Myst IV Revelation

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?
The sequel to the sequel (Exile) to the sequel (Riven) of Myst! Just like Exile, this is a point-n-click adventure, in full screen, 360 degree bubbles. Chronologically, this game comes after Exile; Yeesha, the baby at the beginning of Exile, is now a bright, engaging 10-year old, and Atrus (played, once again, by Rand Miller, CEO of Cyan Worlds) is starting to show some age, with a distinguished display of greying hair and beard.

Okay, I have to come clean, right from the start. I've been a fan of the Myst games since 1993. So, you can imagine the sense of excitement and anticipation I felt when a certain package arrived on my doormat! I've been really good this time. I've not looked at the preview screen shots, I've assiduously avoided any Myst-related threads on adventure forums; I know next to nothing about Myst IV Revelation. Until now....

Where does it come from?
Again, like Exile, this game was not written, nor developed by Cyan (the originators of the Myst story) however the first "ident" movie is the wonderful Cyan one that sends shivers down my spine!

This game was developed for UbiSoft by Team Revelation, under license (and with artistic and plot oversight) from Cyan. Development of the project started well before Exile was complete, and you can tell from the quality of the game that it has taken all this time to produce. There's just so much in it. It comes with two whole DVDs of resources -- giving an 8GB (yes, eight gigabytes) full install. Even the minimum install is a whopping 3.5GB!

Is there a plot?
Of course... it's a Myst game! Atrus introduces the story by telling us that his sons, Sirrus and Achenar, weren't killed at the end of Myst (as some people had supposed) but remained trapped. Now we find out how Atrus and his family -- Catherine, his wife, and Yeesha, their lively (roughly) 10 year old daughter -- have dealt with the situation. You're invited to help out.

Those sons of his seem to have been the bane of Atrus's existence, providing the plot and motivation for three out of the five Myst games so far.

This is also the second Myst game to have its plot written by Mary DeMarle. She also wrote the story for Exile, to such good effect, and this one is similarly excellent, fitting the canon of Myst-lore well.

How do you play?
Starting in Tomahna (Atrus's family's home), you solve puzzles, fix machinery, go on wild rides, decode texts & sounds, etc, in four Ages. The Ages are spectacular, but I don't want to spoil any surprises for anyone. So I'll just say that the Ages are bigger, more elaborate and more fully realized than anything in Exile. Riven only rivals this by dint of it being set almost entirely in one Age, rather than four. On a personal note, I have to say that Tomahna is my favourite Age in this game; I could live there myself.

Navigation is simple, being entirely mouse driven. The customisable hand cursor is used throughout, making smoothly animated transitions between idle, pointing, grasping and touching forms. You can change the colour, transparency, and handedness of the cursor in the Options menu. A nice touch, enabling you to control how visible your cursor is.

Hotspots are rarely difficult to find - there's no pixel hunting here. Controls on machinery are clear in their location, if not their function. But then the game wouldn't be true to the Myst genre if Atrus's mechanical wonders were obvious in their layout.

The Puzzles don't interrupt game play and plot...they're essential to progressing the story. They're not just in the style of "here's a fancy puzzle-lock, you don't get to see the Treasure Chamber until you can figure out this sliding tiles game". There are some very novel puzzles right from the get-go. And the final puzzle is a complete doozy!

Just so you know, there are no mazes, nor sliding blocks, but there are sound puzzles and a timed sequence.

Notable Features
The live acting is excellent. Rand Miller is the *only* person who can play Atrus, much as he'd like to escape the role! Yeesha (Juliette Gosselin) is lovely. Sirrus and Achenar were played by Rand and Robin Miller in Myst, and are now played by Brian Wench, (a US TV actor) and Guy Sprung (a Canadian TV actor). Both are excellent, bringing back to life those two apparent psychopaths from the first game with great flair and enjoyable characterisation.

Technically, the live action sequences are integrated very, very well with the pre-rendered elements, animated environment, and real-time effects. Characters interact with objects, pass through doorways accurately, and show up as distant glimpses through intervening structures very smoothly. There's a great sense of the characters being real within this world.

Inevitably, I have to gush glowing praise for the graphics in Myst IV. Every time we have a new Myst game, I am astounded by the leaps forward made by the development teams, be they Cyan themselves, Presto (Exile) or Team Revelation. The Ages are stylish, intricate, beautiful (in their own ways), and fantastically brought to life by the optional immersive features. Even without the optional material, there is life in the environment, with moving water, animated insects, lightning, wind and wildlife. However, if you turn on the optional effects, the overall picture is stunning. To take Tomahna for example, the trees move in the wind, the waterfall is shrouded in mist (not myst, sic!), smoke rises from the kitchen, birds and insects flutter around the vegetation and scattered leaves blow in the breeze.

This game really is a tour de force in world realisation and photo-realistic environments!

As with Exile, the music for Myst IV was composed by Jack Wall. I've always found his material beautiful, haunting, dramatic, and brilliantly applied. He has linked this game stylistically and thematically to the earlier games, without just re-using Robyn Miller's material. There's also a song by Peter Gabriel (who also composed music for Uru: Ages of Myst), which fits in very well where it comes. No spoiler intended.

Any other novelties?
ALIVE technology - most objects and surfaces within range of your hand can be touched to find out what they sound like - walls, books, glass windows, plants, equipment; all sorts of things. Some objects can be used without appearing to have any true part in the game -- lovely extra colour, to bring you deeper into the game. This addresses one of the longest held gripes of many point-n-click adventurers; the fact that the game environments almost always include many objects about which the user is curious, but can never actually explore (for example, in Syberia, all those 1st floor doors in the hotel in Valadilene that went nowhere).

The game also allows you to have objects take on a degree of soft focus based upon their distance from the user. I must say that I really didn't like this feature, and turned it off as soon as I discovered it was optional. I like my world to be as clear as possible; I can get all the blurred images I could possibly ever wish for, if I take my glasses off.

There's the built-in hint system, using hints from Prima (publishers of the Strategy Guide for Myst IV, amongst many other guides). Level I, II, and III hints provide gentle nudges, pointed clues, and complete instructions for the various puzzles. There is a warning every time the hint system is about to reveal more information (almost every click whilst using the hints). This gets annoying very quickly. Yes, I know using this hint may "affect my gaming experience". Enough already!

Part way into the game, you obtain an amulet of memories that is used to give plot and character developing colour, especially by allowing the player to hear the characters read out the contents of their various journals. This makes absorbing the information in the journals a much more enjoyable aspect of the game than it has been in previous Myst games.

A camera may not be a novelty to adventure gamers anymore. There was one in Timelapse and many other games since. But the Myst IV camera is one of the most useful ever. We all know how difficult it is to take good graphical notes for Myst games; the clues can be so subtle. Well, the camera and viewer (with its note taking function too) make taking notes so much easier, it's almost simple to use Atrus's crystal viewer. Not too simple of course, because the clues are hand drawn, but still, much easier than puzzling out clues copied down late at night by someone who's own drawing skills leave much to be desired!

Problems
I'm sorry to say that my playing of Myst IV was marred by a number of bugs.

First of all, there's a compatibility issue with ATI Radeon cards (7000, 7500 and in my experience 9000 too) where the 3D environment is masked out by sandy squares. However, UbiSoft have a fix for this on their support site; a modification to a configuration file.

Secondly, the game has periodic crashes to the desktop. The game never crashed my PC, but did quit suddenly at a number of places, and never reproducibly, making it very hard to diagnose the cause. Therefore, save often; but this leads to the third problem I suffered.

