dovka

I recently purchased Bethesda's excellent 'First-Person RPG'; Fallout 3. After 20 or so hours, I've made a few observations about this excellent game I would like to bring to light:

Ammo Plz - The problem with most games is too much ammo, you can't seem to open a soup can in most shooters without finding a shell. Not so in Fallout 3. Ammo is scarce so far in the game. Often times I will finish a quest with no ammo left, having started with enough rounds to bring down most of the Canadian Army.

…and the horse you rode in on - Kevin Costner once played a postman in post-nuclear war America, where he rode a horse and duped people into believing the government was coming back, before becoming a hero somehow that I forget. Anyways, he rode a horse. Some form of transportation beyond my feet would be amazing. It's not so bad when you instant-travel to already discovered areas. But it's long walk to Rivet City from Megaton is all.

V.A.T.S. of crap - VATS - that is to say, the system that stops time and allows you to aim at specific body parts to dismember your enemies or even blow their heads out, is at best a nice gimmick. The first few times you use the system you are amazed at the varying results. Until you figure out the grueling pattern; take out the legs then blast away the torso. My biggest annoyance with VATS is the fact it often makes no sense; 5% chance to hit torso but 95% chance to hit an arm? What the hell is this?

The above being said, this is still an amazing game.

I also recommend everyone check out Auditorium. This has to be the most addictive thing since WoW.

I came across this website this morning, and I have to say it is pretty damn funny. Well, if you like *that* sort of humour it is (and I certainly do). It looks like it has only just started out (October 2008) but there is a wealth of good shorts on there already. Reading through the about section of the website, I get the impression that it started off as an 'idea' amongst a group of friends. With that in mind I thought there may be a lot of in-jokes and shorts that I just 'would not get', but it doesn't seem to be the case. Most of them are accessible and immediately amusing: something of a byproduct of the films being just five seconds long!

One of the reasons I find this funny stems from something the prefabricators stumbled upon by accident many moons ago. On the TinyPic Video page, there are occasionally clips that are a few seconds or less long. It was here that the infamous bus good clip was found, amongst others. Will any other clip ever surpass its greatness? I doubt it.

If announcements hold true, yes we will. In the form(s) of:

Everyone's favourite anti-video game crusader just received a huge blow in the state of Florida, which is recommending that, in 30 days Jack Thompson be officially disbarred; IE: prevented from practising law and can never re-apply to do so again.

Source:GamePolitics

Just something interesting i stumbled across:

If the world could vote.

Guys, it's out. And it's fantabulous. Get it here.

I'll have more to say on it as I play through it, but even two hours in, I can tell you it is by far the best fan translation ever to be completed. It feels official; it's that good!

If you don't know what Mother 3 is, I'm sorry. I don't think Europe ever experienced the magnificence of Earthbound, so it may be a bit lost on a lot of you. Why not do some reading?

I would just like to rant a little here, as I love my country and the election process and yadda yadda….but there is a problem. You see, when Bush was re-elected, people everywhere, all over Canada in fact hooted and hollered about how ridiculous it was to re-elect him.

Well in fact, I think Canada has one-upped the United States, we have in fact re-elected a prime minister for a second time whose election platform was, in fact, non-existent. His entire campaign was spent defending things he did in his past 3 years as prime minister, he didn't put forward anything new, and yet SOMEHOW he GAINED seats. So, while we rip on someone who at least puts forth a plan of action (no matter how much we might disagree with it) we turn out to have no problem at all with someone who puts forth no plan in Harper. Annoy.

On another note, hooray for the Tony Romo of the Dallas Cowboys being injured, I sure hate the Dallas Cowboys.

Hello, again.

In the past week we have had a minor flood, a near oil-spill (damn furnace), a computer nearly melt and the coffee maker seems to hate me.

Aside from that, owning a house is wonderful. We can blast music at all hours of the night (provided the baby isn't asleep), I can play Bioshock until my eyes bleed at high volume (again, provided the baby isn't asleep). The annoying thing about home ownership is the responsibility. When renting if something goes wrong you just call your landlord and it gets fixed. Now it is an ordeal! Scheduled appointments must be made, payments completed, plumbers yelled at for leaving their dirty tools in on the floor!

My daughter will be a full Earth-year shortly. October 12th is the date. We are excited she did not succumb to colic and in honor will be holding a party, complete with cake.

Reading:
Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Ex Machina - The First Hundred Days
Henry Rollins - Roomatarian

Listening:
The Eagles - Long Road Out Of Eden
Rise Against - Appeal To Reason
Mastodon - Blood Mountain
Finch - Finch

This morning in Tokyo, Japan - at the Nintendo's Fall Press Conference, it was announced that they will be updating the Nintendo DS with a new model, known as the Nintendo DSi (see above).

Nintendo is currently (and has been for a long time) the dominant force in the handheld gaming market, commanding a 70% share. The announcement of the new handheld device comes only a couple of weeks after Steve Jobs' (Apple's CEO) laughable statement about the iPhone as a gaming platform, where he said "…you can make a pretty good argument that the [iPod Touch/iPhone] is the best portable device for playing games on".

The move is entirely unsurprising of Nintendo, who do have a habit of releasing minor revisions of their handheld consoles every few years. The new console has an interesting new feature set, and it is difficult not to get excited by the prospects (scroll down and watch the video if you are impatient!).

