Blade Edge

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The contingency plans

February 2nd, 2009 · Personal

So I’ve weathered through a couple of hard drive failures so far. My laptop hard drive failed and more recently my desktop hard drive bit the dust. In both instances I was able to recover pretty much all of my data and continue on without much hassle. However I know this isn’t the happy ending that many people experience when they’re hard drives go kaput. It’s one of those “it won’t happen to me” things that a lot of people tend to not worry much about, which is unfortunate because the cold hard truth is that hard drives will fail at some point. The problem is that hard drive life spans are notoriously difficult to measure, so you can have one drive last 5-6 years while another tanks after just two. And that’s not even taking into account mechanical defects that can shorten a drives life-span as well. So given that you can’t predict when your drive is going to fail (and it will, at some point) the only thing you can do is be prepared for when it happens.

Currently my data is protected from destruction via Mozy.com offsite backup, which I signed up for back in 2007. This is what saved me from my most recent hard drive failure but getting back up and running was a bit of a nuisance. Mozy’s recovery system isn’t that fast, it takes up to an hour for it to retrieve and organize all the files you need from its servers and then you have to download them all, unzip them, and restore them to their proper location. I had to do this through their web interface because the local client on my machine kept saying it didn’t recognize my computer and could not directly restore my files. Also I didn’t realize that it stored everything and didn’t mirror my system. Files that I had deleted or moved to another location were still in their original spots on the remote server, so I had to check file dates to make sure I was getting the most recent version. So Mozy did a good job saving my data, but retrieving it was a bit of a pain.

I’ll be holding on to Mozy for another month or so to make sure I have all the data I need from it, then cancelling my account with them. Instead, I’ll be backing up my data to the server here at blade-edge.com, which I upgraded last year to have 350GB of storage. That’s way more than I need, currently I only have roughly 90GB of data that needs to be backed up. Additionally, I’ll be using the laptop hard drive I ordered for my PS3 (which failed to upgrade properly) as an external backup drive that I can detach from my main system and take with me when I’m on the road. Should anything happen to that while I’m away from my desktop I can then access the files on the webserver from any location (assuming I have an internet connection – minor complication). I have the drive in a slick external enclosure that powers directly from the USB cable. I took some ribbon and attached velcro strips and stuck them under the shelf above my tower to make a sling for the drive when it’s at home, to help keep it cool.

To manage all of this I have SyncbackSE, which lets me create profiles that allows for data to be backed up to both the local hard drive attached to my computer and my remote drive on the web server via FTP. It only took me about an hour or so of tweaking to get everything set up and running, with a scheduled back up that runs every day at 6am for both locations. I can also control how my files are backed up so now, if I delete/move a file on my desktop, that file is also deleted from the original location in my backups (after 7 days). SyncBack comes in a freeware flavor too but the SE version offers better FTP support and the ability to access files that are in use by other programs, which means I can work if a back up is still in progress without worrying about opening a file that needs to be backed up.

So I’m pretty much all set. My mobile drive will suit me well when I’m on the road. If I forget it or it dies then I have access to my files online via my web server. If my house is consumed in fire I still have my files backed up off-site. Redundancy is key!

I’m still in the process of completing my initial online data backup. That’s about 90GB of data I need to upload before I can start just backing up whatever files were changed/added over the course of the day. Obvioulsy the back up to the removable drive went quickly and painlessly, but getting all my files to the web server will take a few days. I’ve also had to download quite a few gigs of data off Mozy.com to restore my system. Now I’m just praying that Comcast doesn’t throttle my connection 😛

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No luck on the PS3 HDD upgrade

January 24th, 2009 · Personal

Right now the failure boils down to one of two things. Either

  1. I should have never formatted the drive from its factory state
    or
  2. My PS3 model just isn’t built for HDD upgrades

I don’t like thinking either of them are true but it has to be one or the other. Back when I first got the HDD for my PS3, I decided to keep it as an external storage device, so I formatted it to use it as an external hard drive. A few days ago I decided I didn’t really need 250GB of external storage so I decided to go ahead with the PS3 HDD swap and use the console’s 20GB hard drive instead.

