50th post

I claimed first post (obviously), and now I claim 50th post. Just in time to also wish everyone a very happy and peaceful Gregorian New Year.

There are, of course, many people out there to whom January 1st 2008 is someone else's New Year celebration by someone else's calendar. To those, I wish peace and happiness anyway.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2003)

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (or PoP4 as it will be henceforth known), is an action-adventure, set in an Arabian environment.

Yes, I know that means lots of complicated controls (there's about 12 keys and the mouse is used too) and doesn't fit into our usual point-and-click preference here on GB. But, this one is worth the effort, I think.

The highlights (to be described further, below) include some pretty acrobatic moves for our leading character, stunning graphics, and game play that Core Design would kill for!

Where does it come from?

Surely we all heard of Jordan Mechner by now? No? Well, he's the guy who wrote the original revolutionary, 2D, rotoscoped Prince of Persia. It had a simple plot: bad guy kidnaps princess, street kid (rather like Aladdin) has to rescue her, by exploring the castle, fighting the bad guys and solving the puzzles. By the way, he also wrote the Last Express - a title that's probably better known around here. [Smile]

Prince of Persia 2 and 3 both took this idea and did it again... 2 was more platform-y, and 3 full 3D (quite a lot of fun, IMHO, but a bit clunky by today's standards).

Is there a plot?

Yes. And it's not the same as the previous three games. The Prince (yes, he's been promoted since starting these adventures) has stolen a mysterious dagger and has been tricked by the Vizier (never a character to be trusted in an Arabian tale), into using it to release demons upon the land. Now it's his job to clean up the palace and save the kingdom.. and there's a pretty girl to chase, rescue, and (possibly) marry too. Ahh, what would life be without 'structure' to our games.

Having said that the story is somewhat clichéd, the story telling within the game is nicely presented in frequent short cut-scenes giving you a preview of where you need to try to get to (some rooms need this preview to give some shape to how you approach them), and some rather nice flash-forwards that give hints of the acrobatics yet to come. This is something I think has been done well here, and other developers could learn from this!

How do you play?

As I've already mentioned, the controls for this game are reasonably complex (though less so that Outcast, IIRC). However, it's a case of one hand on the mouse, to control the camera (rotation about the Prince) and click to use the sword and do some moves (I'll come back to those in a moment [Big Grin] ), and one hand on a small area of keys (centred around W,A,S,D) for control of the Prince and his weapons. After a little practise, I found this worked fine, despite my usual preference for simpler controls.

Okay, those acrobatic moves. One word... WOW! The first time I saw the Prince do his wall-running stunt, I knew I was immediately back where I was when I first played Tomb Raider back in 1996. Our hero is a stunningly well animated guy, who does moves that would make Ang Lee proud - if you enjoyed the 'ballet' in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", then you'll love this!

Of course, this being a Prince of Persia game, there's fighting involved. Not all the time, certainly, but there are times when it gets a bit involved! There are always more that one opponent... but the Prince always manages to outclass them in the end! I did find some frustrating periods with some of the more difficult timed sections (a major part of this game) and some of the later fights. Though I think these added to the challenge, rather than putting me off.

Any other novelties?

There is one idea introduced in PoP4 that I've never seen before... a rewind function! Once you have the dagger of time in your grubby little hands, you can rewind up to 10 seconds of action at almost any time. So you missed that jump (after all, this is a platform game to a certain extent [Wink] ), not to worry... rewind will take you back to the point just before you made it. Be warned, however, the dagger does not have infinite power.

The graphics are wonderful. Not a glitch anywhere! No pop-up polygons nor limbs vanishing into walls. Something else for Core to take notice of. The palace is nicely modelled and feels quite real. My only quibble is that Prince of Persia 3D actually managed to look beautifully decorated (if slow & jerky in places), whereas these environments are a bit more staid... so far, of course.

