for 2-3 business days.”

I did finally get the downloads and game codes. Ultimately I had to wait roughly 16 hours for them to be available. It doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to me though; if I had ordered this from any other company, the download is available the very second you make a payment. One would assume that since BestBuy is such a huge company they could at least match the other 2-bit services out there. One would be wrong. The good news is that now that I have spent all my reward points I have no reason to ever make another purchase from BestBuy, and judging by their impressive 10% rating on customer service scoreboard it’s probably for the best (that stat is horribly skewed since that website is designed specifically to collect complaints… I know that, but I am using it here because this process pissed me off quite a bit. What really pissed me off about it was the customer service rep was not even a bit concerned about the misleading statements on the website, and didn’t seem to give half a rat’s ass whether I ever got my products; she seemed actively annoyed that I had called at all).

As I noted in a comment in one of their forums, “I really believe that if bestbuy were to completely scrap their digital download service it would increase their sales. If every sale you make loses you a customer for life, it’s probably not going to increase profit.” And to answer the question put forth in the title of this post, How long does it take to get a digital download from BestBuy.com? The answer is 16 hours, but 16 particularly annoying hours because the website intentionally misleads you and the customer service reps lie to you. Kudos BestBuy.com!

The $700(ish) PC build begins!

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Shadowtwin — No Comments ↓

I had initially planned to take copious photos of the PC build to put up here with lengthy descriptions of the PC building process. I did take some photos, and I am going to talk about specific parts of my particular build, but NewEgg has a 3-part video series on PC building that covers everything in much more detail than I ever could:

Part One covers the parts that you will need to buy before taking on the project. Unless you have never taken the sides off of a PC tower it doesn’t really offer much in the way of new information.

Part Two Is where they cover the actual assembly of the components. I kept this one up on my screen as I was putting these things together just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. It is quite informative, and is definitely a recommended view for first timers.

Part Three Covers installation of the software in your new machine. This also isn’t something that will be a great deal of use, but it does cover the subject well, so is worth watching -especially for first time builders.

My particular circumstance was this: I wanted to build a pc for about 800 bucks. That changed after I had ordered a pair or video cards and a pair of power supplies (as was detailed in a previous post). With the video cards, power supplies, and cases in hand, my mission changed from building one 800 dollar PC to buying the rest of the components to build TWO reasonable gaming systems for under 1000. I did it, but barely.

The previous post has the exact specs of what went into it, but I will sum it: Rosewill Gear X3 cases, Rosewill 600 watt power supplies, Intel BOXDH67CLB3 motherboards, Intel core i3 2120 processors, Radeon HD6850 video cards, Team Elite 8gig (2×4 gig) RAM, WD Caviar Blue 500GB HDDs, ASUS DVD drives, NZXT fan controllers, Rosewill CPU cooling fans (there were a lot of complaints about noise and vibration with the stock fan for the i3-2120), 1x140mm fan and 5x120mm fan per system, and finally, Windows 7 Home Premium. That all tallied up to $731 per system after delivery charges. Not a bad price for what it is, I think. And it looked like you see here before I started the build.

It was pretty intimidating to look at. While you can’t really tell in the photo, that all took up a huge chunk of my living room. I had planned on waiting until the weekend (my day off) to start putting them together, but I wanted to start getting the place dug out, so I opted to start working on them after I got home from an 11 hour shift on Wednesday night (they are all 11 or 12 hour shifts, so no biggy).

The first external build went together pretty quickly:

As you can (maybe) see in the photo, I did the full, powered external build on the first system (although I had the power supply disconnected and the 6-pin power removed from the GPU before I thought to snap a picture). The only reason I went so far as to power it up externally was because I had bought such a random mish-mash of components that I wanted to make sure they actually would work together. When I got around to building the second one I still put the CPU, CPU cooler and RAM into it externally, but I didn’t do a full, powered external build. Now a note about the particular Intel board I was using (all Intel boards?): The boards came with an electric system speaker hard-wired to the motherboard -and no system speaker header-. I was thanking the stars that there was no system speaker header though because in the process of googling the location of it, I found out that the Intel board had done away with the single post beep. If I hadn’t known that bit of information I’m sure I would have freaked right the fuck out when it didn’t make a sound at power up.

The workday being 11 hours and the drive each way being an hour, I really only had an hour and a half or so to work on this on day one (and opening all the boxes probably accounted for at least half an hour of that). That led to leaving the first system, not to mention the living room, in a state of complete disarray. The following photos should be pretty clear evidence of that:

When I started on night two (another hour and a half or so to work on it) all the components were in place (except the fans), and I just had to get everything wired up, and said wires put away. I did this exactly wrong. I thought that the way to go about it would be to run the big ass power wires all around first, then fit the little ones in where I could. While this ultimately did work, it meant having to feed the wires for the front panel, the SATA cables, the fan wires, pretty much everything, over the top of the big ass cables that were already in place. Once I had it all hooked up, the result of that was that the cables were sticking so far out of the cable-corraling side of the machine that it took a good deal of force to get the side on. So while you may see a nice clean machine here on the right (except the extra power cables all gathered up below the drive bays), the back was a huge fucking mess. It was bad enough that, even though I made it through the Windows install, driver installs, and windows updates on the second day, I would go back the next day and reroute all the cables. I mean, I may want to add or remove a component at some point and if I opened up that mess I’d probably have to kick my own ass.

Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of what it looked like before I re-worked the cables and this photo doesn’t do a lot of justice to just how well the wires are actually secured. As you can see, the big, braided power supply cables are the real hard part to hide. In this photo there are four fan cables, the USB 2.0 front panel cables, the HD audio front panel cables, a USB 3.0 passthrough cable, and all 6 (well 4, but 6 pins) of the power, reset, LED, and HDD LED cables running from the front panel to their destination, and aside from the big-ass, white molex mess near the drive bays (the fan controller came with 3 pin connectors, the front fan had a molex connector, so I had to use a 3-pin to molex converter to hook up the front fan. And since there are six fans and only 5 slots on the controller, and since the headers on the motherboard are conveniently 4-pin [none of the fans had such a connector] I had to add two additional 3-pin to molex converter to wire together the two top fans [because I didn’t have a 3-pin splitter and there is nowhere to get one in a town of 3000 people at 3am]) all you can really see is the braided power cables and the SATA cables. And while the photo doesn’t really evidence it, the wires were all below flush and the side panel slid on without any cartoon-character-sitting-on-a-suitcase type shenanigans.

One other thought on the cabling subject: It was actually a good thing that I had to rewire the case, because it gave me a day to think about it while I was at work and I handled it completely differently. The first time I wired it up, I just grouped everything together and zip-tied it. It seemed like a good idea, but what if I need to change the power supply later, or the hard drive, and everything is tied together? So in the second run I routed and tied all the front panel wires first, then I routed and tied the fans, then I routed and tied the power cables, and the SATA cables went in without ties because I think they will be the most likely to need to be moved in the very near future. If anything else need replaced I should be able to change it without having to rewire the entire case.