As you accumulate save games, the menus get slower and slower. So either limit yourself to, say, ten save slots, or find the save directory and move save files out of the way, or periodically delete old saves from within the Load Game menu.

Conclusions
In a nutshell: magnificent! This is my favourite Myst game yet. There are the awesome Ages, with perilous heights, stunning scenery, fantastical creatures. We get plenty of lifts, cable car rides, amazing machines, intriguing and challenging puzzles.

Flies in the ointment: blurry focus (can be turned off), massive full install, virtual CD/DVD check, and graphical problems that weren't completely solved until I'd finished the game. It's a shame that after three years of development, there are still issues in the game. These issues, including the save game slow-down and repeated crashes to desktop, contribute to a slight tarnish on the overall product. I'll be betraying my fan-dom of the Myst games by saying that I was willing to work around the issues, and have been able, I feel, to see the gold underneath.

Grade: A-

A patch solving the issues mentioned above would convert this into an A+.

What do you need to play it?
Minimum Requirements
• 700 MHz Pentium(r) III or AMD Athlon(tm) or better
• 32 MB DirectX(r) 9-compliant video card (800x600 display)
• 128 MB RAM (256 MB required for XP)
• 3.5 GB free hard disk space
• 4x DVD or faster
• DirectX 9.0-compliant sound card
• Windows(r) 98SE/2000/ME/XP with DirectX 9.0c (included on DVD)

Recommended Requirements
• Pentium(r) IV or AMD Athlon(tm)
• 64Mb or more DirectX(r) 9-compliant video card (800x600 display)
• 256 MB RAM
• 8.0 GB free hard disk space

(I used Win XP, AMD XP 2400, 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

Everest?

China claims that the Olympic torch has been taken to the summit of Mount Everest.

First question : why?

Second question: what distinguishes the location shown in this video from any windy, snowy, rocky, slightly elevated, location in any part of China?

Third question: why is there no evidence of breathing equipment on the climbers? Oxygen support is required for all but the most extreme mountaineers at the summit of Mount Everest.

Answer One, Two and Three : they didn't do it.

The Streisand Effect Strikes Again

I find it quite amazing the number of people who fall for this lawyer-dream-cum-true behaviour where some offended party chooses to sue an internet site for libel or defamation or just to get them to pull particular content. Many people have done this, but every time they do, all they get is a bloody nose and a whole lot of publicity they never wanted in the first place... example: Barbara Bauer is a literary agent and somebody doesn't like her. So instead of just telling their friends and neighbours not to use her services (perhaps they don't have any friends or neighbours who're in the market for literary agencies?), they created a page on Wikipedia to describe her. Now, that page kept on being restored and deleted, and it actually appears to have survived for 10 months from May 2007 to March 2008 (wiki deletion log).

So Ms Bauer decides she doesn't like this, so she's suing Wikipedia. No, not the author of the defamatory article; Wikipedia. It's about time somebody at whatever passes for a Bar Council or a Law Society in the States needs to hit the entire legal profession upside the head with a big clue stick. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) means you cannot sue the service provider (in this case Wikipedia) for what their members chose to post. I'm sure there's something in the US Constitution on the subject too!

So Ms. Bauer, welcome to the Streisand Effect. You make an ill-aimed fuss about something you want kept quiet, and what happens? Everyone hears about whatever it is you want kept quiet. Me? I'd never heard of you. Now? I'm left with the impression (rightly or wrongly) that you're a poor literary agent with a penchant for scatter-gun litigation. Sure sounds professional to me!

What's worse is that you'll now go down in history (via Google's indexes, Yahoo! indexes, MSN Live Search indexes (maybe), Altavista, Ask.com.... not to mention the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive) in that way, but not at Wikipedia because not only have they deleted the article, no-one can create an article with that name any more.

Note: the Wayback Machine will have articles about the Wikipedia case, it doesn't actually have the Wikipedia article itself ... at least I couldn't find it. I'm not sure which is worse in terms of publicity: an article few people are likely to read, or many many articles of opinion scattered across the 'net, based upon journalist's reporting of the case. So we may all be quite wrong.

Scratch that. I do know: Ms Bauer, the correct way to handle this would have been by a simple appeal to the administrators of Wikipedia. Only an idiot involves lawyers where a simple email would more than likely have sufficed.

Analogy

Apparently found on the archives of talk.bizarre from September 1998, here is a fascinating analogy for the stock market. Seems remarkably apt, especially given this article from yesterday on the BBC.

Both go a long way to explain the mess the markets now find themselves in. But the most frustrating thing is that, of course, everyone suffers from the financial fall-out of their adrenaline & testosterone addictions.

To: Microsoft, Re: OOXML

Shamelessly copied (and modified) from Chris Samuel, down under:

Dear Microsoft,

RE: OOXML

Due to massive irregularities in the voting process in ISO, the requirement to use patented media formats such as MP3, the enforcement of old date bugs in the standard, and the sheer inappropriateness of using the fast-track process for your massive XML document format OOXML I will not accept it as an agreed ISO standard, even though you managed to con enough people into voting buy enough votes for it.

Aliss

p.s. please feel free to copy my copy to your heart's content, but please give credit for the original to Chris!

The Moment of Silence

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?

The Moment of Silence (TMOS) is the newest adventure game from the House of Tales, the German outfit that brought us The Mystery of the Druids. Right away, I have to admit that I really didn't like The Mystery of the Druids, but I stopped comparing the two games pretty quickly. TMOS contains none of the graphical bugs and immersion-breaking missteps of The Mystery of the Druids, so this is the last time I'll mention it.

Okay, so now we've dealt with some of my prejudices, let's get on with the game at hand. The game arrived in a standard DVD-style box and this was the first surprise - it comes on DVD. I had thought that the DVD format was limited to the really big-budget guys like the Myst franchise and Half-Life 2. But, obviously, I was wrong, as it seems to be taking over further down the market. This is a Good ThingTM, because it means developers can offer games that can honestly claim "spectacular set pieces and dramatic action sequences", "over 75 rendered and animated locations", "more than 500 interactive screens". All of which, I must say, TMOS does indeed deliver.

Is there a plot?

Oh yes! Most definitely - this game is completely plot driven. The main character is Peter Wright. He's a communications designer - an ad-man, so to speak - working on the government's latest political campaign for anti-cryptography legislation. His world, as is so often the case in such games, is turned upside down by the sudden arrival of a S.W.A.T. team at his neighbour's apartment. Peter's neighbour is dragged away by armed police, leaving his family stunned in the doorway. At this point, Peter makes what might be considered in the real world to be a critically bad move... he goes round to his neighbour's place to see if he can help. But, I hear you saying, there wouldn't be much of a game here if he didn't! And you're absolutely right. Anyway, the story leads from here in Brooklyn to locations in various parts of New York City -- including Peter's office and Greenwich Village -- and then beyond to the tropics, the Arctic and even off-world for a time. Along the way, some of Peter's recent history is revealed, which makes his reactions to some of the story elements more than a little surprising.

