Blessed by the Potato

Wow, Portal was every bit as awesome as I heard. Neat new puzzle gameplay, hilarious computer, short but sweet. Add on cake and companion cubes and you’ve got a winner.

In fact, it took me longer to get my video card updated to a new set of drivers than it did to play through the game (about 3 hours, but I still have to play the bonus stages I unlocked). It’s an Asus made X1650 Pro (ATI) over AGP. And for some reason, ATI drivers don’t work on it. I install them, reboot, and then face a screen full of fuzz. Go into VGA mode, try another driver, repeat. When I last tried this, I ended up sticking with the out-of-date drivers that came on the CD (dated mid-2006 or so), which were good enough to run CivIV. Unfortunately, Portal just wouldn’t start up under those old drivers, so I had to try the process all over again. Fortunately, news of this stupid card’s incompatibility has spread enough that I found evidence of it when searching the web… just too bad it came too late to keep me from buying the stupid thing in the first place. To make a long story short, Asus has dropped the ball on this card, hard. Their drivers are really out of date for this card, and it is completely incompatible with other versions. I found two potential fixes: the first involved reflashing the BIOS on the card to make it think it was a Sapphire made X1650 Pro AGP. The other involved a custom version of the Catalyst drivers (“Warcat XG 7.4”) which properly recognizes this card.

“Anything that doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” As a Paladin, pretty much nothing kills you, so…

On a more serious note, playing a Paladin in WoW (even though I haven’t touched the game in almost two years) gave me the incredible ability to read a book 30 seconds at a time. (Seal, autoattack, read; look up, repeat). That ability is quite useful at the moment as I’m doing image analysis. Set up brain. Select fiducials, let computer chug for 30-60 s. Look up, pick next option, repeat.

Yes, I don’t know why I didn’t post on it earlier either… perhaps it was just too good to be true.

I’m really surprised that it’s not an MMO: there were so many good arguments for why it had to be one (all the infrastructure/back end programming is in place from WoW, WoW is getting old enough that there’s enough churn of players looking for a new Blizzard MMO to roll into, and last but certainly not least, the trainloads of money they’re rolling in from the MMO genre — no matter how well StarCraft 2 sells, it’ll never match that because they’ll only get the money once), that I just didn’t believe it at first when it was a return to RTS.

I miss having a Blizzard RTS to play. I’ve been playing C&C3 lately, but like all entries in that franchise, it’s less about strategy and more about “Mammoth tank rush”. True, I haven’t been playing online against real players, where more subtle strategic interactions may lie patiently in wait, but I don’t hold out much hope since the single player campaigns are often designed to help encourage using mixed forces — but after finishing the GDI campaign, I found that once I had the right mix of forces to defend my base, it was just as effective to send a force of Mammoth tanks as it was to coordinate a mixed arms force, and much less demanding of my skills, too. But StarCraft, now that was a game that was exquisitely balanced. Balanced three unique ways, too. While there certainly were plenty of players on Battle.net who were slaves to the zergling rush, or the hydralisk rush, or the all-mutalisk swarm, or of course the processor-lagging all-Carrier fleet, a good mix of forces (particularly Terran, since I tended to pick that when I wasn’t going random) could usually bring those monoculture swarms down.

I’ve actually tried to get my friends into playing StarCraft or WarCraft III again, but it’s been tough — very few of them love the genre as much as I do, and with StarCraft being over 10 years old, it does look a little dated (especially if you now have a widescreen monitor that stretches it). So the previews of the new units and abilities sound neat, and the gameplay trailers look amazing, but the biggest thing I’m looking forward to in StarCraft 2 is simply getting StarCraft back to the forefront of everyone’s minds so I can play with my friends again :) If it takes a new release and a visual makeover to do it, then so be it.

It is a fact of life:

• Anything invented before you were born is old and cruddy.
• Anything invented while you’re young is exciting and the way of the future.
• Anything invented after that is against the natural order of things and will doubtlessly kill us all.

[modified from Douglas Adams]

I find I’m feeling very old lately, and that’s partly due to experiencing a lot of that “this new technology just isn’t right” lately when it comes to TVs/monitors, particularly widescreen ones.

Widescreen, as much as I hate it, seems to be the way of the future. Its proponents claim that it is more immersive, that looking at something in a “landscape” format makes you feel more like you’re actually there than if you spread your screen area around more evenly. Perhaps I spent too much time as a kid inside watching TV rather than outside tracking antelope across the horizon, but I just don’t really find that’s the case. I have terrible peripheral vision, so that may play a large role in that. I have to constantly track my eyes across the screen, and when it’s nicely compact around the centre, then I can keep my eyes roughly near the centre with less movement overall to follow the action — widescreen stretches things out so I have to track further horizontally (though less up&down) which I just don’t care for quite as much.

