CodeMonkey's foobar

Left 4 Dead

2009-07-26T17:05:00.000-06:00

Halo - 10 years

2009-07-22T09:08:00.003-06:00

Yesterday was the ten year anniversary of the announcement of Halo: Combat Evolved, the first in a series of games that has revolutionized the first person shooter genre of games.

I was living abroad at the time and didn't hear about Halo until I moved back to the states. Needless to say, Halo is what got me back into gaming. I had casually played games, but once my friends got me to try Halo:CE, I was hooked. I went out and sold my Playstation 2 and all the games I had for it and went out and purchased my original Xbox console (which I still have now and hasn't given me any problems like the RROD on the 360).

First there was Halo:CE on the original Xbox. Then there was the PC version. By the time Halo 2 released in 2004, I was hooked to the point I was waiting in line for the midnight release with my friend Nate (and mistaken by a few in the local Wal-Mart for waiting in line for the new Brittney Spears album that released the same day). Halo 2 was the game that spurred me to get onto Xbox Live and move into online gaming. Halo 2 consumed many hours of my time. Halo 2 is the game that got me in touch with almost all my current online gaming friends through online clans, tournaments, etc. We played the game so much that every little glitch was well known and easily exploited, everything from superbouncing to getting outside the maps.

In 2006 I purchased my Xbox 360 in anticipation of Halo 3, only the biggest game release ever up to that point. Halo 3 introduced four player cooperative campaign play, something new to the FPS genre (at least, done properly). The game is still as great as ever and worth many more hours of gameplay, but suffers now only from competition as other gaming studios have caught up to Bungie in terms of game quality. Needless to say, the Halo franchise is my foundation in gaming. Without it, I really have to wonder if I ever would have started gaming again. Whenever anyone plays a first person shooter now, it's always compared to Halo. Bungie really did reinvent the genre with their multiplayer netcode, party system, game lobby, campaign co-op mode. Sure, other games had these features, but Bungie just seems to be the company that finally got them right. Other game studios really should just rip off Bungie when it comes to design. After all, isn't imitation the highest form of flattery?

With the lackluster games out right now I think I may just go back and replay the Halo franchise start to finish. That should hold me off until the next Halo game comes out, Halo ODST.

Mass Effect 2 Dev Diary

2009-07-10T20:02:00.002-06:00

For those of you looking forward to Mass Effect 2 and really worried about spoilers, be warned, this video contains some. That said, it's a great video. Can't emphasize enough how excited I am for this game that will take many hours of my time away from reality.

DVD Collection

2009-07-01T17:34:00.003-06:00

Some people, like me, have fairly large DVD collections. Sometimes they can be quite a pain to keep track of what you have and what you don't. When birthdays and holidays come around and family and friends decide they would like to give you a gift, a lot of times they decide on a DVD movie or television season. The tricky part for them is figuring out what to get you because they have no clue what you have or want because your collection is so huge. This is even more of a problem for me because I keep all my DVD's stacked 4 rows deep under my television in our media cabinet. They're not even organized in any way.

A few weeks ago a friend directed me to a software company that makes a product to help people like me keep track of their DVD collections. Invelos makes a DVD Profiler package that lets you enter in your DVD's to a database. You can search for your specific DVD edition. You even have the ability to just type in the UPC number on the back of your DVD case. Their database is made up of mostly user contributions. This means if a DVD you try and enter isn't in the database, you can enter the information in yourself and upload it to them. The benefit of this is that unless you're entering in your DVD the day it released, the odds are it's already in there.

Once you've got your DVD collection squared away you can even upload it to their website, from which you can make it available to friends and family. This allows them to see both what you have and what you want via your wishlist. After having tried to code my own DVD database for my collection a few years ago, I can say this product exceeded every expectation I had for it. A very cool little piece of software.

25th Anniversary of Tetris

2009-06-06T12:35:00.007-06:00

I'd have to say Tetris is hands down the best game ever made. The reason I say this is because it's so simple, yet so addicting. This is a very simple game with very simple rules. Blocks drop down and you have to place them in such a way to fill the rows, otherwise they stack up and you lose. Other games have come and gone, yet I still can enjoy playing Tetris. Not many computer games are still enjoyed 25 years later as much as Tetris is.

I still remember the first time I played Tetris. It was when my dad brought it back with him after going on a work trip, back in the late 1980's. Tetris was also the first game I ever remember having to compete with my father for time to play it. He wasn't too pleased why I finally knocked him off the high score list on our home computer.

Download the Original DOS version of Tetris

Mass Effect 2 E3 Trailer

2009-05-29T07:52:00.003-06:00

Again...this game is going to be awesome!

Slot Loading Drives

2009-05-26T09:28:00.003-06:00

If you even remotely consider yourself a geek, you've more than likely heard this old IT support story before. True story from a Novell NetWare Sysop:

Caller: "Hello, is this Tech Support?"
Tech: "Yes, it is. How may I help you?"
Caller: "The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty period. How do I go about getting that fixed?"
Tech: "I'm sorry, but did you say a cup holder?"
Caller: "Yes, it's attached to the front of my computer."
Tech: "Please excuse me. If I seem a bit stumped, it's because I am. Did you receive this as part of a promotional at a trade show? How did you get this cup holder?
Caller: It came with my computer. I don't know anything about a promotion. It just has '4X' on it."
At this point, the Tech Rep had to mute the caller because he couldn't stand it. He was laughing too hard. The caller had been using the load drawer of the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder and snapped it off the drive.

Not that I don't find stupid people funny, because I really, really do, but why do we still use tray loading CD/DVD drives? Slot loading drives have been around for a few years now. Somehow the entire car audio industry decided to skip the whole tray loading step and went straight to slot loading CD players. Maybe it's so our IT staff people can continue to weed out the stupid people by allowing another generation to mistake their CD/DVD drive for a cup holder. Maybe the manufacturer of drive trays is bribing industry leaders to continue to use them. I don't know. What I do know is that slot loading drives seem a whole lot less cumbersome. Slot loading drives, in my experience, tend to be quieter too because the disc never rattles against the drive tray as it spins up or down.

