Michael Cook’s Place

I’ve been playing GTA4 on and off for about a week now. It’s pretty well done. There are some curious framerate issues, and the game is definitely in the uncanny valley. The shooting controls are much improved; which is to say almost playable. But I’ve come across a fair bit of things that caught my interest while playing.

• While playing yesterday I was on a date with Michelle. I took her to a small bar. There was a fade out and suddenly I was drunk. REALLY drunk. Michelle was fine. The game does a great job of this. Walking was near impossible, let alone driving. The camera moves around on it’s own. Niko stumbles around comically. As time goes on, these things get easier and easier as your buzz wears off. There are visual filters applied making things tougher to see too.

  Yet Michelle didn’t care at all. She didn’t see to make anything of it. To get home, I called a cab. The driver picked us up and then started a very vulgar conversation discussing how many girls he finds in the city. Michelle didn’t react or blink an eye during this time. At the end of this date (where I got so drunk I couldn’t walk)… she was happy with me.

• Other dates have been similar. What’s Michelle’s reaction if you hit a pedestrian with your car? Not much. Doesn’t seem to effect her mood the few times I accidentally did it.
• The police are interesting. Carjacking someone in front of them will get you in trouble. Doing it 20 feet away doesn’t. Crashing into their cars will get you in trouble, bumping them with some minor damage won’t. I went to a nightclub that had a bouncer to make sure you didn’t walk in carrying a weapon. He didn’t mind when I stole someone’s car right in front of him.

• The people often react really well. After taking one guy’s car, another car stopped and the guy got out and started coming after me. While playing one mission a fellow pedestrian (I was on foot) saw me chasing someone with a gun so he pulled his and tried to stop me.

  The one that really surprised me was when I took a car from a guy and ended up chasing him. This wasn’t intentional, I took the car and started driving towards my destination. This happened to be the direction the former driver was running in. As I drove down the street, he was running on the sidewalk, pushing between people, jumping through a construction site. He got more and more panicked because I was “after” him.

• While driving one character around for a mission, he was smoking weed in my car. The windows were cracked (because of him) so as I drove around thin white clouds of smoke would seep out of the windows and float in the air… all looking quite realistic in the way they acted.

They put a ton of attention to detail in this game. I wish they had improved the shooting controls more. The uncanny valley and (relatively) low polygon counts of the people could be improved. But they made a great little city.

Intro

Thanks to the large storm cell that went through the midwest on Thursday, basically every TV show that my TiVo recorded off the major networks during primetime was useless. I would guess I got about 10% TV shows, 90% weather coverage.

But I’ve got two nice internet connections (6Mbps at home, dual T1s at work) so I decided to try out the streaming services that the major networks are now offering on their websites. The last time I had this problem almost no TV shows had an official way of viewing them. You’d have to just use a torrent. But that’s changed.

CBS

I just finished watching Thursday’s episode of CSI using their episode viewer. There were noticeable framerate problems during the show. It basically looked like portions of the show were missing frames, purposely. My guess is that it’s an encoding issue as my computer had plenty of extra CPU head room so I doubt that to be the problem. Other than that (which is kind of minor, but if common could effect more action oriented shows like Survivor quite a bit), the video was very nice looking.

The site it’s self is easy enough to navigate. The video plays simply in the web page, using a flash player that looks quite a bit like the YouTube player. Commercials are short (just one commercial per commercial break), and embedded straight into the video. This is quite nice. When paused, the video simply pauses and nothing odd happens (keep reading for why I mentioned this). You can watch either in the native size, or fullscreen. The problem here (which is minor) is that when put into full screen, it stretches up the 4:3 size of the player. Yet the content is widescreen, thus putting black bars that are unnecessary on my widescreen monitor all around the video.

ABC

Using ABC’s service I watch both Ugly Betty and Grey’s Anatomy. ABC’s service is the one I liked the least. The biggest problem for me was the commercials and pausing the video. When you pause the video, it becomes a much smaller version of it’s self and moves off to the side so the whole window can be used for an ad. When unpaused, things go back to the way they were.

