T w e n t y S i d e d
Not that anyone noticed, but Friday is when I usually post my “Free Game” links. I didn’t have time for that this week, so no free game. This weekend I plan to sink some time into UT3. And naps.
The Devolution of Windows
Lots of people are upgrading to Windows Vista and then regretting the move. As I contemplate this, I look back at my own history with the PC platform:
DOS (1988): I started here. It was cryptic and odd unless you knew how to use it, but it got the job done.
Windows 3.1 (1992): It was ugly, stupid, and annoying a hundred ways, but it did what I needed. I usually just ran DOS and jumped into Windows when I had to run something designed for Windows. Yes, it was appalling compared to the Mac OS of the day, but I’d never used a Mac and had no idea what I was missing. Windows 3.1 managed to more or less stay out of my way. Pointless but harmless upgrade.
Windows 95 (1995): It enraged me with just how much memory it demanded. It no longer ran as a DOS application, which means that you couldn’t just jump in and out of Windows at will. It was bossy, pandering, frustrating, with the very worst dialog boxes I’ve ever seen. I had to upgrade to do my job at the time, or I wouldn’t have done so at all. The constant nanny prompts, “Are you sure you want to do that thing you just did?” probably cost me a couple of keyboards. If I need windows for my job I would have run to Apple at this point and begged them to take my money. Took me a year to get used to it. Awful upgrade.
Windows 98 (1999): This upgrade was a relief. File sharing worked more or less as it should. While the memory footprint was somewhat bigger, Moore’s Law had caused memory to expand faster than the OS, which means that I had a larger percentage of system memory at my disposal. It looked better, ran better, and corrected some of the worst problems of Win95. This was arguably what Win95 should have been in the first place. Took me a month to get comfortable with it. Decent upgrade.
Windows XP (2002): The system was more reliable and more stable than before. There were still a lot of nanny dialogs here and there, but most of them could be turned off. Again, the memory footprint was bigger but Moore’s Law kept it from being too big. The only complaint I had was the overly fancy UI seemed like a total waste of resources. I turned off most of the visual enhancements and enjoyed something that looked like Windows 98 but ran better. Took me a couple of days to get comfortable with it. Good upgrade.
Windows Vista (Never, never I say!): I will resist this upgrade for as long as I can. This looks a lot like the the Windows 95 upgrade. Everyone I know who uses it has been driven mad by the “security” features, which are little more than confirmation dialogs that chide the user when they engage in reckless activities like running programs. The memory footprint sounds needlessly gigantic, and even the hard drive requirements are shocking. (Fifteen gigs of hard drive? What on Earth do you have in there?!?!?) It also requires a cutting-edge graphics card, which is just absurd. All of these headaches, all this expensive hardware, and I can’t think of a single reason I’d want to upgrade even if it was free and had the same requirements as XP. I have all the OS I need right now.
How did they go so wrong? Windows has been getting gradually better since the mid 90’s as far as I can tell, and now Microsoft has taken an awful step backwards. It needs two hundred times more hard drive space than Windows 95, and about sixty-four times more memory. Yes, we need operating systems to do more now, twelve years later. But that much more? This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m really wondering: What are they doing with it?
I have 2 XP license keys & clean install discs here. Not system-specific “restore” discs, mind you, but real install discs. I’ve been in the habit of buying “no OS” PC’s and then installing XP fresh, and I’m very glad I’ve been doing that. Hopefully I can keep XP going for several more years, and skip Vista altogether.
It will be very interesting to watch what Linux and Mac do in the next couple of years. I’m chained to the PC platform for various reasons, but lots of people aren’t. Will a lot of fence-sitters migrate to one of the alternatives? I’m hoping so.
WordPress: Dexter
I’ve been eyeing Dexter, the latest version of WordPress. Fledge has had some problems with it, though.
He makes the point that categories and tags are somewhat redundant. I think that’s true in some cases, but I think this blog is a good example of where both could be useful. I often do “series” of posts, and I always have to manually link to other posts in the series. For example, I don’t want to create a new category for every new videogame or anime I cover, but each one takes up several posts spread out over a couple of weeks, and I’d love for readers to be able to check out the entire series if they show up in the middle. Bioshock. Fullmetal Alchemist. Quake 4. It would be super great if I could tag each series, those tags would appear automatically, and if it wouldn’t break my blog, make a mess, or take forever in the process.
Sure, users could search the blog for the series they’re interested in, but that’s not the same as having the link at the end of the post. Plus, searches will return posts that contain stuff like, “I liked this game almost as much as I liked Jade Empire”, which doesn’t really have any information on Jade Empire. In fact, a sentence like that sort of assumes you’ve already read my stuff on Jade Empire.
Fledge mentions the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, which I used. Once. For about an hour. It was painfully slow. I don’t know why. I didn’t try to debug it, I just shut it off. I’m not knocking the plugin, many people like and enjoy it. But for whatever reason, page loads took about five seconds when the plugin was active.
So, a little discussion:
Do you find tags useful on other blogs? Do you use them? Ignore them? Did you ever wish I had tags here?
And a tangent: Anyone else have problems with Dexter?
Seam Carving
This is amazing:
It’s sold as a way to make photos scale to available space while still retaining vital elements, although all I could see was the greatest photoshopping tool ever devised. The part where they seamlessly cut people out of the beach photo was brillaint.
The Capricious Nature of Motivation. (Meh.)