The bad guys are as well animated as the Prince, with a nice level of detail, and plenty of attention to visual effects and so on. They even come across as reasonably intelligent on occasion, except for their willingness to throw themselves at the Prince who's clearly a rather special chap! [Smile]

I have a rather limited sound system, so although there are nice bits of voice-over commentary, and good sound effects, and music, I can't really say anything about any 5.1 or EAX issues. The sounds are well done, and keep the mood well. And the voice acting is so much better than many adventure games where the voices could be considered to be rather more important!

This next point counts as a real novelty in my book: the game has been remarkably stable in these days of game patches being released the day after the game hits the shops! AFAIK, there is no patch. But then, in my experience, there is no need for one! The only crashes I experienced were during a period when the entire machine was being unreliable, due to a hardware fault.

Ok, this is an adventure game, so what about the puzzles. Well, most of them are physical. There are places where the Prince has to jump between columns, climb walls (which he does rather more dynamically than Lara Croft ever did), creep along ledges, dodge things, etc. There are a few moving block and lever puzzles, but as the game progresses, the Prince gets more moves.. rope swinging, and narrow wall-top walking, and his sword gets updated a few times, so there are puzzles that make use of these abilities.

What do you need to play it?

Win 98 SE/Win ME/Win 2K/Win XP

Pentium III 800Mhz or faster

256MB RAM or more

Geforce 3 or better (Geforce 4 MX is explicitly *not* supported)

DirectX 9.0b (on the CD, although the website claims 9a is sufficient!)

(I used Win XP, AMD 1300 Thunderbird, 384 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

Conclusions

Downsides: Limited saves... this game is more in the console style than a normal PC game. Non trivial hardware requirements (for the time).

Upsides: Novelties like rewind. The story telling. The graphics. The acrobatics! And the overall excitement. This is what Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness could and should have been, but is so far short of. [Frown]

In fact, I found TR: AoD so dull and lifeless that I got no further than the bomb (people who've play AoD will know what I mean). PoP4 is so much more exciting, it took me a month (of 2-4 evenings per week) to complete. And, like PoP3D, it's one I'll come back to in the future.

Unfortunately, this game has received a rather muted and somewhat negative reception in the reviews I've seen thus far. The notable exception to this is JustAdventure's review which is nearly as positive as mine. And GameSpot ran a series on the final days of the PoP4 project.

If you enjoy action, this is a definite winner, and so, finally, I have to give this game an A!

Upcoming content

Over the next little while I will be publishing some of my older game reviews. Most of these were written under the auspices of GameBoomers: an adventure/RPG website and community with an excellent atmosphere and very, very little of the back-biting and nastiness I find in many other online communities, game based or otherwise.

Review of an awesome Microsoft release

Well, finally, Microsoft have figured out how to release an OS they can be proud of, and that we, as consumers, can be satisfied with upon installing. (Open Source issues notwithstanding, of course)

Coding Sanity has an excellent review of this new product: Windows XP.

Laugh? I nearly cried!

Neil Stephenson Interview

Slashdot has an excellent interview with Neil Stephenson. It was done in their usual style of getting the Slashdotters to submit questions, and getting the victim (sorry: interviewee) to respond by email.

I particularly enjoyed his discourse on Dante vs. Beowulf writers (question 2), but that's mostly because I agree with his analysis. Mind you, most contact I have had (or read) with (or involving) the Dante style of literary types leads me to the "they're a bunch of snobs that wouldn't know a good tale if it grew out of their .... um, the end of their spine" conclusion!

Speechless!

What is the difference between McLaren and Renault?

1) Ron Dennis vs. Flavio Briatore?
2) McLaren was close to beating Ferrari to this year's F1 World Championship, Renault were little more than also-rans?
3) British vs French? (okay, probably not this one as the reality is that the majority of the Renault F1 racing team is probably British anyway, because most of F1 is British too)

Personally, I suspect the FIA is the corrupt puppet of the fourth son of the leader of the British Union of Fascists (the fore-runner of the British National Party). It doesn't give a shit for fairness or even the appearance of consistency and legitimacy.