The commercials are either videos or little flash files. The problem is that the video stops, and this ad shows up instead. When the ad is over (you are forced to wait 30 seconds), the ad doesn’t go away. The program doesn’t continue. You have to click the continue button. This means you can’t just watch the show, you must interact. Where I watched CSI on my TV using the VGA port, I wouldn’t be able to do this with the ABC shows because I would have to get up and click the little button every 10-15 minutes. On the plus side they offer four sizes for the video (small, normal, large, and fullscreen).

The player is a big flash window, which sucks up extra CPU that it doesn’t need. It’s all animated and nice looking, wasting cycles on pointless transition effects (that could be trivially accelerated with 3D processing, which flash has access to). The video looks great though, I have no complaints in that department. I just wish they’d fix the player. I’m not sure if it is flash though, as it required a little plugin to be installed (some custom thing).

NBC

The system NBC uses is pretty nice. It’s not hard to use, and once the video starts playing the screen more or less clears of clutter making things a bit easier to watch. I used it to watch The Office, Scrubs, and My Name Is Earl. The video quality was great, I didn’t notice any problems. Yet not every NBC show is available: notably ER. Since the episode isn’t being rerun on my local station (as far as I can tell) and isn’t available online (legally), I just won’t get to see it until it reruns later in the year or in syndication.

My favorite thing about the NBC system is one that will probably be fixed. When your show first starts or during commercials, you are shown an ad video. At least I think that is what is supposed to happen. You see on my Mac those videos didn’t play… at all. Yet after that was over (30s) the video would start back up. This meant that it was commercial free for me. Now whether this was a Mac thing or a Safari thing, I don’t know. But it was nice.

It Works With A Mac!

The best part of all this is that it works with a Mac. No Windows Media Player nuttiness. No “you must install Silverlight”. They all worked on my Mac. It’s nice to see that. So many people just ignore Apple users or cop out and say “get Parallels.”

None of the services were bad, they were all quite usable. That’s a good thing, since we’re entering severe weather season and I’ll probably get to use them again.

Maybe I’ll get to checkout Fox or The CW next time.

I just finished Half-Life 2: Episode 2. This means that I am now out of Half-Life. Since I recently finished Season 1 of Sam & Max (my full review: fun, not bad, annoying DRM on boxed copy), this means that Team Fortress 2 is my only reason left to boot into Windows.

Episode 2 was plotted very well, and some of the new graphical touches were quite good. The realistic shadows cast by everything when you have your flashlight on is new, I believe, and looks very good. It’s too bad all the lights in the game don’t cast shadows like that when appropriate. The worst new enemy, the hunter, is like a little strider… at least in the terror that it will start to induce in you. The things are tough, fast, and have a pretty tough weapon on them. In a brilliant sequence very close to the end of the game, you are pitted against waves of striders who are guarded by little groups of hunters. The combination is extremely adrenaline inducing. I died numerous times until I discovered a strong run-and-gun approach that worked well. By the end I was running out of many kinds of ammo, which only increased the tension.

There are many other great parts. The antlion colony looked fantastic and was very well designed. The shimmering effects add a nice touch and don’t look out of place like they do in most games when used “just to make things shiny”. The bloom effect used in Episode 1 continues to be well used. There are some fun physics puzzles, and you get some very tantalizing clues that really make me wish I could just jump into Episode 3.

When I came to the final scene, I saw something that made me really excited for what was going to come next. All of a sudden the generic scripted scene became a full scripted scene with action, drawing me in further. Some events happen (I won’t spoil them) and then the screen blacks out and the credits come up. You can tell the folks at Valve know what they are doing, because I would have happily plunked down $20 at that moment to continue playing the next episode.

Episode 3 is a complete unknown at this point. I try not to know too much about the plots of video games before I play them, but a quick check online shows that basically nothing has been released about Episode 3. According to the only real piece of information I found, they hadn’t even nailed the story down, and that was less than two months ago. There was also the obligatory “when it’s done” kind of message. I believe I’ll be waiting a while for the release.

Now that I have played everything, it’s very clear: Orange Box rules.

I just finished playing God of War: Chains of Olympus. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I don’t have much of a review on this one, there isn’t much to say.