The environments in this game are somewhat reminiscent of Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner'. However, this game has none of the empty spaces, ultra-busy streets, dark drama, or the rain of that film, though it does rain during some of the sections. We're talking 2044 here, 40 years hence; the world is governed by a democratic super-state with Big Brother-like tendencies. Technology has moved on in a surprisingly understated manner - people carry messengers (hand-held video phones), desktop computers look pretty much like the current advanced models with some nice enhancements (like no tower to get in the way), and the Internet has been renamed GlobalNet. Of course, GlobalNet is still used primarily for chatting, email and publicity, very much like today. Public transport has advanced - the maglev train is the subway of the future, and Peter mostly uses automatic cabs to get around locations in New York. Other transport media are used too - aeroplane, zeppelin, space elevator, skidoo and rocket. But most of the time, Peter is on foot.

How do you play?

The third person user interface of TMOS is mainly mouse-driven, with a couple of keyboard controls to summon help (displaying the exits from the scene) and Peter's Messenger, when it is available. Left clicking moves Peter around the world and performs actions (picking up objects, starting conversations, pressing buttons and applying inventory objects to people, the environment or other inventory objects), and right clicking gets descriptions of things from Peter's point of view, or de-selects a held object. As this is a third person game, navigating Peter around the environment is done using the mouse. This has one major drawback. It can be difficult to navigate in confined spaces and there is a particular problem with controlling Peter within his own apartment. This is really rather distracting when the start of the game requires you to spend some time in said apartment finding things.
The Escape key brings up the standard game menu for saving and loading games and setting options. There aren't many configurable options - just the voice, music and sound effects volumes and subtitles. What more do you really need?

Puzzles in this game are varied. There are inventory-based puzzles, including object-combining ones, and as we've come to expect, not all of the solutions are obvious applications of the particular objects. There are conversation trees - some of which are quite deep. Other puzzles include combination locks and dentistry, of all things.

Regarding the conversation trees, it would be nice if someone could finally sort out conversation trees so that you don't get comments from characters before the main character should know the information. Using the multiple choices in an order other than that displayed on the page gave rise to out-of-order information. If there are dependencies between conversation branches, then the dependent branches should simply not show up until the leading branches have been traversed, even if this leads to fewer options appearing at a time. Sadly, TMOS falls foul of this sufficiently often that I gave up trying conversation options in the order that seemed interesting and stuck to the order in which they're listed on the screen.

Notable Features

TMOS comes on DVD. This is important and the DVD-style game box makes this clear in five places, and just so you don't miss it, that's the same number of times as in this review. I repeat, this game comes on DVD - got it? ;-)

To those people who have an issue with StarForce protected games, be warned, this is another one of them. However, the only problem this caused was that the DVD sometimes was detected improperly by the StarForce disk checker if the DVD had been in the drive for a long time before starting the game, so I had to try to start it again.

This is also a big game - 3.4GB full install. It is somewhat unusual in that you install it normally, and then you use an extra button on the AutoLauncher to convert the normal installation into a full install.

The developer has already patched the game; however it is a small download when compared to many others currently available. The AutoLauncher has a "Check for updates" option that simplifies the patching of the game quite considerably. I didn't try the optional GameShadow program that comes with TMOS, as I'm not a fan of programs that scan the contents of my hard disk looking for games to upgrade - even if it is under my control.

Any other novelties?

I'm not sure if this next comment really counts as a novelty; in an ideal world, it certainly shouldn't. The voice acting in TMOS is almost universally excellent. The box claims "over 35 professionally voiced... characters," and indeed there are a goodly number of characters, though I didn't count them all, and they are all well acted.

The one exception, and this may be the reason I had some trouble getting excited by this game, was the voice of Peter Wright himself. Now, given his circumstances, I can understand why he's somewhat unhappy at times, but I feel the game suffers for his downhearted presentation - he needs to show more anger and outrage, and less numb melancholy.

Oddities

TMOS offers two levels of anti-aliasing in the hardware settings section of the AutoLauncher. However these caused the game to crash to desktop when starting, so I gave up on them. Apart from this, the game was remarkably stable - I can't, in fact, recall any other crashes or hang ups whilst playing it.

I rather liked the developers' idea of how the mobile phone will change over the next 40 years - into the mobile video phone. The device seems useful and usable; with a simple menu and "start call" and "end call" buttons. However, the phone is used very little within the game, compared to how it could have been used. It is interesting that the phone acts as a metaphor for Peter's identity. When he is without his phone, he is a non-person; when he has it, he is a functioning member of society.

What went missing -- beyond the essential excitement that a game of this quality should engender -- were certain sound effects. With such a richly rendered environment, including objects that Peter can comment on but which turn out to never be used (something we adventurers regularly ask for), it seems odd that the House of Tales didn't take the opportunity to include footstep sound effects. There are times when Peter walks on pavement, carpet, vinyl, metal plating, concrete, and puddled surfaces, plus varied indoor spaces where you'd expect some of the sounds to reverberate around the room.

Conclusions

The Moment of Silence is a very professionally made, tightly plotted, well-acted (in the main), good-looking game that would justify all but the highest of price tags. Just one problem -- it lacks the sparkle and excitement I need to really recommend this game. It is a good example of the conspiracy theory genre, and certainly didn't fall into the trap of predictability. I'm usually a pretty good plot-spotter in mysteries and movies, and I didn't predict this ending before I got there, although I did have some of the elements quite early on.

Okay, I lied; one more mention of Mystery of the Druids: TMOS is much, much better than Mystery of the Druids. Finally, this game comes on DVD, so make sure you have a DVD drive before you buy.

Grade: B

What do you need to play it?

Minimum Requirements

• Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP.
• Pentium II 450 or equivalent
• 64MB RAM
• 32MB 3D graphics card
• DirectX9 - oddly, DirectX 8 comes on the DVD
• DirectX9 compatible sound card
• 2x speed DVD ROM drive.

(I used Win XP, AMD XP 2400+, 512 MB RAM, and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

P.S. Dekker was a replicant, so there!

AOL & Compuserve

It occurred to me this morning that the Google universe has now become, by growth and stealthy usefulness, an ecosystem rather like AOL and Compuserve once viewed themselves.

AOL and Compuserve were gateways to online content. You connected to their servers, through their browser, and spent most of your time reading their content, providing eyeballs for their advertisers, and contributing to their forums (or email lists). Eventually both providers opened up access to more of that new fangled 'internet'-thingy... and gradually their own content whithered away, so that they're little more than search and portal services.

On the other hand, as we all know, Google started as a search engine with a friendly logo, (Rather remeniscent of the "Don't Panic!" of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) but has gradually grown to provide all sorts of services, and a portal homepage to boot.

Specifically it struck me that I use (in no particular order):

• Google Mail
• Google Search
• Google Homepage
• Google Reader (RSS feed reader)
• Google Analytics
• Google Documents
• Google Checkout
• Google Maps
• Google Earth
• Google Finance
• Google Notebook
• Google Images
• YouTube
• ... and ...
  
• Blogger (did you know that?)
  

Check out this list for yourself... you might be surprised just how involved in your life Google has become.

I'm not sure at this point whether this is a good thing or not, mostly because it's never caused me any problem to be so entangled with Google, but that, in its own right, causes me anxiety ... what about resilience, and availability? And can I really trust the big cuddly, cool, fluffy corporation that is Google never to anything evil with my data?

Financial reasons

Something a little unusual for me: my boss sent me a link today to a blog from an analyst in the UK financial sector, and the content is actually interesting. Everyone is complaining about the so-called 'credit crunch'. That self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling prophecy that financial doom is going to cause another global recession.

Whilst Chris Skinner (the blogger in question) isn't actually saying the crisis isn't upon us, but he is at least writing about the real causes: machines being given too much unchecked freedom, people not recognising and managing risks, and the regulators being too divided and ignorant of their own markets to due a proper job.