In a nutshell, the new Nintendo DSi will:

• be 12% lighter
• have a 17% larger screen (now 3.24 inches large)
• have improved speakers, and AAC support
• contain a 0.3 mega-pixel VGA camera (capable of 640x480)
• have two touch-screens! Both are now touch sensitive
• NOT have a GBA game slot…
• …instead, have a SD Card slot
• support web-browsing (probably via Opera Mini)
• run downloaded 'DSiware' games: similar in concept to Wii ware
• come in two colours (see above): "White", and "Frosted Black"

So, when can we get hold of it? It is currently slated for a November 1st, 2008 release in Japan, which is a little over a month away at the time of writing. Nintendo has thus-far been relatively tight-lipped about release dates of the Nintendo DSi in other territories. Currently, the Nintendo DSi release date is pencilled as Spring 2009. Price wise, it will be released at JPY 18,900 (which is we work backwards, comes out as about USD 179, EUR 129 and GBP 99). As you can see, it's not all that different in price to the existing Nintendo DS. And what about games? Well, check out this video for an overview of expected releases. It's probably worth noting that some of these games look very Eastern, and as such I will be surprised if all of them make it over here to the most conservative West (which is always a shame).




I was interested to hear about the DSi Shop. Apparently, customers will get 1,000 points free upon purchasing the console that they can spend at the DSi shop, which do not expire until March 2010. Games (and other such things) in the shop fit into four categories: Free, 200 points, 500 points and 800 points. The top level, I assume, will be for premium games such as new releases. This is fantastic news. If I understand correctly, it equates to at least one free game upon purchasing the console!

One final thing I have heard regards the built-in camera. Although I find 0.3 mega-pixels terribly disappointing (couldn't they fit in a 1.0 mega-pixel camera, at least?), it's a nice addition. A lot of people have critisised the decision to introduce a camera into the DSi, stating that most people these days have at least one device that can already do that, and better (a typical mobile phone these days has a camera at least five times better). I suppose they didn't want to include a camera capable of massive resolutions due to the lack of storage space on the DSi. It was probably part of the reason they chose to include an SD Card slot on the console just for memory. Oh, and another thing: photographs taken on the DSi can be put straight into your "Photo Channel" on a Nintendo Wii console.

Overall, I'm happy with the announcement. I think the games are the clincher, especially a new Kirby game and of course Chrono Trigger. The camera, I couldn't really care less about. The lack of a GBA game slot? Hmm, we'll it's a shame that the old Advance generation has been put to sleep by Nintendo, but it has to happen at some point. I am interested in how well Activision are going to take it however, since their new-ish "Guitar Hero on Tour" requires the GBA slot for their fret peripheral. The improved audio capabilities are welcome — although, I play many DS games with the volume off. Perhaps the new sound capabilities will have me turning up the sound, or using headphones. Larger screen, yes, good. Lighter? Doesn't bother me too much. Thinner? Good I
suppose, but a lot of this just feels superfluous: I just want it to play games. One genuine improvement over the original though, is two touch screens. I can imagine that will make the next iteration of Wario Ware a lot of fun!

So what do you think of the new console? And have you heard anything else as laughable as Apple's claim? Leave me a comment.

Sandbox game addicts, get your wallets ready. One of the most anticipated games of the year, and perhaps even the past five, is about to hit stores on 7th September 2008. Spore's release date has been widely publicised since it slipped last winter by six months.

So, what exactly is Spore? It comes from the terrifyingly clever mind of Will Wright and his team at Maxis (the same company behind the phenomenally popular 'Sims' franchise), now a subsidiary of Electronic Arts. It is also a game which has proven difficult to explain, although the best explanation I have heard so far is “it is Sim Everything”. You start out as a small organism and, much like the real world, it's survival of the fittest. Progress through the game is rewarded with upgrades, where you can spend DNA points on upgrading your lil' fella. As the game progresses, you move from simple organism to pond life, to a land animal, and from there to founding society, then civilisations, and onto becoming the dominant species of your world. But that is not all – from there, the game folds out allowing intergalactic travel to other worlds, where the local monsters have been populated from a huge database of other people's creations.

I toyed with the 'creature creator' a few weeks ago. It's a small part of the game that EA released early, so we could get a taster of what is to come. The creator is fantastic fun – I made a crocodile with a huge head for instance, and I laughed at it for probably fifteen minutes straight. The bright and colourful models together with the very cutesy animations your creation performs (my crocodile almost shat itself in excitement when I gave it an extra set of eyes, for example) not only entertained me, but roped my non-gamer girlfriend in too. It was interesting to see what monsters she came up with. Inevitably, the first one looked very sappy and cute, some sort of hug-monster. I have a sneaking suspicion come this Friday, I may have competition trying to get on my PC!

So what is this blog about? The pitfalls, really. I don't mean to be cynical but I'm British, and it's in my genes. I really want this game to succeed, I really do. A few things worry me, however. First off, great, it's a game where you can 'level' your monster up (reminds me of E.V.O. on the Super Nintendo, if anybody remembers that game), which is great. I'm familiar with that concept, and together with the creation mode, it sounds like a game I'd have a lot of fun with. What about the other areas of gameplay? If you watch the trailer, it shifts from top-down munch-em-up to a third-person action game, then to an RTS, then to a space-faring sim. The variety looks great and I applaud it, but I hope it doesn't feel like I'm just playing a set of mini-games with a tentative link between them all (the link being your creation, as it will be constant throughout, although you can 'upgrade' it). It's that sort of detached feeling that made Wii Sports a decent game and not a great game, in my eyes.

The second is the fact that content comes from other people. If this thing gets as big as 'The Sims' did, which lets face it is likely, there will be a hell of a lot of content within Spore. Somebody has already mentioned: what happens when the Star Wars, Pokémon and Futurama creations start appearing? Are they protected from take-down notices? Will EA have to screen all the content? If you're new to the whole concept of Spore, or gaming in general, you may not be familiar with the one core concept rooted deep within our kind. If you give a gamer (especially a male one) a sandbox environment where you can build or model things, they will. make. a penis. I haven't got the statistics to hand, but apparently there have been thousands of cock-monsters uploaded already and the game isn't even out yet. Spore has an ESRB rating of E10+. Would you want your ten year old daughter and her interstellar pal 'Mr. Cuddles', the green snuggle-monster to suddenly arrive on a planet filled with huge pulsating penis-monsters, wriggling around and oozing god knows what? I'm not so sure either.