Here's a short video of the results of some guy modifying his Xbox 360 to have a slot loading drive.

Why didn't they just design it this way in the first place? Why don't they change their current production to do it this way? Why don't they offer replacement slot loading drives? I'm sick of drive trays, both on my PC and my gaming systems. I really wish they would wise up and switch to slot loading drives.

Terminator Time Travel

2009-05-22T08:56:00.004-06:00

I guess I should premise this post with the disclaimer that I'm not a time traveler and have no first hand knowledge of how these things work. I'm also not a theoretical physicist who spends their entire life studying these things. But I have taken a few advanced physics courses during the course of getting my college degree and I have read a number of books written by actual theoretical physicists. I would like to think I can discuss this topic with some sense of knowing what I'm talking about and not completely spewing hot air.

The other day a friend of mine and I were talking the merits of time travel in the movies, how it's depicted and which movie does it best. The main movie he concentrated on was the Terminator series (movies + television). After thinking on it for a bit I thought I'd post this today. This is mainly the result of my musings, based on my understanding of string theory and the dimensionality of the universe. Before I really get into it though, here's a short video I found based on a book I read recently that attempts to explain the dimensionality in the universe.

Ok, you're still reading after watching that. Good. Think of our timeline as a single line. Every event in our past is defined. It's happened. There's no changing it. Our future timeline has an infinite number of possibilities. Every event, choice or decision that is made in our future could send us down any number of paths. Every distinct path is its own alternate universe, sharing commonalities with other universes only prior to the events that split them.

In regards to the Terminator series, the more I think about it, the more and more I see that they really didn't have a clue what they were doing in regards to time travel. In the original Terminator movie, John Connor sends a man back in time to 1984 to stop a Terminator from killing his own mother before he is born. The fact that John Connor exists in 2029 is evidence enough that in his particular timeline, his mother didn't die. He was in fact born. As soon as the Terminator goes back in time, that timeline is changed at the point he arrives. From that point in time, that timeline is now a distinct, different universe than the one the Terminator left. Nothing that happens there can ever cause that timeline to coincide with the original timeline, because in that timeline, no Terminator existed in 1984. Also, when Kyle Reese is sent back, he can never end up in the same universe the Terminator ended up in, because his time line he is traveling back in, is one in which the Terminator never existed in 1984.

From the perspective of the original John Connor, a Terminator and Kyle Reese both went back in time and nothing changed. Nothing in his universe is affected because their presence in the past branched the timeline down a different path than the one that was his past. Essentially, this means that time travel for the sake of changing your past, in your universe, is impossible. Yes, you could go back to cause changes, but those changes would only present themselves in an alternate universe separate from the one you left. Also, traveling 'back to the future' from a time in the past you visited, would never return you to the universe you left. Instead, it would return you to a possible future of that timeline you created by your presence in the past.

Essentially then, time travel is pointless as a method of changing the present by traveling to the past because you will never affect the current timeline you're in. From the perspective of being the time traveler yourself, you can use time travel to move into a new alternate universe and improve (or degrade) your situation. But from the perspective of staying in your original universe and sending someone else back in time to change things for you, it's totally pointless. Nothing would ever change. In regard to television and movies depicting time travel (or dimension travel, if you will), the only show I think that even came close to grasping this concept was the show Sliders, where the main character built a device to travel between these infinite parallel universes, neither forward nor backwards in time though. I guess that's why I actually enjoyed watching that show.

Mass Effect 2 Pre-E3 Video

2009-05-15T14:58:00.004-06:00

As someone who played through the first Mass Effect game (first in a trilogy), I am really looking forward to this sequel. The first game had better in game immersion than almost any role playing game I've ever played. The characters were very well developed. The graphics were amazing. The soundtrack fit the story. Bioware just released a Pre-E3 video for Mass Effect 2. When they finally announce a release date for this game, I think I'm going to have to take a few days off work...

This game looks AWESOME.

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

2009-05-08T14:51:00.005-06:00

Recently I purchased a new game, Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. (HAWX) (HAWX stands for High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron). I had heard about it before it's release and the only real thing that interested me then was the fact that the game developers chose to use real satellite images as the basis for the in game landscapes. They took the satellite images and added in the 3-D element of terrain and buildings. This gives this game a very realistic feel. I didn't look too much more into it then because for the most part I'm not interested in flight simulator games. My biggest gripe with flight sims is that they make the most mundane elements of flying the focus of the game. Landings, take-offs, etc are not why I play flight games. I think the last flight game I actually enjoyed was the old Sega game After Burner II, which I used to play at the youth center on the military base I lived on at the time. At least now I don't have to save up my quarters to play the games.

One night some friends and I just finished playing some video games together (probably Halo 3) when we decided to all download and try out the HAWX demo. I was very pleasantly surprised. HAWX is in no way a flight simulator, despite the excellent graphics in the game. This is 100% a fighter arcade game. No more practicing landings where precision control is required. This game just throws you into the middle of a dogfight and goes until all the enemies are killed. You get virtually unlimited ammunition and a wide range of aircraft to pilot. The game gives you the option of playing the campaign in multiplayer cooperative mode. Unlike other games where playing co-op makes the game easier (because you have more help on your side) HAWX developers scaled up the number of enemies you have to stave off when you add more teammates to the battle. This can be quite unnerving when you're playing missions where the objective is to protect a valuable target from enemy fire.

After playing the demo we all went out the next day and picked of the full version of this game. HAWX developers did a great job with the landscapes in the game. Having visited some of the cities in the game, I was able to find key landmarks and even follow the roads to a friend's parent's house (Sorry Nate, I crashed into your parent's house). The game took out the the realism that makes flight simulators so boring, in my opinion, but left in all the aspects of flying a jet fighter that any little boy wants to experience.