So build one took me three nights at an hour and a half a night to complete from opening the first box to the latest windows updates being installed. Build 2 started at about 4:30 am on Sunday. The build took roughly 2 hours to complete, but I stopped after installing windows and the drivers because the front panel USB didn’t work. I would have kicked myself for not doing a full, powered external build except that the front USB isn’t something you are going to check during that process. The USB 3.0 passthrough was working, the audio and mic was working, the power and reset buttons were working, just not the USB. So rather than finishing up, I had to leave it for after some sleep.

When I got back up to try to troubleshoot the USB problem, I searched google for anyone else having the same issue, and of course found nothing. But since I had no way to test the USB headers on the motherboard, I decided to check the front panel connections first. Unfortunately I couldn’t see what the hell was holding the front panel on, and any google search for the case with “front panel” in it just resulted in dozens of pages of the item description, which conveniently says, “Easy to remove front panel”, but doesn’t tell you how to remove it. Nor does the owner’s manual. Once I got out a flashlight I was able to chase down six of these little plastic clothespin looking things (two of which can be seen in the photo) that were holding it on. A quick job with some needle-nosed pliers and I finally had access to the front panel connectors:

While it is hooked up in the photo, the USB connector was absolutely disconnected when I got the front panel off. I don’t know if it was that way from the factory or if my various routing maneuvers caused it, but I was certainly glad that all I had to do was plug it back in to get USB; I really didn’t want to have to rip the whole thing apart and RMA the motherboard or the case. Anyhow, each build took 3 to 3.5 hours including installing all drivers and latest windows updates. The finished product (one of them) is to the right here, complete with snazzy Intel core i3, Sapphire Radeon HD6850 and genuine windows stickers in place -for that professional look … or it would be if there was any way at all to fit the component stickers on the front panel or the genuine windows sticker on the chasis -which there simply is not. As you can see, this is a very plain little box. Previously I was very happy to have big, bright, shiny PC’s to showcase just how big my penis is, but all the LED’s and cold fusion lights in the world can’t increase your frame rate… Also worth noting that all those bright, shiny LED’s are a bitch to keep clean.

So once I had these things built and all the drivers in place, I had to run the Windows Experience Index to see where I was at, and was rather disappointed to see:

an experience index of 5.9. I know I wasn’t running premium parts, but my two year old pc has exactly the same rating! Further inspection shows that it’s not that bad:

Looking at the same page on my two-year-old PC, it has exactly the same thing crippling it: damn hard drive. But when you are putting together a 700(ish) dollar PC in February 2012, there’s no way you can go with a solid state drive with a reasonable amount of storage and a decent video card. But since the machines are primarily going to be used for playing games I think the rest of the ratings are pretty damn good for the budget. I am keeping an eye on SSD’s though, and as soon as I can get 120 gigs or better for a reasonable price I will probably jump on that -of course I will have to buy one for each machine.

And in case you are wondering, ReaperCell Systems is the company I invented just so I could put a cool logo on this thing (see, because the box is so plain it made me think of the ‘sleeper’ cars; old granny boats that some kids used to drive in high school. That made me think of ‘sleeper reaper’, but that is a game someone made already, plus it sounds too cutesy. That made me think of ‘sleeper cell’, which is also a game (and a tv show), but it made me think of ‘Reaper Cell’, and I like the way it sounds)… Because it was either that or a picture of me, and no one wants to see that.

The Great 2012 PC component adventure

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Shadowtwin — 1 Comment ↓

The idea was to do a minor upgrade to the two main pcs in the house. I just wanted to bump up the graphics a little bit. My graphics card is an antiquated (by enthusiast standards) radeon hd 5570, while my wife is sporting the also antiquated (by enthusiast standards) geforce 220. I say antiquated (by enthusiast standards) because they are plenty for what we are doing now, but they won’t be able to play new games at max frame rate, and my computers are the one area of life that I like to indulge (on a budget).

sapphire radeon 6850 — Sapphire Radeon 6850 - mmmm.

So I set about to choosing a video card. I turned to Tom’s Hardware’s best video cards for the money to help me pick them out. If you are at all geeky about computers and you don’t know about that site, you certainly should check it out. Nearly any time I am trying to find information on a specific pc component, I am able to find it there. The site doesn’t just have a dude throwing out anecdotal evidence for why he thinks one brand is better than the other; there are pages and pages of benchmarks and extensive testing. The testing even breaks it down by what component is better suited for what task. To use a for instance, in the January edition of best processor for the moneyit breaks down the current hundred dollar processors and mentions that the AMD is better suited for multi-tasking, while the Intel counterpart may pull ahead in single application speed. That is exactly why I go there for the majority of my research. So in the aforementioned best graphics card for the money article, I found the Radeon graphics card they recommended in the ~150 dollar price range to be just what I was looking for; I play my games in 1920×1080 or 1920×1200 depending on the game, while the wife plays them at a lower resolution because she likes the interface to be bigger (she is a clicker, not a hotkey-er). This card should be able to run any game in those resolutions without having to lower settings. I was able to pick up a pair of the Sapphire Radeon 6850 cards for 149.99 a piece.

And that is how it all started.

I set about to scrolling through my email for the invoices for all the crap in our current pcs (I never delete any email. I have copied all incoming and outgoing email from pc to pc ((minus obvious junk mail)) for quite literally more than a decade) to see what I put into the power supplies at the time of purchase. You see, the video cards that are currently in our pcs are in there mostly because I was trying to get the best cards I could find without having to run separate power -that is, they are powered by the PCI-e slot alone.

It turns out that I (just like all pc manufacturers nowadays) had totally skimped on the power supplies on our current machines. In both cases they have listed the “surge” power on the PC stats, so realistically they are running at about half the listed power (and how can they get by with that? They don’t do that with a power supply when you buy it, why is it different when it comes already in a case?) While my wife’s rig does have a 600w power supply, that is a no-name, 600w “surge” unit that does not have a 6-pin power connector for the PCI-e. My machine only has a 500w “surge” unit, but it does have a 6-pin connector… which really doesn’t make sense, because at the maybe 250 watts it puts out continuously it won’t be able to realistically push a discrete video card in the first place unless I, you know, remove the cpu. At any rate, when I ordered the video cards, I went ahead and ordered a power supply unit as well. I ordered a Rosewill Rosewill RP600V2-S-SL 600w power supply for $59.99. I did this based on favorable results I have had with Rosewill power supplies in the past, as well as the ratings the power supply has on NewEgg. A lot of enthusiasts throw around the “you don’t want to run a cheap power supply like that because it will fry your whole system” phrase. But, what? In the 501-600 watt category on NewEgg, this particular unit has 73% five star ratings, which is better than the OCZ Fatal1ty and ModXstream, better than the Antec TruePower, better than the SeaSonic Bronze, better than the Corsair Gaming series. In fact the only supply you can find with a better % of 5 star ratings is the Antec BP 550 and then a few that have under 35 reviews, while this one has over 600. So I can’t figure out what they are basing this on. That is actually the reason I am writing this, but I will get to that later.