After backing up my PS3 data with the data backup tool onto another external disk, I swapped out the hard drives and switched the console back on. But it told me that it could not start properly and I had to reinstall the firmware. It was supposed to pop up straight to a menu asking me if I wanted to reformat the HDD. So I popped the drive back out and hooked it back up to my desktop, deleted the NTFS partition (since the PS3 can’t read NTFS) and re-formatted it with FAT32. Stuck the drive back in.

No luck, same result. So I pop the drive out, hook it back up to my computer and completely wipe the partition off the disk, thinking that the console wasn’t detecting any empty partitions to format so it was throwing up the error. Pop the drive back in and still get the same results. I tried restarting as well thinking maybe it was still hung up from the last attempt but no joy.

Grumbling to myself I swapped back in the original drive and started up the system. My heart froze in my chest when the same error message popped up saying the system could not run properly. I imagined the EPIC FAIL status update I would make regarding the untimely death of my PS3. However upon restarting the console via the controller it booted up properly and all my data was still intact. *phew*

So I’ve tried everything I can think of. According to all the tutorials I’ve found online (like this one) this is supposed to be a painless and easy process. What leads me to the two possible conclusions above for my failure are the facts that everyone (to my knowledge) who tried those tutorials did so with a factory-new hard drive that hadn’t been formatted (but that shouldn’t be any different from an unpartitioned drive right?) and I can’t find a single tutorial that sports a drive tray similar to mine:

What’s up with that??

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Had enough of Tomb Raider: Underworld

January 16th, 2009 · Gaming

Well I wasn’t impressed with Underworld much besides the visual quality of the game. Underworld is stunning in its visual detail and lighting and overall environmental design. If I could just watch the whole game being played I would – I’d pop the popcorn and sit back to watch the story unfold in the various beautiful settings. Unfortunately I can’t do that. Instead I’m forced to puzzle my way around the levels, spending the majority of my time climbing, swinging and hopping around ruins. Every now and then I get attacked but that mainly involves me running around in circles and shooting repeatedly. There’s no manual aim (that you can use while moving) and my guns pretty much have unlimited ammo so what’s the point in being conservative? It’s just hold down L2 to target and blast away until everything is dead. *yawn*

Plus the game bothers me technically a lot. Lizards and people seem to die in the most awkward of poses, many times lizards would die half inside of a wall. Bats seem to spawn out of a single point in thin air to attack you. The animation system has no real means of transitioning smoothly between a lot of moves – the worst is an example I highlighted in my last post about people having to die standing up. The camera has a few issues when Lara is hopping and climbing around. Has anyone else entered the area with Shiva’s statue and noticed one of the lizards running in a circle on the wall down the corridor to the left? I could target it, but could not damage it at all when I shot it or stuck a sticky grenade on it. And it failed to notice me – it just kept circling on the wall. WTF?

The clincher for me however was this:

This is where you use Thor’s Gauntlet to move the pedestal around the circle to advance to the next location. Well if you move it past the exit, you can retrieve the Artifact that is next to the statue of Thor. However despite spending more than 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get the pedestal rotated back to the exit and get back on top of it, I couldn’t. I think I was close at one point, but then I slipped off the ledge at the base of the pedestal and died. Again. So in desperation I tried to grapple the ring back at the start of the puzzle by jumping off the top of the pedestal. I was successful, climbed back up and ran back to where the level started, jumping into a pit to kill myself hoping that it would reset the pedestal. Well the pedestal did not reset and I did not revive atop it, which meant I was now stranded out of reach of the pedestal. I exited and restarted the game but upon resuming it dropped me straight back to the same spot, where you see in the screen above.

