Coming back

So, basically I've been in not the best health lately and haven't spent any time at my PC... Then I was on holiday for a week and coincidentally I was quite lazy all through my illness AND holiday! So the blog has taken a back seat...

I'm pretty much back in good (well, better) health again and maybe even not so lazy... So the posts are on their way back aswell!

On a related note, I'm going to host a couple of relevant posts from my wife who will explain the delicate side of gaming from a ladies point of view and if there's any of you that have ideas for articles or reviews or cheese flavours - Send them to me!

See you soon.

Dimensional shift oncoming.

So, I got a bit carried away recently with an extraneous purchase... I had to justify it to myself, and the amount I saved was one part of that, another was that I like to be amongst the forerunners of new PC tech' so I'm then equipped to talk about it and more importantly (for my job), to sell it. It's a fantastic excuse, er, I mean "reason" for effectively spending over £300... *cough*

As I mentioned in a previous post, I preceded this purchase with a Graphics Card upgrade. For those that care, I'm now running an nVidia 285 GTX with one gigabyte of it's own stupid fast memory. Once that was fitted, tested and running smoothly I just had to wait for the real kit to arrive... Now there's a whole dull back story to this, that involves distribution channels for PC hardware that's immensely dull but can also be immensely impractical. Really, the way that this industry works leaves me as confused as a Redneck in a Sauna with his naked Mum and Sister...

Back to the point; The real upgrade here was a new monitor and matching 3D Glasses. As a consumer it would cost you lot somewhere in the region of around £350 to £400 for both items combined. I realise I could have gone the cheap way and bought a TV Guide when they next show Jaws 3D for the complimentary Red and Green Paper Glasses, but hey, I felt like fighting against the Credit Crunch in my own geeky way...

To give you a very quick rundown over how this all works, I'll try and keep it in terms that we can all understand... And do bear in mind, I'm glossing over all the technical details, not only because no-one wants to read technical white-sheet style crap, but because I'm lazy and don't want to do anymore "research"...

The glasses are actually kind of mini LCD screens that "blink" 60 times per second, per eye. As each eye blinks separately, the monitor is told to display 50% of the image in synchronisation with whichever eye is open. So when you combine the two lots of "blinks" at that speed (120 times per second), you get a solid image that appears to quite literally stand out from the screen. The reason it has to do it at 120 images per second is to stop users brains from exploding in the typical Scanners (check iMDb) way. You see, most older forms of proper 3D caused the majority of users to get massive amounts of retina strain, causing severe headaches. This obviously wouldn't be acceptable for anyone who's payed £400 for the latest tech-toy!

What you all REALLY want to know, quite obviously, is "Do I look a tit wearing the glasses?" and "Does it all actually work?". The answers, amazingly, are "No, not too much of a tit; just a bit..." and secondly "You're goddam fucking right it does!".

Right now there are quite a few upcoming technologies for 3D display, however this one here happens to be the most efficient right now. It's very easy to setup, it doesn't make your brain do an impression of a melon falling off a roof and most importantly, it genuinely works. The other techs' that are on their way or are being implemented just now are mostly built into the screens themselves, but there are many more problems associated with this; cost being the most considerable. I thought that £200-£250 was expensive for a 22 inch monitor but when the 3D screens become readily available we can look at way over twice that cost, possibly even three to four times that...

There is one minor problem right now... There isn't a single game out right now that is actually designed specifically to use this setup. However, there are a LOAD of titles in development for it, by pretty much every developer you can name and more importantly, through some clever programming nVidia have managed to make this third dimension work on older titles. There's a large list of games that all work with it on the nVidia website, and that list gets bigger every time they update the driver. Some of these games are absolutely spectacular in proper 3D.

Another big bonus to the whole idea is that it also works for 3D films, of which there are an increasing amount coming out; thanks to the iMax chain of cinemas. You can also make 3D pictures and photos using some clever software. This leads to the inevitable however; 3D naked people and probably also 3D naked people fucking... The Porn industry is almost always the deciding factor in whether a new media type becomes accepted as the standard or not. DVD was given a massive boost by porn, as was home video before that. I'm somewhat scared by the idea of large 3D peni (i prefer that as a plural of penis, than penises. Don't ask...) waving around the screen, but well, it'll undoubtedly rock many peoples boat! To be honest, I can't really see 3D porn taking off, but I've been wrong before...

To get to the crux of the matter, should you consider buying this? Well, I have two answers, one for those of you who're spending like it was 2005 and another for those of you who're waiting for the sky to fall on their heads due to the imminent end of the world through not having enough money/equity/whatever...

1 - If you can afford it and need to upgrade your monitor anyway, go for it, absolutely. I like getting technology early and so should all of you. The early adopters are the heroes of the modern world. Without people taking a risk on new technology we'd still be listening to cassettes and watching black & white TV and eating dinosaur poo (I made that last one up...).

