blake johnson

I finished Star Wars: The Force Unleashed last week. I had a lot of fun with this game, but I was disappointed to discover that I mostly agreed with the reviews I read. This is a game that has great elements. Playing a dark Jedi means that you get to destroy basically everything in your path. And the designers wrap each level in a story which is about as good as video game storytelling gets. Unfortunately, the overall experience is diminished by a couple of annoying flaws which really should have been caught by quality control. First of all, there is the targeting system. I can’t even begin to describe how annoying it is to repeatedly lose a boss fight because you are trying to grab the box right in front of you but the game keeps trying to grab the static object which is unmovable behind it. Now, this is challenging programming task to get right… and while it occasionally frustrated me, I was able to overcome the targeting problems. The more serious issue is with the Star Destroyer.

Here is a set piece which has the potential to leave the gamer screaming, “that was awesome!!!” but instead, it causes him to get increasingly frustrated, have to read several online guides after unsuccessfully trying for 30 minutes, return to his computer 15 minutes later to get some help from YouTube videos, and then he finally is able to complete it. And why did this happen? Because the little joystick images at the bottom of the screen which direct the player to the proper alignment of the Star Destroyer do not correspond with the actually game mechanics. In other words, you have to ignore what the game is telling you to do in order to beat the game. Huh? How did this ever get past the testers? (For anyone curious, the star destroyer is not properly oriented until it is rotated so that you can see the underside of the ship)

Unfortunate to see a game with so much potential get dragged down by a couple of careless problems.

After discovering it on a physics blog yesterday, my labmates and I have all become obsessed with a flash physics game called Fantastic Contraption.

Procrastinators may want to stay away.

I bought Guitar Hero 3 for the Xbox 360 about a week ago (I know, I am a bit late getting on the bandwagon). I find it to be a rather fun rhythm game, less exhausting than DDR (a minus, I like the physical craziness of DDR), but also a less familiar experience (a plus). I am stuck on medium difficulty until I get more familiar with the game.

Something that surprised me, though, as I was browsing the iTunes music store’s best sellers a couple days ago, was that many of the songs I had been playing in Guitar Hero were on the best sellers list. After a bit further investigation, I noticed that almost the entire song list of Guitar Hero 3 is on the 100 best sellers in the Rock genre of the iTMS.

Maybe I should not be surprised that Guitar Hero can revive interest in some great rock classics— it is a popular game and it features some great music. However, it does suggest something else… the makers of Guitar Hero now have a good argument that they shouldn’t have to pay to license songs for future Guitar Hero games, because having your song in their game will create a massive increase in demand for your music.

It also means that we have entered a time when video games are influencing music listening, and not in some minor way. Digital music sales have finally surpassed retail store sales, so when the top sellers on iTMS are from a video game, that indicates a big impact. It would be fun to see some real numbers on sales for these songs.

Nothing can ruin your day like having your file server crash at the end of a long day. This happened to me yesterday, and I have been dealing with the repercussions for a good 24 hrs, and it looks like I have another day of the same in store for me tomorrow.

Luckily, the pain has been dulled somewhat by a marvelous little flash game that I found through Wired. The game mechanics of Bloxorz are dead simple, but it is a lot of fun.

The goal of the game is to fit the block into the hole, without falling off the edges of the level. Enjoy!

Let me show you what I have been looking at every time I try to play Far Cry or Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast for more than 5-10 minutes:

I get to look at that garbage, for which the only option is a hard reboot of the computer. I have been trying to track down the source of the problem. First of all, I discovered that I was probably pushing my RAM a little too hard (I had the CAS timing set to 2.5 but it should have been 3 ns). Then I discovered that I was inadvertently overclocking the AGP bus from 66 MHz to 68 MHz. I am told that my graphics card (an NVidia GeForce 6800GT) really requires that the bus be locked to 66 MHz. Alas, while I was initially hopeful when on my first attempt after correcting these problems I played 15-20 minutes of Far Cry without a problem, eventually I got stuck with the same fuzz of pixels.

So, let’s analyze the potential culprits:

1. The system is overheating - I have put a lot of work into fixing this, so I find it unlikely.
2. My power supply is not supplying a stable current - another distinct possibility given the type of problem. I would find this more likely if I didn’t have a high-quality power supply (an Antec TrueBlue 480W).
3. My DRAM is hosed - a likely possibility. I would like to run Memtest86 for a few hours to test this, but at the moment my CD/DVD drive is also refusing to read burned media, so I need to replace the DVD drive before I can check this.
4. My CPU is hosed - I haven’t experienced any computer trouble outside of video games. Processor-intensive tasks such as encoding video to H.264 work fine, so I doubt this.
5. My video card is hosed - the most likely candidate in my mind. This card has always run very hot, and it doesn’t get extensive use in my computer except when I play games, which is when I am having trouble.

Sadly, if the problem is the video card, I don’t have very good upgrade options. My system requires an AGP video card, which is no longer supported by the video card manufacturers (PCI Express has widely replaced the AGP standard). I think it is silly to put $100 into buying an old video card which would work with my current setup when that money could go towards overhauling my entire system. With that in mind, I have specced out a new CPU, motherboard, and video card. I think I can put together a system which can run the latest games at respectable framerates (at very high/max settings) for only $600.