This game lets you fly everything from the A6 Intruder to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. (note: the F-35B is the actual fighter depicted in the game, with the vertical landing engine visible) They even threw in the YF-12 (SR-71 Blackbird). Even though the YF-12 isn't a fighter plane, they made it handle like one. I remember going to the Air Force museum as a kid and seeing this plane on display and imagining what it'd be like to fly that fast. Those type of imaginings are what I think spurred developers to include this plane.

The multiplayer versus mode of the game can be a bit unnerving at first. Instead of flying against the artificial intelligence pilots in the game, you're flying against other gamers. The reaction time has to be quick, but the thrill of lining up a shot and blowing the other guy's plane to smithereens exceeds anything felt when I watched Top Gun the first time.

Overall, HAWX is a great game that will provide many hours of enjoyment. The game could use a bit more flexibility in the multiplayer setup, such as implementing a party system where players can join a game together, but what it does provide is sufficient. This is a game I recommend to anyone who can still connect with their inner child and enjoy the thrill of flying big, fast airplanes.

Achievement Hunter

2009-04-22T10:03:00.005-06:00

The number of good video games being released lately has been pretty low. I think the last video game I actually bought was Fable 2 around Christmas time. I'm not big on movie based games like Spiderman or X-Men. Sports games really aren't worth buying when they come out with a new version every year (Madden). The flood of music games from the Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchises is just too much to really care about anymore. I've been tempted to go back to PC gaming for a bit but I hesitate to do so until I bring myself to go out and buy a better computer desk chair. I'd play more of Left 4 Dead since it just released some extra content if it weren't for the fact that the stupid game limits party size to 4 players and I easily have more than 3 friends with the game.

With all that, I've decided to dust off some of my RPG games and go back and finish up some of the Xbox Achievements on them. One game that I think many gamers gave up on completing the achievements is Mass Effect. Seriously, this game takes FOREVER to complete all the achievements.

3 playthroughs (Soldier class) to get the Extreme Power Gamer (Level 60 character), Distinguished Combat Medal (Hardcore difficulty), Medal of Valor (Insanity difficulty playthrough), and the Ally achievements.

2 playthroughs to get the biotic skill (Use each skill 75 times) achievements.

2 playthroughs to get the engineer skill (Use each skill 75 times) achievements.

As long as you switch up the weapons you use, do all the sidequests and investigate all the little informational items, you should get all the other achievements as well during those seven playthroughs. With an average time for a playthrough at somewhere around 20 hours (that's my average), this game literally takes almost six days of gameplay to finish. If you only played an hour each day, and then only five days a week, it'd take you seven months to finish this game.

Because of the slowdown in good games coming out recently I've dusted off my Mass Effect game and have been plugging away at finishing these achievments. I think either tonight or tommorrow I'll finish it up, as I only have 3 biotic skill achievements left, and I'm pretty close on those.

After I finish that game, I guess I can always move on to Assassin's Creed and go flag hunting...

WD My Book Mirror Edition (2 TB)

2009-04-21T01:14:00.002-06:00

Those that know me know that I have quite a large amount of storage space when it comes to the hard drives inside and attached to my computer. Ever since I learned that you could stream videos from a PC to an Xbox 360 over the local network, I started ripping my DVDs and converting them to MPEG-4 video files. Using Microsoft's Zune software I now share my entire video, music & photo collection with my Xbox 360. Although I'm not quite finished converting all my DVDs, I have converted well over 250 movies and at least 2 dozen seasons' worth of episodes of television shows. This makes it quite handy when wanting to watch a DVD because now we don't have to dig it out of our tightly packed cabinet of DVDs.

To handle that storage space I recently purchased a new external hard drive. Sure, I could have kept the data on my internal RAID array, but that space was soon to be full. Then there's the problem of moving my data to a new computer some time in the future. Eventually I'm going to have to copy the video files off of the internal drives to move them. I figured that since these video files aren't changed at all over time (I just rip them once and then they're basically read-only files) that an external drive would suffice. Over the local network, a USB 2.0 speed is plenty to be able to stream these files to my Xbox 360 for viewing.

The hard drive I chose was the new My Book Mirror Edition (2 TB) from Western Digital. This drive allows me to run it in a 1 TB RAID 1 array (which I am) to give me some redundancy in the event of hardware failure. The drive sits nicely on my desk and is just as quiet, if not quieter than my other external hard drive (320 GB Maxtor One Touch).

RSS For Dummies

2009-04-03T16:32:00.002-06:00

What is RSS you ask? RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. It's a tool many websites use to give their readers a summary of what's on the website. Just about every website out there that publishes articles, blogs, posts, etc. uses RSS feeds. It's a way of giving users just the headlines so they can know what's new. On the technical side, it's just an XML file with links to the website stories it's syndicating. Now, you may ask why I decided to post about RSS feeds. Well, I was talking with a group of friends the other day, most of which are fairly affluent with internet related technology, yet I was very surprised to learn that I was the only one among them who took advantage of RSS feeds. Most didn't know what they were or how they could benefit from them.

Have you ever received the newspaper? Of course you have. Did you have it delivered to your house? Of course you did. Wasn't that much easier than going out and finding the news stories yourself? Wasn't it convenient to have reporters put together the news in one, central location for your reading pleasure? Of course it was. With the advent of internet publishing, RSS feeds are basically the tool for home delivery. Different websites publish stories, blogs, etc on their own sites. Most also provide an RSS feed for your convenience. In many web browsers, this looks like this:

or this:

Now, what do you do with all those syndication feeds you ask? For that, you'll need what is known as an aggregator. This is a tool that reads in your RSS feeds and then displays them for you in a chronological order of when they were published. There are many aggregators available out there for you to pick from. Some of the popular ones are MSN, Yahoo and Google. Those that know me know I'm partial to google products, so I'll use that as an example. When I go to a website I like and know that I'll want to be kept updated with new posts or stories from that site, I'll subscribe to it using Google Reader aggregator. Google also allows users to add it to their Google homepage as well. Here is what a feed looks like when it's subscribed to using Google's homepage.

