An Argument With a Jerk

I received a comment on my Zimbio review of Beijing 2008, which is in fact a copy of the one I posted here. The following is copy & pasted directly from the comments section:

Your full of shit , this game is the best olympic games since barcelona 1994 on megadrive, has so many events the control system using a ps2 pad with usb convertor works perectly , you just have to get used to control moethods of each event , theres tutorials that show you whats what, providing you find out your controlers keys it will work perfect,
the reviewer is a pc dweeb with no knowledge,

I was considerably irritated, and was actually about do delete it when I recalled this XKCD comic. So instead of deletion, his post received an overly long rebuttal, which I have provided here:

Let me begin by saying that I don’t feel compelled to respond to your comment because it contains a cogent argument; indeed, your so-called “argument” is mostly a collection of baseless assertions that don’t cohere in any manner. Instead, I’m responding because I can’t stand people like you who will skim something I’ve taken the time to write, then write belligerent comments that are full of syntactical and grammatical errors.

So first let me explain what I mean by “baseless assertions.” You assert (correct me if I’m wrong) the following:
1. I am full of shit (I assume you meant your first word to be “you’re,” not “your”)
2. This game is the best Olympic game since “Barcelona 1994″

Your third clause, after your second comma, is incomprehensible, but a linguist friend of mind suggested the following:
3. Using a Playstation 2 Gamepad controller in conjunction with a USB converter will allow you to successfully play the game.
4. There are tutorials that explain the events
5. I am a “PC Dweeb”
6. I have no knowledge.

Let’s tackle assertion #1: I am full of shit. Actually, I am not full of shit. I assume you mean “full of shit” in the non-literal, colloquial sense. That is, you are declaring my review to have factual inaccuracies. You named no inaccuracies, though, so it may be that you think my *opinion* of the game is incorrect. You and I may subscribe to different philosophical systems, but I believe that an opinion *cannot be* incorrect. I am entitled to think the game sucks, just as you are entitled to think it’s fun. Somehow though, you think it’s still okay to say I’m full of shit.

Assertion #2 is that this game is the “best Olympic games [sic] since Barcelona 1994.” Here I don’t disagree. I have no way to actually disagree with you here, because I haven’t ever played any other Olympic games. Ever. You will note, though, that nowhere in my review do I say it’s not the best Olympic game since “Barcelona 1994.” You will also note that the fact that it’s the best game in its genre does not necessarily make it a *good* game.

Your third argument is your most poorly formed, but perhaps your most powerful. You do not describe how using a PS2 controller effectively is in anyway related to my review. However, I’m willing to do the work for you. It could be that my bad experience playing the game was due entirely to the controller I was using: a wired Xbox 360 controller. This conclusion is doubtful but possible. I should mention though, that the Xbox controller WORKED just fine. There was no problem with the buttons; the problem was the speed with which you needed to press them.

Argument #4 can be responded to in a similar manner as above. Yes, there *are* tutorials in the game, but again, that was not the PROBLEM. I knew which buttons to press, the problem was that it’s almost physiologically impossible to move your hand fast enough. Thus arguments #3 and #4 are both possibly correct, but neither one is contrary to anything I said in my review.

Argument #5 returns to the pugnacity of argument #1. I was tempted to disregard this assertion on the grounds that it is entirely irrelevant to your argument; in fact, it’s relevant to MY argument. In the second paragraph of my review, I mention that I played this game on PC. From then on, I assumed that an intelligent reader (clearly not you) would know that my review was germane only to the PC release. Even if you’re somehow intellectually impaired, I thought that this would be self-evident from the fact that my review was posted to the “PC Games” online magazine. Indeed, I have NO idea how fun this game is on consoles, because I’ve never PLAYED the console versions.

I was also tempted to disregard argument #6 (that I have no knowledge), but I felt that I should defend my intellect. I do, actually, have SOME knowledge. Knowledge is difficult to quantify, as evidenced by the plethora of standardized exams our students have to take, but I can offer incontrovertible proof that I do, in fact, know something: I am writing in the English language. I assert that it requires KNOWLEDGE to speak or write in a language. My expertise in neuroscience is admittedly limited, but I believe this to be true.

In closing, I hope you will begin to use that thing that’s attached to your neck and isn’t your torso. If not, you might as well do the rest of us a favor and remove it.

Alone in the Dark

I really wanted to like this game. It’s been a while since a decent survival horror title, and I thought Alone in the Dark would fit the bill. Sadly, the game’s flaws far outnumber its few redeeming features.