I will never watch another Formula 1 race until the FIA is divested of Max Mosley, or they learn how to actually govern fair play in their sports.

If the Pear Anjou cable wasn't enough

Try this link for over-priced, physics-ignoring, guff for the gullible audio-extremo-phile. This one had me rolling on the floor!

Is it a rip-off, or just a remarkably clever business model?

I think most people are aware that, should you so desire, you can spend unimaginable amount of cash on audio equipment, and you may well get some nice gear along the way. However, there are some audio companies that take this to an extraordinary degree of geek-ish-ness. Case in point: Anjou cables from Pear Cables.

Take a couple of minutes to read their product description. It's laced with a goodly mixture of science, pseudo-science and just plain hokum! And the price? $7250 for a 12 foot pair! Just to get an electrical signal from your stereo to the speakers. That's just obscene.

And I'm not the only one to think so. Techdirt (a tech blog I read regularly) have this article on the on-going discussions between James Randi (a professional debunker & skeptic) and the general audio-extremo-phile community. He wants someone to prove that Anjou cables give an audibly perceptable improvement in the sound emanating from the speakers, than using Monster cables (another audiophile supplier of cabling, but without quite the same obscene prices: just $80 for a pair of HDMI cables).

Now my question. Is the Pear Cable company having a laugh at the expense (pun quite intended!) of the audio-phile community? Are they deliberately trying to make a fortune out of mis-guided snobs, who's knowledge of physics comes from the back of cereal packets or the inside of an audiophile magazine like Positive Feedback Online? Or are they serious.

Surely someone who has the technical nouse to be able to manufacture decent cables (which, admittedly, the Anjou ones appear to be, though not quite to the degree suggested) must have the technical knowledge to know that most of the claims are pure snake-oil?

The final word, however, goes to Gizmodo with the excellent post that first brought this subject to my attention, and to their most recent post on the subject of the James Randi challenge: Pear Cable Chickens Out of $1,000,000 Challenge, We Search For Answers.

Perhaps someone at Pear has realized the idiocy of their claims? Well, they're still selling the cables, so perhaps not.

The 2007 Formula 1 championship

Time to fulfil some promises - a posting on the 2007 Formula 1 championship.

Well, what a damp squib of a finish that was. Okay, so well done to Kimi Raikonnen for picking up the ball that McLaren so comprehensively dropped. It was all over, bar Alonso phoning in a totally weak performance, at the fourth corner (at the end of the Lake Descent straight) when a panicing Hamilton out-braked himself and ran wide.

The result of the 2007 Championships: both were given to Ferrari, one by the FIA, and one by McLaren.

Let's hope that the 2008 season has as much good racing, and none of the stupid manipulatory antics by the FIA.

Speaking of anniversaries...

I've completely missed my own 1 year anniversary.

After 40 posts (this is number 41) since August 15, 2006, I'm still blogging, albeit less regularly than some people.

Planned posts for the next few weeks:

• the North West Passage and the outrageous territorial claims thereupon
• insane, or is that just seriously delusional, audiophile equipment prices (google 'Pear Anjou cable' for a taster!)
• the 2007 Formula 1 championship (rant or celebration TBD pending the Brazilian GP this weekend)
• and finally, you never know, I might even post some directly identifying information about myself at last
  

ttfn!

Congratulations Microsoft

From Slashdot.org (which is 10 years old this month, btw!):

FFII awards Microsoft "Best Campaigner against OOXML Standardization" prize

FFII president Pieter Hintjens explains, "we could never have done this by ourselves. By pushing so hard to get OOXML endorsed, even to the point of loading the standards boards in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, and beyond, Microsoft showed to the world how poor their format is. Good standards just don't need that kind of pressure. All together, countries made over ten thousands technical comments, a new world record for an ISO vote. Microsoft made a heroic — and costly — effort to discredit their own proposal, and we're sincerely grateful to them."