A lot of this is because I deal with a lot of text, or small detailed graphics (ship icons, etc). Perversely, it was the immersive wide-screen movies that really drove the recent widescreen craze, and you can probably still see a number of demonstrations of why watching a movie in widescreen (as it was meant to be) is better, showing the action that was cut out by fitting to your 4:3 TV screen. I say this is perverse because many of those movies were actually shot on cameras with 4:3 aspect ratios, and they simply used fancy lenses to get a wide picture (typically compressing the horizontal, so that even though you get more scenery side-to-side, the resolution is worse), or crudely cut away the top and bottom (which reminds me of a counter-ad I thought of a long time ago: rather than showing the two bad guys on either side of Jackie Chan that would be cut out if widescreen were adapted for 4:3, instead show a picture of an actress in a close-up that only goes down to the collarbone, and how if it had been in 4:3 rather than letterboxed, you could have had cleavage in the shot).

Anyhow, the point is made: I have some reservations about the widescreen craze, and kind of like my 4:3 monitor, particularly for all the text work I do (such as writing my website here). Recently though, I’ve thought about getting a new monitor, and it might just make a weird kind of sense to get a widescreen one, since that seems to be where everything is going nowadays. My reservations, aside from a personal and partially irrational distaste for the format, is that a lot of old content just doesn’t look very good on a widescreen monitor (many games are simply stretched to fit, rather than resizing or adding black bars at the side), and more bafflingly, that there seem to be multiple widescreen aspect ratios (16:9, 2.35:1, 1.85:1, and I’m sure, somehow, the French have invented a metric one like 2:1. Bloody French).

Why you ask, would I be interested in a new monitor when my gianormous flat screen CRT monitor is still in good shape and produces rather excellent pictures in my antiquated yet preferred aspect ratio? Partly, to have something new and cool (both in the sense of being nifty and in producing less heat). Partly because I would get a bigger screen than the one I have now (even if just off to the sides). And partly because of this awesome boxing day sale. A 22″ monitor with <8 ms response time for $300 with free shipping? Hell, yes. Plus I can get a… relatively paltry, in comparison to the cost of the monitor… bonus 33 Air Miles by going via airmilesshops.ca. Plus, 22″ (widescreen) is just about the perfect size for me because the vertical dimension is just about exactly the same as my 19″ (18″ viewable) CRT, which means that it’s really just getting wider, instead of trading height for width like I would have if I went for the 20″ one I was initially looking at.

For a while now, I’ve had my “price point” for a new monitor set at about $300, so this looks like the time, even if I may not be completely ready for widescreen (luddite that I am). I’ve also been really impressed with the Dell monitors at work. While I’ve had some serious reservations about Dell in the past for their computers (proprietary parts, skimping on certain things, tech support, etc.), their monitors have always been decent, and their LCD panels seem to be top-of-the-line, so I’m hoping that’ll be the case with this screen. Look for a review after it arrives.

Update: After sucumbing to Boxing Day fever and placing the order for the laptop, I noticed a comment about it: it’s in a strange 16:10 aspect ratio. For the love of… Ah well, we’ll see what happens when it gets here. Also, one thing I was looking forward to with a Dell is that their monitors have USB ports and the ability to swivel 90 degrees into portrait mode, both nice “plus” features that really helped sell it, but this one doesn’t mention those on its details page. Hopefully they’ll be there anyway, but I’ll have to wait a week or so for it to get here…

So, I was taking some much needed time off last night and doing a bit of gaming. Wayfare came in to my room complaining that her air conditioning was making too much noise to sleep and wanted my bed, so I went out to the kitchen to play Civ4 on my laptop.

The game went well, I won a time victory (I keep thinking that as soon as I get modern armour, I’ll just roll over their regular tanks, but conquest just doesn’t go that much faster…). I left my laptop running when I went to bed…

And when Wayfare got up in the morning, the exhaust from my laptop melted the candle on the kitchen table! Wow!

I also tried the Evil Genius demo. I downloaded it over a year ago and just haven’t found the time to try it out. It was pretty cool, in the same vein as Dungeon Keeper, except without the goobering demons. I sensed something was missing in terms of ways to move my minions around — I recall dungeon keeper had a way of slapping them to a specific spot or planting totems to attract them or something, whereas here they were all milling about the back without guarding the front door. It was also really annoying to have to individually tag each agent of good for destruction; I would have figured a game largely built around not having direct control over your minions would also intelligently target intruders for death or capture. However, the animations were cute, and it’s a fairly unique type of game, so I think I’m going to get it next weekend ($20 US for a direct download isn’t too bad).

Finally, a picture I promised to post last weekend but didn’t get around to (apologies, as always, for my crappy camera phone):

“Out of the car! Do it now!”

Yeah, this was last weekend. I was stopped at a red light about 5 cars back on that giant hill at Don Mills & Finch, just sort of spacing out waiting for the light to change. Next thing I know, there’s a cop car with its lights on screaming up the hill behind me, then cuts in front of me, through a space in the right lane, and blocks in a car two ahead of me. At the same time, to other cars come rushing in from around the corner on Don Mills to block the car in from the front. Before the cars are even fully stopped, the cops are leaping out with their guns drawn yelling for the driver to get out of the car. He comes right out with his hands up, and they turn him around for a quick pat-down and cuffing. Before the light cycles again, they’ve got him in their car and a tow truck is hooking up to his car, while traffic starts moving in the left lane again… Pretty intense!