When the cards arrived, I threw them right into the pc’s. More or less as expected, my machine would fire up and run with it, but when I attempted to actually use the card to play a game the system would simply shut off. The wife’s machine could run it, but barely. It soon became evident that I would need to get a new power supply for her machine as well. So I ordered another of the Rosewill ones pictured above to replace the cheap-ass, flimsy crap that came with the system.

Roswill X3 Gamer Case — Roswill X3 Gear Case

Here is the part where I curse NewEgg (where I buy all my parts). When I went online to order her power supply, they had the exact case I had been planning to buy for my next pc build on sale with their shell shocker deal for … $39.99. When I say it was the exact case I had been wanting, I don’t mean that I was looking at this case and a few others too, I mean I had done some research on cases, I narrowed my decision down to a few different ones, then I watched the NewEgg review of it on YouTubeand decided it was definitely the case I wanted. The major selling points for me were: 1)A single USB 3.0 on the front panel; I recently got an external hard drive that uses USB 3.0, and I currently have it running through a 2.0 on my machine. I am storing all my programming crap on the external drive so I don’t have to copy it to a thumb drive anytime I want to use it on a different machine. Having the USB 3.0 on the front panel will make that so much easier. 2) The case has one front, two top, two side, and one rear fan position. I intend to use them all -more air is always better. 3)There are slide-out, washable filters on the PSU intake and front fan intake. I have several dogs that like to strategically place their hair all over the case fans on my PC’s, hopefully this will alleviate some of that. This leads us nicely into 4) The thing that sets this case apart from all others I had been looking at is what you see to the right here: The top fans can be lifted out for cleaning. My current rig has 2 top fans, but to clean them I have to disconnect all the cables and take the pc out, otherwise I have to blow the dust down on top of the MOBO and other components. With this I should be able to quickly snap them out, hit them with compressed air and be right back in business. In theory.

At this point, I had already purchased three out of 8 of the components necessary to build two new ground up pcs, so I started shopping that idea to see if I could come up with a build that was 1) forward compatible. 2) A reasonable upgrade over our existing systems. 3) Cheap. And while I didn’t know it at the time, 4) Just to piss off some smug, know-it-all enthusiasts. Here is the final build -in image form, as the cart came through in email with base64 encryption, which didn’t transfer to the web page. I also made it into a public wish list, which looks like it will stay active for about six months, after which that link will be broken and I will be directly responsible for slopp(~~ier that usual~~)y writing.

I’m no computer expert and I don’t pretend to be. I would have been happy to hide in a dark corner somewhere to build this budget box and never tell anyone what components went into it… Had it not been for the wild, unsubstantiated facts that were being spewed to me when I asked for a compatibility check in a popular pc building forum. First up was this one:

…It’s a low quality power supply that could potentially fry other computer components. The Seasonic 520W would output more in reality and definitely safer. Alternatives are the Atnec Earthwatts Green 500W (no power cords included) .

This scared the beejeezeus out of me. Could my choice of this piece of shit power supply cause my entire pc to catch fire, rape my wife, stalk and kill my children? Oh noes! That actually talked me out of the build completely for about a week. That was when I started reading customer reviews for the power supplies (and other components) and tried to find evidence beyond anecdotal of this (or any other for that matter) spontaneously exploding and taking the rest of the machine with it. Sure, there is this video (which is thrown about on every pc building forum):

What you’ll notice about that video is that -like all tests designed for a specific result- they conveniently don’t tell you what they are testing, don’t show you any evidence of what load is on it, don’t perform the same test on units from multiple brands, hell, for all I know this is corsair performing this test on their very own power unit.

Next up is my immense annoyance at what constitutes a low quality computer component. What is this based on? I don’t know of any pc part manufacturers that say like, “Buy Widget Brand motherboards, creating low quality pc components for over 3 days now”. Feel free to take the time to search the internet for any computer parts being advertised as “low quality”, I think you’ll come up with the same thing I did: nada. In fact the only references to ‘low quality’ that I can come up with in any reputable review or benchmark testing is in reference to the video setting on graphics cards during testing. Simply put: low quality computer parts is a subjective term. If you have an old eMachine or Dell system laying around somewhere, go pop the cover off of it and take a look at the stock power supply. All of them that I have laying around (about three) have a power supply that is non-descript, wrapped in some cheap galvanized looking tin, look flimsy, feel flimsy, and weight about 10% of what any hard drive you can buy from NewEgg does. I actually wrote about that when I was replacing the stock power supply in my first CyberPower PC. So to me, and probably any layman out there, I think the definition of a low quality power supply would be these cheap-ass, stock power supplies. To some enthusiasts, however, anything that is not their preferred brand gets that moniker.

Since the power supply that was suggested several times as the best replacement for the Rosewill was the Seasonic 520 Bronze, I started to compare the two as objectively as I could with the information I had at my disposal. They had roughly an equal % of DOA complaints -but I would ignore those anyway as DOA does happen and NewEgg is stellar at their customer service and RMA process. As I mentioned way up in this page, the Rosewill power supply that I bought has 73% 5 star ratings on newegg. The Seasonic 520w Bronze currently has 67% 5 star ratings. Of those reviews, 5% (3) are 1 star ratings that say that this high quality psu failed between six and nine months. A direct comparison to the customer reviews of the Rosewill product is difficult since it has 10 times the customer ratings, but I went through the 100 most recent reviews (35 more reviews than the Seasonic has total), and there are also about 5% (5) 1 star ratings based on longevity, only in the case of the Rosewill there is one instance where the customer review says it lasted only six months, while the other four gave it a one star rating because it lasted between 2.5 and 3.5 years. So the average complaint of failure of the high quality Seasonic is 7 months, the average complaint of failure of the low quality Rosewill is 2.25 years. So the term low quality is subjective indeed.

It was at about that point that I realized that it is all bullshit. This is really no different than someone who really likes Ford saying that Chevy is poorly built, shoddy crap, and any foreign cars are death traps held together by rice paper and spit. Someone uses a particular component (a power supply in this case) and every other one is worthless crap. I did find one little nugget in a forum that proves a point (although I think it is exactly the opposite of what the poster was going for):

A low quality psu can do all kinds of things including frying your entire system…if you try to run it anywhere near the overexaggerated wattage rating

Well that is true of any power supply, isn’t it?