(slashdot discussion, original press-release)

Amazing how well ballot-stuffing, strong-arm tactics, and vote-buying works in getting exactly the wrong message across! One just has to suspect that Microsoft knew just how weak OOXML is before they even submitted it to ISO.

Hats?

From a comment on Coding Horror blogpost on Egoless Programming:

A woman goes into a shop to buy a hat. The hat maker takes a length of ribbon, and deftly folds and twists it into a beautiful hat. "How much?" she asks. "Two hundred dollars," he replies. "For a length of ribbon!?" she exclaims. He smiles and just as deftly disassembles the hat, and hands the ribbon to her. "For the hat, two hundred dollars. The ribbon is yours for nothing."

And the followup:

To use this analogy, I think programmers are like the hat maker. In the olden days of programming, it was the art of creating the hat that excited and impressed people. These days, it is the collection of hats they have created.

I like this way of thinking.

My Last Word on the Subject

I hope this will be the last time I feel I have to comment on the Stepney/Coughlan/McLaren/Ferrari industrial espionage 'case'. The FIA have now released the transcript of their recent hearings, and the BBC have their take on it. It's much more readable than anything I can put together just now, but it does take a similar tone to my thoughts on the subject that the penalties dolled out by the FIA are simply dis-proportionate and mis-guided.

They're all at it, it's just that the FIA wanted to make an example of their favourite whipping boy: McLaren.

The FIA WMSC

The FIA (Federation Internationale de l'Automobile) has a WMSC (World Motor Sports Council). It is their main court for handling disputes within motorsports. It has just handed down one of the most extraordinarily punitive punishments in its history to McLaren (the F1 team previously leading this year's excellent F1 Constructors World Championship). They've removed all the points so far scored this year, excluded the team (but not the drivers, Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton) from the remainder of the Championship, and hit them with a $100 million fine. The impact of this will be that McLaren will start next year right at the bottom of the pit lane, with limited garage space, and little help with transportation costs - just as if they were the old Minardi team!

The crime? Gaining competitive advantage from having proprietary Ferrari design and performance data. Now, bearing in mind that F1 teams are always monitoring the competition - at tests, at races, and so on, and that staff move between companies quite frequently, definitely taking knowledge, if not actual documentation, with them, and bearing in mind that McLaren & Ferrari cars are designed by different people with different design philosophies and theories, I find it remarkable that the FIA should be so remarkably punitive.

Not only that, there are numerous precedents of industrial espionage cases between F1 teams that have never, ever, resulted in such extreme measures.

Worse, Max Mosley, President of the FIA, said, "But that they had an advantage is almost beyond dispute." (my emphasis)

What is a regulatory committee doing issuing such commercially damaging punishment for a relatively common-place, but not often publicised slightly dirty side to F1 racing (and probably every other competitive motor-sport).

I hope McLaren take them to the cleaners in the real civil courts, and put the frighteners on the kangaroo court that is the WMSC.

Two Worlds ... wrong location

I live in Europe, and I've just received a copy of the PC version of Two Worlds as a gift from a friend in the US. It installed just fine, but when I run it, I get the following message:

This version of the game cannot be run in your location.
Please email legal@zuxxez.com for help.

Not only is this classic 'annoy the legitimate end user in some misguided effort to stop piracy', but the work around suggests I should re-configure my operating environment to 'trick' the game into believing I live in the US, and confusing all the other programs on my system that need to have accurate time stamps - such as my virus checker!

This is unacceptable. If it weren't for the fact that this was a gift, I would be taking the game back to the shop, forthwith!

All the companies involved in this product: Reality Pump (warning: Flash site. Ugh!), Zuxxez Entertainment, TopWare Interactive, and SouthPeak Games should all take a long hard look at their strategies for (avoiding) annoying legitimate customers.

UPDATE: What's worse is that I've now had time to try the workaround, and it simply doesn't work around anything. So now I've mailed the 'support' email, instead of the 'legal' email.