I especially like the "young pups every 7-10 years" cycle in the second post, and the details of the Northern Rock situation (about half-way down the third post) - Northern Rock's business model was to be carrying over 3 times more debt (as client mortgages & similar) over the deposits of their clients. So for every £1 in the bank, there was £3.25 in debt! On top of that, they only had £1.5 billion in insurance, against that £90 billion debt! No wonder there were problems when they couldn't keep the wheels oiled with inter-bank loans.

Competing with 'free'

Dealing with the fact that music now fits into the category of 'infinite goods' is proving mentally challenging for many in the music publishing business. Not so Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame.

His recent album distribution plan has a number of options for the 'purchaser':

1. download the basic album for free
2. ...
3. various packages of extras and DRM-free file formats: small costs from $5 - $75.
4. ...
5. the exclusive limited edition (only 2,500 copies) primo version at $300 a pop.

Despite the fact that option 1 is widely executed, gross sales in the first week alone are $1.6 million.

Now that's what I call competing with free and still making a living!

The Internet is not Especially Dangerous to Kids!

This news from Techdirt needs to be pushed out there as much as possible. All to often the Internet is portrayed as the most dangerous place for kids in the world. It simply isn't true because, well, kids just aren't as stupid and unaware of simple stranger-danger as the more nanny-ish of adults out there would like to think.

Is this a control issue? The adults don't understand what the kids are doing, so get all over-protective?

Come on parents, grow up, and learn to judge risk online like you do in your own lives, not just by using the standards of the circulation-whoring headline-grabbers in the old media industries (newspapers, magazines, television and radio, in case you're confused over whom I'm blaming).

Update: rotten.com has this disclaimer on their site that also makes the point rather nicely.

Fairy Tale

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?
"Fairy Tale", or "Fairy Tale About Father Frost, Ivan and Nastya" to give it its complete title, is another point and click adventure from Eastern Europe. The developers, Bohemia Interactive Studio, are a Czech outfit, based in Prague. The eponymous Tale is inspired by Russian folklore, and focuses on the story of a young girl, Nastienka (Nastya), and a hero, Ivan.
The game is described by the publisher, Cenega, as being suitable for 'Any child able to switch on a computer' with parental assistance, but 'ideal for children aged 6 years'. This seems to be reasonably accurate. The game is not difficult to operate, nor overly complex in it's puzzles, but I'd be very impressed by a child of 6 who can play the entire game.
Because this game is aimed at people so much younger than me, I'll once more be asking Purple Bear (my 10-year old daughter) for some comments, in an effort to overcome the old fogey effect. Her comments are in bold italic text.

Is there a plot?
Yes. The Fairy Tale is the stories of Nastienka and Ivan. Nastienka is a young girl who has a new stepmother and stepsister to use and abuse her in classic fairy story ways. Ivan is a young hero, leaving home in search of a bride, learning humility along the way.
The two story threads are nicely interleaved; we begin with Nastya before switching to Ivan. They eventually meet, before diverging again to continue their stories. The player must help Nastya to overcome her overbearing stepmother, weak father, and annoying stepsister, and help Ivan learn some degree of humility - he's a particularly obnoxious character to begin with. I don't want to give away any more of the plot because it is about the only element in the game that is surprising. I will say, though, that Father Frost doesn't appear until very late in the game - in retrospect, his inclusion in the title is rather surprising!
I found the game fairly easy. The story was interesting and different from other games I've played. The game was not scary at all, and I think the story turned out right in the end.

How do you play?
When you start the game, you're dropped straight into the beginning of the story; a grandmother is telling a bedtime story to her grandchildren - this element returns from time to time in the game as a break between the four acts. Even to load an existing game, you have to hit the Escape key to get to the menus. The menus are simple - New, save and load, options, credits and exit - what need is there for more? Options are limited to subtitles, colour depth, special effects and sound volumes.
As I've already said, we're dealing with a point-n-click adventure. It is played in a full screen playing area, from the third person perspective, with the mouse only. There is an extensive inventory of objects to use to solve the puzzles in the game. Inventory items are changed by activities; some puzzles require the combination of items. Puzzles vary from knitting socks to extracting bears from fallen tree stumps, from defeating robbers to escaping a fiery dragon. The majority of puzzles are inventory based, but not exclusively.
The inventory is shown on a pop-down, translucent bar across the top of the screen. Most of the time, the inventory doesn't get in the way, but there were times it popped down when I didn't want to see it.
It was fun to play two different people at different times in the game.
I like the bits where Squeaky the Bat was talking and the words were upside down. The names of the characters were very unusual. But my favourite parts were Baba Yaga's dancing, and the .
Human Misery was my favourite character because she was so different from the other characters.

Notable Features
Unusually, in my experience, the manual for Fairy Tale is surprisingly informative! It is a slim affair - a mere 6 pages of information, plus credits and space for notes. However, once the author gets past the installation instructions and the detailed description of the user interface, there is a useful set of hints on adventure game playing strategy, for example, "Think 'game-like.' Improvise. You don't necessarily use all the items you find for their primary purpose. For example, a horseshoe can be used in various ways, such as throwing."
Now the game doesn't actually require you to throw a horseshoe, but if granny just gave an 8-year old child this game (it is suitable for 6 year olds, remember), and the parents have no adventure game experience, consider how useful strategy hints are going to be for all concerned! The same goes for the detailed description of the user interface.
Okay, I've covered some of the nicer features... now the downsides. The graphics and the voice acting.
I know we all say in those polls on the game factors, that the story is king, well that may well be the case, but why are we still dealing with animated games with characters that could have been drawn by a high-school student, rather than a professional artist - and if they weren't drawn by a professional artist, but by a programmer in his spare time, why didn't the developers hire a professional artist?
Now the worst factor: the voice acting. This was a real area of weakness. Most of the characters sounded like they'd been instructed to impart the opposite emotion into the lines than what was needed - or at best that any old reading of the lines would do! I only hope that the characters come over better in the original Czech. That's a do-over, guys - especially Nastya's stepmother.
There is also a key that Ivan has to retrieve early in his story, but there seemed to be bug around this as a couple of times through the game, we couldn't find the key, despite solving the relevant puzzle.
I think that the menus were quite simple to use. The key bug was the only really annoying bit.
The pictures were all quite flat, and even though they were quite colourful the game looked boring. If I could change anything, I'd change the graphics from 2D to 3D. .
I didn't need much help to play the game, except with the missing key problem and when I couldn't find the pub in the town.

Any other novelties?
The biggest novelty in this game is the use of Russian folklore as inspiration. How many times have we been to Atlantis, Egypt, a medieval land of fantasy, or Outer Space? Too many to count. But how often have we seen a game set in rural Eastern Europe? It doesn't sound an exciting prospect, but in the context of this story, it works well.
Conclusions
This game shows some promise. It has a novel (apart from the troublesome stepmother) story, given the current state of the art of adventure game writing. The interface is reasonably solid - though it did hang a few times. But, and this is a big but in my opinion, the game is severely let down by the voice acting. I feel it is especially important to get this right with games aimed at children because of the story telling aspect of the game.
The worst offence against gaming, however, was the dire execution of the voice acting. I know an evil stepmother is supposed to sound bad, but this one sounded like she'd had a stroke.
This is not really a keeper, for me. I would never replay it.
I'd say that some of most of the girls in my class would like the game, but not the boys. Even though I finished the game, I think it was a bit boring. I don't want to play it again.