I hope it lives up to the huge weight being placed upon its digital shoulders by the Internet. I'm sure it will pull me away from reading and programming in the evenings for a while, at least. The game has to be admired, just for the sheer scale, the ingenuity (you can give a creature a billion legs and it just works out how to walk), and the love that has gone into designing something this complex. At five or so years in the making… let's see if can match the hype.

A little development blog I've had on my mind lately. Consider the hierarchical nested set article which I have linked to previously. I began using this paradigm extensively for my hierarchal data and one thing that immediately leapt out at me (about the MySQL article) were the examples. I found that whilst informative, I couldn't really contrast or compare the two methods (adjacency and nested) in several ways, since the outputs were different. The example they gave for retrieving a "single path" from a "root" to a "leaf" is a good one for illustrating my point. Often whilst working with the nested set model, I have wanted to get results related to a node in the system (with joins with other tables). Also, I have wanted to grab all the tree that relates to something (for example, imagine a 'purchased' table that links items within the 'nested_category' table to a user) and also have information about the path to that product. I achieved this with a sub-query.

If you haven't used them before, sub-queries are a very handy addition to your developer's tool kit. Traditionally, they are used to grab parts of data where the grouping in the main SQL query makes it difficult, or for getting similar result sets to outer joins. Going back to our nested set model, if you look at the examples for the adjacency set you can see that when they are getting the path to a node, the result set is one row containing several fields.As the article rightly states, this method is extremely limited as the SQL query has to be written knowing how 'deep' the tree will go. If the depth is always the same, then it isn't so bad. The nested set model offers a lot more flexibility. However, when we are figuring out the 'path' from a specified root to a leaf, the results come out in the same column as different rows (shallowest node first). You can try this for yourself (I'm just reiterating what can be found in the article currently) with the following queries:Now, the query……will result in the following result:Now, I get to my point. What if I wanted to get the full tree, with a column inside that result set that showed me the path to each node in the set. My initial reaction was to do it as a sub query. As my original result set is being built, I know everything about that node (with the select *). I can just use the path query on every row. However, as the above 'path' query pulls back several rows, they will overwrite each other. So, instead of obtaining a path to say, the 'FLASH' leaf, i'll just have the name of the product 'FLASH' again. This is because FLASH is the last row in the pathing query: it will overwrite 'MP3 PLAYERS', which in turn will overwrite 'PORTABLE ELECTRONICS', and so on and so forth.

So, what do we want to do? We could do it programatically with a loop, and use two queries. I am always incredibly weary about placing queries in loops and I decided against this. All we really need to do is concatenate all the node names together into a string. Makes sense? So as we traverse the path, PORTABLE ELECTRONICS is appended to ELECTRONICS, and then MP3 PLAYERS is appended to the previous string, and finally FLASH is appended to this string.

Unfortunately, this method doesn't work either. Your 'node' and 'parent' elements will concatenate together, but again they will overwrite the previous concatenation. The only way around this is to use an aggregate function that is present in MySQL 4.1 called GROUP_CONCAT(). This will concatenate a field together based upon a GROUP BY clause. If we run the query:It produces:Notice the 'SEPARATOR' modifier I added in. All this does is decide the 'glue' of the concatenation. If you leave this out, it will default to a comma. As you can see, this would be useful for pulling out CSV (comma separated values) of certain datasets. Now, if we introduce this as a sub query to the original query, we shall get the entire result set required.Please forgive my unimaginative naming in the sub-query… but you get the idea! if you use a 'EXPLAIN' query and check out what's happening in that query, I think you'll agree it isn't too bad. The only irksome part I'd say is the temporary table when checking for equality between node2.name and parent.name (i.e. where this path's node name is the same as the original's parent). Note that I also put an INDEX on the 'name' column in the table, and this drastically increases the efficiency of the query (in this instance cutting down row scan from n to just 1).

So there you have it. GROUP_CONCAT()… I feel stupid that I never knew about it before. I use it every now and then in queries like this to produce a CSV from a dataset and use WHERE IN() or just return the string and 'explode' the list with PHP. Hopefully my little adventure with the nested set model and this MySQL string function proved useful to you. If you have any further ideas for making the query more efficient, or you can rewrite this without a sub-query, please: leave a comment!

The development of my pet project, rpg2knet 4 is continuing very nicely. I've overcome certain problems I was having earlier (including one small issue I had with my nested set model code) meaning so far… so good. No problems that remain unsolved. One of the more esoteric problems I have been pondering over lately is this: am I making this website too involved and complex?

Looking through what is complete at the moment (and I'd say we're definitely closing on half-way done), there is a tremendous amount of interactivity. These days, with the advent of the social web and the advances in user experience and interactivity, I'd say this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Conversely, the forum element has been dubbed 4um4-lite, as layers of complexity have been removed. The use of the forums is a much more tied in experience with the rest of the site. Previously, the forum had upwards of 85% of the traffic whilst the rest of the site languished behind. Now, there will be more of a reason to visit the main site as a lot of information is available there.

My main concerns, due to the lack of problems with the codebase, are turning to two other things. The design, which I have tried and tried to perfect but doesn't come off quite right, and content. The site will inevitably feed from user participation and submissions from the users, but I think a site of this size and complexity will definitely need some very devoted people to keep it fully stocked. With the issue of design, I'm contemplating asking (very nicely) a friend and colleague of mine to see what he can come up with. Either way, these concerns are trivial — I still have a lot of motivation, regardless of the criticism and comments from certain people.

For those of you that haven't noticed the wonderful side-bar app that Jon coded, we now have a nice little Twitter streamer. I also thought some nice links would be in order, feel free to follow Dovka-ers on our many adventures, in our many acres as we drink from many toilets.

