The Blog of Oa

iPhone arrived, everything works fine

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:47:14 GMT

I'm still not convinced its the right phone for me, but I did manage to sort out the data network issue I was worried about (thanks to DarkCampainger's link).
I've got it running exclusively on WiFi without interrupting my phone service. I just need something to do with it. Anyone know any good apps and tricks?

Now I've just got to figure out how to get a copy of the SDK for Windows...

Buying an iPhone

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:55:38 GMT

I was walking home last night and dropped my phone for the first time, it broke. I was walking to work this morning and dropped my iPod for the first time, it also broke.

So I figure I might as well get an iPhone. Going back down to 32GB is going to be a pain but I'll deal with it until something better pops up.
My real concern is that I may have to change my phone plan. Right now I'm off contract and the bill is never over $30. I only get like $20 of a free calls, but my rates are so low that $20 actually means something.
The problem is that when I set up my plan mobile internet was a joke, and thus my data allowance is ridiculously expensive and woefully inadequate.

What I want to know is whether or not you can limit the internet capabilities to WiFi? If I can then there should be no problem keeping my existing plan. I wont be able to access the internet everywhere, but I think I can continue living in a world where I don't have instant access to Cracked's latest article on the Top 6 Cavemen Mating Rituals (That Are Still Used Today!).

So yeah, does anyone know whether I can turn the internet off completely on the iPhone? Also any other advice would be great.

The Collectors Edition Rut

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:47:43 GMT

I used to really like Collectors Edition games, but now it seems they've fallen into a rut where every collectors edition is the same. A tin case, an art book, a crappy toy and the standard CE price tag (give or take $5).
Sometimes, if you're lucky, its a tin case and a walking billboard t-shirt (that only come in XXS and XXL). You know, the ones that are pretty much just a cheap t-shirt printed up to look like the E3 booth polo shirts.

Publishers have found a cookie cutter solution that involves minimal work and the price tag that works for it. Gamers have got used to forking over a little more for the Collectors Edition without thinking about whats in it.

Something needs to shake both of them up. I doubt it will, but I'm hoping that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's Prestige Edition is that something. It comes with crappy Night Vision Goggles based on the ones used by the characters in game. It costs twice as much.

Anyway, I freakin' love it. This is exactly what I think Collectors Editions are meant to be. The standard edition of the game, plus some extras that could sell on their own and a price tag tailored to fit.
Instead of working within the standard Collectors Edition budget and just pressing out figurines at $1.50 per unit, they sat down and looked for something that a Call of Duty 4 fan might enjoy and figured the price out based on the content.

Like I said, I don't think this will pay off for them. I think its a little too extreme. What I'm hoping it leads to is Collectors Edition content being taken a little more seriously and breaking free of the mentality that you have to make your Collectors Edition include these things and cost this much or else it wont sell.

I don't just want high-quality packs with bigger price tags but smaller scale packs with lower prices. If the game isn't big budget, then I'll settle for paying $5 more for a really nice laser cut keychain of the games logo. A nice mouse-pad?
From there you get more ambitious. A custom headset modeled after the in-game ones. A real-life version of the hat the main character wears. A remote control Liberty City Police Department squad car. If an figurine is appropriate then put in a decent one. Just don't fall into the trap of using the same cookie cutter package for everything.

Really the idea that publishers need to be slapped on this one is ridiculous. Games lend themselves to this sort of stuff perfectly. You're always using cool signature weapons/gadgets and wearing neat signature clothes. Not to mention the loot. The game is centered around finding a mystical artifact? Why not give the Collectors Edition a prop replica version you can put on your shelf.

Even just giving the standard Collectors Edition content some thought would be great. What's the point of a Banjo-Kazooie figure? Best I can tell you can sit it on your computer desk as a decoration. If its purely decorative then there are much better things you can do. How about paper weight/bookend made out of Gruntilda's skull or Jiggy with a display stand? Even a Banjo-Kazooie themed sticker set would be better than a crappy rubber toy.

So what's your idea of the perfect Collectors Edition content? Altair white hoodies with Assassin's Creed? Gear style COG tags with Gears of War? A Weighted Companion Cube with The Orange Box? A big o' helmet sized Metroid statue with Metroid Prime?

My XBOX 360 broke and I don't really care

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:17:13 GMT

Last week my XBOX 360 broke. The surprising part is I'm not upset by it at all. I was playing Call of Duty and it froze. I restarted, it froze five minutes in. Then the next time it red ringed on me.
It was fairly late anyway, so I called up the guys I was playing with and explained why I dropped out, then watched some Mighty Boosh before going to bed. The next day I picked up a new one on the way home from work.
My original XBOX 360 isn't under warranty, but because it's a hardware failure Microsoft will do the repair for free. I booked it in and I'm sending it off tomorrow.