Grade: C+

What do you need to play it?
Minimum Requirements
• Pentium(r) III 733 MHz or Athlon(tm) 733 MHz
• 32MB nVidia GeForce2 / ATI Radeon video card
• 256 MB RAM
• 400 MB Hard Drive
• CD-ROM or CD/DVD-ROM drive 8x
• Mouse
• DirectX certified sound card
• Windows 98/2000/XP with DirectX 8.1
Recommended Requirements
• Pentium(r) IV 1.5 GHz or Athlon(tm) 1.5 GHz
• 64 MB nVidia GeForce 4 / ATI Radeon 9600 PRO video card
• 512 MB RAM
• Sound card with 3D sound support
• Windows XP
(We used Win XP, AMD XP 2400+, 512 MB RAM, and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks, Oh My!

I read the Techdirt blog every day, generally via the RSS feed. Their usual themes are business models, law, and economics, with a US bias. One of today's posts is one of their best ever (IMHO), giving decent definitions of the above concepts: Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks. Oh my, indeed! It's nice to see these terms laid out simply and straightforwardly.

Patents: grant a monopoly to an inventor for 25 years.

Copyright: protects your creations from unauthorised copying, in order to incentivise future creative effort.

Trademarks: protect the public from confusing Bob's Cola with Coca Cola.

One of the most interesting points on the post though, is the 7th comment, where "Jerry in Detroit" points out that property is subject to property taxes, so why isn't so-called 'intellectual property" subject to property taxes? Default on your tax payments, and have your patents/copyrights/trademarks put into the public domain.

How interesting.

I wonder why we've never heard of such a concept from the US government? Perhaps Rep. Howard Berman (the "Representative from Disney") would like to bring such a bill to Congress?

Three weeks!

An update to a post I made on Jan 29th.

My replacement Netgear Ethernet-over-power (or HomePlug) unit has arrived. As expected, it's an XEPS103 unit - with built-in power supply for a Netgear router like my DG834G. This has the benefit of meaning you can plug the router into a socket, and get it's ethernet connection from the same socket.

The whole process was a bit more painful than I'd hoped, but no more than I'd expected. I ended up phoning A-Novo (Netgear's UK rep. for this recall) three times. The first time, the person who picked up the phone immediately dropped it again, putting me to the back of the queue! I was therefore, not a very happy bunny by the time I got to speak to a real person. At which point I discovered that Netgear had failed to supply A-Novo with sufficient replacement kit to cover the returns they were getting. How helpful. Not only that, but A-Novo were getting (& giving) mixed messages about when they had (or had not) been sent kit, and when they were expecting more.

However, all in all, another week of waiting, and on my third call I was informed that my unit had been shipped. Being as I don't live in London (or anywhere close to it!), I didn't believe the girl on the phone who said I would be receiving it 'today'. I received it two days later, but given my location, that was acceptable. So, now, 48 hours later, my network is still working, and I no longer have long cables trailing around doors, and up stair-wells.

I will have no problem choosing to buy Netgear equipment again in the future.

Inaccurate Journalism

I've said for many years that, as soon as you find a news story about which you have first-hand knowledge, you'll find that the journalists reporting it have made fundamental errors, and will often have failed to check their facts.

My Dad appeared on local radio in the city where I grew up, commenting on pre-Christmas retail trading (funnily enough, he worked in retail, and so knew something about this subject!), and usually found, when listening to the recording later, that his comments had been mis-edited, or mis-interpreted by the journalists. There have since been other cases in my own experience, though nothing all that important.

Now I get to point you to a detailed example in someone else's life. Joel on Software was interviewed on the subject of Microsoft's recent release of API documentation, and he has posted a correction for the benefit of anyone unlucky enough to read the journalist's mis-interpretive garbage. Mind you, Joel himself had to later post correction to his own correction! Which perhaps just goes to show how easy it is to screw up in this media business.

The opposite of the Wii-mote

Nintendo are pushing the Wii as a vehicle for increasing gamer fitness, by use of whole body movements, so how about this new Emotiv device (from Kotaku and the BBC news sites) as a complete antidote to all this bouncing around in front of the telly.

A fourteen-point sensor net, plus a gyroscope, are supposed to pick up 30 basic commands direct from the head, face and brain and transmit them wirelessly via a Bluetooth dongle to the computer. Seems an obvious choice for Prof. Stephen Hawking and many others with various bodily paralysis conditions, not to mention people who have difficulty with keyboard, mouse or game-controllers. But what will the rest of us do? Sit there drinking coke and eating nachos whilst thinking about killing the next Zombie?

Intriguing technology all the same, and not as expensive as I'd expected: $299... no price in GBP, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was £299, but that's a topic for another day.

Google's answer to MicroHoo

From a comment on New York Times BITS:

If i were google, i’d prepare to spend 44 billion on a counter-attack, not to buy yahoo, but to develop a wifi-enabled mini-laptop running an open-source OS (like the asus eee) and giving it out free of charge to every man woman and child in the USA. With one bold move google could break microsoft’s back overnight.

— Posted by stephan baishanski

Hell, why doesn't Google just buy Asus and give away 250 million eeePCs? (Okay, so 250 million times $300 (retail 2GB model at Amazon.com) is $75 billion, not $44 billion, but surely that's pocket-change to Google, and the cost wouldn't be the retail price anyway.

My only question is, so what about the rest of America, Europe, Africa, and Australasia?

Flashy product promotion

Now this is what I call a good use of Flash! (give it a moment to load)

HEMA is an international retail organisation with stores in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and Germany, but it's pretty clear from the above linked site (as opposed to their normal site) that someone there has an excellent sense of fun.

It's rather reminiscent of the world's greatest car advert or one for the gourmet, or student's of automotive dance.

Enjoy.

Superbowl XLII

On Friday I found out that this weekend was Superbowl Weekend - the XLII (42nd one, to be precise). Now American Football used to be one of my few indulgences with respect to the culture of the USA, way back when Channel 4 used to show it around 11PM. It later moved to the early hours, at which point, (surprise, surprise) the viewing numbers dropped so much that they decided to stop showing it altogether. So now, in the UK, we get one dose of gridiron a year on terrestrial TV.

In the recent past, the event has been broadcast by ITV, so I went searching around the commercial TV station listings for Sunday, and could no find no sign of the event. Oh dear, thought I. Yet another year where I go without. So imagine my pleasure when I discovered, quite by accident, on the wikipedia.org page on Superbowl XLII, that it was going to be on BBC2! No commercials need apply!! Yes, I know many citizens of the USA watch the Superbowl just for the ads, but, frankly, I couldn't give a damn for ads, US or UK.

So, for once, my TV license fee has gone to pay for something I actually want to watch! (soap-opera producers, soccer companies, 'reality' show makers, go spin!)

Finally, the game itself? Brilliant.

In the run-up to the event, the New England Patriots have had an amazing season - unbeaten though the regular season, and the play-offs. They were even taking pre-orders for 19-0 merchandising before the weekend! (19 wins, no losses - the full 2007/8 season)

Every pundit out there though the Pats would walk it. The New York Giants, on the other hand, had a poor start to the season, but ended with a 10 away-game winning streak, but are led by a much criticised quarterback, Eli Manning.