Anthony (_parable)
Jon (_jon)
Ethan (1p5v)
Liam (_yen)
Johnny (JohnnyDubble)

Some other interesting twitters I follow:
Mars Phoenix Lander - First person perspective on the Mars Phoenix Lander, neat idea.
Thursday The band Thursday has a neat studio journal, unfortunately every album they've released since Full Collapse has been a disappointment.

Although, according to this, UK users can no longer receive SMS updates. Poor fellows.

Some other great sites I frequent:
Official Ubuntu Forums - A great resource for all things *buntu.
Deezer - Online music streams, great for work.
OpenDrive Access your hard-drive from anywhere.
Today's Big Thing - Whatever the latest internet video-fad is.

A more complete, and actual blog, post to follow.

This is pretty old (circa 2006) but I've never seen it before… so I thought I'd write a quick piece about it. Verizon (a phone and data carrier in North America for those of us in Europe) seem to be really struggling with simple multiplication. It all revolves around the customer service representative not being able to discern the difference between 0.002 cents and 0.002 dollars. Obviously, the unit different here means there is a one-hundred fold difference between the two. I say 'obviously', but the caller in this recorded phone-call to Verizon explains to the representative in a multitude of different ways. No matter how hard he tries to get through to the sales rep, he fails to understand.

I can't believe it. How stupid do you have to be to not understand the difference between a $0.002 and 0.002¢? The poor guy had soaked up 35,893Kb of data transfer whilst in Canada (which Verizon charge 0.002¢ for, which is $0.00002). However, when he got home he had a bill of $71.79. Obviously, they have charged $0.002 per kilobyte instead of 0.002¢. Hilarity ensues when he attempts to get his bill rectified (and so he should, considering his bill should only be $0.72). The recorded phone-call is pretty long, so if you want it compressed, there is a YouTube video (~3 minutes long). The YouTube video doesn't really go into the same amount of detail as the phone call, but if you listen to the call first and then watch the video, you can see how prolific the problem is. Furthermore, the guy in question chronicled his quest for a refund in the Verizon Math blog. Worth a read!

Sad to see you go…

Okay, I have a summer job, which, sometime in November will turn into a full time adult position. As we all know summer, according to school rules, ends at the end of August, or rather, after Labour Day. This leaves me with approximately 2 months in some jobless void (a sort of frictional unemployment if you'll allow me to flex my economics degree).

So with this short term freedom - during this time I intend to mouch off the system (Unemployment Insurance) - I am trying to figure out what I should accomplish, not accomplish, or how i should enjoy myself. There are a couple of options:

1. Drive across Canada to British Columbia for approximately 1 week there. I figure this will kill a good 2 weeks of time as it takes about 3 days to drive out there and 3 days to drive back, maybe a little more if I'm in no hurry. I've never seen my own country really and I figure now is as good a time as any plus one of my housemates from University lives out there, so I can stay with him for free.
2. Fire out to Thailand in November for about a week and a half. I've got a buddy at school in Australia who also wants to go to Thailand, so we would meet there and pick up one of those many Thai hookers…double wrapped of course…
3. Sit at home and do nothing… boring…
4. In the mean time, throughout September and October, I have baseball twice a week and am entering a bowling league (I am actually overly excited for a bowling league), but that will not keep me busy, what is there to do in your own town to make you not bored?

Help me out here people! Make my decisions for me!

\new topic/

On a side note:
A conversation with andrew:

(andrew) imagine
(andrew) a mexican japanese person
(andrew) they'd have an amazing 14 year old moustache

I think their moustache would be outstanding at any age

\new topic/

I want one of these.

Legitimate uses for flash carts be damned, WE'RE SUING!

As most visitors I imagine will know (since they are mainly friends), I used to run a website about game making called rpg2knet.com. The site has been down for many years now (since around about this time in 2006) and I have been trying to get it sorted and back online again. It has only been recently that I have really been pushing hard to get this all completed. I got really wrapped up with Counter-Strike: Source for several years (starting around about April 2005 and ending just recently), which caused me to struggle finding time for programming. Now that I have effectively retired from the source scene, I have had plenty of time to get on with rpg2knet.

I thought, since I'm coming up to roughly the half-way mark in terms of coding, I could start using the group blog here at dovka as a devlog as well, since posts can be filtered quite easily with our tagging system. So, today I thought I'd let people know about how things are progressing. This weekend has mainly been spent working on part of the site that I have toyfully been calling Nutforge (a play on sourceforge). It is a tool for starting a game-making project, finding your team/friends with certain skills to help you work (and rating them on how useful they've been, etc), talking about your game, showing off screenshots, and uploading/releasing your game to the masses. The 'end-game' for nutforge is to have your hard work reviewed by the panel of reviewers here that we shall (hopefully) hire for rpg2knet.com, just like it happened last time.

One of the features I have implemented is a "skill set" system. Using the excellent Hierachical (Nested) Set paradigm, I've managed to come up with a tree of skills that you can tag with different levels of proficiency. The idea being, you can search for 'free' people that have listed that they are looking for a project to help out with, and order them by their proficiency, filter them out and well… cherry pick the people you like. Obviously I can foresee a problem with trolls putting all their 'proficiencies' at maximum just to clutter up the search results. With that in mind, I've been thinking about adding in a modifier system where community members can vote a member up or down in skill level if they have been involved in a project with them. That way, if somebody is a time waster, they'll essentially be flagged as such and this will warn others about undertaking a project with them.

This tiny feature is something that I consider to be, at the time of writing, very unique. I can't see any other RPG maker based website doing anything like this, although I'm aware I may have been mildly inspired by the excellent assembla.com. This is what rpg2knet.com is all about in my eyes. Something original, that nobody else has thought of, or something that nobody else can do. If all goes to plan and we can couple this website up with the sort of community spirit the old rpg2knet.com had, I believe we are really onto a winner. And that spirit is exactly what keeps me programming every night to get it completed *hurl*. As cheesy as sounds, it's true.

