/var/log/orava

The Crysis is over

While I like playing PC games, I do find that I have much, much less time than I have games – especially since the types of games I tend to like are huge, sprawling and complex affairs that require gazillion hours of gameplay. As a result, while I do make an impulse purchase now and then, I don’t buy all that many games. I don’t have time to play all the ones I have, so the incentive to buy the Next Shiny Object(tm) isn’t as overpowering as it could be.

So… having read reviews that Crysis was an ok shooter but demanded silly amounts of horsepower to run it, I skipped the game when it came out – at that time, I didn’t have a very powerful graphics card. Later I upgraded to an overclocked HD 4850 which has some more serious “oomph” to it, but again, too many games too little time. Well, about a week ago I stumbled on a single copy of Crysis in a discount bin for 16 euros. “Ooo”, goes me, “shiny!”. So I got the thing and started playing.

Initial impressions: pretty, very pretty. On the other hand, the reports of it requiring a monster machine from the future to run it are quite true. My system is no slouch (though far from the ever-evolving state of the art of course), and I could only run it at “high” settings (with a few sliders on “medium”) at acceptable framerates… and this on a lowly 1280x1024 resolution. So I don’t quite get the jaw-dropping graphics that I might, but still, this thing is very pretty. The sunlight gleams on water, the jungle rustles around you… very immersive.

Of course, graphics alone don’t make a game. So how does it play? Surprisingly well, actually. Sure, this is no Half-Life 2, but very few things are. Crysis is a very competent shooter, and it has a few nice surprise twists (including some awesome microgravity sequences). Gameplaywise, it’s an upgrade from Far Cry: most of the action takes place in huge outdoor areas, and the enemy AI is quite decent (though notably lacking in some places). Though your mission objectives are quite linear, you’re given a multitude of ways to accomplish them. I did a lot of sneaking around in “stealth mode” (you have a hightech “nanosuit” which enables all sorts of unlikely crap), but going the Rambo route should work too. I really liked the “sandbox” play style offered here, sneaking around and scouting out the best way to accomplish the next goal was a lot of fun.

On the minus side, the vehicles in the game aren’t that hot. While fun, they handle horribly and when they blow up (which they do at a moment’s notice) they’ll take you with them. Often it’s a lot safer to walk than to drive that tank you have access to – which is a bit a of head-scratcher.

To my own surprise, I ended up playing this one to the conclusion a few days ago (after some late-night binges). It’s not all that often that I actually finish a game. I may even pick up the sequel-of-sorts (Crysis: Warhead), if I see it available at a decent discount somewhere.

So, in sum: a good, immersive “sandbox” FPS game, with at times jaw-dropping graphics. On the downside, said graphics require monster hardware to run them, and some of the vehicle sections are in the “could use some work” category. I had a ton of fun playing this.

As always, Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation review is required watching material.

Minireview: Pathfinder #18, Descent Into Darkness

Descent Into Darkness (by Brian Cortijo) concludes the Second Darkness adventure path. This time round, the PCs are assumed to have tracked the main bad guy to a vast underground region, “The Land of Black Blood”. Various glyphs are active there, and unless they are deactivated everything will end with a big bang topside.

It’s ok. While it does feel a bit like a computer rpg plot at times (multiple weird glyphs, all of which have different effects and must be deactivated in a different fashion), it can probably work pretty well in practice. The underground world is given some coverage in the scenario and also in a secondary support article, but if players do what they tend to do (i.e. wander off in a random direction), some extra work will be required to populate the place. I think this scenario has some promise if the GM manages to build a sufficiently creepy and threatening feel to everything. Not sure how easy that is, though, especially since this isn’t the first time the PCs are venturing into unknown underground depths.

As a whole, I have mixed feelings about this adventure path. I liked the “low-key scum” beginning, and the weird island hit my meteorite was pretty cool. But then it went into elfland, and underground, and somehow I didn’t like that part all that much. Sometimes for specific reasons (the second-to-last part was much, much too railroady in a bad way), sometimes just because it didn’t strike a chord with me, for whatever reason.