This means I would have to load my last saved game, which would take me about 2 hours back. No thanks, I’m kinda sick and tired of climbing around so much and I don’t have enough stake in the franchise (this being my first and only Tomb Raider game) to want to continue for the sake of the story. I’ll most likely end up trading this in towards a copy of Uncharted, as that was borrowed from a friend and I don’t own it. I’d rather play through that a fourth time than bother continuing with Underworld. Sorry Lara, you’re hot and all and fun to watch, but not fun to play.

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Another HDD bites the dust

January 11th, 2009 · Personal

Well,  it seems my WD Raptor 150GB drive has up and died on me. I took a 2 hour nap today and when I woke up I found my computer had restarted itself for some reason and the boot screen greeted me with the message “Primary H.D.D. Not Found!”. Well crap. I had to run open workout at the gym but when I got home I opened up the computer and swapped the SATA cables (I have two internal drives). Upon reboot the computer made it to the “OS Not Found” message, because the HDD it was now successfully detecting as the primary drive is not the one with XP on it. Upon leaning down next to the drive bay, I finally heard the “whirrrrr – CLICK! … whirrrrr – CLICK!” repeating itself. Bah.

I’m not a stranger to hard drive failure, although this time nothing showed up on the SMART test that is performed every time I restart the computer, and I make a habit of restarting it every 2-3 days. The boot process displays the HDD SMART status and if any serious problem is detected it hangs up and notifies you. That’s how I avoided the failure of a previous (much older) additional internal hard drive. The most recent HDD trouble I had was with my laptop two years ago.

Fortunately I should not have lost much. I mostly kept applications and the OS on my main drive, every month I would move unused files to my secondary drive. Being that it’s the start of January, I made that move a few days ago. In addition, I signed up for Mozy.com’s online back-up service last year and I back-up my data every morning. Of course, I’ve never had to use my back-up before so hopefully it’s all really there like it’s supposed to be!! Hah.

I’ve purchased another hard drive to replace my Raptor, none other of course than the WD 150GB Velociraptor, which prices in at around $100 less than my original drive when purchased two years ago. Ahhh technological advancement. It should be here by Tuesday so I can get to re-installing XP and all my stuff. Well, I was kind of considering a reformat anyways – thankfully I put it off because it would have really sucked to go through it all just to have to do it again.

Don’t forget that hard drive failure is an inevitable thing. It’ll happen at some point so be prepared. I talked about this back in 2007 when the first terabyte drives were starting to make their rounds.

Well, a forced partial vacation at least…

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Red Bull Air Racing in Home

January 10th, 2009 · Gaming

Logged into Home today to check out the new content, namely the Red Bull island that let you pilot three different-skinned Extra 300 aircraft around a race course, just like they do in real life. The controls are basic and the flight model is arcady, but it’s not supposed to be a flight sim. There’s not a lot of explanaition for the game, but it doesn’t take long to figure out how to play. Pretty soon I was racking up times around 55 seconds. However the problem is that for some reason there is no system in place to store scores online. Which means no official recordings. Which means no one is going to believe anything you say. Yea, this is pretty stupid >:(

I posted up an image of my second-best time taken with my camera phone and one of the people next to me said it could have been photoshopped, and that the time doesn’t appear directly over the plane for them. They were willing to “give me the benefit of the doubt” but of course they wouldn’t take the photo as proof. So I pulled out the videocamera and recorded myself and actually brought in my fastest time the first try – 0:54:64. I thought for sure that would be up near the top of the heap. Turns out though I’m only in 25th place overall by the current standings, and although I though I raced a nice line through the course, this guy did it in 0:48:84 and didn’t edge around pylons as much as I did.

Anyways, they game is fun and addictive – I hope they change up the course or at least provide new ones. My video is embedded below, though I would suggest clicking through for a slightly larger version.

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More Tomb Raider thoughts

January 9th, 2009 · Gaming

As I suspected, the gunplay in Tomb Raider is nowhere near the level that Uncharted managed to acheive. You pretty much lock on and shoot at stuff, and it seems you have a limited range in which you can deal out damage as well. You can switch between targets, and Lara will even divide her attention between two seperate targets when oppurtunities present themselves, but it’s all rather simplified action. Plus there are no cover moves. You can run and dodge and hide behind things, but you can’t take cover behind objects. Additionally, the crouch is not a toggle, which means you stuck holding O with your thumb and can’t maneuver the camera (R stick).