2 - Yes. Do it, even if you cant afford it, sell your current monitor, your cat and family members if necessary. We're almost at a zenith on current display types and really we need 3D to come along and shake up the system. Do we need more hi-def? I'm already grossed out when I watch a talk show in hi-def, seeing the people's spots in pixel/pore perfect resolution, larger than my own hand... Hi-def is more than high enough; it's time we came up with something that has a greater impact on our viewing. That something is the third dimension.

We've been living in three (four if you're pedantic) dimensions since the dawn of time, can't we start watching things and playing things that way? What's the point of having two eyes with depth perception if our number one pastime isn't made better by two eyes instead of one? Go on people, reach out, sample the future. Just imagine, 3D genitals! Coming soon to a screen near you, smell and taste-o-vision! (maybe not...)

The Internet, in it's entirety.

I think this about sums it up, the collective knowledge of the whole planet:

Cats, nudity and anime. Is there anything else to the internet, really?

Dying 2 do it all over again! [pt2]

* - continued...

Now to me the Left 4 Dead 2 announcement should have been fantastic news, and Valve were a company I had a lot of respect for, not least because they don't normally rush a game to market, especially a follow-up to such an influential and important title. However the alarm bells started ringing in my head. It completely seemed to me like they'd turned into more little milk-maids of the game world, grasping L4D's udders and milking it for all it's worth.

I was upset and amongst the first group of people to post on forums, criticising Valve for their new found "biz" skills. I joined an online petition for Valve to release this as a simple add-on for their game, giving us faithful players the value that they had themselves promised us many times. You see L4D was meant to have additional story parts added to it as free downloads. New weapons, new maps and possibly even new enemies to eviscerate. I felt betrayed by the only big gaming company that seemed to care about their fans. I even enlisted friends to join the petition.

You see, I was a tit. I've come to realise that even though I criticise other people for finding the negatives before the positives, I actually do it myself. My first instinct is usually a brief hint of optimism followed by a larger dose of quiet pondering to whatever bad side there could be, and then elaborating on it. Thankfully I usually then go onto a further stage of analysis that's mostly hopeful.

A year. I really thought that twelve months wasn't enough time with a single game. Other than my wife (obviously) and music, there's rarely anything that extends beyond a couple months in entertainment time. Say we pay £30 for the average game, which most people get at least fifteen hours of play from; that's £2 per hour. There's not a lot you can do for that price. Fun parks take tens of pounds every hour from you, a film costs £15 for up to two hours. Really, it's amazing value. Sure you could say the PC or XBox costs much more initially, but that's actually irrelevant as most people get their value from that in the sheer quantity of other things to do than games.

I've since watched some more clips of L4D2 and read a whole lot more. I've re-discovered my faith in Valve. They've made so many little changes that we'd be playing a slightly different game every couple of days if they were to add them all incrementally. What I would like to see mostly, are a bigger variation on the Special Infected (boss zombies) and more maps. Valve have also released the official L4D authoring tools, allowing everyone and their goldfish to build maps and change whatever they like. They've made numerous fixes and improvements to the gameplay and have basically got rid of 90% of the server browsing functions (it actually works now). Valve really do have our interests at heart, and after I realised this I took my name off the petition/group-list that is berating them on facts we don't even really know yet.

So with a renewed enthusiasm, I decided to do a little preparation to my PC for what I'm sure is going to be the game of 2009. I upgraded my graphics from something stupidly powerful, to something ridiculously powerful. I purchased a new widescreen super duper ultra high refresh monitor, and the one really over-the-top accessory that's more like a kilo of cherries on top of the cake; 3D Glasses.... They however, are a topic for another post. I'll just say "goddam!"...

I keep checking on all the new zombie films that are coming out, and there's probably five or so every month now, and actually one or two every few months that look fairly decent! It's now getting to be as big as the rest of the horror genres combined. We see AAA blockbusters released that are just glorified zombie shoots. Will Smith in I am Legend being one of the more entertaining. Yet for all these great films, I'd trade them all in for the hope that Left 4 Dead 2 doesn't disappoint.

I'm not going to talk about the game in any vague detail, as there are hundreds of other and better informed sites doing that every day. I posted this because I realised that a simple game had the power to get me more riled up than my own countries politics and current affairs. It got me more excited than any news about a favourite bands album. Games truly have become the number one form of media based entertainment. It's about time we treated them in a mature way. Not stamping our feet when we get something we weren't expecting. If we stop acting like children maybe the developers will stop giving us products for children. Maybe in fact, we can have our cake and eat it...

Left dying to do it all over again! [pt1]

Of all things Zombie, my single favourite is Left4Dead; the multiplayer co-op survival horror first person shooter (fps) from Valve. It's quite literally genius. I've played it for eight hour sessions at a time, with only small breaks to get a cuppa or let nature's course (and the previous cuppa) run through, so to speak... I'm going to come back to L4D in a minute, but I have to inform you all how bad I have this Zombie bug.