In the game, it became clear quite early on that both teams were up for this. (In the past, the Superbowl can be an anticlimactic conclusion to a tense and exciting series of playoffs). The Giants defensive team (and their defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo were absolutely stunning. The Pats might have been leading 7-3 by half-time, but the Giants were winning the ball game! Then, in the last two and a half minutes of the last quarter, the Giants and Eli Manning were given their moment to really make the winning plays. They made over 83 yards in 12 downs, to score a touchdown (received by Plaxico Burress) with 35 seconds on the clock. The Pats just couldn't bring it back from there, though, to give them credit, they tried very hard!

All in all, a game that had me awake throughout (not an easy task when it starts at 11:30PM and goes on until 2:30AM!), and on the edge of my seat (absolutely literally) for the last 5 minutes of play (that took about half-an-hour to play because of timeouts, etc).

Go Giants!

(trademark lawyers, please take note, I am not infringing the NFL's trademarks because I'm not trying to convince any member of the purchasing public that what I have here is the Superbowl XLII event - no consumer confusion, no trademark violation)

Nancy Drew, Curse Of Blackmoor Manor

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?
This is another instalment in the well-known Nancy Drew series. In fact, this is number eleven. Think about that for a moment. Eleven games based on a dramatic character. That's not IV, that's not IX, that's XI. That's even more than the Final Fantasy series. I think that counts as a successful series. Okay, so we're in multiple, multiple sequels territory here, and if the developer and publisher haven't completely nailed this one, there is something seriously wrong with the world... or at least their QA procedures.
The Nancy Drew games are marketed with a particular market segment in mind; the 10+ female gamer. So, as I am lucky enough to know one such young lady quite well, I thought I'd bring her along and let you hear from her too. She's known as Purple Bear (her choice!), she's my 10-year-old daughter, and I'll be dropping her comments in from time to time.

Where does it come from?
The character of Nancy Drew was originated by Edward Stratemeyer, alongside the Hardy Boys and many others. Since then, she has solved around 350 mysteries, written by many different authors. A number of the stories have been made into a long running TV series. Then in 1997, Her Interactive decided to specialise in adventure games aimed at the female pre-teen and teen market, and chose Nancy Drew to lead their campaign.
Seven years, and eleven games later, they're still going strong. However, this is the first one to involve international travel; it is set in England - more on this later.

Is there a plot?
This is a detective mystery; what kind of detective mystery would it be if it didn't have a plot?
Nancy has been invited to England to visit with Linda, daughter of her neighbour, Mrs. Petrov. Linda has recently married an English diplomat, Hugh Penvellyn, gaining a stepdaughter in the process. But Linda is no longer seeing visitors, and has taken to hiding behind a curtain in her bedroom. Now this would not be much of a mystery if it weren't for the location. Linda now lives in Blackmoor Manor on the misty moors of Essex, in a 14th century manor house. There are rumours of family treasure, and of course, there's the Beast that haunts the moors to add a little spice to the mix.
Purple Bear would like to add, "The story fits together well. Some bits were surprising, but nothing was really scary. I did feel concerned about what was happening to the characters. I think LouLou is my favourite character, because I like the way she talks and acts. Finishing the dragon puzzle made me feel good."
Being British, I can see there are some nasty holes in this plot. For one thing, Essex does not have moors. Fens (wet-lands), yes; moors, no. Therefore, the house should be Blackfen Manor. Worse, Penvellyn is not an Essex name - especially not one that would have survived from the 14th century. This story belongs in Devon or Cornwall - on Exmoor or Dartmoor! Where they have moors, dark manors, rumours of beasts, and ancient families with names like Penvellyn! Perhaps somebody at Her Interactive thinks that Exmoor is in Essex?
Having said all that, inaccuracies aside, I agree with Purple Bear - the story does fit together nicely, and drives the game throughout.

How do you play?
In common with the other two Nancy Drew games I have seen -- "Message in a Haunted Mansion" and "The Final Scene" -- Curse of Blackmoor Manor is a first person, point-n-click adventure game. The user interface is clean and clear. The older games have a slightly more cluttered main game screen, so this is an improvement. The menus are structured the same as the earlier games -- with the usual buttons you'd expect to see on any game. However, a notable feature of the Nancy Drew games is the 'Second Chance' button. Essentially, just before critical moments in the game (moments when you can die, or the game ends prematurely), there is an auto-save which means you can immediately return to the point before the mistaken decision.
Purple Bear says, "I like playing in the first person; it feels better to be in control. It was easy to use things in the game, and it was quite good that the tool bar covers the talking. The main part of the screen is much bigger than in Nancy Drew, The Final Scene."
Game play is all about talking to the people in the house and on the telephone, collecting clues from written and pictorial materials, and solving puzzles. The game contains a nice selection of puzzle types, but there is a sliding tiles puzzle, a maze, and a couple of timed sequences. There are two levels of difficulty to the game; 'Junior Detective' and 'Senior Detective'. Junior Detective gives more help and hints, and is more generous with the timed features. Since Purple Bear and I are both new to Nancy Drew games, we started with Junior Detective, but on replay, I'd certainly go for Senior.

Other Notable Features
Neither Purple Bear nor I had to make much use of the Second Chance button. In fact, I deliberately tried a few things just to see if I'd need the Second Chance as a result. There are some nice "game over" moments to see if you do, and of course, they don't affect your overall progress.
Purple Bear points out that, "LouLou [the hint system] is a good source of information if you use her right. The main characters were easier to get information from than LouLou, but less fun. But sometimes LouLou could be annoying, like my little sister."
I must comment on two particularly annoying features. Firstly, the cursor; although it is clearly drawn, and indicates what actions are available (moving, magnifying, acting, doing nothing, and speaking), the active spot of the cursor is somewhere in the centre of the image, rather than at the top left point, where most arrow-like cursors are active! I found this particularly annoying in Nancy's phone / web-browser device.
The second annoying feature was the accents of the characters. Several of the British accents are weak, and the American origin of the actors comes through to spoil the experience from time to time. Once again, Nancy is played by Lani Minella, and several of the other actors have played roles in previous Nancy Drew games, but there is little evidence of British acting talent being used to voice British characters. Jonah von Spreecken's "Cockney" accent brought tears to my eyes. Let's put it this way; Dick van Dyke did a better Cockney accent in Mary Poppins!
Puzzle and game clues and hints come from all sources in the house; people, pictures, objects, books, maps, diagrams and Nancy's mobile phone / web browser. Of particular note is LouLou, the parrot. At turns annoying, as only a parrot can be, and endearingly amusing, LouLou adds significantly to the humour and fun in the game.

Are there any other novelties?
Not really. I've never played a game with such a strong notion of the passage of time before, but this appears to be the norm for Nancy Drew games, so it's hardly novel.

Conclusions
As a complete experience, I enjoyed playing this game, even though it is aimed at a completely different market segment from where I would normally be found. The puzzles were not in the least bit trivial, despite playing at 'Junior' level. There were no graphical glitches or game play bugs, but there were some crashes-to-desktop. I am certainly not ruling out playing other Nancy Drew games - older or newer.

Cons:

• 2 timed puzzles, 1 maze, 1 sliding tiles game, and 1 sound-matching puzzle
• 35 save game slots
• Annoying mis-positioned mouse hotspot
• Plot hole the size of Essex
• Some really rather poor English accents
• A few crashes-to-desktop.

Pros:

• Variety of puzzles
• Good story and entertaining characters
• Nice environment, and graphics, though the people are somewhat cartoony
• Some replayability due to the different difficulty levels and complex dialog trees
• Atmospheric music and well placed and helpful sound effects.