FURTHER UPDATE: It works now. However, I have to keep my PC in the EST timezone (in which it clearly does not belong), and I've created a user specifically for use with Two Worlds so that I don't have to put up with US locale on everything else.

FINAL UPDATE: This post of mine seems to be the most popular (via Google Analytics) to date, especially coming via Google searches, so I'll say 'Hi!' to everyone coming in via this post in particular, then point out that, if you're having this problem, and want to know more about how to configure your PC with my solution, check out the comments (there's only 2 atm). Finally, I must say that I've really enjoyed playing Two Worlds after all the grief I had, so it was all worth it in the end. It plays quite like Oblivion, but without all the Blue Screens of Death! Have fun!

My Better Half is Wonderful

First, a little background. Now that the children are back at school, I thought this week would be a nice quiet time to take a short holiday. It is, however, last night I had a meeting to go to, and came back from a long night that ended in an unfortunate upset. I'll say no more about that, apart from to indicate I wasn't involved personally, I was just there at the time.

So, I came home very tired, annoyed, and quite disappointed in some people. At which point My Better Half came into the picture, and rather than just avoid it, or tell me to ignore it and go to sleep, she said, 'go get a cup of coffee and stay up 'til 3AM playing computer games.' She knows I occasionally do this - mostly by accident, and never before with the accompanying cup of coffee!

So I did.

But wait, it gets better.

This morning, rather than expect me to get up and help with getting the children out to school as I normally do (come rain, shine, feast or famine), she said, 'would you like to lie in.' What normal person would say no? I certainly didn't say no!

Three hours later, already relaxed from a decent rest, I wandered up to my study to read Slashdot, etc., and 10 minutes later there's a call up the stairs. I went down to see what my dear wife wanted, and she handed me a plateful of scrambled eggs and bacon on toast, plus a cup of coffee.

Now I'm sitting here, relaxed, happy, on holiday, and with a tummy full of goodness. What more could a man want in the morning?

'Microsoft' and 'credibillity' ...

... should not appear in any sentence that suggests Microsoft has any! (Mind you, did it ever have any to lose in the first place?)

Once more Microsoft's FUD engine has swung into action with specially crafted press release regarding their failure to win fast-track approval for OOXML (their proprietary document format that they claim to be open) from the ISO. As reported by Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet, amongst others.

So, as if ballot stuffing (in Sweden) and dodgy lobbying practices weren't enough, they go for spin, suggesting that a 74% vote is better than a unanimous vote (for ODF), simply by counting the constituencies differently.

Now it's time for all ISO voting members to fully reject OOXML not only on the grounds of it's serious technical and licensing weaknesses, it's proprietary nature (being controlled by a single organization with no interest in interoperability), but on the grounds that the sponsor of OOXML is deliberately and maliciously mis-representing the outcome of ISO processes, in order to further their own interests.

This kind of behaviour should simply not be tolerated.

Dedicated to...

anyone who's spent too long alone with a Windows PC:

Is this funny or just seriously hypocritical?

Three posts in one day? What is going on?

This one made me laugh: the atheist Chinese government wants to regulate reincarnation in Tibet!

Let's, for a moment, allow that reincarnation works. Now post the anti-religious, atheist dogma of the Chinese government. Are they now admitting that reincarnation works? Or are they just seriously trying to damage the political structures in Tibet? Or perhaps they just want to give the Dalai Lama (and many others) yet another excuse to lambast the Chinese government.

I roll my eyes, whilst ROTFLMAO!

Microsoft buys Swedish standards process for $30,000

Once again from Chris Samuel's blog, it appears that Microsoft is making unfair and unethical use of it's massive financial muscle and influence to buy approval for their OOXML standard in Sweden.

If there was any doubt in the past, now there really isn't, that it is time to start actively campaigning against Microsoft and their complete dis-regard for anything but their own bottom-line interests. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is no more than a sugar frosting on a deeply cynical and manipulative mega-corporation.