I saw the Dark Knight, like the rest of the world, over the weekend. I'm not here to review it, though. I want to discuss the possibilities, my friends. The possibilities of awesome comic movies that we're missing out on. Somewhere towards the end of the film, I was half paying attention. Hey, it's long, and I was tired. I was thinking about how completely incredible a Green Arrow movie would be, done PROPERLY.

I'm not a big Batman fan by any means. I like the guy well enough; he's just never completely grabbed me. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight have shown us, though, that comic movies don't need to be campy nonsense, or overdone trash relying on lowest common denominator effects and writing. They can be well-written and thoughtful, appeal to the masses, and respectful to the source, all at the same time. Apply that to my favourite comix characters, and it's a wet dream. Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Swamp Thing? Don't they all deserve a chance to win the hearts and minds of moviegoers everywhere?

DON'T THEY?

But as Run DMC says, not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good. As every nerd knows, Square-Enix just pushed out its latest Final Fantasy remake, for the DS. Final Fantasy IV has always been a favorite of mine, thanks to an enjoyable cast and a story I adore. Seriously, you take a whale to the moon. What's not to like? So, is this another cashgrab, or is this actually worth it? Let me answer that for you.

Short answer: Yes. It's a nicely polished remake of a great game, with additional features to boot.

Long answer: FFIII was okay, I guess. It was a good remake of an okay game, and thus it ultimately lacked any real draw for me. Class changing was a hassle and the story was reeeeeeeeal light. FFIV changes all that. It's a remake of a great game, so the foundation is more solid. What it adds, however, is what really makes it.

First off, the Active Time Battle system isn't much changed. The meter still fills, you still pick an action, and then perform said action. Nice touch: you know see how long it will take until the spell you just selected is cast, as the gauge starts filling up again, in a different colour.

Secondish, also related to battle: Each character's battle commands are now customizable. Do you think Edward's Hide command is useless? Replace it with a shortcut to a potion. That's right, instead of just being able to pick "Items" to throw on their list of five battle commands, you can specify which item. Same with magic-users. Why dig through the menu to cast Cure or Fire, when you can put it smack on the commands list up front. The only ones that must stay static are Attack and Items. The other three slots are flexible. AND, since characters now have the full complement of actions they had in the Japanese version of the original 16-bit game, there's quite a variety. Rosa now has Pray, not just Aim. Edward can use Salve, to use an item on every party member. Palom and Porom, Yang, too — every character I've used has extra commands.

Thirdforth, also also battle-related (let's face it, the bulk of time you spend playing an RPG is spent in battle, so it better be good and tweaked): Auto-battle. No longer must you sit and pay attention to every single random encounter. Push X and the party will fight for you. What's awesome about this, aside from the time savings? It's completely customizable. You choose the command. If you want Cecil to fight, Tellah to cast Thundara, Yang to use Kick, and Rosa to heal, you can do it. It's all set up in the same menu as their battle commands. Reeeeally tricky, Square. Nice.

Fourthwise, and this is a plus that potentially was a minus: Cut-scenes and voiceovers. Any time you take material this old, with a following this large, you run the risk of shattering everyone's mental impressions of characters, which have been established for what, about 15 years now? I'll admit: at first I hated the voices. Cecil sounds younger than I always imagined. Kain sounds too growly. Everyone else, however… has been pretty spot-on. I've even started to accept the others. Combine them with cut-scenes — thankfully NOT FMV — and it's a nice touch. Cut-scenes use the same character models as the rest of the game, so there's no shocking switch from 3D to FMV. It's a nice touch, and I don't usually like these things. I do, however, wish that you could skip them, which you can't.

So what's not to like about it? Not much. It's hard, for one. You will die. You will probably die multiple times. You will have to level your party or face death at every boss, and occasionally in random encounters. For serious. I also don't understand why they missed out on a couple little tweaks that would've made a big difference. For example: You can't set the cursor to memory mode, meaning you have to pick your action again and again every time you're in a battle. That's an annoyance. Also not configurable is the battle message speed, so you'll have to sit for five seconds after you're done reading, every time someone says something in-fight. Not major items, but silly just the same.

To summarize: If you like Final Fantasy IV, you'll like this. If you don't, you should. If you want something easy, don't get it, and miss out. It's up to you. I just can't imagine passing this gem up.

The Batman is truly Amazing. Everyone should be required to go see it or be shot in the face…

Truly amazing

If you're a fan of RPGs like myself (obligatory link to rpg2knet), the fact that Chrono Trigger has been announced for the Nintendo DS probably hasn't escaped your attention. It's pretty fantastic news if you're a fan of the struggling Square-Enix. Lately, they seem to be pretty obsessed with releasing poor rehashes or half-sequels of their old classics. Fanboyism asside, I played through and thouroughly loved Final Fantasy VII when it was first released. I locked myself in my room with my friends Playstation and played it solidly, only coming out for toilet breaks and meals. I cared for the characters, and I don't feel any other game has managed to surpass it so far. Even a fool can see they are attempting to cash in on VII's success by releasing tripe like Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII.

Finally it feels like they are getting back on track by developing something that the fans actually want. I mean, I know it's still a bit of a cash in (with it probably being a direct port of the SNES game [although people have hinted Square-Enix will continue porting the FMV into the DS versions of their games, as seen on the PlayStation edition of Chrono Trigger) but at least it is a product that the fans will actually be interested in. I think the Dirge of Cerberus tie-in was a complete insult to the intellect of their fans (duuur you like FF7 so you'll immediately buy this game). A large cross-section of their fans would not have played previous Final Fantasy games and bought FF7 on the strength of the reviews it received. If you're the sort of gamer, you're not going to rush out and buy any title that has been labeled an obvious doozey by a reputable magazine such as EDGE. Final Fantasy tie-ins are no exception.