Getting close to enemies seems to be the best solution, as you can then shoot them and deliver melee attacks at the same time. However it seems that enemies can only die standing up. If you knock them to the ground with a melee attack and then kill them with a gunshot, they’ll pop back up to die and fall back down again. This puzzles me, as when Lara dies she clearly goes ragdoll, so why can’t the enemies go ragdoll when they die and just lay on the ground if they’re already down there? Why did they need to have a dying animation? I guess the upshot is that they end up dying in a variety of funny-looking positions:

It looks like he's *still* dying

I screwed this one up but you can still see his arm stuck through his leg

I screwed this one up but you can still see his arm stuck through his leg

This one made me laugh. Hes just sitting there. Dead. Hahaha

another guy looks like hes not yet dead

another guy looks like he's not yet dead

I’ve also been having a bit of trouble with getting around the levels, but I think there’s some mentality to the game that I’m just not getting having not played any prior Tomb Raider games – at least that’s what I’m telling myself to keep believing I’m not an idiot for taking like 5 minutes to figure out I had to jump across the top of the cargo containers on the ship to get to the next area. There are also times it’s not so obvious to me where I should leap to next when climbing along ledges and pillars and whatnot; I have to work the camera around to spot my next goal. Uncharted was much better in angling the camera automatically to show you where you had to go next.

However one thing still going for Tomb Raider is that it is undeniably beautiful when you’re outdoors, and has a nice dark mood when inside temples. It is, in my opinion, prettier than Uncharted, and this makes me all the more excited for Uncharted 2 because it’s supposed to be drop-dead gorgeous and I’m betting it will beat out Tomb Raider. Still, drinking in the visuals helps to get me past the rest of the game’s frustrations.

Oh and I got to battle tigers. That was cool but again, not as cool as I imagined it would be. Even the tiger animations seemed a bit rougher than I remembered from gameplay videos for some reason. The adrenaline headshot system is pretty sweet – actually any kind of slow-mo gunplay is pretty sweet so there’s nothing particularly cool about this except for an excuse to go all Matrix and kill with one shot. Which is awesome.

And if I Get Your Fail publishes the last two screens that I send them, I’ll pass along this one as well:

The diagonal line you see there is some kind of tear in the world. It’s a texture strip or something that can only be viewed from this angle, if you move the camera to the other side it disappears. At first I thought it was a rope or wire or something Lara could clamber up, until I ran through it of course. If anyone else wants to find it (if it’s replicable, I didn’t test that) go to where you first encounter the tigers. If you walk towards that spot along the creek you should see it to the right.

So, Tomb Raider continues to be mediocre but I think, even though the game has its issues, that’s largely the fault of me being utterly spoiled rotten by Uncharted.

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2008 in Review, looking ahead for 2009

January 9th, 2009 · Personal

I’ve read a number of journals over at GameDev.net from people who have taken a look back at the previous year and assessed their performance in achieving any goals they set for themselves, as well as re-aligning their goals for the coming year. This is a great idea and something I’m going to start doing as well. So let’s take a look back at 2008.