I'll give the final word to Purple Bear: "I think the game is aimed at the right age group. It's not too easy and it's not too hard. But I needed a little bit of help with some of the puzzles. I look forward to playing more Nancy Drew, in fact I'd like some more for my birthday or Christmas."

Grade: B

What do you need to play it?
Minimum Requirements

• Windows 98/Me/2000/XP
• 400 MHz or greater Pentium II or equivalent class CPU
• 64 MB of RAM
• 300 MB or more hard drive space
• 16MB DirectX compatible video card
• 16 bit DirectX compatible sound card
• 12X CD-ROM drive

(We used Win XP, AMD XP 2000, 512 MB RAM, and an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

Product Recall

I've never been affected by one of these before, but there you go.

Netgear (a credible manufacturer of network hardware) have a bit of a problem with a relatively new device: the XE103 HomePlug network adaptor. It appears that someone forgot to do proper testing of the device in a 220/240V environment (i.e. all European and most African and Asian countries). The circuit that allows the device to run at 240V overheats and fails, in my case within 48 hours of installation. The resulting little brick is a sorry sight with no blinken-lighten or activity of any sort. But my XE104 4-port switch is unaffected (thankfully!).

But, for that first 48 hours, I was really happy with my ethernet-over-powerline network. It allowed me to remove 5 long cables (including two strung through the stair-well between two floors of the house!) and put the wireless hub / broadband modem / ethernet router in the centre of the house (it's a very neat Netgear DG834G 54Mbps Wireless ADSL Modem Firewall Router with 4-port 10/100 switch that has given me very, very good service for more than two years solid). Best of all, the powerline kit really is plug-and-play... no setup at all, unless you want to change the network password.

So, anyway, the courier will come and collect my XE103, and return it to Netgear's UK representative, at which point, an XEPS103 will be sent out. This is a more bulky device with a power supply for a compatible Netgear router builtin... which, on extra thinking, will be rather handy given how I've relocated the router next to a single socket, so that should work out okay afterall! In the meantime, my poor desktop PC is routing through a laptop sharing it's wireless connection via it's ethernet port, as re-connecting all the cabling I disassembled on Friday would just be so disheartening!

Not bad... a company releases a faulty device, recalls it properly, and still comes out smelling if not of roses, at least not of dung. (Though I reserve final judgement pending the actions of the courier and Netgear's UK rep A-Novo)

Links: the press release, the registration website, and the details of the replacement device on offer.

Pure genius

Sir Edmund Hilary RIP

I heard the news of the passing of Sir Edmund Hilary today. This guy was the first person of European descent to stand on the summit of Mount Everest, the highest point on the surface of the Earth. At the time it was quoted as 29,002 feet - a number I will never forget, though now the numbers are 8,848 meters, or 29,029 feet.

As a young lad, in the late 1970s, I read the Ascent of Everest by John Hunt. It's not a big book - it's only a few hundred pages, in a roughly A5 format, but it is a description of the 1953 expedition to Mount Everest that he led, and that enabled Sir Edmund to reach not just the roof of the world, but the very pinnacle. I found it absolutely fascinating. It was not because of any deeply moving purple prose about the achievements of the expedition, but the simple presentation of the facts of the work, and the technologies they used to achieve the summit - the ladders, clothes, and open system & closed system breathing apparatus.

Remember that this was in the period before GPS, satellite phones (in fact Sputnik didn't even fly until 4 years later!), carbon-fiber framed geodesic dome tents, high performance fabrics & climbing boots or rescue helicopters. These guys did it with cotton, wool, leather, WW II radios, aluminium, wood, steel, ridge tents, and kapok. I don't think they even had nylon ropes!

So, serious kudos to the John Hunt expedition, and all those who made it possible.

In the long run, however, I think that Hilary's contributions to the Nepalese people through the Himalayan Trust will be of greater real significance than his climbing. The Trust has helped to establish clinics, hospitals and nearly 30 schools in Nepal, to the lasting benefit of many. For this, Hilary deserves great credit in inspiring people to go beyond simple personal glorification and climbing achievement, and to really put something back into a relatively deprived society that has long supported the ambitions of foreigners to climb in the peaks of the Himalayas.

Sir Edmund Hilary, RIP, but may the Himalayan Trust continue long in your memory.

Here, here!

Oh, boy, it's not often I read a piece in the Times and agree with virtually all of it, but in this case, my own experience of the British rail network over the last 20 years of regular, cross-country and metropolitan travel is completely born out.

The British government needs, as a matter of urgency, to re-nationalize the railways, in order to drop prices by 10%, and plough all the profits, currently passed to the share holders, into the infrastructure. The rolling stock is generally okay, but the track, stations and signaling hardware is in dire need of a major re-fit. The staff needs increasing to levels where you can find people who actually work on the station on the station, and not staffing (through some contracting-out) the appalling platform 'cafe'.

Finally, scrap all these stupid fare structures ... getting from A to B should have two prices (standard and first class), regardless of when you travel, how much notice you have of when you'll need to travel(*), what route you choose to take(**), whether you make stop-offs along the way, or what colour the fabric of the seats in the carriages.

(*) "what do you mean, my mother is critically ill in hospital, I urgently need to get to Oxford NOW, but I have to pay £250 because the only train available is a commuter route and I didn't give you six weeks notice of my intention to travel!"

(**) common sense (that so-rare of commodities amongst public servants!) to be applied so that people don't get a ticket from Didcot to Bracknell, and then go via Inverness!

Remote Sensing Archaeology

I've long thought that geophysics and related sciences have more to offer archaeologists than the occasional magnetic survey or resistivity map. How satellite photography and other remote sensing technologies are being used to find significant archaeological sites worthy of further investigation. So much so, in fact, that some archaeologists are using Google Earth to search for sites. By the way, if you've never played with Google Earth you really should!

Cosmos Magazine has this article on the subject of satellite imagery and GE archaeology.

How long before someone uses high resolution imagery of territories that were covered by rising sea levels after the last Ice Age to find a significant city-level settlement?

I suggest looking around the coasts of the Mediterranean, and Northern Indian ocean! I'd put money on a site around the scale Çatalhöyük (in Anatolia, Turkey, and at wikipedia) - a 'city' thought to have had around 10,000 inhabitants up to 7,500 years ago. Since the last Ice Age was at it's maximum around 20,000 years ago, and ended roughly 12,000 years ago, and Homo Sapiens has lived on the planet for some 150,000 - 200,000 years, I think there are bound to be flooded settlements in shallow marine contexts. It's just a matter of finding the right form of satellite image.

DRM meets stupid

If ever there was an illustration as to the ultimate stupidity of DRM, this article at Techdirt comes close to perfect. The guy legally buys movies from one source, with DRM, then buys a new monitor that supports HDMI and it's associated DRM restrictions, and all of a sudden his legally purchased movies don't work any more.

The response of the companies concerned...? Downgrade to a lower-spec monitor. Duh!

Motley Fool trashes music industry

Just when you thought the RIAA was gaining traction in it's desire to get us to pay through the nose for every single format of music we use (i.e. they want to stop even ripping legit. CDs for personal use), the Motley Fool investors' advice site weighs in on the side of common sense and fair use.

From the last paragraph of their article:

As I've said before, a good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value. If it starts to pursue paying customers -- which doesn't seem that outlandish at this point -- then I guess we'll all know the extent of the desperation. Investor, beware.