It’s a God of War game, mostly true to the formula. If the God of War franchise wasn’t so good, I could say it’s just a God of War game, but that’s not really a bad thing. It doesn’t feel as grand as the previous two, missing the amazing scripted boss battles… except for one at the start of the game. The script fits in well with what I remember of the previous games (considering this is a prequel). The graphics are very impressive for a PSP game. There are one or two little rendering errors through the game of in the distance, but for the most part it looks like God of War II did. The sound is good, the voice acting is (mostly) good. The controls work fine, no complaints there.

It’s God of War, only a little smaller. It was a fun game, I’m glad I played it. At $40 it’s not bad. Once the price drops a little, it’s definitely something to pick-up.

I’m trying to write a Widget for OS X, but I’m running into a terrible brick wall.

My widget, so far, does nothing. It’s just static HTML. I know that’s right. It works fine in Safari. I’ve got all my various files (like Info.plist). Yet I can’t launch my widget.

When launched, it just shows the loading graphic the whole time, the actual page is never rendered. I can open it in Dashcode and see the correct view of the widget, but when I launch it with run it immediately quits running again. The console output shows nothing.

I’ve been trying reformatting the Info.plist file, renaming things, and anything else I can think of. Nothing seems to work well. I have managed to get my widget to launch once or twice, but I have no idea what I did. When I tried launching it again, it didn’t work. Something is going on but I can’t figure it out for the life of me. If I can figure out what I did wrong, I’ll post it here in case someone else runs into this.

Here is my test version of my widget. I stripped it down completely, but still have the same problem. Test Widget.

Update: So I try this one day later, and it opens just fine. I’m really starting to hate dashboard.

I’ve updated Gravitoids, adding a few little cleanups and making it generally run better. There are still some clear problems with it, such as the fear display lines seem off, and they learn to ignore the walls completely… which means my balancing is off. Still strangely distracting and fun to watch.

A short while ago, I finished playing Patapon. At only $20, the game is a great value. I wasn’t expecting much, but I was rather pleasantly surprised.

Basics

Patapon is a often described as a rhythm game combined with a real time strategy game. This is somewhat true, but I don’t entirely agree with the real time strategy part. During boss fights, it feels more like it’s a rhythm based fighter. This could be applied to normal stages as well, though the feeling is not as strong.

In Patapon you bang your drums of war in specific patterns to instruct your little Patapons to advance, fight, defend, retreat, or charge-up. I’m a big fan of rhythm fans, going back to PaRappa the Rapper nearly a decade ago. Because of the rhythm aspect, decent reviews, the interesting graphics, and the low price, I decided to pick the game up.

Gameplay

The game largely works very well. The system is responsive to the controls, and never feels arbitrary in if you hit or miss the beat (which some games, like PaRappa, did). The better you match the beat, the louder and more complex and rich the drum sounds the game produces. This little bit of feedback works quite well. The best feedback is the Patapon that you command. As you do better and better (by hitting sequences in groups without messing up) they chant louder and louder, then start to sing. Their little war song changes depending on the units that you have in your group.

The game is mostly quite fun. There is a delay between issuing orders and them being carried out. It’s this dichotomy that causes some confusion in the “feel” of the game. If the responses were more delayed, they would feel more like the Patapon were acting on their own and you were sort of guiding them (like an RTS). If the responses were more immediate, it would feel more light a real fight (and thus a fighting game). For the first few hours, this delay was somewhat annoying. While it never went away, I began to factor it in as I played more and it stopped being noticable. Only when I messed up (issued a attack instead of a retreat, when a boss was about to attack) did I notice it, and it felt like my fault. It didn’t feel arbitrary.

The mini-games, while somewhat fun and cute, were kind of simple. I didn’t feel like I needed them too much. Unlike the combat, they often DID feel like they were punishing me for not being exactly on the beat. This was especially true when playing with the baby mountain. The cooking mini-game, with Gashapon, was very fun though. I found his animations (walking along the top of the kettle) to be very cute.

I only have two complaints about the game. While the weapons and armor system seemed somewhat unnecessary to me (I never had to mess with it, just choose “optimize”), the Kaching system was annoying. Kaching is the money that you need to create new units, which can be quite expensive. The problem is that Kaching is quite hard to get, relative to what they want you to spend. This can cause you to replay some simple missions over and over just for the money, which gets tedious.