The thing is I know I shouldn't be so cool with it. I treat my consoles well enough that this shouldn't happen. It interrupted a really good game of Team Deathmatch and instead of getting angry I went out and brought another one (on the plus side I got Halo Wars and some other games free with the new XBOX).
I didn't even get mad when a database error forced me to call XBOX Support by phone rather than booking the repair online.

I'm actually sort of looking forward to getting my old XBOX back so I can start double bokkin'. I'll probably flush even more money down the toilet buying games I already own for system linking.

Crispy on Kotaku

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:44:05 GMT

While browsing Kotaku today I noticed a very familiar looking screenshot. It turns out Crispy is doing some awesome charity work to help out with bushfire relief.
So now thanks to Crispy you can rule the universe with an iron fist AND feel like a hero.

-Inventive Dingo
-Kotaku

So stupid I had to make a blog entry about it.

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:28:48 GMT

"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?"
-Sony Computer Entertainment boss Kaz Hirai.

I think this sums up what went wrong with the PS3. "We can't beat the Wii outright, but if we ran the PS3 into the ground we would be able to make more progress than the Wii simply by not having loan sharks blow our toes off at the end of the generation".

Star Wars Galaxies

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:04:15 GMT

I'm a little late to the party, but I've just started playing the Star Wars Galaxies.

It's not the greatest but it does do a few things really well. They didn't lock out major features just to include them as progress rewards. I'm only level 13 and I've had a Z-95 Headhunter that's capable of hyperspace travel for quite some time.
I don't have to catch the space bus until level 40 simply because they needed something cool to unlock on a milestone level.

I don't mean to sound like a brat with no attention span, but ever since I got my first mount in World of Warcraft I've been unable to play on the low levels. The game just can't hold my attention when I have to run across the countryside for ten minutes just to kill goats in a cave, then walk another ten minutes back to where I started to get told to go back out there and kill an elite goat.

I actually follow the quest plots in SWG because I don't have to gather as many quests for an area as possible and do them all at once. I can do the quests one by one and not waste three hours walking.

That said, the game is really dated and the engine is pretty bad. I don't think I'll play longer than a month or two. So anyone know of any other sci-fi MMORPG's that let you fly spaceships and own droids without pouring in weeks of effort?

Resident Evil: Degeneration

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 23:44:09 GMT

This movie sort of killed my Resident Evil 5 buzz. If the writers of this have anything to do with Resident Evil 5's script then the game is going to need an AWESOME engine just to pick up the slack.
For starters, these people are just dumb. They live in a post-Racoon City world where everyone is up in arms about 'bioterror' yet nobody other than Leon and Claire get what's going on. I don't mean in a Die Hard 'those two highly trained men who just shot up the luggage section were probably just petty thieves' denial sort of way, I mean they don't understand zombies.
Even after Leon has briefed a group of special agents they don't seem to get what they're dealing with. I'm having trouble thinking up zombie movie characters who were more clueless than pretty much the entire cast of RE:D.
There's one scene where one of the main characters, who knows why they're there and what they're dealing with, runs off to help someone on the ground. She picks him up to carry him to safety without even looking at him (it actually looks like she purposely avoids looking at him). Even after he's attacked her and she has seen his clearly not fresh face she yells at Leon for shooting him.
Luckily Leon is there to offer his sage-like advice of 'look' as it's revealed that the room is clearly full of moaning and groaning zombies. She probably would have rushed to help those guys too if Leon hadn't pushed her out of the way and started shooting.

Even the security response team in the lab that was working with the G-Virus don't seem to understand.
They also love long countdowns for some reason. 'Ok, if the virus gets to this point we need an automatic self-destruct to contain it, but even though we're sacrificing our own people indiscriminately lets throw a five minute timer on it just for kicks'.
Their entire containment system centers around the idea that anything that was infected would get so distracted by the countdown they will just stand there and wait to die.
Seriously, they don't even seem to have doors between the different containment areas. 'Oh no, he's walked into a different area that isn't going to self-destruct', 'Don't worry, the 15 minute auto-destruct sequence that failed to get him in the previous area will surly stop him this time'.

With pretty much the entire cast being brand new this movie really highlights the writers inability to create American characters. Claire and Leon work because they've had games/stories to build their backgrounds on, but the new guys are really poorly written.
Japanese writing seems to get stuck using stereotypes. Even when they write Japanese characters they tend to be stereotypes of whatever group the person is a member of. When they don't really understand the groups it gets pretty bad.
I'm not going to say their use of western stereotypes offended me, but it was harder to enjoy the movie with such poorly written characters.
I think this has potential to be a really big problem for Resident Evil 5. The initial 'outrage' was that the zombies were almost exclusively black and I think that was more of a knee jerk reaction than a legitimate gripe with the game. However, I also think this movie is a good indication that when the game is released there will be legitimate problems with the non-zombie African characters.