The Good

Alone in the Dark sports some beautiful next-gen graphics with HDR effects. Every object is rendered in vivid detail; fire looks fiery, electricity looks electric, and hellish cracks running through the walls look, well, hellish.

Besides looking good, objects are almost always interactive. If it’s small and light enough to pick up, you can pick it up; if it can catch on fire, you can light it on fire; if it can break, you can break it. Some objects can serve multiple purposes: fire extinguishers can put out fires or be used to smash things.

The game works very hard to keep you engaged. The inventory isn’t a separate screen—you just glance down into your coat’s pockets and you can see all of the objects in your inventory without breaking the flow of the game. There is little to no loading between stages, and autosaves are frequent enough that you don’t have to worry about quicksaving on your own.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly for some gamers, Alone in the Dark is available on several different platforms. There are PC and Xbox 360 versions, which are developed by Eden Games, and PS2 and Wii versions developed by Hydravision Entertainment. The PS3 version is slated for a November 2008 release.

The Bad

As I said, the game appeared promising. Unfortunately, the cons just outweigh the pros. For example, the game is stunningly linear. No, I don’t expect a sandbox, GTA-style world for a survival horror game, but in Alone in the Dark you just plod through room after room in a predetermined order. Even the older Resident Evil games allowed for some exploration, but in Alone in the Dark you’re forced into a very narrow pathway with no opportunity for deviation.

Most of the rooms have, for lack of a better word, puzzles. If you need to go through a door, but your path is blocked by a flaming table, it’s likely that you have to find a fire extinguisher. Unfortunately, many of the puzzles are bizarre and downright stupid. Very early in the game, you need to bring a fire extinguisher from a lower platform to a higher one so that you can put out a fire. You can’t climb on a ledge while carrying a fire extinguisher, which I suppose is realistic. So to get it to the upper platform, you have to put it on a floorboard that’s attached to a cable which in turn is looped over a pulley. You then grab onto the opposite end of the cable, thus drawing the floorboard and fire extinguisher upwards, but the floorboard  connects with some protrusion on the wall so that the inertia of the fire extinguisher propels it at angle that allows it to land on the upper platform.

My point? For a game that tries so hard to keep you engaged, having such ridiculous puzzles just pisses off the player. Even if the puzzles aren’t so contrived, they tend to fall victim to the game’s most major flaw: the movement and camera controls.

The game uses two camera styles: first-person and third-person. Unfortunately, rather than let you choose which perspective you prefer, the game requires you to use both. If you’re carrying the all-important fire extinguisher, you can only douse fires when you’re in the first-person perspective, and you can only swing it around to smash doors or bad guys if you’re in the third-person perspective.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the controls are in fact different in the two perspectives. In first-person, the controls are the normal FPS controls; W and S bring you forward and backward, A and D cause you to strafe, and the mouse controls the camera. In third-person, A and D make you turn, not strafe. This may sound like petty carping because you get to choose when you switch perspectives, so you should be ready for the control change… right?

Sadly, while you can switch between perspectives at will, the game will force you into third-person when you do just about about anything: pick something up, grab onto a cable, climb onto a ledge, etc. And even though you can just switch back to the first-person, you sometimes don’t want to because you won’t be able to use objects as weapons.

So why not just stay in third-person perspective and switch to first-person for the rare times you need to extinguish a fire or shoot a gun? There are two reasons. First, the third-person perspective has very limited camera controls. This wouldn’t be much of a problem except for reason two: the WASD controls are absolute, not relative to camera view. That means that when your character is facing the camera, hitting S still makes him go backwards—away from the camera. Again, this may sound like a trivial quibble, but it seems much less trivial when you can’t get your goddamn character to go where you want him to go.

Just Don’t Play It

I wish Alone in the Dark were a fun game, I really do. I wish I could write a stellar review of it and tell you to go buy it immediately. But I cannot. I cannot justify recommending this game to anyone, save, perhaps, for the lunatics at 1up who gave Beijing 2008 an A+ review.

The graphics can be breathtaking

A new take on inventories

Oh fire extinguisher, how may I obtain thee?

Of course. That made sense.