Major Happenings in 2008

  • Single again. My second real relationship came to and end this year, however thankfully this one ended way better than the first one. She and I still talk and hang out from time to time, and it’s mainly because I was more in control regarding my reasons for ending the relationship. Right now I’m not interested in starting up another one (well, a serious one anyways), though I always enjoy a female’s company. Back in high school I determined that I never wanted a relationship because I had too many things in life that I wanted first – that still seems to be the case.
  • GDNet book project. This was quite the undertaking for myself and co-editor John Hattan, and took the majority of the year (with planning going back into 2007) to get done, but boy was it an experience I’m glad I was able to partake in. Having contributed to a game development book in the past, getting to edit one seemed like an appropriate step up. I’ll be posting a detailed blog entry on the entire epic process sometime next month or March.
  • More of a gamer. With the purchase of a PS3 I started to get back into mainstream gaming a bit more. 2007-2008 was a pretty dearth period of time for me in relation to gaming of any type. I barely played games on the computer, N64 or Gamecube besides Guitar Hero. It was both a matter of not having the time and not making then time. In 2008 I made the time to play games other than Guitar Hero.
  • GameDev.net. In general, GDNet grew substantially this year. We added new features to reinvigorate the news section, like Tales from Journal Land, the Daily’s and Help Wanted picks. Our Facebook page has over 1,600 fans as of this writing. The community is very matured and we can have all kinds of crazy conversations without having to lock down a thread. The editorial side of things has evolved greatly – I now have a panel of editors to approve technical articles that I don’t have the knowledge to critique myself. It was a great year all told.
  • Good health. Both mentally and physically this year I was in great shape. I never got sick to the point where I had to stay in bed, and I was never so stressed to the point where I had to make myself take time off from anything. Sure there was stress, and there were small bouts of sore throats and runny noses, but nothing on any notable scale. No major injuries as well.

Goals for 2009

I have three goals for 2009:

  • Get back in shape. I’m currently at the brink of what I would constitute being “out of shape”. I can still do everything I used to be able to do, but a lot of it feels harder and I’m definitely a bit rounder along the midsection. I can go either way at this point so I have to act. My current plan is to start out with workouts at my gym after hours, then once I’m limber enough again to get back in the dojo for martial arts training. I’ll also be indoor rock climbing again. When things are back in full swing, hopefully by April, I’ll be doing karate on Mondays, gymnastics on Wednesdays and rock climbing on Fridays, with basic strength workouts (push ups, weights, etc) at home Tues and Thurs nights.
  • Get back into development. At some point this year I’d like to code again. I have no sub-goal like complete one of my old projects or push out a small game – just to sit down and code every now and then and see what happens. I’ll still be using Torque Game Builder. In 2008 I don’t think I wrote a single line of code for anything, which is rather depressing.
  • Keep on  making GameDev.net better. GDNet has a lot more work ahead of it, especially with a site redesign and our 10th anniversary happening this year. Plenty of work to keep me busy and heavily involved with the games industry – wouldn’t want it any other way!

Well that was insightful. I’ll be looking back on this post at the start of 2010 and we’ll see how well I did!

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Upgrades and Additions Galore

January 8th, 2009 · Personal

I made an oder off NewEgg a few days ago as part of my Xmas expenditure to myself. At the end of every year if I have enough money left over I spend as much of it as possible. Yes, I am not the saving type. I like to start each year in defecit and work my way out by December. Anyways the parts I purchased were for both the computer and the PS3:

For the Computer

You’re looking at a 68-in-1 card reader from Sabrent, 2 sticks of Corsair XMS2 1GB DDR2-800 SDRAM, and a floppy disk drive

For the PS3

Here you’re looking at a Western Digital Scorpio Black 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Notebook Hard Drive and it’s external enclosure

For Myself

Bubble wrap!!!! POPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPOP

Installing the Computer Hardware

Yea that’s quite the tangle back there – it’s actually rather organized just all bunched together. The main thing to notice is the dust on the wall next to the fan that’s blowing air past the subwoofer and the back of the tower (upper left). Yea it’s been a while since I’ve vacuumed back there or anything. The size of that dust bunny in the inset picture is just scary. So I took about 30 minutes sucking up dust from behind my desk and taking out my expansion cards and video cards and dusting those off as well. Using a soft paintbrush I dusted the motherboard and the heatsink fan, which is a massive Zalman. That had enough dust on the copper vanes that I had to remove clumps at a time:

Next I took care of the easy stuff first, which was slotting in the extra 2GB of system memory. I now have 4GB of memory, not of all it is accessible though with Windows XP but 1) I couldn’t find any sticks of 512MB that I could pair to make just 1GB and 2) I’ll be upgrading to Windows 7 eventually anyways and that will be able to fully address the 4GB of memory. And besides I can use all the RAM I can get these days so even if I can only use 3GB that’s still better than 2GB.