The other complaint is the ending. I expected more, but was quite disappointed. On the plus side, they left room open for a sequel which I will be looking forward to. At least the game didn’t solve every problem, only to come back a year later and pretend like there was some need for a sequel. The progression here will be much more natural than many games.

But for only $20, I can overlook those. I’ve enjoyed quite a few hours throughout the last week and a half.

Graphics

Like LocoRoco, this programming team’s previous game, the graphics are all vector based, which makes them quite clean and rather stylistic. The little Patapons are quite cute, and their changes of dress (based on the armor and weapon they have) works very well. The bosses are quite a bit more detailed, and the whole world is rather charming. I really enjoyed all the little Patapon animations as they threw spears, shot arrows, and swung axes. The little Megapon units really remind me of some of the characters in Pepper Land in Yellow Submarine.

Just a quick note, I’ve fixed the Photos section. I just noticed last week that you could only view things if you were logged in, and since I don’t give anyone accounts, that kind of defeated the purpose. It used to work, so it must have happened during an automatic version upgrade I ran. I didn’t think to check it afterwords. It should be fixed now. One of these days, I’ll put more photos up too.

Things have finally died out in my SPAM reply chain. It took two days or more. There have been a few fun updates. When we last left, Steve had sent an email, marked important, that he didn’t understand anything. A few other people responded that they were in the same boat, or more on the “I’m not responsible” bit. Then came this:

Good day Mr. [redacted],

We do apologize for the inconveniences these emails have caused you.
We would like to verify the sort of emails sent to your email box by our email address. Please also confirm if you are a customer of [redacted] Bank and if you are, is it the [redacted] -( electronic notification on each transaction done on your account) that you receive? You can select a limit of the [redacted] you want to receive in your email box.

Waiting for your reply.
Kind regards,
[redacted]

So some bank is in on this chain, and is now apologizing for this situation (which isn’t their fault). There were 5 or 6 more “who is doing this” emails, along with another 3 or so “take me off your list” messages. Next, Tim chimed in:

Dear new friends

I feel I have made quite a few this morning, as so many different people unknown to me have joined in this discussion, taking the nuisance value of this silly bit of spam to new heights.

Can I suggest no more replies to this message, tempting though it may be. Each reply is probably being distributed to many other innocent receivers of it. Remember that the original evil sender will be on the mailing list too. Having made up lots of random combinations of email addresses, it is very likely that they are now gathering in the real, working email addresses people are unwittingly give them, for even more targetted spam in the future. Don’t get duped. The age old advice is, if something arrives and it is not for you, bin it and move on.

Tim

Someone has some sense. There were a few other people saying “stop replying, just delete these messages”. Someone explained how this was all going on, one address forwarding to us all. Some, like Reena, were getting pretty upset:

i am being blamed as well for sumthing i havent even done .. my email address is purely for job hunting and i wouldnt send out “smut” to anyone .. i hate the things myself and it is bloody annoying.. i am getting the freefix crap as well .. and i really personally dont want to open another email account .. so whoeva is doing this .. please get a freaking life

Responding to one of the shouting “stop emailing me” messages was Ceejay:

Hello Keith,
Sorry about all these crap coming to your email i think someone might have added all our addresses to a mailing list at [redacted] and the best way out is to report to the persons ISP and get his domain name banned, I get them too but just delete them but I don’t like the fact that you think they are coming from Nigeria. That there are a lot of school gunshots and murders in the USA does not make USA a country labelled for murderers. I don’t like the label you guys always try to apply to our country, there might as well be other countries doing this but hiding under the label of Nigeria just the same way they hide trying to make their smut look like it is coming from our email addresses. I did not want to reply to this list but the moment I saw Nigeria it set me off. Just pray for the best and exercise all best and safe internet practices but leave out the label of fraud and smut from Nigeria. It is not our Label and we would not accept it.

Thanks and Good Luck.

Some people take all the fun out of watching a thread like this. Soon someone tried to start an investigation, that was Ken.