As you can see, the latest articles are listed there with a box around them grouping the stories from that website together. That's great if you only want to view a few websites at a time, since space on the screen will run out pretty fast. Personally, I'm a fan of Google Reader. Here's an image of what Google Reader's interface looks like.

It provides you with an easy way to view all your feed stories together or you can click on an individual feed and just see those stories. Similar to email, they let you mark stories as read or unread. This makes it very easy to keep up on news stories, web articles, blogs, etc because they're all delivered to my Google Reader right when they're published. This means I can keep up on news from sites I really don't want to bother going to visit every day just to see if there's something interesting there, instead, they send it to me.

One really cool new feature of Google Reader that I've come to like is the Shared Feed feature. This means, that out of all the news stories, blog posts, and articles I get in my feed, I can mark the really interesting or important ones as shared and Google creates a special feed just from those that I can then share with other people. To me this is a very effective way for applicable news to get filtered down. I can subscribe to other people's shared feeds and get just the stuff they found interesting as well.

CodeMonkey's Shared RSS Feed

Utah Governor vetoes HB 353

2009-03-25T16:55:00.004-06:00

Thanks @ethanmillard for letting me know that Utah's Governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. vetoed controversial bill HB 353 "Truth in Advertising Act Amendments". Thank you Governor for listening to reason and not subscribing to the right wing rhetoric.

I've attached the letter the Governor sent back to the Utah Legislature explaining his veto. Enjoy.

HB 353 Veto Letter (PDF)

Utah Legislature HB 353

2009-03-19T23:01:00.003-06:00

UPDATE: Gov. Huntsman vetoed HB 353!!!
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A few weeks ago, the Utah State Legislature passed a controversial bill. This bill, known as HB 353 "Truth in Advertising Act Amendments", was penned by controversial self proclaimed video game crusader and former Florida attorney Jack Thompson. This bill amends the current Utah laws concerning advertising. These are the laws that say if you advertise something, you better adhere to it. The full text of the amended Truth in Advertising Act can be found here.

Essentially, this bill targets any media outlet that sells or provides a form of media to the public that also advertises that they follow the ratings system that applies to that media. With movies, this would be the MPAA ratings system (PG, PG-13, R, etc) and with video games this is the ESRB ratings (T for Teen, M for Mature, etc). If a business advertises that they follow these ratings and then somehow either sell a game or movie or allow a minor into a rated R movie at a theater, then they would be subject to lawsuit. They could avoid that lawsuit by formally training the offending employee(s) on the company policies. Now, if this happened more than three times, those exemptions are no longer available and you will be sued. Considering the ultra right wing private groups that are backing this bill, I would be fairly certain they would sue anyone they could. The key loophole in this law lies in the fact that if you don't advertise any such policy of adherance, then this law does not apply to you.

Being the normal person I am, I fully admit I could be wrong on this, but to the best of my understanding, this bill doesn't really offer any incentive for businesses to have these type of policies. They don't gain anything from having the policy except the added risk one of their employees will open them up to a hefty lawsuit. But, if they don't implement this type of policy of adhering to the ratings systems or if they cancel their current policies, they avoid that risk of lawsuit. It seems to me this is the smart thing for a business to do.

You may argue that not having a policy of following the ratings system will result in them losing business. I would counter that you would be totally wrong on that. Most people in the general public don't have a clue what the ratings systems are or how they work. Most people think they are already enforced by law when in fact they are purely voluntary. Most people, when they go shopping for a new movie or video game, don't shop based on what policies stores have. Most people shop based on where they can get it cheapest and easiest. The ESRB has pushed for the ratings system to be used because they, like many parents, don't want the mature rated games with violent content and adult content to fall into the hands of minors. Those type of games are written for adults and the ESRB wants adults to play them.

Now, I understand what the Utah Legislature is wanting to do with this law. The problem is that for some reason they forgot how to think for themselves and decided that letting some outside private interest group pen their legislation is a good idea. Even when I emailed my state representative, before the bill passed, she didn't seem to see this as targeting the video game industry, despite who penned the legislation. Her response was "...this appears to be not about video games, though they could certainly be included, but about the sale of any product, including video games, that are provided to minors. I agree that more education for parents would be helpful as well."

This law is not an incentive to follow the ratings systems. This law is incentive to NOT follow the ratings systems. The best incentive, one that every business understands, is and has always been money. When the legislature wanted to encourage video game developers to come to Utah, they offered them tax credits. I don't see why they can't pass a bill offering tax credits to businesses that adhere to the ratings systems with a certain level of compliance. To me, every business would see the benefit of that and would want to follow those rules, just to get some free money from the state.

The last step for this bill right now before it becomes law is for the Utah Governor, Jon Huntsman Jr, to sign the bill. As a Utah citizen, concerned adult, and fellow video game player, I would encourage anyone and everyone to call, email or write the Utah Governor and encourage him to veto this bill. Contact information for the Utah Governor is listed below.

Utah Governor's Office
Utah State Capitol Complex
350 North State Street, Suite 200
PO Box 142220
Salt Lake City, Utah 84114-2220
801-538-1000
800-705-2464
Fax 801-538-1528
Email Contact

Other Links:
Utah House Bill 353 media coverage

Camping - A Tutorial

2009-03-06T16:26:00.005-07:00

I saw this article and got a good laugh out of it...
On FPS guerrilla tactics or: Stop camping me, you camping camper! - by BonfireAg03

The guy does have some valid points. Many of you who play with me know our strategy pretty much is just to camp every map we play on. As stated in BonfireAg03's article, spawn camping is a no-no. Any other type of camping in Call of Duty 4 is pretty much open. The really funny part is that our opponents rarely grasp onto the simple features provided them in the game to allow them to fight against campers.