Then it was time to install the floppy disk drive. Why did I get a floppy disk drive?? Well first of all they’re just dirt cheap, so why not? And second of all I have a lot of old crap stored on floppy disks from back in the day that I would like to recover because I’m a pack rat. Also it’s still a nice storage medium for those teeny files you just want to tuck away. Of course I had to dig into my big bin of parts to pull out the floppy ribbon cable, and I had to search my tangle of power cables for the floppy power plug, and I had to find some screws to fasten it to the case because it was an OEM drive that came just as itself. Luckily for the latter I still had case screws tucked away in my parts bin. Then when I started up the computer I forgot I had disabled the floppy in the BIOS so I had to go in and re-enable it before it actually worked.

Next I slotted in the 68-in-1 card reader. Initially I was confused as to how to hook it up, but after a quick search online I realized I would have to give up one of my internal USB 2.0 connections. I was using both to power the additional rear-panel ports as well as the front-panel ports. So I detached the front-panel ports because the card reader came with a USB port, albeit only one instead of the two front ports I currently have. But oh well, I pick up a card reader for it. Now I can pop in both my Sony Memory Stick and Sandisk Compact Flash cards from my cameras without having to fuss around with a USB cable. It’s faster too. Once the card reader was connected XP auto-detected and set it up, no problems there.

There was one little snafu though because I removed my one IDE hard drive to use in my external enclosure (more on why later) when I rebooted the computer (after installing all the hardware) I got a message saying “OS Not Found”. So I had to reboot and go into the BIOS, switch around the HDD with XP on it to the primary HDD (I still have two in the desktop) and then set that HDD back into the boot order. Minor annoyance but I just hate getting that damn “OS Not Found” message.

PS3 External Hard  Drive

I had watched this video a few months ago on upgrading a PS3 hard drive and was pleased to learn just how easy it is. A few weeks ago I had to finally delete stuff from my paltry 20GB hard drive to make room for the Home install, so I vowed to get a bigger drive and upgrade. I originally just wanted a 160GB drive but since that was out of stock I shelled out a few more bucks for a 250GB one. I also picked up an external case to hold the original hard drive so that I could use it for backups.

However when I went to hook up the HDD I pulled from my desktop to backup the drive the PS3 failed to recognize it. After a quick search on Google I learned that the drive first had to be reformatted in FAT32, and of course it was currently in NTFS. D’oh. So now I’m actually in the process of removing all the stuff from the hard drive so I can reformat it as FAT32 and use it to back up my PS3.

But I think I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to use the new HDD in my PS3 because it turns out that the external 2.5″ case is powered only by the USB cable. That means I have an extremely portable 250GB drive on my hands! So I’ll still be reformatting the desktop drive but I’ll just hook it up to the PS3 to store videos and game data. If I really want to expand the internal PS3 drive then it’s just another $60 for a hard drive. In the meantime I can tote this little baby around with me wherever I go if I so desire. Me like.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some bubbles to pop…

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First Foray into Tomb Raider

January 7th, 2009 · Gaming

So I’ve never played a Tomb Raider game before, mainly because I was never much of a platformer gamer back in the day. I liked my strategy games and flight simulators mainly. The only FPS game I’ve ever really liked (and really played) for the computer is Deus Ex (of course on console that would be Goldeneye). Then when TR transitioned to the Playstation from the computer well, I never owned a Playstation so that didn’t help either.

When I got the PS3 and my friend lent me Uncharted, that was what got me hooked on the action platformer genre. The similarities between Tomb Raider and Uncharted are striking, moreso to me because those are the only action platformers I’ve ever really played. Ledge gripping, wall climbing, running and gunning, puzzles, treasures, etc – it’s all very similar. Others with a more wider range of platformer experiences would see things differently than I of course.