Well… rant over. I'm just glad to see something that, in my eyes, is worth doing by Square-Enix. With this announcement, I thought I'd compile my top 5 16-bit era role-playing games that I would like to see get the DS treatment:

1. Earthbound. And Mother 3. I will CRY if they announce this.
2. Secret of Mana (imagine link-up play for co-op!)
3. Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals
4. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the 7 stars
5. Shining Force 3 (I wish they'd done the map engine in 2D, though)

All relatively unlikely, but a gamer can always dream…

TimesUnion: Man dressed as penis disrupts graduation

I think it would’ve been a better soundbyte/quote if the officer had said “…he was pretty easy to catch because he was tripping over his testicles.”

If you would allow me to go a little nuts (pun intended) here and talk about something I enjoy, I will…although the 4 people that read this blog have no interest in it, in the hockey world the Toronto Maple Leafs are going nuts. It makes me happy. They are my team and Cliff Fletcher has finally started turning them around; the only problem I foresee in this is that people are going to expect a cup winning team next year. Not likely. It will take a couple years to build a new foundation centered around a hopefully prosperous career of Toskala. Anyways, however it turns out, I give the man credit for trying.

On another sports note… GO SPAIN…

I would like someone to explain why this would make me want to buy Diet Coke more:


That commercial boggled my mind. I was waiting for the punch line and it never came…no wonder I like Pepsi better…

I have used several IDEs for scripting PHP over the past five years. Since starting my job in 2006, I've been forced to switch a couple of times for hardware reasons. A bit of back story. When I first began to dabble in PHP I used UltraEdit32, on recommendation of a friend that was proficient in C. It suited my needs as a HTML editor originally, and was pretty flexible when it came to PHP (offering syntax highlighting) but no code completion.

Some time in 2004 or 2005 whilst I was at university, I was lucky enough to win a copy of Zend Studio 5. Obviously I began to realize what I was missing in my IDE. Before this point I don't think the IDE I was using really crossed my mind. However, the code completion was absolutely excellent (still unrivaled for PHP, I reckon) and the spread of features was awesome. One of my favourites was the built-in support for version control (CVS and Subversion) which became a bit of a killer app for me whilst coding my final year dissertation project.

Now, some of you might have tweaked that I said I switched due to hardware, and Zend Studio (as it is written in Java) is cross-platform. When I started my job I was thrown into the world of Apple Macintosh. After getting used to the basics of the operating system and falling in love with the BSD-esque underbelly, I got my copy of Zend running nicely under OS 9.0 Tiger. After a couple of months of glorious use, it began to get extremely sluggish. Loading it up took 20+ minutes, and each keystroke seemed to lag for about 2 seconds. Obviously, this was completely unusable. Apparently, it's something to do with the cache folder that Zend creates inside the user preferences directory. Despite following those instructions, it didn't remedy the situation.

I moved to OS X and a new (more powerful) iMac hoping that it would remedy the situation. Not really, I found. It still feels much more responsive on my PC in my home office, despite the specifications of the machines not being that distant from each other. In frustration, I went through some other popular IDEs for Mac:-

• Dreamweaver CS3 - Terrible. Honestly, I can't understand why people use this IDE. Crash-happy, slow, irritating text-completion. The site-wide (or project-wide) search is a decent feature, though. I hope more IDEs pick it up.
• Coda - Very enjoyable to use. Obviously an exercise in Cocoaforge for the authors, who have a very good grasp on GUI programming. It is missing certain tools, and some of the features are annoying (and cannot be changed via preferences). The IDE will shine with the advent of modules or plug-ins, if that ever happens.
• TextMate - My current IDE of choice. I switched to this for it's flexibility (code completion via Textmate 'bundles' is a fantastic idea and full-circle, reminds me of UltraEdit32). Thanks to my co-worker for praising it enough for me to take notice(!)

And so, I come to the REAL reason I started writing this blog. The PHPDoc competition for classes in the standard PHPdoc textmate bundle is ass. It is nowhere near as good as Zend Studios… but since that IDE isn't an option for me currently whilst I'm in the office, I've reverted to hacking away at the bundles in order to make it more 'Zend-like'. After reading through and putting into practice the TextMate and phpDoc Comment Blocks article at Killersoft, it became obvious that it is completely possible to do what I am trying to achieve. (Note: if you also follow that article, make sure you get the newlines correct in the bundle- if you copy-paste like I did, it does not work. Get the text-only version they supply and copy-paste that!)

So yep. Zend is great and all, but for the time being I'm flitting between Coda and Textmate. Is there any better alternative for scripting on a Mac? I can't get the Eclipse-based Zend Studio 5.5 by the way, since my license key won't stretch that far, and I refuse to pay for the upgrade!

I am speechless. Here is an absolutely insane medley of video game and anime songs overlayed by timed sound-effects from Super Mario World on the SNES. The crazy thing is, whoever has done this has gone and developed his own level (I assume via ROM hacking) which is completely hands free. Mario and Yoshi flow through this magical world bouncing off all sorts of blocks and shells to recreate the highlights of the backing track.

Weighing in at around eleven minutes long, it really must have been a labour of love. I had to post it as Mario is a strong favourite here at dovka, and I've never seen anything quite like it. It is quite fun to try and identify the songs in the video. I definitely heard a bit of Mega Man in there, some Final Fantasy and bizarrely a song by IOSYS. Have a listen, it is well worth it!

If you've been hiding under a rock the last week (or just don't follow technologically by repeatedly refreshing 20 different tech-blogs, you might now have heard of Psystar, but if you have, you no doubt have heard about the companies new, ultra-cheap Mac.

Yup, somebody finally flipped ol' Jobs the bird, and is selling a Mac computer. Originally dubbed the OpenMac (Psystar has since changed it to the Open Computer to avoid a potential copyright infringement suit, ironically). Psystar argues that they are not selling anything illegal; all the copies of Leopard are authentic and purchased from Apple or a licensed Apple Vendor and the machine itself uses a clever series of emulation layers to run Leopard (the fact Apple switched to Intel chipsets probably helps, too).