I think I have a fundamental problem with D&D adventure paths in general. I like the idea, but the “from zero to hero” level progression of D&D forces you to escalate things into superhero country pretty fast. I usually tend to find the beginning parts good, but the later episodes not so much… partly because at that point the power level has risen to silly levels, and the plots usually have you saving the whole world (yet again). In addition, D&D doesn’t have the concept of “high-level social combat” like Exalted does, so it’s more and more just about high-power physical combat – which can get old fast. I think that problem was magnified here; the beginning rocked, but the rest of the adventure went off in a totally different direction, and one that I didn’t find as interesting.

If you are fond of the drow and/or of D&D elves, you’ll probably find a lot here to love. If not… well, I think this is the weakest of the Paizo adventure paths I’ve read so far. It’s not bad by any means, just lacking a bit in comparison with the others.

Star Trek: unexpectedly, it rocks

This one was a bit of a surprise. I used to be a huge Star Trek fan when I was young, but in a weird way – we didn’t have TV in Ethiopia, so my exposure to the show (the original show, of course) was via books. I read all the episodes (including the animated series and the “fotonovels”) and loved them rabidly. It was only much later that I actually saw the things (and yes, still liked them). By the time TNG rolled around I had partially lost interest, being much more interested in (at that time) new stuff like Babylon 5 and such. I did watch some TNG, though, and found it “ok”. Deep Space 9 was actually more interesting to me generally, though the episode quality was very uneven. Then we got Voyager, which was utter, unfiltered crap. I actually found the dreary Enterprise follow-up to be more watchable than Voyager, which is saying a lot.

Then there were the Star Trek movies. The first one was slow…. but I did like it, in many ways. I’ve only seen some of the later ones and found them to be a very mixed bag, and the things just seemed a bit tired, somehow. Later, when the ill-fitting Enterprise finally dropped off the air, I concluded that Star Trek is done for. I still had fond memories of the original series, but…

Then there’s this new film, a “reboot” of the story by J.J. Abrams of Alias and Lost fame. I wasn’t sure what to think, but I wasn’t expecting anything very good – despite the good reviews the movie had been getting, I generally view most “reboots” with suspicion. Sure, sometimes rarely they succeed wonderfully (Battlestar Galactica, anyone?), but more often than not they are utter flops, with the director totally missing the point of what made the original so good and just cramming in tons of explosions and cgi effects.

Well, Abrams “gets it”. Throwing “canon” (and sometimes “logic”) to the wind, he has built a re-imagining of the original series that actually rocks. Both Janka and I loved it, much to our surprise. Sure, it could be subtitled “juvenile delinquents in space” and there are plot holes you could drive starbases through… but that doesn’t matter, since the “feel” is right. The new actors mostly get the characters spot-on (with appropriate modernization thrown in); Zachary Quinto is great as Spock and Karl Urban is brilliant as Dr. McCoy. The action is fast-paced, but somehow there’s a ton of character development here, too. The balance is pretty good. Most importantly, it felt like Star Trek to me. I know many “old fans” are saying just the opposite, but…. screw you. I loved it.

The plot is pretty clever, but does require you to suspend disbelief and logic at times. It also reboots the setting in a way I hadn’t been expecting, and in a good way which lets this movie (and potential follow-ups) be much more than just retellings of the old story.

Now, ordinarily huge plot and logic holes would annoy me, but here they just don’t. Maybe it’s just the fact that Abrams clearly loves the setting and the characters, and gets the feel of things so very spot-on in so many places… I’m willing to forgive a movie a lot of things if it has its heart in the right place. And this one does.

Didn’t see this one coming.

System Failure Imminent (have a nice day)

Yesterday Janka noted that the server “had been making funny noises”, and lo and behold, my email queue held a few notices about RAID1 disk failure. Seems that the older disk of the pair (a Hitachi 160G) had crashed hard, all partitions unusable. Still, thanks to the RAID, the system is up and running (in degraded single-disk mode). Put in an order for a new (larger) disk at Verkkokauppa, should be here in a few days – I’m betting that the single newer disk won’t also crash in the meantime. Did do some extra backups, though, just to be paranoid.

So… seems that the software RAID is working as intended and the email notifications are also working. Things could be a lot worse. Having suffered one big server crash in the past and lost quite a bit of data due to the backups also being corrupted, I’m now firmly in the group which refuses to run a server without a RAID disk (and reliable backups).