I’m past the first underwater Mediterranean level and about to lay waste to a boat of pirates. So far the game has been very engaging – the puzzles are not too difficult although I admit I did take a few minutes locating the second wheel to open the underwater temple doors. Swimming underwater was easy and fun, seeing bits of seaweed and plankton floating past you adds some much needed depth to the view. The sharks are not overly-aggressive, which is nice. They don’t really chase you unless you provoke them, I was able to swim around and not have to bother shooting a single one of them. Swimming around the entire underwater area to look for treasure, I came across this little buggy artifact:

It’s just a peice of rock stuck in the middle of the water. It doesn’t move or anything and you can swim through it. I found this way out on the edges of the swimmable territory.

I guess my only major gripe so far is how the game handled the Krakken’s tentacles. How they were attached to the beast is beyond me. For example when you stir the one near the underwater entrance to the temple. That scared the shit out of me but when I cautiously peeked out of the water what do I find? A barred door I have to unlock with a puzzle. Then I proceed to climb at least 4 flights of stairs, while navigating over several pits and rock falls, before finally reaching the huge room containing the Krakken itself. That’s one long-ass tentacle! Then in the gear rooms – if you look under the ledge the tentacle was resting on, there’s no hole in the wall or anything that it could have come through to be there in the first place. Speaking of which, I hope this gear doesn’t do anything:

I’ll be submitting these two images to I Get Your Fail 😛

So the platformer stuff is real good: running, jumping, swinging, climbing, swimming – all that is handled well and I haven’t fallen to my death accidentally yet because Lara does a good job of catching herself when she approaches ledges. I love that (unlike Zelda: Twilight Princess where Link happily jumps into lava as much as possible. Grrrrrrrr). I especially like the wall climbing where you just use the L stick to navigate along the wall. Simple and effective, no need for any fancy button combos, just traverse. I hope that’s in Uncharted 2.

Oh and being entirely new to the franchise I should also mention that I don’t feel lost in the water. They have a short prequel video that contains a bunch of key scenes from earlier games to set up the backstory, and the journal Lara keeps in her PDA also reveals more about things that happened in the past which are relevant to this game. So good job there Crystal Dynamics.

Next play session I’ll be able to evaluate the running and gunning aspect, which I don’t expect will top Uncharted’s excellent combat/cover system, but we’ll see.

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It had to happen sometime…

December 30th, 2008 · Gaming

So Xmas Eve I logged into Playstation Home because it had been updated to v1.5, which restored voice chat (thankfully only to private areas like clubs and personal spaces). I had forgotten to bring down my bluetooth keyboard that I use for my computer, so I found a nice quiet spot in the Central Plaza, a sunken circular area that was kinda like a meditiation circle, and sat down in the middle. You sit cross-legged when you choose to sit on the ground, so I thought it was kinda cool, sitting there in the middle of the sunken circle patio looking all tranquil-like. I then got up to go fetch my keyboard.

Sitting down was a mistake.

I was gone for like, two minutes and I return to find a guy humping my face.

Refusing to give in to this childish behavior, I remain seated as I connect my keyboard to the PS3 and proceed to type “gee, thanks asshole” which of course pops up on the screen as “gee, thanks ***hole”. But I’m sure he got the idea. Of course such action on my part has no effect, because we do exist in a virtual environment and I can’t physically strangle the life out of him as I would like to had he been standing before me humping my face for real (and I would have, lest there be any doubt). Apparently my defiance was noted by other rapists in the vicinity as they soon congregated and proceeded to run a mean train… on my face.

So okay one guy is humping my brain, another is humping my face and the third is humping the guy humping my face who’s actually also humping the guy humping my brain.

What’s totally ironic about this is the dance move that’s used to create this humping motion is called “Rave” in the menu of dance moves. Apparently it’s just a typo on Sony’s part.

And I’m seriously not surprised, as this has been a well-documented case in Home, as evidenced by the YouTube video I linked to (from the closed beta, no less) and the always spot-on Penny Arcade comic strip.

Just thought I’d share my own experience. I feel so bad for female avatars, even if most of them actually are men.

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