Facebook “Hacking”

A few of my Facebook pals have recently been posting inane garbage on people’s profiles. This garbage often directs the reader to a site that can “enlarge your penis,” or  tell you who your “secret crush” is. Here’s an actual post from a friend’s wall:

Ok pay close attention <friend’s name> what I am about to tell you must stay on the low down. Matty has been taking these cok pills now for a while and I found two bottles in his glove compartment. He made me promise that I would not tell anyone that he is on them, cause they changed his whole size and life, he told me if I shut up he would tell me where to get them, so he did, they are on http://checkneed.com and not only that, they are totally guarenteed to work fully or all your green back, every penny. http://checkneed.com

Such posts are clearly spam, and are identified as such by the majority of Facebook users. One thing, though, that they all seem unable to recognize, is that the spam is most likely not the result of hacking.

Mostly, this is just an issue of semantics. Nevertheless, I want to make it clear that if Facebook has actually been hacked (and more than once, to boot), then there are a lot of clever people out there who know something that security professionals do not. To “hack” Facebook, one would have to hack Facebook’s servers, which have, I imagine, very good security. And even if someone did manage to hack Facebook, the infiltration would be noticed and anything the intruder had done would be reverted. It’s also worth noting that if you got admin or root privileges on the Facebook servers, posting spam on people’s walls is probably not something you would care about.

I therefore believe that the people who have had their accounts taken over are not the victims of hacking, but rather of either a phishing scam or a keylogger. Given the victims that I know personally, it is my guess that the culprit is a keylogger. Why? Because they’re not stupid people and phishing scams are pretty easy to spot—particularly if you use Firefox 3 which won’t even load a page if it thinks it’s a scam.

A clever keylogger may get around a weak firewall (viz. Windows Firewall) undetected. But, if you have AVG Free, you should be able to detect such keyloggers and get rid of them before they can do any damage.

There is a slight chance that my victim-friends were just sitting in a T-Mobile hotspot or something, and happened to be there at the same time as a spammer who knows of the cookie-spoofing hack as revealed at Black Hat last year. If this is the case, I’d suggest using an SSH tunnel or encrypted VPN.

Europa Universalis III

As an amateur programmer I often find myself writing bizarre and complex programs. For a while I dreamed of writing a program (in python) that would simulate European commerce and diplomacy in the Renaissance/Baroque period. In this program, I imagined, there would be AI-driven monarchs, merchants, military commanders and colonists.

Paradox Interactive, the creators of Europa Universalis III seemed to have almost exactly the same idea in mind. I picked up Europa Universalis III because I’ve been in a strategy and administrating mood recently. Little did I know, it’s one of the deepest and most complex strategy games available.

The game is played on a global map that is divided into regions, much like the Total War games. The major difference is that in Universalis, there aren’t actually any objectives. Instead of being told to take over the world in however many years, you’re simply thrown into the game and told to go.

Things To Do

It’s difficult to enumerate all the things you can accomplish in Universalis simply because there are so many. You can, as stated in the tutorial, play the game however you want. Nevertheless, I tend to find myself gravitating toward one of the following goals:

• World domination
• Making lots and lots of money
• Colonizing absolutely everything
• Assassinating British monarchs

The game is technically real-time-strategy, though you can increase or decrease the speed of the game at whim, and you can even pause it if things get intense. With the game slowed down, you can accomplish a monstrous amount of things. You can recruit armies, send diplomats and spies, send colonists, invade other countries, and more. Each of these aspects of gameplay is affected by a pretty complex set of data.

For example, the price and time it takes to recruit an army in a given region is affected by your type of government, your current monarch, your monarch’s advisors, the buildings in that region, the amount of money you’ve invested in military technology, your country’s military history, and a whole slew of other things. Rather than force you to keep track of all these things in your head, the game provides simple-but-detailed tooltips for just about everything in the game.

One of my favorite features is that after you quit a game session (which you can, of course, save and return to later), you are given a brief history of what happened in your country. You get cool readouts like:

“In 1587, King Juan VI’s army performed valiantly in the War of Genoese Succession.”

Universalis isn’t all perfect, though. It’s desperately in need of a graphics update. Its graphics are about on par with Civilization III, even though Europa Universalis was released 6 years after. Also, the battles are resolved automatically by random dice rolls; you don’t get to actively participate as you do in Total War. This is probably a very deliberate choice by the developer so that players focus more on the big picture. Nevertheless, it can be pretty fun to orchestrate a heroic victory in battle.

Minor flaws aside, Europa Universalis III is a fun and incredibly engaging (dare I say addictive?) game. It has two expansion packs which I’ve never played, but I would certainly like to.

Beijing 2008: The Game

I write this review with a sense of urgency. I’m writing it not simply because I enjoy writing reviews, but also out of an obligation that I, as a humanitarian, have to the rest of mankind. If you get nothing else out of this post, remember this: do not play Beijing 2008.