Once the investor community starts being wary of financing the likes of 'Sony, BMG, Warner Music Group, Vivendi Universal, and EMI', it's clear that the writing is on both sides of the wall! No doubt the RIAA will just take this as a sign they're having an effect (along the lines of 'no publicity is bad publicity'), but when the real money begins to talk there have to be some more crinkled foreheads in the boardrooms of A-media-rica.

Gooka, Mystery of Janatris

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

Where does it come from?

Hmmm, a game from the Czech Republic? Sounds interesting! I've enjoyed games from unusual European countries before; The Longest Journey, Faust (Seven Games of the Soul), and Rally Trophy (okay, that's about classic rally driving, but still a game) spring particularly to my mind.

So, I've done a little research. Not enough to spoil the game, but something to be going on with before I get my sticky little hands on the disk... now hang on, is this based on a story, called "Gooka and Yorimar," by Richard D. Evans, or by Vlado Risa? Confusion reigns.

Okay, lets get this straight. It's "Gooka: The Mystery of Janatris", but that makes it Gooka 2; there was a Gooka game published in 1997 too. It's based on a novel by Vlado Risa, or his Western European pseudonym, Richard D. Evans. Aha! Now I've got it!

Next problem, is this a point-n-click adventure game (as indicated on the back of the box), or an adventure/RPG hybrid, as I've discovered having completed it.

Confused? Yes, I was. Thankfully, once I started playing the game, things got better.

What is it?

As I've already said, the back of the box gave me the impression that this is a point-n-click adventure. However, once you get into the manual, it becomes clear that there's a degree of character stats development, and combat. Now, we're not talking about a reactions-based, laser-blasting, gore-fest, but combat it is. I'll come back to this later.

So, after my moment of confusion, I set off for my adventure in the land of Janatris.
This game actually is, for the most part, a point-n-click adventure, but from the third person perspective. Just like Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey, Syberia, and many more excellent games, we watch our hero, Gooka, progress through an environment that could have come straight out of Medieval Europe. Except... there are bits of future tech dropped in seemingly at random!

The graphical content, both environment and characters, is nicely modelled, and well rendered (on my 2-year-old graphics card), but the character animation is a bit sluggish, and Gooka is not good at opening doors - he reaches out to them, but they then open without his holding the handle - and in many cases, without his hand being even close to the door.

For the most part, the world is quite natural in appearance, the buildings medieval, and the creatures quite believable. All the creatures, except the rats and the humans, are fictional. The special effects, particularly as used in the combat sequences, are really rather nicely done, with subtle volumetric effects and swirling colours, even on my old graphics card. The overall look of the graphics approaches that of Schizm II, or Broken Sword 3 - quite coherent environments with attention to detail and vegetation that works close up.

Is there a plot?

You want plot in an adventure game? Well, you got one here; fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles... well, almost all of that. And I'll leave it to the reader to discern which one isn't in the game. ;-)

The story works something like this: in Gooka's absence, someone has attacked and burned down his house, injured his wife and kidnapped his son (Yorimar, of the original book's title). Upon Gooka's return home, he has to fix everything. Just as you'd expect from an upstanding citizen, really.

So, it's off to the monastery to find out what's required to save Lidra, and what's happened to Yorimar. Suffice it to say that both these tasks require Gooka to travel to various parts of Janatris (the planet) and cooperate with and fight against a variety of people and creatures to reach his goals.

How do you play?

The game play here is generally quite linear, with periods of wandering, trying to achieve larger plot milestones. However, the milestones occur in a particular order, and you can't go backwards through the story, nor skip milestones.

The environments encompass a variety of settings: buildings, towns, beech, dockside, countryside, jungle, caves, a ship, and low- and high-tech castles.

You can use your mouse to achieve everything in the game, so perhaps this is the reason for the 'point-n-click adventure' description. There are keyboard alternatives to most actions, so you can mix and match mouse and keys to suit. Also, the Escape key is used to skip dialogue lines, which is handy as much of the dialogue is laboriously voice acted. The subtitles option is rather handy to get the story without waiting an eternity for the dialogue to finish. The Escape key also enables you to skip some animations (like rolling dice, or opening doors), but beware! therein lies a game crashing bug. This is rather more serious, as the use of the 'Escape' key is particularly useful to skip slow animations, but if you use if at particular animation transitions (I had trouble pinning down exactly which ones), the game will crash.

The combat sequences in the game are turn-based; you, your allies, and your opponents each get to take turns choosing an action to perform. The order of action is determined by the relative speeds of the people concerned. The fastest go first, the slowest last. I found that it was reasonably easy to learn how to do combat like this, but even the earliest fights are quite hard. Thank goodness for the AutoSave that happens before every fight. Although the game manual does describe the combat, it is lacking in the screen shots that would clarify that description.

Many RPGs involve the use of magical powers as well as swords and so on. In Gooka, we have the unusual feature of telepathic powers. However, when it boils down to it, they're basically magic spells by another name. Most of the time, Gooka's telepathic powers are used to boost his performance in combat - some powers are attacks, some are defences, some are temporary 'power-ups'. Many of Gooka's opponents and allies (whose actions during combat are also controlled by you, the player) have Mind skills, which the opponent character AI makes use of quite effectively.

The most unusual aspect of Gooka's combat skills, was the ability to shift power from his physical (Body) to mental (Mind) score, or vice versa. But the downside for me was that it seemed that the only way to win the majority of combats was to use a particular strategy which emphasized just one of those way beyond the other.

The puzzles do have a nice variety: some involve inventory items, one is a series of three timed sequences, one is audio, one is a small maze, some are pattern based and some numeric. For me, it was the dice game (no-one tells you the rules and I've never played that game before!) and the combat-based puzzles - especially the unavoidable milestone combats - that caused me the most difficulty. Until, that is, I discovered the combat strategy that worked, almost without fail, for the remainder of the game.

Conclusions

After playing this game for a few days, I began to get to like it, in a general sense.

The weaknesses are the frustrating combat issues and the dice game, the voice acting (dull & lifeless), and the lack of dramatic sound effects - a shipwreck should cause some distress in the characters involved, and make some noise to say the least! Furthermore, there were a number of times when the game would hang with a confirmation dialogue box back on the desktop, complaining of 'vertex errors'. The game didn't crash with these bugs, and clicking "OK" brought the game back. The 'Escape' key bug I mention during the dice game is rather more serious, and would be a serious candidate for patching.

However, I would say the real strengths of this game are the plot and variety of puzzles and environments. After two weeks playing, I can say that, because of these elements, I would go back and play Gooka again, which is more than I can say for many pure adventure games.

Overall grade: B.

What do you need to play it?

Minimum Requirements

• Pentium® III 733 MHz or Athlon™ 733 MHz
• 32MB nVidia GeForce2 / ATI Radeon video card
• 256 MB RAM
• 400 MB Hard Drive
• CD-ROM or CD/DVD-ROM drive 8x
• Mouse
• DirectX certified sound card
• Windows 98/2000/XP with DirectX 8.1

Recommended Requirements

• Pentium® IV 1.5 GHz or Athlon™ 1.5 GHz
• 64 MB nVidia GeForce 4 / ATI Radeon 9600 PRO video card
• 512 MB RAM
• Sound card with 3D sound support
• Windows XP

(I used a homebuilt PC running Windows XP, on an AMD Athlon XP 2400+, with 512 MB RAM, and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP graphics card)

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.