I'm sure Capcom are taking measures in that area after all this fuss has been made, but they're naive enough that they may screw it up in some weird way (ie, satisfying African's rather than African-American's).

Overall this movie is something to watch once when you've got nothing better to do. You might enjoy it but it's not worth rushing out to get.

Playstation Home

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:03:52 GMT

I decided to load up the PS3 and check this out last night, 12 hours later and I'm logged in.

As a whole, the character creator is completely uninspired. Four pairs of pants without the ability to do even simple things like choose from a half dozen preset colours. Of the few options in there, the majority aren't even worth considering.
Facial hair is literally a joke. The mustaches are all the equivalent of rainbow afros.
I'm not saying that the character creators on the Wii and 360 are great, but Home is being pushed as much more than a interface upgrade and Wii Tennis so it really needs to live up to higher standards than this.
This is one of the most important aspects of the entire Home experience, yet I'm having difficulty thinking up a character creation system from any B+ game within the last year that doesn't blow it out of the water.

The world itself functions alright. The constant loading screens between areas is annoying and seems sort of unnecessary. There are also some dumb things like physical limitations on who can be using what, but it does it's job well enough.
That said the world may do it's job well, but it's job is boring. There's not much to do. If my friends were interested it might be a different story, but I just felt like I was standing alone with nothing to do. I eventually found an arcade game that was free and it was (and I'm stealing this from Penny Arcade) nothing more than a flash browser game.
It was an ice-themed version of basic Breakout (no power ups, no special bricks, just bounce the ball at the bricks until they're all gone). Pool and bowling looked better, but there were no tables/lanes free, and even if there were I don't think anyone would appreciate one person taking up a whole table/lane by himself.

Playing alone, and I can't imagine ever saying 'hey guys, how about instead of playing skate we just stand around in Home', the whole Home world seems to have this atmosphere of being stuck at your lame cousins birthday party. You don't know anyone, you don't really want to know anyone, so it's pretty much bad music and cake.

The cinema is sort of cool but it needs to be more. Being able to watch actual movies in full screen, with groups of friends to chat with during the movie, would make it worth while. Until then I'd rather just use a menu.

Next up you've got your apartment. It's got a sweet realtime editor, but I would have liked the ability to go into a Sims-like editing mode where you get a broader overview of the apartment as a whole.
I like the idea of being able to buy new homes but $8.99AUD is a bit much when, like every other purchasable item, there is nothing more than a thumbnail picture to show you what you're getting.
This brings me to the Shopping Centre's only problem (it's two floors of shops, there's nothing to really screw up or do right). The one situation where a 3D environment can work better than a menu and they go ahead and use the standard PSN Store. Instead of having stores you can walk into, look at the show room floor, select what you want then buy it they just make it so that when you enter the stores doorway a PSN Store menu pops up with a bunch of thumbnails and descriptions for what ever is being sold there.
You can still browse, and most of the thumbnails seem to give you a good idea of what you're getting, but the whole thing just feels really backwards compared to the rest of Home. Really you'd expect them to have a showroom floor where you can browse, maybe even try on (and get your friends opinions) and then have the PSN Store menu interface at the checkout counter.

If they put in some serious development time, ported it to 360, Wii and PC, increased the amount of free AND purchasable content and offered a web-based Facebook style interface, this could become a serious social network. Until then there is no good reason to use this. Anyone you meet there has access to the PSN which is must faster and easier to use.
It's the equivalent of replacing Windows Explorer with a Matrix-like file warehouse you have to walk around in to find your files. Cool, but pointless.

Overall, my verdict on this is pretty much the same as it was with Lair and Heavenly Sword. If the PS3 had a decent selection of software and Home was simply allowed to be itself this would have been a fun toy and some people would have really liked it. However due to the PS3's game shortage it was over-hyped and held up as something far bigger than it is, which I think is going to turn a lot of people sour to it and ultimately result in its death.
Playstation Home is a support act, not the main event. If you treat it as such you'll have a much better chance of actually enjoying yourself.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:52:57 GMT

I just found out that the remake is about the environment. I am now very, very sad. I can see why you'd make changes to the original movie, I can see why you might choose to make something new based entirely off the original short story, but I can't see how, when trying to stick with the original movie, you would do something as lame as make Klaatu's message about saving the environment.

How can that even make sense? Is Gort now a member of a race of intergalactic hippybots? Do Green Peace build super-robots now? I'm also pretty sure the movie will last five minutes with that message.
Opening scene: Gort and Klaatu land in Washington DC. Gort disables all technology that is harmful to the environment. The Earth stands still. Gort and Klaatu crack open some space beers, pat them selves on the back for a job well done and head home. Mission accomplished!

That's right. Either the title doesn't make any sense, and Gort doesn't have the power to make the Earth stand still, or he does have the power and chooses a needlessly complex plan that amounts to the same thing over just turning all our junk off.

This is why I've been avoiding info on the movie up until now. =(