Beijing 2008 is a recently released PC game published by SEGA. The premise is clear: you compete in different Olympic events and try to win medals. I’ve never really enjoyed sports games, but I thought Beijing 2008 would be worth a try because it has — as advertised — almost 40 different events.

The Crappiest Game Ever

The first event I tried was the high jump. I read a review on IGN or something a few days ago saying the high jump was the best event in the game; I soon discovered that they were right. To perform a high jump, your character runs towards the jump and you have to alternately tap A and B (on an Xbox controller) in sync with your character’s foot hitting the ground. The better your timing, the higher you’ll be able to jump.

Unfortunately, the controls for the remaining 40-odd events are incredibly poorly designed. Most of them involve alternately tapping A and B, but not in sync with anything. Instead, you just tap them as fast as you possibly can, and build up speed or power. This in itself isn’t a bad thing. What’s bad is how ridiculously fast you have to press them to be at all competitive.

The first time I ran the 100 meter dash, I held the controller normally and moved my thumb between the two buttons as fast as I could. I came in 8th (of of 8), with a time twice as long as the guy in 7th. So the second time I ran, I just rubbed my thumb back and forth across A and B really really fast. That time I came in 5th. I tried this a couple more times and eventually in the 200 meter I came in 2nd.

And what’s so bad about this? Well, I now have a blister the size of Mt. Fuji on my right thumb. I am in excruciating pain, and I didn’t even manage to get first place.

Another Complaint

Although I should have used a pencil, not my thumb, I still probably wouldn’t have been able to get first place. In all of the racing events they have, just like the real Olympics, no “3, 2, 1, GO!” countdown. Instead, a gun is fired and you just run. This is problematic because the computer AI seems to go pretty much exactly when the gun is fired, and no matter how fast you are, there’s no way you can start a race anywhere but in last place.

My current theory is that the game is actually a joke to punish BitTorrent users who like to download games, and I’m hoping that refunds will be sent to all legitimate buyers. You would have to pay me to make me play Beijing 2008 again.

Silliness

WordPress offers a number of site statistics, including “Most Visited Page.” Currently, my most visited page is my review of ratatouille. This is “silliness” because one of the top web searches that has led people to my page is “ratatouille-disney-film,” which means presumably people are reading the post because they expect it to be a review of the 2007 Pixar film, not a review of a really old French dish.

This is made sillier by the fact that the post doesn’t contain lots of keywords that you would expect of a review of the film. It doesn’t have words like pixar, disney, film, movie, cartoon or talking rat. It has words like zucchini, bell peppers and potatoes. So if you’ve somehow accidentally arrived at this blog in search of a review of the film, look elsewhere. You will not find one here.

Baltimore

Baltimore is rarely a city that makes it onto the “Top 10 Sweetest Places In The World” sort of lists. To be honest, this isn’t surprising. I just spent two days in the city visiting my grandfather, and I have to say that every time I go I am amazed out how extraordinarily uninteresting the city is.

According to city-data.com, Baltimore ranks as the 38th least safe city in the United States. This is remarkable for a city that’s less than an hour’s drive from the capital of the country. You wouldn’t believe this if you were in the downtown metropolitan area, but if you happen to be driving from said downtown area to Baltimore Washington International airport, you can either drive through what is essentially a ghetto, or you can take a two hour detour.

A Brief History

Baltimore is a very old city, which is confusing to me because the old east-coast cities like Boston, Philidelphia and New York have a habit of being very interesting places. Baltimore is not interesting. Though Baltimore was technically founded in 1706 as a place for trading tobacco, the city proper wasn’t really built until the mid 1720’s. As it was the largest port south of New York for a long time, it was a convenient place for sugar growers in the Caribbean to store produce that may or may not end up being shipped over to Europe.

Strategically, Baltimore was a moderately important place. The city’s fort, Fort McHenry, commands the Chesapeake bay, which juts into mainland Maryland and is a really great place for invading armies to sail through if they want to make landfall near D.C. Unfortunately, when Baltimore’s founders chose its location they were thinking more of finance than of strategy.While Fort McHenry was being unsuccessfully bombarded by the British during the war of 1812 and Francis Scott Key was scrawling out the patriotic poem that would later become our national anthem, Washington D.C. was literally on fire.

General Robert Ross of the British army had landed south of D.C. and Baltimore, marched north, burned a bunch of important buildings in D.C., then he went on to assault Baltimore. Not that it’s Baltimore’s fault that the nation’s capital was burned, but it’s pretty dumb that a great place like D.C. got burned and Baltimore didn’t.