Someone camping a specific location - Usually this is realized when someone gets killed and then goes back to that spot only to be killed by the same person in the exact same place. In Call of Duty 4, the game designers had such tactics in mind I think when they designed the weapons available to you. With grenades, they added a feature that is in very few other games -- the ability to 'cook' your grenade. This allows you to hold that hand held bomb until its almost ready to go off (or let it go off in your hand if you so choose). Since you know exactly where your opponent is waiting, all you have to do is cook your grenade and throw it in there and have it blow up in their face. Pretty simple and effective strategy to get rid of someone camping a specific location.

Choke Point Camping - This happens when our team decides we want to stop you from coming through a certain area. A lot of maps in the game are divided into smaller areas with 'choke points' between (narrow places that you must go through to pass from area A to area B). If you pick the right choke points, you can effectively cut a map in half and keep one team on each side. Rarely is this form of camping involve sitting in one location, but it can. The point of this style of camping is to keep your opponent from crossing some imaginary line.

One map we really like to do this on is Bog. This is simply done by using snipers to effectively make the open ground a very large death zone. Not surprisingly, our opponents think it then is much safer to run through the building on the side of the map. The problem with this is it forces their team to all pass through one small doorway to get to our side of the map. A very simple way we guard this is to have one person sit pretty far back with a very high powered weapon with tons of ammunition. It's not uncommon for this person to rack up 15-20 kills in one game without ever dying, all because the other team chose to keep running through that choke point without using the tools the game has provided them to combat this.

One of the special grenades at your disposal is a smoke grenade. At first, many gamers dismiss this as practically useless. It doesn't disable your opponent in any way when you throw it at them. It's slow to get its full effect. What's the point, right? Wrong. This is a very useful grenade. Going back to the bog example, if you have two or three of your teammates with these equipped, taking the marine spawn area is quick work. A few key smoke grenades can eliminate both the snipers and the person camping that doorway from seeing your approach. Once within range, a few frag grenades will displace them and send them running, making it easy for your team to pick them off with small arms fire.

Snipe Camping - This is where a sniper likes to find a spot to sit and pick everyone off in their field of view. Some gamers are very proficient at this and require little more than a glance in your direction to aim and pull off the headshot. These snipers are very deadly. Usually done with a sniper rifle, this can be employed using any long range weapon too.

Once again though, the game developers provided you with tools to combat this. When you get shot and you have no clue where your opponent was, it can be very frustrating. In Call of Duty 4 though, the developers gave you something special...a kill cam. This small glimpse at your death is shown from your opponent's perspective, allowing you to know immediately their location. Using the previously mentioned smoke grenades you can get a good run at them without that sniper ever getting so much as a glance at you.

While each of these types of camping can be combated effectively, the most prolific reason our team does so well is the fact that our whole team employs these different styles in a web of cooperation that allows us to utterly dominate our opponents. When someone is camping a specific location, we usually have someone else snipe camping and covering that person's back, keeping opponents from approaching their location. The effectiveness of a whole team employing choke point camping strategy is shown in the many games we achieve deathmatch scores in the range of 750-100. Very rarely do we have games where opponents are within ten kills of us in the end.

If you're another gamer on Xbox Live and you encounter camping, just remember: You can prevent Camping! Camping (not spawn camping) is just one strategy that gamers use and it's really not worth complaining about. When I hear a postgame lobby start to complain that my team camps too much, just after we decimated them, I really have to hold down the laughter. By complaining about it, you've just admitted that we outsmarted you. We came up with and implemented a better strategy than you did. You allowed our simple and effective teamwork to frustrate you to the point you thought that running into our bullets was going to somehow hurt us too.

Gmail Gets Better

2009-01-28T13:49:00.005-07:00

A while back (ok, a long time ago) I posted about the many Google services I use. It seems that Google has come out with another great tool to make their email services (Gmail) even more useful -- offline email.

An article over at PC World goes through and explains the details of this new tool. After reading it through it seems like this will be the perfect solution for my parents. They're the sort of people who still prefer dial-up internet (I still don't understand why) and primarily use their computer for email. With this new tool, they won't have to be online while typing up all their messages. They can compose while offline and when everything is sitting in their outbox, just connect and send.

Another reason to use this, even if you do have a broadband connection, is for backup. This provides you with access to your old email messages even if you lose internet access. A little over a year ago when I moved I didn't have a broadband connection for almost a month. This type of email connectivity with Gmail would have kept me from only using my cell phone for email. That brings me to another point, a lot of people can use their cell phones as data modems with their laptops via a bluetooth or USB cable. This would save your battery by allowing you to do all your correspondence and then only connecting to send the data.

Overall, I've been really impressed with Google's services. For those that don't know how Google churns out so many good ideas, I'll let you in on it. Google engineers get to use 20% of their time to develop their own projects. How would you like that, to spend 20% of your work day working on whatever project you wanted?

Bleh...

2009-01-25T20:14:00.004-07:00

That's how I've felt about gaming lately. There really isn't anything new (worth playing) coming out. The old good game franchises are just bleeding themselves dry with sequel after sequel and it's taking it's toll.

Halo 3 was supposed to be the grand finale on the series, but Microsoft Gaming Studios won't let that money machine go away, so we have mediocre games like Halo Wars (Halo RTS??) or Halo 3 Recon...wait, Halo 3 ODST (they can't make up their minds).

Call of Duty had moved beyond the WW2 genre (we thought) with last year's Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat, but thanks to the ineptitude of Treyarch, the franchise took a u-turn back to a genre that about every gamer out there is sick of.

There are a few good sequels out there, such as Fable 2 and Gears of War 2. It just seems that there really isn't any good new games making an impact, beyond maybe Left 4 Dead, but even then, that game gets old quick. Seriously, when I look down the top played games list lately, there isn't anything out there really that isn't a rehash of old ideas. As a gamer I want something new, something interesting, something that doesn't just seem like developers trying to recapture old memories. Even the upcoming anticipated games are pretty much all sequels (FEAR 2, Bioshock 2, etc).