Lots of things I want to improve, once/if I get some extra cash. I want a separate NAS box to handle backups and other mass storage for our home network (D-Link DNS-323 is my current candidate), and I also want to upgrade the whole server at some point – the current machine is a low-end desktop box with a 1.8GHz single-core Sempron and only 2 gigs of memory. It works, but a multicore machine would make a lot of server operations snappier and more memory would naturally also help. The current machine only has 2 memory slots (low-end desktop, remember) and they are DDR400. I’m not sure if 2G DDR400 modules even exist, and if they do they are almost certainly very expensive – so might as well upgrade the whole machine at some point. No real hurry on that, though.

Minireview: The Great SF Stories 9 (1947), edited by Isaac Asimov & Martin Greenberg

The last book I read in this series (#5, 1943) wasn’t too good, to be honest. I’m sure the editors did their best, but apparently the state of the art was pretty poor that year – possibly due to that “war” thingy that was grinding down around that time. Who knows. In any case, Great SF Stories 9 is much better. Much better.

This series is edited by Isaac Asimov (who gets star billing) and Martin Greenberg (who actually seems to do the work). Asimov mainly provides extremely annoying and self-centered intros to stories, most of which are along the vein of “this story reminds me of my own story Y, which of course is more famous…”. Well, not always, but he does come off (again) as a bit of a pompous jerk. Greenberg actually talks about the stories in question and provides some small amount of background. In any case, the editorializing doesn’t matter all that much, it’s the stories that carry the weight (or don’t). Here, they do.

Lots of stories here that I remember reading when I was younger, I think this is starting to be representative of the SF short stories I read a lot when growing up. Clarke, Sturgeon, Tenn, etc. I practically grew up reading Clarke and Heinlein. Explains a lot, I suppose. Almost too many standout stories here to mention, but let’s see… especially memorable were Thodore Sturgeon’s “Tiny and the Monster”, Ray Bradbury’s “Zero Hour” and Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Fires Within”, but all of the stories here were at the very least in the “good” category.

Nice compilation of classic science fiction stories. Some are a bit dated, of course, but they still work very well.

Exalted pays homage to...

John Chambers recently leaked the cover art for the upcoming Exalted book Scroll of Exalts.

While it’s a really cool cover by itself – and features an unlikely group of signature characters working together – it’s also a fun and very intentional homage to a certain “classic” rpg book from way back.

If you’re not getting the connection, try this link for a clue.

Minireview: Dracula, by Bram Stoker

Ok, I admit it, I hadn’t actually read the original Dracula before – and it’s far from being the only “classic” I’ve missed. Sure, I’ve seen and read countless adaptations in various formats, and played games that can trace their roots to that book (among others). But no, never read it before. Now I have.

Since it’s an old book (originally published in 1897), you have to make allowances. The writing style back then was very different, and the culture was in parts quite alien to our viewpoint. Casual xenophobia and racism is mixed with overly idealized and “spiritual” views of marriage, and just so many things are different. Taking all that into account, it’s a pretty good tale. The pace is quite glacial at times, but the slowly mounting creepy threat of a vampire loose in “safe” Britain works quite well – especially since the main characters have little idea of what they are dealing with. The parallels between disease and vampirism are quite obvious, here. At about midpoint in the book the foreign & educated character of Professor Van Helsing arrives on the scene and acts as a focal point in fighting back, of actually knowing something about the “enemy”. We never really learn why Van Helsing knows all he knows, at times he’s a bit too much of a “mysterious stranger who knows everything” figure.

I was actually quite surprised by the female characters here, especially by Mina Harker; by my limited experience, period fiction seems to typically depict women as helpless wallflowers, while here Mina is shown to be a surprisingly strong and firm-willed character. That was quite refreshing, and made her one of the more interesting cast members.

The book is quite different from all the adaptations I’ve seen and read. The story is told completely via letters, diary entries and field notes (from various viewpoints). It works pretty well, though the detail level on these “field notes” requires some suspense of disbelief. There is also some excessive gothic-style angsting… but hey, this is one of the base books in the whole “gothic” genre, so that’s not something one can easily criticize without sounding silly.

While all too many “classics” are tedious reads at best by modern standards, and many are (imho) quite over-rated, this one is well worth reading in its original form. Slow going at times, but the mounting creepy dread in the tale still works.