The thing is that in the case of Chevy vs. Ford I know that it is just an opinion. In the case of the power supplies I was under the (mistaken) impression that there was undeniable truth to what the tech guys were saying on the forums. I am thankful that I took the time to look a bit further into this because it really changed my entire view of pc building. Every stat I need to know is right there in the component listing, and rather than taking the advice of someone who says that component x is worthless at face value, I can read reviews of actual customers to see if that opinion has merit. In every case in this budget build, the answer to that question was a resounding no.

With all that in mind, I put the pc back together using my own research instead of listening to what the tech guys in the forums were saying. I went with the Intel BOXDH67CLB3 LGA 1155 Intel H67 motherboard because it had the features I was looking for: USB 3.0, SATA 6gb/s, 4×240 pin DDR3 SDRAM, a much lower sticker price and, you guessed it, better customer reviews than the MSI H67A-G43 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel H67 that was being recommended. The Intel Core i3-2120 Sandy Bridge was a no brainer at that price range. And of course for the RAM I went with the Team Elite 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM because, once again, it had a much lower sticker price than what was being suggested (G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333) and had great customer reviews. And that is what happened with every other component in the build.

To be fair, I haven’t built this thing yet, so it is entirely possible that once I hit the power button it will catch fire, rape my wife, stalk and kill my children. …I’m going to call that unlikely… Since I’m going to assume that’s not going to happen, the bottom line is that I saved myself about 20% off of what the tech guys recommended, and got these two machines built with the components you see listed for about $731 each (after bundle discounts and shipping). I’m not saying that you should outright ignore input on a pc build, but I am saying that you should definitely use that input to augment your own research and make a relatively informed decision; just because TechMan2012 has godlike builder status in the forums doesn’t necessarily mean his opinion is gospel.

Auto oddities and hallucination

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Shadowtwin — No Comments ↓

I was driving home from work the other night in my little Mazda B2300 -some of you may remember this pickup from it’s starring role in my first (and to date only) cinematic production Tailgate: The Movie, which I am embedding right here just in case you happened to miss it at the myriad film festivals that I never entered it into, but probably should have just to be an ass:

It’s been a good little truck for the last couple of years. I have put about 40,000 miles on it since I bought it sometime in 2009, and it hasn’t left me stranded (okay, once). Upkeep has been pretty minimal: I’ve changed the oil a few times, I replaced an alternator a week or so after I got it (that was the once), I had to replace the flimsy, plastic intake manifold along the way, a heater exchange valve was replaced, and now it is leaking a bit of the refrigerant for the air conditioning -so I just keep pumping more in as opposed to getting it repaired because honestly global warming is taking way to long to come to a head to really have any effect on me personally 🙂

60/40 Mazda Seat — Luxurious new seat -nothing like mine

Like all cars, though, this one came with some quirks. Probably the worst of which is that someone had removed the stock “60/40” seat and replaced it with a couple of bucket seats. Why is this bad? Well for one the bucket seats look damn near identical to the 60/40 seat, only without the center compartment for storage, elbow leaning, and cup holding needs. Secondly, the bucket seats they chose came from the back of a mini van. So while they look pretty much identical to the stock seat in shape, and could probably pass for stock in a pinch, they have a cupholder that can only be expanded if the doors are open (and why they put the cupholders on the outside edge of the seats instead of the inside I gots no idea). Thirdly, and probably the only issue of real importance, is that the seats, being from the back of a mini van, do not have the sensor hardware necessary to use the airbag switch cables … so the airbag light on the dash has been on since the day I bought it (and probably well before that, as there is evidence of a piece of electrical tape covering up the position of that light on the instrument console).

As with all things, I told myself I would fix it one day. All it really should take is a seat from a similar Mazda or Ford Ranger to be installed and I should be able to hook the switch back up to solve the problem. Of course finding the seat has been all but impossible. I’ve seen a couple of them advertised on ebay over the years, and have seen them a couple of times on some auto salvage parts websites, but invariably the shipping on them just kills any thought of making it a reality. If I can buy the seats for 200 dollars, but it costs 150 more to have it shipped I simply can’t make myself to it. One of these days though, I will finally fix it for real: I’ll just remove the light bulb in the dash that shows the airbag status. (And here I should point out that this is all conjecture. I bought the pickup for well below low blue book, and it did come with a salvaged title. It could be that the airbag was deployed in an accident years ago and the seats were only changed to get rid of the blood stains from the horrific crash…)

Another of the quirks was discovered quite by accident when I was fumbling around for my ~~Slim Jim~~ lockout toolkit. To elaborate on that, I once locked my keys in the pickup, and even though I had never attempted to break into a car, I went ahead and dropped 15 bucks on one to try it out before I spent over a hundred to get a locksmith out. Once I got to the truck and chose my weapon, I had the door opened in under 10 seconds. No one was more surprised than me. Since then I have had a bit of a flair for unlocking cars with the little toolkit (which looks very similar to what you see to the left here). My next break-in attempt was for one of the cashiers at work, she locked her keys in her Pontiac Grand Am -which had electronic locks and I thought I certainly wouldn’t be able to crack, but I tried it to humor her. Perhaps 2 minutes in the door popped right open. Next up was a Ford van from the late 70’s. That one practically opened up just because it saw me coming… But to date I am most surprised that I was able to pop the door on a 2007 Ford Mustang. This one also had power door locks, but this one is certainly new enough it should be using all of the preventive features that are supposed to make the ~~slim jim~~ lockout toolkit obsolete. I’d like to say that I got right in, but I didn’t. This one took me a good 10 minutes of fumbling around to finally get to pop open, but it was all worth while to see the relieved look on the woman’s face when I got in. In fact to date the only car I was not able to get into using the old slim jim method was a 2001 Camry. I was able to get into it, I just had to use a different device to manipulate the electronic door lock on the driver’s arm rest after the attempts with the slim jim had failed. So breaking into cars thus far is a 100% success rate. I would also like to point out that I am doing this for customer service in my official capacity at work -not to go joyriding.

My how I digress… It was when I was reaching behind the seat for the ~~slim jim~~ lockout toolkit (and isn’t it ironic that I now keep the thing behind the seat? So if I happen to lock my keys in the truck again I will have to buy another lockout toolkit to get to both the keys and the lockout toolkit) that I happened across a thick electrical wire with frayed ends from where it had been ripped off of … something … Apparently I must have hit it against the metal on the back of the cab or something, because a huge spark shot out and (as I would only discover later) it blew the fuse to my turn signals. I took the time later to trace this wire up under the dash and remove it from the fuse block -where it had been haphazardly smashed into an existing spot instead of using one of the several empty (but powered) slots. I thought it may have been to an audio amplifier, but unless they had the stereo rigged to make the lights flash with the beat I can’t figure out why they would have wired it on that circuit. Just another quirk.