Actually, in 1904, Baltimore did burn, in what is referred to as the “Great Fire of Baltimore.” To this day, historians aren’t sure whether it’s called “great” because of its scale or because everyone thought it was fantastic that Baltimore was being burned to the ground.

Modern Baltimore…

…sucks. My theory is that since Baltimore is no longer an overwhelmingly useful financial and strategic location, it’s been overshadowed by its more exciting neighbors Philidelphia and D.C. It’s not all bad, though. We had a nice dinner in a Baltimore neighborhood known as Ruxton. Ruxton used to be a separate town, but as Baltimore grew, it eventually consumed Ruxton. The dinner was fine, but I was a little perturbed to learn (from my grandfather — a reliable source) that there was no train station in Ruxton because its obscenely wealthy inhabitants (viz. Nichole Kidman) had decided it would bring too many troublemakers.

Not that I blame them. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: I was perturbed because I can’t imagine living somewhere where the mere addition of a train station could conceivably cause criminals and general miscreants to take over. So if you’re planning a family vacation in the near future, please don’t go to Baltimore. There are many wonderful and interesting places to visit in the United States; Baltimore just isn’t one of them.

Apple Computer: Fascists?

I’ve notice a couple articles circulating the internet about the recent discovery of a “blacklist” of applications on the Apple iPhone. Of course nobody knows what the blacklist is really for, but this site, this site, this site, this site, this site and this site (and a few more “this sites”) appear to make the assertion that this blacklist is “bad” or even “wrong.” Some go so far as to suggest that the blacklist is “Orwellian” and reminiscent of 1984.

Now here’s the thing: Apple Computer is a business, not a government. How can Apple possibly be Orwellian if they’re not a totalitarian government? Yes, Apple keeps absurdly strict control over their products, but you know what? If you don’t like it, don’t buy a fucking iPhone.

It’s that simple. It’s not like the US Government has mandated that all webcams be constantly transmitting to the NSA 24/7, it’s not like phone companies allowing the government to listen to customers’ phone conversations without notifying anyone; it’s Apple doing what they want with their product.

The only thing that actually bothers me is that this blacklist doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere by Apple. If its purpose is something like deleting potentially malevolent iPhone apps, then I think they have an obligation to inform the consumer. In the end, though, we don’t know what the blacklist is used for if it’s used at all.

FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage

Once in a blue moon a game comes out that satisfies my random-but-frighteningly-frequent urges to go around breaking things. FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage is such a game; it’s a wonderful blend of fast-paced racing and uninhibited destruction of cars, buildings, signs, fences and just about anything else that Empire Interactive thought they could throw onto a race track.

Ultimate Carnage has been out, of course, for some time now on the Xbox 360. Unfortunately for me, I don’t own an Xbox. Instead, I’ve been playing the much more recent PC port of the game.

Prettiness

Ultimate Carnage is an extremely pretty game. With the graphics on full settings, the cars glisten in the sunlight, the mud kicked up from skidding vehicles blossoms in the air, and shards of glass and wood fill the screen like so many petals of a flower. And even with all this going on, the game manages to run smoothly and flawlessly.

Gameplay

Gameplay is of course what Ultimate Carnage is all about. This is no hyper-realistic, all-the-vehicles-have-to-be-classified-as-GT1-or-GT2-or-LMP-for-me-to-want-to-drive-them game. No, Ultimate Carnage is all about taking whatever gnarly, beat-up car you can find and smashing it into as many things as possible.

The physics and control scheme are designed with this in mind. Pure racing ability is de-emphasized, and the physics allow you to smash into all sorts of things without hampering your car’s ability to drive. I play Ultimate Carnage with a 360 controller, of course, so I can’t speak to the keyboard control scheme, but I find that driving is much easier than in games like GRID.

Extras

Only part of the game is even about racing. Sure, there’s a career mode where you get to win races and buy new cars, but there are several other modes in which you can compete in derbies to smash other cars, try stunts like launching your driver through the windshield and (hopefully) into a soccer goal, or drive as far as you can before a bomb goes off and your car explodes.

If I were actually sane and consistent enough to offer numerical scores for things I review, I would give Ultimate Carnage something like an 9/10 for its nigh-unparalleled illness.

Shiny

This did not end well

I want to break freeeee

The car from the Dukes of Hazard… flying

Rollin’ through the canals in a gangsta car

Derby mode can be… violent