Sure, there may be new games coming out, but it doesn't seem that way in the genre's I enjoy playing (FPS, RPG, Action-Adventure). Am I the only one who wishes that developers could come up with something new?

Top 20 Horde

2009-01-04T03:17:00.003-07:00

As you most likely read previously, my friends and I made the Top 100 on the Horde leaderboards in Gears of War 2. We really should have been satisfied with that, but no, we decided to go for more. Tonight we just finished our attempt at playing through on hardcore difficulty. Unfortunately we didn't make it all the way through all 50 waves. We died on wave #48. Our final score though moved us up to #15-19 on the leaderboards.

If we had managed to finish out all 50 waves we probably could have taken the top spot. Maybe we'll attempt it again in the future, but it'll probably be a long wait. The hardcore play through took us just over eight hours, with a few short breaks, by the time we failed wave #48. It'd probably take an additional hour or so to make it through wave 50.

Gears of War 2 - Horde Top 100

2008-12-28T04:42:00.006-07:00

If you read my previous review of Gears of War 2 or you've played the game, you've heard of Horde mode. Basically, you get wave after wave of enemies to fight off while trying to survive. The first few waves may seem easy enough, but that can be deceiving. After about wave 30 the challenge really kicks in. So long as your whole team doesn't die you can continue on, attempting to add to your high scores.

A few weeks ago a few of my friends and I attempted to go for a high score in Horde mode. We did pretty good I thought, breaking the top 200 then on the map Jacinto. The high scores are publicly available on the Official Gears of War 2 website, listed according to what map the game was played on.

Tonight some other friends and I attempted the same thing. The challenge tonight came in that we went into the game with only 4 of the possible 5 teammates you can bring in, so we started off with a self induced handicap. Four hours later we broke into the Top 100 scores, landing at #98. All in all, it was a fun filled night of gaming with friends, playing a game we all enjoy. Maybe in a few weeks we'll try for the overall high score on Jacinto, this time on hardcore difficulty (we did it tonight on just normal difficulty).

Tips for Horde on Jacinto:

Hold a grenade spawn tower
First priority is ALWAYS the shields--before ammo or weapon pickups, always pickup a shield, you'll need all 5 of them.
Never kill a mauler on the stairs unless you have 5 shields already, as the shields glitch and fall through the map.
Place 2 shields backwards on the stairs next to the sandbags. Place 2 other shields boxing in the area where you land after jumping over the sandbags going up the stairs. Place the last shield at the top of the stairs in the gap farthest from the grenade spawn.
Always use weapons that have auto ammo refills each round (lancer/hammerburst/shotgun) and use a boltok pistol as it spawns right in front of the stairs, making ammo runs quick and easy at the end of a wave. Other weapons are pretty useless after the first few waves as enemy health is too high.
Only shoot grinders when they're weapons are overheated. Sure, it may be slow, but in later waves grinders will one hit kill you without ever downing you.
Kill wretches last. They make it easy for you and your teammates to grab ammo while the wretch chases you around.
Wait for close range kills (bottom of stairs) instead of wasting ammo on long range kills.
When grabbing ammo at the end of a round, have everyone plant their 2 grenades, preferably far from your defended stairs and spread out enough that one won't set off another.

The Old Republic

2008-12-21T10:57:00.005-07:00

I've been a fan of Star Wars for a long time. Not until just a few years ago did I find Star Wars video games actually enjoyable. I think the first Star Wars game I actually liked was Star Wars Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast. Games that came out before that I think were too limited by the capabilities of computers at the time. Jedi Outcast was probably the first game that was able to make the graphics of the game actually contribute to the games success and not detract from it. After that game I played other Star Wars games such as Jedi Academy, Rebellion, Empire at War, Knights of the Old Republic I & II, Battlefront I & II, and The Force Unleashed. Each of these games had good and bad aspects to them, but for the most part were enjoyable for me.

The most successful game for the Star Wars franchise has probably been Knights of the Old Republic. This was a role playing game put out by BioWare, the company that has since made the highly successful role playing game Mass Effect. LucasArts is returning to BioWare to try to relaunch the Star Wars universe into the Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) genre. If you're not sure what that genre is, just think of World of Warcraft, easily the most successful MMO ever. It seems LucasArts is betting on the capabilities of BioWare to overcome their previous failures in the MMO genre. Here's a short preview video BioWare has put out about the new game, Star Wars - The Old Republic.

While this video does make the game look promising, there are a few glaring questions I have before I would jump on the bandwagon, ready to buy this game. Some of these questions are left unanswered in the game website's FAQ section.

1. What are the system requirements for Star Wars: The Old Republic?
-From the game website's FAQ:

We will detail specific system requirements closer to the release date.

2. How much will it cost to play Star Wars: The Old Republic?
-As price is the primary reason I never played World of Warcraft, how this game is priced could have a drastic affect on my decision to play it or not. Again, from the game website FAQ:

Pricing for Star Wars: The Old Republic will be determined and announced at a later date.

3. Will this be a solely PC based game or will this also be playable on console systems?
-I've since moved away from PC's for most of my gaming because of the costs of keeping a PC up to date on hardware. Buying a console is cheaper and all the games for it are designed for that specific set of hardware. In my opinion, console gaming delivers a much better experience for the end user.

Anyways, I guess I'll just have to wait and see on this game, but for now, the potential is there for a great game.

Why the BCS should go

2008-12-07T02:47:00.006-07:00

Yeah, this is one of my rare non-geek related posts. Those that know me know that I'm an avid football fan, following college football and attending 2-3 games a year at different universities I live by. Year after year we as fans have to put up with this mockery of a system called the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). I'm really sick of it, as are most all college football fans, players, and coaches. The system needs to be changed. Now.