Of course the quirk that I came across the other night was a factory one.

I was leaving work at right around 3am -I generally leave anywhere between 3-6am on Sunday morning. Taking a page from the old-school truckers, I keep a bag of corn nuts in the pickup. The idea is that if you are driving a long stretch of straight road in the dark, crunching on seeds or nuts will keep you from dozing off or getting hypnotized by the road. I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced either of those, but the crunch does keep me alert. I was reaching for that bag of beauties just after I left work (Barbecue this time, though they are generally Ranch), but I couldn’t find them. Alone on the road, I reached down to turn on the dome light to aid in my search. There was a bright flash of light, and then … nothing.

Driving in the wee hours and being the only car on the road can make your mind do some pretty neat stuff. There will be times when I am on the road and I literally don’t see another car -going either direction- for the entire 50 mile ride home. Sometimes my mind wanders off and I wonder if maybe there was a Langoliers type event that left me as the only human remaining on earth. Then I generally grab some corn nuts, because that is some bizarre shit to be letting yourself think while you are driving, and thus -in theory at least- at the height of your senses. Such was the case when I flicked the switch and the bright light flashed and faded inside the cab of the truck.

I was still going down the road, but when I looked down I saw that the speedometer was dead set on 0, and the odometer wasn’t moving either. This is what appears to be an old-school, mechanical odometer and speedometer rig, and it’s a touch eerie to look down and see them suddenly frozen in time as you speed down the interstate. In an instant, my mind thought: oh Fuck! That fraction of a second that I took my eyes off the road … There must have been something there … I must have crashed… Maybe this is death… Maybe the crash is so horrific that my mind produced some wicked hallucinogens to keep me from seeing it. Another fraction of a second and my rational mind was able to take over: this isn’t nearly hot enough to be hell, I’m obviously not dead. I pulled off the interstate at the Casa Blanca exit and took stock of my surroundings. Cars speeding past me on the interstate. The ground beneath my feet felt real enough. Maybe a bizarre coincidence caused the speedometer cable to break at precisely the same moment as the bulb for the dome light blew out? Where can I buy a lottery ticket at this hour?

Once I decided that I wasn’t dead, I grabbed my phone and downloaded a speedometer app from the Android market. I put the phone where the speedometer ought to be and was back on my may. Although the story would have been much more interesting if it had been a Langoliers type thing…

Once I got home I was able to fire up google and find a copy of the 2003 Ford Ranger Owner Manual online. While it still took some guess and check, I was able to find that the speedometer and odometer, while they appear to be mechanical, are actually completely electronic, and controlled by a fuse. And, for reasons unknown, the fuse panel remained the same size, shape, and layout for a decade but they moved fuses around inside it year to year. Once I found the correct fuse position for my pickup (fuse 26) and replaced it, my speedometer and odometer came back, and my dome light came on. But what an odd combination of things to have on the same circuit. That is the only thing in the instrument cluster that was affected. All the lights still worked -even the lights for the odometer and speedometer- it was just the controller for them that is tied to the dome light. Nonetheless, the problem is solved.

As I said, it has its quirks. I just hope that next time it’s not like the cigarette lighter gets stuck and when the fuse blows it also takes out the headlights and the power brakes… I can’t be certain of that though, because that would make every bit as much sense as the speedometer and dome light being on the same circuit. But if that does happen I’d like to have some electrodes attached to my head to figure out what the hell part of my brain is causing those insane theories to pop up.

Path of Exile Screenshot

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Shadowtwin — No Comments ↓

In my previous post, I described the mood of the game as ominous and foreboding, but the screenshot I offered up was of one of the spell animations (that I just happened to screenshot at exactly the right moment). I took a bunch of screenshots after that trying to find one that would be able to capture the “feel” of the game and represent it in one still image. That is absolutely impossible to do. This one comes pretty close though (again, click through for full resolution):

This is a shot taken in one of the many dungeons. There is a tremendous amount of detail in the environment, as you can see. What you can’t see is what this looks like in motion -when the water is rippling, the light is dancing, the music is playing, and the edges seem to transform into an impenetrable darkness. You don’t know what might be just a few steps away, only that this tiny bridge will be your only means of escape. It really does set a mood.

This will probably change after the thousandth time of leveling a character, but for the first time through, with really no information available online about what might be lurking just out of camera view, this game has my pulse racing like no game in a very long time.

Path of Exile Beta test day one

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Shadowtwin — No Comments ↓

There are some pretty silly rules as part of beta participation, for example:
Quote:

– Please do not reveal unannounced information or comment on how things in the Beta work. For example, you should not post about some skill that hasn’t been announced yet, or some unannounced looting system we are testing out.
– Please do not post balance values from the game or update public websites or wikis with this information. For example, if someone is gathering a list of item names in the Beta, you should not tell them new names. This information will change very frequently and we don’t want to confuse people.

But I wanted to throw up some information over here, so I will try to do so within the confines of the rules.

1) The game looks amazing. I am running it on a machine that I built for WoW WotLK release some time ago with an AMD AthlonII 250 at 3.0ghz, 8gigs of corsair DD3 ram, and a 1 Gig Radeon HD 5570 DDR3 PCIe video card. I am able to run PoE at my monitor’s max resolution (1680×1050) with the (still very few) graphic options set to max. Although I only set the anisotropic filtering to 4x (it goes as high as 16) because I can see no appreciable difference between 4 and 16. Frame rates go from 30 or so in a zone with others to 60 or so when I’m alone. During some spell animations it will spike as high as 200 (according to their meter). The spell animations are beautiful to watch; it’s not just a lightning bolt that comes out of a pointy stick, there is a full animation for each cast type that is clearly rendered in dozens of frames to give it a beautiful, fluid look. These animations can, of course, be sped up with some skills both passive and as affixes on items. Here is a screenshot of one of the spells in action (click through for full resolution):

2) The mood in this game takes me back to the original Diablo. The whole thing is very dark and gritty (and by that I mean the mood and the tone, not the gamma of the visuals), and from the start gives you a feeling that you are an unwanted stranger in Wraeclast, and there are precious few strongholds in which to seek shelter. The sound effects, special effects and lighting all contribute to the mood and the whole package is quite ominous and foreboding.

3) The systems in place in the game are all very intuitive. I don’t want to overstep my bounds and say something that gets me kicked out of the beta, so I’ll just say that what Chris says in the Diablo Podcast #30 about the handling of the flasks (eliminating the need to stockpile potions), the way the skills are handled, and the passive skills are all put together in a way that is very simple and intuitive, yet gives infinite possibilities for different builds. In fact the way the skills work it would be entirely possible to have two characters wearing exactly the same items -both benefiting greatly from the gear- without having even a single skill or passive in common.