While Psystar has been in various forms of trouble all week; they were dropped by their payment processor for a Terms of Service Violation (more than likely with some added pressure from Apple's lawyers), and the store is now mysteriously down, it brings to my mind one critical idea:

Apple software can run on any machine, and the fact that you need to shell out $1299 CDN for a base model Apple-brand machine is ludicrous (Psystar was selling their Open Computer for $299 + Leopard Licensing Costs). Apple maintains a small market share, and perhaps most of this is caused by price. I know that, personally, I wouldn't mind a Mac, especially as my gaming needs shift away from PC and towards consoles. But there is no justification for the price tag when I can go spend a few hundred dollars on a system and stick a legal copy of XP on it, or a free copy of Ubuntu.

For the time being, I'll wait and see if Psystar comes back, and maybe I'll order a machine from them, it's still cheaper than the real thing, even if it's not as sleek.

Update: http://gizmodo.com/380488/psystar-exposed-looks-like-a-hoax - contrary to the URL string, Psystar is proving to be legit, customers are receiving the Open Computers as ordered and Psystars store has come into existence. (Thanks Lawrie for the link).

I really really hate blog spam. I get so much of it as well, despite all my little modifications to the forms such as adding a simple arithmetic 'CAPTCHA' (I didn't want to go down the image route because I find them intrusive) and testing against known spammy URLs. We even have an XML-RPC service checking the comments. Yet they still get through. How?

Interestingly, a lot of the comment spam I have been receiving lately contains spammy qualities, but the content (i.e. the the links that they are trying to embed) are useless. They are all made up of a random composition of URI-legal ASCII characters, with a '.com' suffix slapped on the end. I've been trying to think of a possible reason why this is happening. My first thought was that somebody was using my blog as a 'test bed' for some automated posting software, using my form to help the bot 'learn' how to overcome my CAPTCHA (solving the problem would be very easy once a human told the bot what to do). It seems viable, although I'm unsure why somebody would bother with my blog. It isn't really read heavily, has no 'subscribers' per se, and doesn't rank highly in google for many common search terms.

I'm not sure what to do now. Lawrie kindly pointed out that we'd had a bit of spam via SMS a couple of days ago, so I've tweaked it a little bit. Has anybody got any ideas of more unobtrusive ways to cut out this crap? Integrating Akismet into my blog looks like the only way…

Lazyness; It's something of a habit of mine. I will start coding a website and purposely leave out making the administration area just because it takes an age to write. But I've finally done it! It's only taken over a year, but in an effort to get people posting more regularly to this blog I bit the bullet and wrote some code.

What you readers don't know is that half of the reason for writing this blog is for test purposes. So, essentially you're a guinea pig within my internet laboratory. How does that feel? Pretty neat, huh. I've had to delete this blog about fifteen times now, since I'm trying to perfect the XML-RPC 'ping' mechanism that tells blogs aggregation sites around the world that little ol' dovka.org has updated. I think it's just about working now. Although there is one site that is persecuting me for pinging it due to me not being of Indian decent…

Interestingly as well, it appears that 3/4 of my links out of the site are now dead! Congratulations to Lawrie for being the only link to survive! Looks a little lonesome over there now with only one link. Anybody have some recommended reading material, eh?

Music

Thrice – The Alchemy Index, Volumes I & II: Fire & Water
The California four-piece that is Thrice continues their evolution with a sonic tribute to the four elemets: Earth, Air, Water & Fire. Each album attempts to create the atmosphere of the element; Fire is heavy, destructive, agreesive, while water is soft, calm, melodic. Each CD also feartures a sonnet for the named element.

The Fire Album is amazing. The aggression is forefront with heavy riffs, thundering drums and vocals to tear one's face off. But, the band manage to blend in meleodies, harmonics and even choirs to remind that fire isn't just a destroyer, but also a creative force.

Water is a calm tempo, featuring the phenomenal instrumental track, Night Diving. This album makes ample use of electronica elements; keyboards, synth pads and the like.

Coheed And Cambria – Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV, Volume II: No World For Tomorrow
The saga continues. As Clauudio Sanchez, the vocalist/lead guitarist/mastermind behind the plot of Heaven's Fence takes us deeper into the Keywork. This album cements Coheed And Cambria as the leading guitar-rock gods in modern music.

Anberlin – Cities
I cannot say enough about this release, one of the most diverse pieces of plastic in my collection. Anberlin moves away from their agro-punk roots and delves into a more indie/punk/rock territory. The end result is a CD I cannot stop listening to, with every song being completely unique to itself, but telling a greaster story of love, loss and redemption. Bonus points for the anamzing finale song, *fin.

Funeral For A Friend – Tales Don't Tell Themselves
This album was a toss-up as to whether I wanted to include it on the list or not. For the sake of the fact that some of the songs are utterly epic in scope, I've left it on. However, the CD tires me quickly, FFAF have yet to master diversity on an album.

NOFX – Wolves In Wolves Clothing
It's NOFX. I can't really say anything that hasn't already been said.

Television

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Verdict: It's surprisingly good, if not predictable. A good tie together for the events between movies.

Scrubs – Final Season
A show I loved through the first three seasons, the last few have been a flunk with pointless plots, side-tracks and fourth wall-breaking. I'm sad to see it go, but at the same time hope something better will take the time-slot.

The Office (US Version)
This show really only seems to appeal to those that work in an office. The humour is fantastic, and the cringing moments of Steve Carrells character, Manager Michael Scott, remind me of so many well-meaning, but ill advises managers.

Robot Chicken
Proof that Seth Green should quit Family Guy and do this full time. One of the most diverse shows, with amazing stop-motion work. The Star Wars episode, full of Star Wars parody, leaves me in stitches every time.