A bit of history... (disclaimer: probably not factually 100% correct, but close enough)
Bowl games started out a long time ago, back when college football didn't have any post season, let alone any collegiate sport. Committees of rich folks got together and thought they could make a bunch of money if they could get some big name schools to agree to play each other after their seasons were over. Over the years, some bowls started agreeing to affiliate themselves with certain conferences. One of the first bowls to be affiliated with certain conferences was the Rose Bowl, which did so to help desegregation more than anything else. The Southeastern conference at the time didn't allow black players to play on their teams, so the Rose Bowl affiliated itself with the Big 9 and PCC conferences (precursors to the Big Ten and Pac-10). As transportation got cheaper for teams and more and more rich folks organized their own bowl games, people started realizing that the whole system was a mess. Some of the really rich schools got together and decided that because they were rich, that they could engineer who would be the national champions. They really didn't like the idea of a small school winning enough media votes to take the national title from the big schools, like BYU did in 1984. They figured if they could come up with a system that guaranteed two of their schools always played for the national title, no smaller school could ever win it. That's how the BCS was formed.

Over the years, enough fan uproar has prompted small patch fixes to their system, but for the most part, it's still intact. No smaller school will ever win the title under the current system. The changes that have been made have been essentially bribes. If the bigger schools share some money with the smaller schools, maybe they'll be quiet and let the big schools keep winning the championships. When it first started out, the smaller schools could compete with the bigger schools (see BYU 1984). Over time though, the engineered system of the BCS has made the BCS conferences stronger to the point that more than likely, a smaller school couldn't win a title now. The advantage BCS schools have, when it comes to recruiting, boils down to one fact only - if you play for a BCS school, you have the opportunity to win a national title, otherwise you don't - that's it. As athletes in high school decide where they want to play college football, they ask themselves if they want to win a title or not. If the answer is yes, then they should go to a BCS school because anywhere else that's just a fantasy.

The root of the problem with college football's system is that the system isn't fair. A flawless system would guarantee that no matter what school a team is from, that if that team is the best team in the country, that that team will win the national title. If somehow North Texas can put together the best team in the nation next year, there's absolutely no way anyone in the country will know it. Because they're from a smaller conference (Sun Belt), their wins won't give them enough credibility with poll voters. Because college football schedules are made years in advance, there's no way a team has control over who they play. It's not like the coach can look at his team one year and think he's got the greatest team ever and then somehow readjust his schedule to increase his schedule strength. Conference membership in the smaller conferences guarantees a majority of their games will be played against inferior opponents. Thus, conference games can't be a reliable indicator of how a good a team is either. The only way a non-BCS school will ever break the system and win a national title is to somehow come up with a dynasty where they have the best team year after year after year. Only after winning so consistently will they ever be able to schedule stronger opponents. Even then though, it may not be enough. They'll have to be good enough for long enough that they get invited to join a BCS conference. But then you're back to square one - no non-BCS school will ever win a national title.

The only way a system can be truly fair is to throw out the bowl system entirely and replace it with a playoff. If bowl sponsors want to sponsor different playoff games, that's great, but get rid of the invitation-bowl system, after all, don't the sponsors only really care about advertising dollars? The politics of college football seem dirtier than any politics in Washington DC. Even though a vast majority of fans, players, coaches, and students all want a playoff system, back door deals done by rich folks are keeping us stuck with the flaw that is the BCS.

To fix the system, a set of qualifications for postseason play needs to be in place that applies to all teams, no matter their conference affiliation. To require a team to go undefeated to play for a title is a little out of the question. The logical next step is to use polls, but the amount of bias and flaws inherent in that type of system negate any advantage it could bring. The next logical qualification to use conference championships. Each conference can set it's own criteria for determining who is their conference champion, but at the end of the season, each conference has a guaranteed representative in the postseason. As there are 11 conferences and because 11 teams does not an even playoff make, add in 5 at-large bids. My suggestion would be for these bids to be decided by committee, without using any type of poll or ranking. This committee could/should be made up of people previously involved in college football but now have no conflict of interest in making these bid decisions. I would suggest former coaches or players who are no longer playing or coaching football in any respect, nor involved in the media.

Since many people want to make this whole system change about money more than anything else (even though we're talking about an amateur sport), I have a few suggestions on how to run this playoff. With sixteen teams, it will take four rounds to play this through. I would play the first round of playoffs at the higher seeded team's home school. This gives them a significant home field advantage. After the first round, I would re-seed the playoffs and then let those rich folks who ran the previous bowl system bid to host these playoff games. The more money they bid to give to the participating schools, the better chance they have of hosting it. The highest bid gets the championship game, the next two highest bids get the semi-finals, and so on. In time I think this type of system will result in more revenue for the actual universities, which is the whole point, right?

One of the big arguments for the current BCS system is that it makes every regular season game a playoff game and any postseason playoff system would cheapen the regular season. Another is that a postseason playoff would mean these athletes would miss too much school and make their season too long.
On the first argument, each regular season game is not a playoff game. If it were, when you lost you would be done with no chance at playing for a title. While it may hold true in some years, this football season is a perfect example of where it doesn't. We have two one-loss teams playing for a national title when below them in the rankings is two undefeated teams. While a postseason playoff would make it so that a team could still win its conference championship with a few losses, it will enable those big schools to hoard the revenue from non-conference games amongst themselves. Since they apparently only really care about preserving their cash flow, wouldn't not having to schedule teams like Utah State, North Texas, Citadel and Appalachian State and instead playing other teams from the other BCS conferences generate more money? Sure, they may lose a few of those, but their postseason hopes aren't thrown out the window either.
The second argument is easily debunked by comparing lost school time of football players to that of other NCAA sports. Football players miss less class time than almost any other sport. Basketball players have games twice a week or more and their seasons last from November through March, spanning two school semesters.