On one hard-drive alone, I have a directory of just Zombie films. At the last count, a few months ago, it was at a hundred and twenty, plus... I've probably obtained roughly one or two more per week since then and easily have a hundred and fifty now. I've watched all of them barring maybe three. Every single one has it's own quality, even if in many cases that quality happens to be a total lack of quality; they can still be admired even for that though, and of course for having zombies in them.

It all started when I was about eleven or twelve and watched Evil Dead 2 with my parents. For the first time I could remember, I cried, not in fear, but from laughing my pre-teen ass off. It made me jump, shriek, jump again, then laugh. A full ninety minutes later I was exhausted and delirious. Stunning. After that baptism of blood it took many more years before I realised I'd become a closet zombiephiliac.

Later I started to admire the earlier Italian zombie films, initially the Fulci films and I then found my way to Day of the Dead; George A Romero's third film in his series. I also laughed at that film, but a completely different kind of laugh. I wasn't guffawing at the Abbot and Costello style slapstick of a man getting his ass kicked by his own, and still attached, Zombiefied hand, but at the sheer gruesome spectacle I was witnessing. At the time it was Tom Savini that blew me away. Seeing a man pulled in half, hearing his voice reach almost ultra-sonic levels as his vocal chords stretched, tore and finally rend apart, all on screen. No dark filters or night time lighting to hide shoddy effects. No, this looked as real as my own hand in front of my mouth.

As I got over my teenage years I began to understand what it was that Romero was actually doing in each of his films and my love for them grew. There were deep social and political issues that he dealt with, that in complete honesty no other director would touch. Around the same time I began tracking down more classic Italian zombie films and finally over the few years I've broadened my collection; figuring that if there's one genre I can have every single entry of, that would be the one. Really I should have picked something more artistic or classy. Then again, I'm basically a geek...

It's at this point that I came to play L4D. I was excited when I first read about it; multiplayer game's where you band together to fight a common enemy appeal to the social and competitive gamer in me. Soon after the screenshots, I was playing the beta version a couple months in advance of the full game being released. Only two small maps and a couple of guns, yet I played that fifteen minute snippet over and over, more times than I could possibly remember. I had Gears of War, Assassins Creed and many other excellent games at the time, but that little demo whipped 'em all, like a fat girl in black leather, called Miss Payne. Or something...

After what felt like aeon's, the full game came out; I'd pre-ordered and pre-loaded it from Valve's Steam gaming network. I started it up, kicked off the single player campaign and relived a combination of Evil Dead and Day of the Dead (with some 28 Days Later thrown in for good measure). It scared me, excited me, amused me and made me rush through to Audrey's office every ten minutes to tell her how I barely survived a fifty strong zombie horde rushing me at a breakneck pace. Me backing away, throwing a Molotov cocktail down on the ground to snag any zombies trying to get to me through the flames. There were hundreds of moments I played through, each one of them like a classic heart-stopping moment straight out of any of my favourite films. Pure and simple genius. The game is a classic.

Forward the clock on a few months, Valve are at some games show with a big announcement. I wouldn't say I get excited when Valve announce something, but I get erect. Actually, I do mean excited... Anyway, I scan through the posting, bypassing the title, eagerly lapping up all the details; being able to sever a zombies foot and watching it hobble slowly towards you. Completely amputating it's legs and watching it drag itself along by the hands before bringing your axe down on it's head to finish it off. Further into the announcement the magic word appeared; "Chainsaw". Jesus himself appearing in front of me and giving me a lifetime worth of bread couldn't have had a bigger impact. Though maybe if he gave me a shitload of cash or magic powers instead of bread my reaction would be different. After satiating myself on all the announced Zombie goodness, I read the title; Left 4 Dead 2.

* - to be continued...

More law? Jude Law? No law.

Moores law; PC technology will improve at a factor of two times every two years. Similar to the level of hair recedence (word?!?) that Jude Law has: 50% less every two years; coincidence? I think not... In actual fact, it wasn't Moore who created this "law". Much like Bell and Edison, he simply refined an existing concept(ual statement) and took the credit for it and attached his name to it, much like leeches stick themselves to juicy people... If you look at the below graph, you'll find it mind-numbingly dull. It is in fact a law that is massively exaggerated and is only vaguely accurate. PC performance changes far more erratically than every two years. The law is only really concerned with the doubling of transistors in a chip and the clock speed. If you're not so interested in computers, then clock speed is how fast time moves. On wheels. Maybe a skateboard.