4) The only complaint I have about the game so far is the camera angle, a sample of which can be seen in the above screeshot. It just leaves you wishing that you could scroll out to get a bit better perspective of what is going on around you. That is a petty complaint, to be sure, as I was used to the angle after about the first half hour of play, and in taking the time to think it through I think it would really take away from the ominous mood of the game if you were to be able to take stock of too much of the game world all at once. As it is if after you barely survive a battle you take a few steps in any direction you could quickly be overwhelmed -making you think through your actions a bit more carefully than the normal faceroll technique that will suffice as strategy in an ARPG.

5) The Beta discussion forum is buzzing. A lot of the people who are in the beta (myself included) are taking the time to give thoughtful, relevant feedback, and the guys at GGG are in the forums every day looking over our posts, offering advice, explanations, and asking for further feedback on everything from issues of balance, to issues of the handling of maps, quests, etc. It is clear from their daily responses that they are still trying to hone this game (which is already beautiful, and has very few mechanical issues) into something that can take the throne as THE must play ARPG. They are so quick to react, in fact, that a patch that will be released on Friday will already incorporate some of the items suggested since the beta started.

6) I felt an obligation to write something over here now that I have been playing around with it for a day, now I have done that. I got get back in there and play!

How far I have come in Java

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Shadowtwin — No Comments ↓

I started ~~fucking around with~~ programming Java in probably 2000 or 2001. I had never taken a course, read a book, or otherwise seen or written any code since, well, ever. So I bought a book with the deceptive title Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days. Here it is at least a decade later, and I am still a long damn way from actually knowing the language. Despite that, I have made leaps and bounds in my programming knowledge along the way.

Here you see my first ever completed Java Program (click through for real size). I had made a few other applets along the way, but just silly little image cycling and displaying type stuff that took very little knowledge, and I don’t think any of those exist on any of my backup disks. This is the first playable game that I ever made (well, a screenshot of it). It was probably the happiest day of my life when this applet was the “featured applet of the week” on the Java Boutique shortly after I finished it. After that though, I pretty much gave up on the language entirely. Why? Well just look at that applet. It is very blocky and drab; it clearly looks like someone’s first applet. Not to mention that since I didn’t know anything about arrays, I had handled all of the blocks in the grid in a ridiculously complicated axa, axb, axc, … bxa, bxb, bxc …, type manner that made the code overwhelmingly long (over 1400 lines of code) and difficult to understand. Simply put, nothing in that applet taught me how to do anything because, while I did soldier through and make a working game, the way I handled every single thing was just flat wrong.

Shortly after the release of the Android, a friend’s suggestion that we should start programming games for the device (which runs on Java, but with a different enough library that it requires a completely different knowledge set to program), combined with a game idea that came to me for the game Cubits (click through to play Cubits on the GoGamesZone), got me excited enough to give programming another go. Unfortunately Cubits proved to be too difficult to play to become popular (though I still love the concept, and love playing the game). The game was successfully ported to the Android OS, and along the way the friend who ported it over helped me learn a great deal about the Java language. I then decided to go completely the other way with it, and created HyperSpheres” (click through to play HyperSpheres on the GoGamesZone). This game uses most of the methods from Cubits, but simplified the game play so much that it is way too easy to play, and as such it also doesn’t get much play. These games were both conceived entirely in my head, without doing any research into what puzzle games were the most popular, and without doing any of the requisite legwork, the absolute flop of both should have been expected.

So for my next, and most ambitious project, I chose to go with the popular match three item type games to see if I could get a bit broader appeal. What I came up with is Fruit Madness (click through to play Fruit Madness on the GoGamesZone). Fruit Madness is just like all of the jewel matching games that are so popular. I went with fruit instead of jewels for two reasons: 1) so that it would stand out a little bit from the myriad Jewel matching games and 2) because in my head I had this super cool casino type theme that I wanted to implement. So when you clear a group of 3 blocks the fruit drops away, but if you clear 4 blocks one of those blocks will turn into a “Spin” block (the spin is a wild block that can be matched with any group of two blocks. It will then spin, slot-machine-style to the same fruit as the ones adjacent to it). But the real fun starts after that. If you match 5 or more fruits, one of the blocks will turn into a gold “Super Spin” block. This block has the ability to turn all of one type of fruits on the board into “Spin” blocks. The spin blocks can also be matched to each other in groups of three or more, in which case they will all spin until they come out in a matching group. The feel of the game really did come out like a big slot machine. Between the mechanics, the audio (some of which I was able to download, and some of which I created the midi files from scratch to match the theme I was going for), and the images (which started as images gleaned from the internet, that were then modified -heavily- to get them to look uniform to the game), not to mention the big, neon sign on the top of the board, I nailed pretty much exactly what I was going for with this one.

But here’s the problem. Still suffering from a lack of programming knowledge, the code for this game is a whopping 2000 lines. Many of the methods used in the game must be used in a sequential order that makes it impossible for me to go in and make edits to the way situations are handled. An example: the biggest difficulty in the game is how to handle when the spin blocks will spin automatically and when the user must initiate it. I had initially programmed the game so that the blocks would only spend if the user had initiated it (meaning actually moved the spin block during the current turn). What this did (and what I would have known had I done any testing whatsoever) was made it possible for someone to get about 80% of the board filled with spin blocks, after which the game could go on, quite literally, forever. In order to change this, I decided to go exactly the opposite way with the spin blocks: they would all spin if matched at any point during the game. This meant that if you made a clear that caused a spin block to drop into a matching position it would automatically spin. Long story short, the idea is that there will never be a time when there is a valid match on the board since they will automatically clear themselves. The way the code was written though, I had to add a bunch of methods to try to handle this, and it is far from perfect. The only way to remedy this will be to completely scrap the code and start over, something I am loathe to do with such a large code that functions almost as intended. But it was another lesson learned.

This brings me to Kerpop (click through to play Kerpop on the GoGamesZone). Taking what I had learned from all of the previous experience, Kerpop is the most mechanically sound game I have created to date. The mechanics are every bit as complex as any of the previous games, but are handled in a mere 1100 lines -that’s almost half the size of Fruit Madness-. In addition to being the most mechanically sound, it also has by far the best combination of graphics and audio of any of my games. The graphics in this case were created completely from scratch, while the audio was gleaned from some slide whistle samples I found at freesound.org. As near as I can tell, the mechanics in this game perform flawlessly; I have played hundreds of games without a mechanical error (some may note that if a group of balloons is in the process of raising and you clear another group it will make that first group restart their ascent. This is true, however since that is how the code is written it is not a mechanical glitch. This led to me rethinking the way I handle the animation timers though, and in a planned sequel to KerPop, every balloon will have it’s own timer to eliminate this).