The general consensus though is that the BCS system is systematically flawed and needs replaced. The sad truth of the matter is that what we're likely to get is more backroom politics applying patchwork bribes to the system in order to preserve their stranglehold on college football for as long as possible. The only way any changes will ever come to fruition is if fans learn to speak to them in a language they can understand--with money. If fans stopped buying things with team logos on them, if fans stopped going to games and just watched it at home or not at all, or if fans stopped donating money to these schools, they might someday get the message that the current system needs to be thrown out the window entirely.

Round and round we go

2008-12-02T21:58:00.005-07:00

So, for the better part of this week at work I took on the job of removing a major annoyance in our project. Previous programmers thought it a good idea to break up the project into as many smaller projects as possible. Sure, this has a benefit of allowing programmers to work on almost any part of the project without running the risk of working on the same piece of code. I never really understood that when I started here. I mean, it's not like we had a ton of developers. We had three. Another benefit of the modular design is it allows the project to grow easier.

Anyways, that's kind of not the point of this post. Over the course of development, different developers would just reference other projects dll's instead of taking the time to do it correctly. Each project was built independently so there weren't any red flags popping up warning of potential problems. As it turns out, the project became filled with circular references where one project referenced code in another, and that other project in turn referenced the first project. So long as there was an existing dll present, the projects would build just fine. The problem is that this type of setup prevents us from ever reconstructing the entire product from scratch.

To cut a long story short, now that I'm the lead developer I've decided to fix this problem. I've spent the better part of a week going through all the projects and removing these circular references by adding in delegates where necessary and moving code where appropriate. Needless to say, this has been a very tedious work week getting a lot of work done, but not much really accomplished. Now that it's complete though I feel a lot better about the stability of the code we have (not great, just better) since I can now rebuild the product again from source code if necessary without having to deal with the mind numbing problems previous developers caused by not taking the time to do things right in the first place.

Xbox Live Avatars

2008-11-20T11:08:00.010-07:00

I thought I'd post some of my friend's Xbox Live avatars. I've linked directly to Microsoft's servers for the images, so if they don't show up, sorry, not my fault.

NXE - New Xbox Experience

2008-11-18T22:32:00.006-07:00

So, a while back I signed up to be an early participant in the New Xbox Experience (that's Microsoft's way of making you feel special when you find bugs in their software). The Xbox is getting a new operating system interface rolled out via Xbox Live tomorrow and I was fortunate enough to be able to get an early look at it. One of the biggest changes, which I'm not going to go much into, is the addition of avatars. Basically, Microsoft saw that tons of families with kids were flocking to the Nintendo Wii and it's feature, the 'Wii Mii' and Microsoft wanted a piece of that action. Really though, the new Xbox avatar is nothing more than a customizable character you get to have on your Xbox Dashboard that stands around striking poses. You can even snap a picture of your avatar to use as your gamer picture.

From a users standpoint, all this is is a new paintjob on the same old car. Sure it ran great, but I guess Microsoft just felt a little too much rust was showing and they needed to touch it up. Nothing much changed in how the Xbox OS works. You still get the same information, just presented in a newer, flashier way. Here's how the new profile page looks when you go into it. Now instead of having to click on My Games, you get a page for each of the games you've played that you can scroll through.

There are a few interface changes that are marked improvements as well as a few that are easily a step in the wrong direction. One of the new changes I like is the way it presents achievements for each game. Before, you had to click on an achievement to get a good description of what it was, but now the display shows the description at the top as you scroll through them.

A stunning oversight in my mind is how they handled the background for the new interface. Before, we were able to download themes for our Xbox blades. This allowed users to customize the look and feel of their Xbox interface. A lot of users paid good money for themes they liked. With the new interface, Microsoft has gone and covered up half the screen so you can't see the theme image at all.

Selecting your theme

How the theme looks when applied

What would have been nice is if Microsoft had allowed users to make the background of the interface transparent or not there at all. This would allow people to still enjoy the themes they paid money for. If they can't do that, I at least hope Microsoft lets people download new, updated themes free of charge--themes that work on the New Xbox Experience.

One new feature that Microsoft is releasing along with the NXE is a new application that allows Xbox users to view Netflix streaming videos over their Xbox 360. While I can understand the marketing strategy to pair it with the NXE, I'm pretty sure the Netflix application (that's all it really is, an downloaded application) would have worked on the old dashboard interface just fine.

The only real sad part about the Netflix app is that Sony, Microsoft's arch nemesis in the video game market and owner of Columbia Pictures, has somehow managed to stop Netflix from allowing Xbox users to view their videos. Hopefully something can be worked out to allow the whole Netflix media library to be available to Xbox 360 users.

Another (cool?) feature that Microsoft added in this update is the ability for gamers to install their games to their Xbox 360 hard drives. This means that for those 15 hours gaming binges that your DVD drive in your 360 won't have to be constantly spinning your disc. Instead, after installing your game to your hard drive, the disc drive will only spin at first to make sure you have the game in the drive (their attempt at anti-piracy).

It took me only 15 minutes to copy my Gears of War 2 game to my 360's hard drive. The game takes up almost 7 GB of hard drive space. As I only have the old 20 GB hard drive, I'll have to upgrade if I want to copy any other games to my hard drive. It doesn't really make much of a difference in gameplay time, but I'm sure this is just Microsoft's attempt to throw money at the problems they've been having with the Xbox DVD drives malfunctioning and destroying game discs. The idea is just to reduce the wear and tear on the drive over time. Maybe it'll work for them.

Overall, I think the biggest improvement in the new interface has to be in the speed in which things load. Navigating through the old dashboard architecture was a real pain in the neck for some people because they weren't used to waiting so long (really, it was only a couple of milliseconds...but to some gamers, that's an eternity). The new interface is significantly faster at loading, especially when in a game. They found a way to make it faster and even provide a little more content available to the users than before.

Now, back to playing Gears of War 2...