Yesterday I crossed the finish line on a Big Project at work. It’s been requiring some overtime and after a couple of weeks of being “two days” from the end I was really starting to fatigue. Hopefully my sour mood didn’t come through on the site.
I managed to get through this while keeping up with stuff like this for Chainmail Bikini, meeting my output goals for this website, and still get in some family time here and there. Still, I’ve been looking forward to a break, and for a chance to pursue some side projects that got pushed to the back burner. So now the Big Project at work is (in theory) done and now I can finally get around to…
Erm. Nothing, really.
I’m sitting here with a good three hours to burn any way I dang well please, and I can’t think of a thing in the world I want to do. I have a programming / research / learning project I’ve been itching to work on, and now I don’t even have the energy to try and express my abiding apathy for the thing. I have anime here – good anime – which I don’t want to watch. I have a pile of games here I don’t want to play. Even “surfing the web” seems like a chore, and that’s the twenty-first century equivalent of channel surfing – just click, click, click through the disposable hours by searching out easy-to-digest entertainment. The condition of being “too bored to surf the web” is just one step away from “catatonic”.
This is frustrating. I’m going to pass the time staring at the ceiling, but Real Soon Now I’m going to wish I could have these hours back. Here I am with the vast riches of unallotted time, and I can’t even work up the energy to feel apathetic about the lack of guilt I’m experiencing over all of the things I’m not working on. In fact, I’m so lazy right now that I’m not even going to fix the previous train wreck of a sentence.
And not only am I wasting a bunch of my time, but I’ve just now wasted a couple of minutes of yours. Oops!
Top 10 Spooky Videogame Moments
Jay did this the other day, and it seemed like a good Halloween post. Note that this is just my own personal list, sorted roughly according to just how much the experience stuck with me after I was done playing. Here they are, from the timid to the terrifying:
10. Quake 4 – Stoggification: I still think that this could have been one of the great moments in gaming – right up there with Shodan’s reveal in System Shock 2 – if not for the fact that they made the whole process part of the marketing campaign. Everyone knew it was coming, and was in fact waiting for it, so that the event lost most of its potency. If they had left this a surprise it would have blindsided players and given them something to really talk about. My write up here. A YouTube video here.
9. Doom 3 – Trites: This game had spooky moments, although it was never quite the sum of its parts, fear-wise. It started out spooky, but the more I saw of the plot the less frightening it seemed. The story worked against it, keeping me from taking things seriously enough to get worked up. Every time I started to get immersed Dr. Betruger would get on the intercom and start hyperventilating about his awesome plans to BRING HELL TO EARTH LOLZ!!!11!1!, which just ruined it for me. Still, those little spider things were well introduced and quite scary to those who might not be so fond of bugs.
8. F.E.A.R. – Hide and Seek with Alma: I was crawling through an area of cubicles. I’d forgotten about Alma for the moment and was more worried about the soldiers ahead. In a moment of perfectly timed scripting I edged forward (crawling) and then looked to my left to see her crawling towards me like an animal. I flinched so hard I lost my grip on the mouse and it slid off the back of my keyboard drawer. If someone had filmed me at that moment it would have turned into a YouTube video labeled DUMASS GETS SCAERD AND DROPS HIS MOSE, and it would have half a million views by now.
7. Doom – E1M2: That dark area with the computer walls, blinking lights, and moaning zombies.
6. X-Com – First Mission: Steven is with me on this one. It’s a turn based game with stone-age graphics, and it can still evoke a sense of fear in the player. There is something about the way it does line-of-sight that makes you painfully aware of what you can’t see.
5. Silent Hill 2 – The Hospital: This was my first survival horror game, so it will always have a special potency to me. The hospital was pretty bad to begin with, but when the nurses showed up I really just wanted to run away. I have a lengthy (even by my standards) plot analysis here.
4. Unreal – The Sunspire: Everyone gives this game a nod for the moment when the lights go out and you have to fight a Skaarj in the dark. That seemed a little contrived to me and didn’t give me quite the scare that others got from it, but sections of the SunSpire terrified me. Those little bugs gave me the willies.
3. System Shock – Level 3: It’s bad enough being inside of the belly of a space station run by a xenophobic AI who wants to murder you and turn your corpse into a meat puppet, but it gets worse when you’re fighting small, translucent blobs in the dark that seem to be immune to regular bullets.
2. System Shock 2 – Polito’s Office: I knew I was about to meet Shodan. I’d figured it out just before I got there that I wasn’t dealing with a human, and that somehow Shodan was involved. This was mostly due to metagame thinking, but still: I thought I was ready. When the walls vanished and I saw my old nemesis towering over me in some sort of strange vision my heart rate went through the roof.
1. Thief Deadly Shadows – The Shalebridge Cradle: This entire section of the game was a masterfully executed effort. There were many techniques layered together to generate fear, and all of them fit together to make a truly frightening whole. Everyhting was well done. Scenery, monsters, voice acting, story. My own writeup on the experience is here. A YouTube video is nothing compared to playing it yourself, but if you’re curious there is a series that depicts the entire mission. It begins here.
Happy Halloween. Save me some Skittles.
The Dice Are Trying to Kill Me
I’m probably not the first person to think of the phrase, and I’ll probably never know, but it warms my heart to think that I may have inspired this shirt at ThinkGeek.
I guess I should add: This design is available at my Zazzle store.
From The Archives:
Why I Hated Resident Evil 4
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
Starcraft 2: Rush Analysis
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
The Mistakes DOOM Didn't Make
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.