I took a few steps back from programming over the last six weeks or so. I am still kicking ideas around in my head, still actively working on the sequel to KerPop, and have one other interesting concept that I am working with a friend to try to hammer some potential mechanical problems with before I go to programming it full scale. This short hiatus has given me a chance to clear my head of the code a bit, and is ultimately what led to me writing this today. I actually went and played each of these games today as a fan of puzzle games for the first time -every other time I had played them was as a programmer, and I didn’t take away from those sessions the same experience that a player would- and I was just blown away by just how far I had come as a programmer. They may still have a couple of little bugs here and there, but for someone who has never had any training in Java, audio engineering, or graphic arts, I am damn impressed with the results that I have thus far achieved. Now if only I could get more people to agree and play the damn games…

To finish this post more or less where I started, I recently got another request for the source code for Lightz Out (click through to play Lightz Out on the GoGamesZone), and was so embarrassed by the code that I decided to rewrite it (I still get requests for the code once every couple of months. Usually from kids in college or trade schools taking courses in Java that want to see how to make a simple game work… the old code was not going to help them). I set about to re-writing the game without using any of the old code. In fact the only thing that made it into the new game was the audio (for nostalgia really, since this game is a direct rip off of Tiger Toys handheld game and I sampled the audio directly from that device.). Every method in the code was changed: the overly complicated board layout was changed to a simple boolean array; the hints were put into a separate method that makes their use more reliable; the graphics were updated to bring it into this century. The only reason I used the old code as a reference at all was to know the layouts of the fifty boards (again stolen from the handheld device), the exact hints that were given on the boards (also stolen from the game), and to know what the minimum and maximum moves were (also taken from the handheld game). Did all this modernizing increase the size of the code? Nope, exactly the opposite; the old code was 1434 lines, the new code is 399. Additionally the new code is handled quite well (I think) and is heavily commented so that when I do surrender the source code it will be helpful to those who are reading it.

Along the way I have learned how to handle arrays fairly well. I have learned how to use some simple graphic tricks to make mouse-over buttons that change colors. I have learned how to create fairly decent simple graphics. I have learned how to create a separate, system-based timer for every object on the board to move separately. I have learned how to store the entire game board all the way back to the very first move for the purpose of undoing them. And, probably most importantly, when I look at the finished projects like KerPop and Fruit Madness, I am filled with pride that I was able to handle all the elements, from code to finished graphics and audio, with nothing more than determination and a bit of technical advice from a friend (mostly in handling arrays and reciprocating check methods). And now that I have taken some time away and had the opportunity to see how fun the games are to play, I am getting excited about creating the ones that I have currently shelved. Who knows which one of these could become the next Angry Birds.

Diablo 3 controversy

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Shadowtwin — No Comments ↓

I have been anxiously awaiting the release of Diablo 3 for a very long time now, and am as excited as ever that there is news coming out fairly frequently, and that the beta is supposed to start sometime in the third quarter of 2011. But the last bit of news, coming from the reporters who played the closed beta, started a bunch of controversies.

The first controversy is about not supporting offline play. They were pretty clear that you can still play by yourself online, but that you can’t play the game if you aren’t online. This upset a couple of hundred people, it seems, but they are all very vocal about it. I wholly support the online only decision though, and here is why: In the days of Diablo, Diablo II, and Diablo II:Lord of Destruction nearly every hack, cheat and dupe method was made possible by somehow getting offline characters into online games. Offering Diablo III as a server-based game instead of a client-based game makes it so that the actual files that run the game will never touch your computer. It is much more difficult to reverse engineer, and that means it will be much easier to control hacking, duping, and cheating. While it will still be possible for some talented programmers to recreate the server, it should be next to impossible to force any of this hacked data into Blizzard’s servers. And it is their game, so if they want to limit it that way, that’s their own choice. But I’m sure that the hacking, cheating, duping thing played a huge role in their decision.

The second controversy is about the removal of skill points. For anyone who played Diablo II, the way it goes is each level you get a skill point. You generally ignore those skill points until you get to level 30, then start dumping them into only your most powerful skills. Ultimately, you have a character that has 80 skill points dumped -20 a piece- into 3 powerful skills, with the other ones going one point a piece into pre-requisites to use the most powerful ones. Not everyone played that way, of course, but anyone who played much beyond level 80 in multiplayer pretty much had to do it that way or else you just couldn’t kill anything or survive. In the new system, you don’t have to dump 20 points into the skills, you just get the skills, then have to choose which ones you want to use. A simplified process that will take a lot of time out of looking up builds, looking up what skills work best in what situation, and lets you play the damn game already. I’m for it, but some hate it. It does take away from some of the personalization of the characters, but I’m all for getting to playing the game and not having to dick around choosing skills and then having to redistribute them all again later once I found out that I horribly fucked them up in the first place. Again, I am for the change.

By far the biggest controversy to come out of the closed beta though is not only an auction house, but also a real money auction house. The auction house was something that was being hotly debated prior to the announcement, but no one had ever really considered that not only would there be an auction house, but also one for real money. I think it is a great thing for the game, for a lot of reasons, listed here in no particular order (except the numbers to separate them -which in no way are by way of importance):

1) Blizzard will be charging a listing fee for items listed and taking a percentage of the sale price of all items that sell through the real money auction house (they did say there will be a couple of listing free items for each account each week, so you don’t have to pay to post your first couple of items). This means that, if successful, Blizzard should be able to generate enough revenue from the auction house that they won’t need to charge any fees to play -ever. This also means that they will have a vested interest in keeping patches coming to release new end-game content, thus adding new and better items to the economy, to keep the revenue coming in. That should mean way more time and attention spent to Diablo III after release than to Diablo II. Which would be great.

2) A real money auction house will stabilize the economy. Without having to go through the black market (illegal websites) to buy items, the prices will eventually stabilize. And with the listing fees and sales fees, it will be in people’s best interest to post only items that are worth real money, and to only post those items at fair (consistent with the current economy) prices. This means that if you choose to pay real money for items, you are going to be far less likely to get screwed. And also having it as a part of the game means that you won’t send money to some korean website and never know if you are going to actually get their item or not. Blizzard will be backing it, the sales will be instant (once the auction ends) and the items are yours.