I have been deleting this rubbish , but something caught my eye and decided to go through my deleted files. A Paul [redacted] of [redacted] tel [UK phone number redacted] responded to an email from [redacted] regarding a music purchase.
That could be a starting point for those who want start some form legal action.

Then we got another 6 messages of “unsubscribe me”, and things amazingly went quiet.

All in all, there were over 40 messages, not including bounced emails. I was really enjoying watching this.

So what happens when someone starts sending SPAM from your domain? Well it seems that this weekend someone started doing just that, maybe. There were at least using my mail server. It’s been a little annoying to get a bunch of bounce messages, but I got something interesting out of all this. (ed: continued later here)

First I got just a single message from someone. I don’t know their name, just that their email address (which I won’t post). This person was not happy to get this SPAM.

we are going to get an attourney if u keep sending smut to my email adress. i have kids here that could be exposed to this. this is my last reguest and if it keeps coming i am turning my laptop over to the law firm to investigate. i will try to make an example for the whole united states to see if u keep sending this crap. i dont know what other people do when they get this smut sent to them but it makes me sick every day i check my email. sometimes i wont even want to check it because i know there will be so much smut to delete so one more time STOP SENDING ME EMAIL STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP there that should be more than enuf requests to legally get u to stop
sending me email. please stop.

You see, people have been talking about this. For some reason, I’ve been getting these people’s replies. It all started when someone named Tiffany apologized for the emails, saying she wasn’t spamming us, but her name ended up on the emails somehow.

I have not now, nor have I EVER sent out “smut” I do not send out Spam or Porn or any thing of the sort, if you have recieved something from someone claiming to be me, check the actual headers and email it was sent from .. forced headers happen all the time… all they need is my name and email address to send it as me and IF the email was sent from MY address, I will change my profile information and security info… I am sorry, I have never … ever sent anything of a questionible nature to anyone.. .expecially strangers

Tiffany <--- NOT a "spammer"

Well, how could anyone resist that? Rowland certainly couldn’t.

Hello Al,,
I wonder why these kind of emails will be flying around my corner.
I never subscribed to any site for these and i keep receiving these trash!
Please i want to beg who so ever that is responsible for this to pls STOP or else i gonna do something funny to everyone.
Moreover, why are mails sent to [redacted] coming to me?
Infact i dont really understand.

Peter made sure to jump in, pointing out none of this was his fault:

I am suffering too and my sever etc is verry secure so its not me. Kr Peter

Matt stepped in to prevent the lawsuit threatened by Rowland.

No one’s going to sue anyone – whatever they might think. This is the whole point of these sorts of emails…to cause stress and waste time. I’d suggest you whack your spam filter up to max and just ignore them! Works for me.

Next came Keith from a consulting company who was also in on this fun little email chain.

I have had the same - think they are coming from Nigeria, just have to block them I think unless you can recommend anything else

Saurabh joined in complaining about Nigerian 419 scam messages.

join the club………i couldnt agree more
even better, i’m getting nigerian emails to give them my a/c number and sort code so that they can deposit $1m.
do they think that i was born yesterday??

Karen replied to Peter, also calling “not it.” The came Kelly who seems surprised at the whole concept of SPAM.

This is the same for me as well. I do not know who is doing this but it definitely has not originated from me. I thought our server was very secure as well. I am not sure what we can do?

me too……i received that message and was totally shocked!!!!

At this point someone named Michael was getting very annoyed at this thread. So this person sent us all this message:

Do not no how you got my email address, but please all keep the rubbish for yourselves. No more emails to this address

Last up (so far), we have Nigel. He doesn’t know why he is on this thread. None of us do.

Its not coming from me…so why copy me in on the e-mails…..

While writing this, Lee jumped in to complain.

To Whom It May Concern

This kind of spam email is indeed worrying and it would seem that a number of individuals have experienced this problem.
I too have never heard of or had any dealing with [redacted] and I must reiterate that I too have NOT sent or been party to any of this behaviour.

Last so far was Steve. He sent a quick little message, but marked it important, as though that would somehow stop this thread because he checked a little box.

I do not understand either, I have not sent anything!!

I can’t wait to see what comes next. I’ve only received 12 emails on this topic, unless my SPAM filter has caught some.