Dirty Jobs With Mike Rowe
If you've ever wondered about those disgusting jobs that nobody would ever want to do; like clean out a sewage tank, this is the show to watch. Mike travels around the US and the world to show the jobs that people do, to keep society moving.

Games

Halo 3 (XBOX 360)
The "conclusion" (?) to the Halo trilogy introduced new gameplay elements, brought us across the universe, and then ended worse then ended with a complet WTF moment that left me googling to make sure I hadn't skipped a level or gotten a faulty disc. It's not that the story ended badly, it just…ended. Without a real climatic battle. I was expected to actually play the huge Diorama Bungie had constructed. Oh well, maybe for Halo Wars.

Call Of Duty 4(XBOX 360) – Apparently you can beat a dead horse a little too long. Activision finally brings the COD series into modern times, after 3+ games themed in WW2. The result is an amazing, if too short, single player campaign and the strongest online contender since Halo to the XBOX Live market. Outstanding graphics, great weapons and a challenging game play still abound.

Mass Effect (XBOX 360)
Bioware is known for creating in depth games, but I think they've not only beaten their own bar, but soared over it at Mach 5 from 40,000 feet. Mass Effect contains, literally, Thousands of voice acted dialogue trees, where your answers determine the tone, length and helpfulness of a conversation. React to sarcastically and a friendly NPC may stop giving you vital information. Only complaints: Combat system is a littlee touchy and the land-roaming Shark is an annoying side-track.

BioShock (XBOX 360)
What if a game allowed you to have super powers like an X-Man and use guns like Rambo? BioShock does both beautifully. Use Plasmids to modify your skills; Shoot flames, suspend enemies in the air, mind control your foes and more. The game's setting can't be overlooked either; a creapy dystopian 1930's underwater cities, with hundreds of kilometers of pathways, rooms, hidden passages and more to explore.

And for the bonus round….

Wireless
Switching from a GSM phone to a CDMA….bad choice. I can't get along well with such a locked down handset that won't even let me edit the configs.

DSL Internet
Awful for the first month, once the kinks were worked out it's been great. Would still prefer cable, but at the deal I got (Free Wireless Modem/Router, Free XBOX 360 Elite + Forza Motorsport) + XBOX Live Gold Membership + Wireless Adapter) I can't really complain.

Landline
What a waste, we used 20 mintues total over 4 months.

Blackberries
Fuck. Off.

Living in the United States for 6 weeks
Enjoyable, not paying for anything was great. Houston is a great city, I'd go again.

Mutual Funds
Need to stop losing money at some point before I retire.

LG TVs
Are fantastic, please buy yourself one or twenty.

LG Cellphones
Equally as fantastic. Better than most entry levels I've used.

Dell PCs
My father bought one, after I spent 3 hours cleaning the crap off it, it still runs slow as hell. Dell says the performance in Normal, I find background processes that won't die properly. Advise my father to return computer. Two months later Dell refunds him.

Kool-Aid
At 13c a package, by far the best juice in existence still.

Nintendo DS
Hurts my neck, but touch-stylus games are incredibly fun.

It's been a slow time here at dovka.org, obviously. Wait, who am I speaking to that doesn't already know this? ON WITH IT.

First on the list for reviewal: Tang. Now with Fruition. If you don't know all about Tang, I'm not sure we can be friends. Tang is one of my passions. It's easily my favourite soft drink in the entire god damn universe. Recently, they changed the decades-old formula, added more vitamins, removed some sugar and replaced it with artificial sweeteners. I usually drink sugar-free, anyway, but that stuff is harder to find, and doesn't come in a large tub, anyway, sadly. ANYWAY, the point of this is: you'd think that Tang had slaughtered some babies or something, the way people freaked when they removed that sugar. SO I was a bit apprehensive when I spend four dollars for a container of this sweet orange powder. UNNECESSARILY. I'm honestly not sure what the hubbub is about. It tastes good! Not quite the same, but it is still very Tang, and superior to Kool-Aid for sure. So, I give you 4.8/5, Tang, but your drooling fanatic freaks score a Jesus, worry about something that matters/5.

NEXT: Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker. It's good! Any Dragon Quest fan should enjoy this. Who among us has never wanted to create a super-powered Drakee, capable of casting Kaboom, healing the party, and using Omnislash, all in one fight? I HAVE DREAMT OF IT. It's repetitive, sure. It's kind of trite and predictable, yes. It involves hours and hours of level grinding, definitely. BUT IT'S DRAGON QUEST. Those are things are the foundation upon which the franchise is built. It's typically a love or hate relationship with Dragon Quest, and I happen to be weeeellllllll on the side of love. For all of this, I give DQM:J a Level 40 Slime/10.

Lastly, before the speed round, let's take a look at my living situation. Those of you who know me know the shack as well, and my opinions and experiences in it. It's been on my mind lately, because I'm looking at my finances and realising that all this rent is not building me any equity whatsoever. On the flip side, however, I do love this house, with all its flaws. I sometimes wish I owned it, because I think I could very much improve it for not much money. Alas. So, I rate the shack 45/68 for all its charms, minus a penalty for costing me money without building equity. Also penalized for squirrels in the chimney.

• Between Hell and Reason: Albert Camus at Combat: quatre.cinq/cinq!
• New Super Mario Bros.: LOPSIDEDDIFFICULTYCURVEONWORLD8/5
• Not having any mice in the house since Christmas: yay/10
• The Asus Eee PC, or Eeep, as I like to call it: i-don't-really-need-one-but-i-just-got-bonuses/neat
• More days of way-below-freezing weater, but still no snow: so depressing/5.
• Being responsible for 90% of the projects going out the door at work: i used to have an assistant/get me a new one please.

Would you guys hate me if I moved my two sentence blogs to here, instead of using my blogspot? Because I totally will, if it means dovka will have something on it regularly. It just seems like one of those things that would annoy the populace. Opinonions?