3) I have thought a lot about this, and the way the economy should work is like this: Only the most valuable items will be selling for real money. Nothing in normal or nightmare will be worth real money, and really only the very best drops in hell will really be worth anything. This means that at least 2/3 of the items in the game will likely only be traded for gold. Because of that any of the dreaded “farmers” that everyone is worried about will be far more likely to sell any item that is not a guaranteed quick sale item for gold, then sell the gold for real money. It doesn’t make sound financial sense to post the items for real money and possibly not sell them for days -if ever- when they can quickly sell them for a little bit of gold, then sell the gold quickly. And the gold will sell quickly, because there will be 2/3 of the items in the game that will only be trading for gold. I would go so far as to theorize that, given the hatred from a lot of people about the idea of a real money auction house -and their staunch position that they will never use it-, it is probably more likely that anyone interested in making real money playing the auction house in Diablo III will be more likely to buy items from the real money auction house and sell it on the gold auction house. Why? Because a lot of people won’t use the real money auction house, be it because they are morally opposed to it, or because they aren’t old enough to have a credit card linked to their account, the gold auction house will have a much higher demand for the high-end items. So it is entirely possible that an item that is selling for (making up numbers) $10 on the real money auction house could be sold for $11 worth of gold on the currency auction house; much higher demand, much lower supply.

I’m sure that there will be people who try to buy all the mediocre legendary items for gold and then sell them for cash. That works great in theory. In practice, however, it is more than buying it for gold and listing it for real money: someone has to actually pay the real money or you just screwed yourself out of $X.XX worth of gold that you payed to buy the item in the first place. And as previously mentioned, since you pay a listing fee to post the items, if the item fails to sell enough times you could actually lose money overall on the transaction.

I could be dead wrong on this point, but I really think I have a good idea of how it is going to shake down, and I needed to vent it.

I apologize for the lack of relevant links, I just wanted to get this posted before the my burrito was done.

Metallica - One

Citing Metallica's song 'One' as 'music lost to history' probably doesn't make much sense to most. In this case, I don't think the song is lost to history, but the video is.

When this video dropped (I'd guess it was about 1989) I thought it was the most powerful video I had ever seen. Now, nearly thirty years later, I still believe it is the most powerful music video ever made.

The story may not be completely unique (the imagery is recycled -but from a film that was so old that my -then fifteen or sixteen year old- eyes had never seen. My now forty-five-ish year old eyes had never seen it either) but that video is shot and edited so well that you will be crying by the end. If, that is, you have a heart.

The video for Metallica's One surpassed all expectations for music videos, set the mark for what music videos would, could, and should be. It rocketed the group from garage band to the biggest group that ever lived. This single video defines not just that band, but the entire genre.

No other video has ever had such an impact on on the world of music. Not Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' video (which I believe to this day gets far too much credit) not The Beastie Boys song Sabotage which was a wonderful throwback to the seventies era cop show, but which I believe, also gets credit far beyond it's worth. Metallica's video for One, on the other hand, didn't try to look like anything more than it was. It was a hard-rocking song and Metallica used some masterful movie clips to add to the morose feel that the instruments generated. That video, for that song, was absolutely perfect.

It is without any form of doubt that I say the video for Metallica's song One was, and ever will be, the best video ever made. Don't take my word for it though, watch the video above (with low light and in a dark room) . If it doesn't move your heart, you're living this life all wrong.

July 2017

Cancer: 6/22-7/22
For 34 years you have been painstakingly removing a single hair from the head of each of woman you murder -with plans to weave them into a belt. A mishap involving a a candle-warmer, a vacuum cleaner, and the police breaking down the door to take you 'dead or alive' will bring your collecting days to an unfortunate end.

Leo: 7/23-8/22
Your plan to rook your boyfriend into marrying you by faking a pregnancy will fail this week. There are several reasons why this plan will fail: 1) you have denied him sex for your entire relationship, promising him that flower on the honeymoon. 2) You actually are pregnant. 3) You've been wearing a T-shirt that says 'Gold Digger' on it since the day you met him. 4) The single strand of hair that the Cancer (horoscope above) pulls from your head will be the one and only time he leaves his own DNA at the crime scene.

Virgo: 8/23-9/22
Okay, maybe the stars have been a bit harsh. They know you are a good guy, but you've made a lot of mistakes. The stars are willing to meet at Gina's Coffee Shop on July 12th at noon. If you aren't there, you may as well write off visitation of your kids.

Libra: 9/23-10/22
98% That is the specific number you will give your wife before you jump out of the plane. That optimistic chance of survival will slowly fade as you realize that gravity doesn't care a great deal if you have your arms out or not: Terminal velocity is terminal velocity. Your attempt to recreate the famous scene from the movie Point Break will end just as it should have in the movie: A horrible mass of flesh and bone several miles away from the guy who actually did have the parachute.

Scorpio: 10/23-11/21
The stars have a huge "to do" list. As such, your childhood wish to have sex with Anna Nichole Smith will finally come true this week. No, there's no way to stop it. The stars do apologize for the lateness of the fulfillment of this request, but they think your friends will count it anyway.

Sagitarius: 11/22-12/21
You've seen the movie The Number 23 exactly twenty-two times. You've built your life around avoiding that number. You''ll feel supremely confident when you leave your house on 07/12/2017. But, on 07/12/2017, you will step onto the sidewalk only to be struck and killed by a drunk driver. The time of impact? Exactly 11:01:00am on 07/12/2017. You will have exactly enough time to add up the digits of the date AND time: 1+1+0+1+0+0+0+7+1+2+2+0+1+7=23. Your realization that any date, time, or irrelevant number can be made to equal 23 will be moot.

Capricorn: 12/22-1/19
The stars have been watching you. And your daughter. Oh my, how we have been watching your daughter... Blah, blah, something about a star rising in Orion, blah, blah. The stars will definitely offer you better guidance once that daughter is of legal age.

Aquarius: 1/20-2/18
Every man wants to die a hero. That's human nature. But you have obsessed about it. When little Johnny accidentally starts a fire in his trash can this week, you should calmly walk out of the house with everyone else. If you happen to stand in Johnny's room screaming "take me, I'm the one you want!" That action may be ill-perceived by the police. The firefighters aren't even going to respond; the trash can fire burned itself out without even melting the plastic of the can.

Pisces: 2/19-3/20
Billy-Ray has been wearing that mullet for thirty damn years, so you figured yours would be fine, too. You'll soon realize that Billy-ray can rock that hairdo because he doesn't have to get it near the shake machine at Dairy Queen. You, on the other hand, have to get those lovely locks right up in there. Or, your now-naked scalp did.

Aries: 3/21-4/19
While the police report will read "failed attempt to jump the Grand Canyon", and the coroner's report will read "severe blunt-force trauma", everyone who knows you will know that they should have read "Eh, I think I can make it."

Taurus: 4/20-5/20
Rape. It's a big, scary word. It will also be the most appropriate word for what the biggest guy in jail is about to do to you. Please confer with a Cancer for advice on how to handle it.

Gemini: 5/21-6/21
Yeah, your Lyft driver is also carrying a knife. Unwanted advances will also result in removal of the penis. Keep it in your pants. Unless, of course, the Uber driver already handed it to you. In that case you can wave that thing around like a flag. You're probably not going to get a ride, but you are going to be one in a very exclusive group of men who can 'wave it around like a flag'.