Recently there's been a monumental shift in computing that completely negates pretty much any law dictating speed increases. Graphics Cards can now be used as General Purpose Processing Units. The common term is actually GPGPU, the centre G standing for Gorgeous. Did I mention that I find silicon and circuits very erotic? Doing common computing tasks like encoding or decoding video, is about 10 or more times faster using a powerful graphics card than a powerful CPU. Well, maybe encoding and decoding isn't exactly a "common computing task"... That would be more along the lines of googling "cheap tarts" (and getting a Sainsbury Lemony type...). So these last two years have seen the effective power of a PC increasing by maybe 15 to 20 times even though the actual transistor count may have only doubled.

I find that part of the problem with PCs is the constant hardware upgrade cycle. It's producing the laziest programming since the dawn of computing; that hallowed moment when some foresighted genius realised that with all of humanities learning and capability to create essentially god-like power, would be best served by allowing us to look up pictures of cats and breasts. However to not wander from topic, you only have to look at the Demoscene coders to realise that with these uber PCs we now have, we're barely pushing them.

Let me give you an example... I've got an over-clocked quad core with four gigabytes of ram, terrabytes of hard-drive space, a graphics card that can probably calculate the combined gravitational pull of the entire solar system in a few seconds. Yet the games themselve improve by very small increments each year and with regular but very small steps in the graphics department. I'm still playing games that looked great three years ago, yet by Moores law they should be eight times better than they did then. The demo coders believe in pushing a small amount of processor, memory and graphics use to it's absolute limit. It's dull to those of you with lives, yet the things these people do with less than a single megabyte of combined memory really put to shame the run-of-the-mill developers releasing "Generic War Game 11".

I'd like to see these coders combine their talents but keep their ethics on programming, to see what they can really do with these uber computers we almost all use on a daily basis now. We should be at a point where games look as good as Pixar movies. Yet because developers are sloppy in their understanding of what the PC can actually do, we're still playing the same looking Marines vs Aliens(tm, me) goddam games we were years ago, and the big difference now? Daylight can turn into night. Wow-fucking-eee. Still it could be worse, the last big thing before that was a lens flare. Games industry types kept going on and on about them for about two years, but what are they exactly, for those of you who don't read technical documents on this kind of boring crap? Well you know those irritating circles and lines you see when you look at a light with your eyes slightly screwed up? Those, cool, huh. *cough*

We see a similiar level of improvement in game graphics on the consoles to the PC's, yet they have static hardware... How can that possibly be if Moores law dictates a doubling of hardware performance every two years? Well, the console only developers, who actually push the graphics of those systems TRY HARD! It's like magic, really, they look to themselves and each other, combine their collective talents and work at improving something through increased knowledge. The shame is that PC developers berate them for sticking with end-of-life hardware, but there's nothing substantially better here on the PC than on those aging boxes sitting under your TVs.Where do the non MHZ/speed based improvements factor into this, I ask, not knowing the answer... Recently-ish some slightly mentally deficient people created a computer dress made of tiles of circuit boards that are powered via other tiles of solar power cells. Is this monumental piece of technology that's pushed our understanding of the world, getting added to Moore's Laws equation? Actually, I hope not. It's silly.

So, what's my point? It may be that I've found a new law. It's going to state "PCs will double in performance over some unquantified period of time, and mans hairline will recede in a similiar period". Jude's Law indeed...

Sony; making me blue all over again.

Blu-Gay*, or -Ray, whichever... I just read that Sony are delighted, they've sold four times as many Blu-Ray discs these last twelve months as they did in the previous twelve months! Sounds impressive, no? In fact, no. The format launched in Summer 06 and had almost no take-up with customers due to the prohibitively high costs, so the first year or more can be completely ignored when you rate it's sales performance. Realistically it can only be considered as a format since Sony's PS3 came to market. This leaves it with about two years of sales. Quite obviously the second year of a two year sales history is going to be considerably larger, unless we're talking about Franz Ferdinand album sales...

Going deeper into their numbers bullshit, you can attribute a huge amount of the last years sales to Discs that were sold as a bundle with the PS3 itself... Another 1.7 million sales go to Batman: The Dark Knight alone... So if you add the bundle sales, which are probably a few hundred thousand to the Batman ones, you're left with only a couple hundred thousand sales of Discs alone. That's hardly going to set any sales records or get the managers at Sony hard in their pants thinking about all the extra money they've (not) made...

In actual fact there are a whole bunch of completely unrealistic idiotic engineers/designers working at Sony. I'm not going to go into their sometimes absurd hardware decisions, instead I'll just remind you of a few media decisions from their past...

Mini-Disc. Still popular and going strong, a real competitor in the public opinion to Audio Cd's! Hmm... They're still used by a select few, but only for making up compilations or for open air recording. I say it again, "hmm". My point being perfectly illustrated by the complimentary diagram of a mini-disc to the right...

UMD. Universal Mongoloids Disc, to give it my fully considered title, is a nonsensical and absurdly noisy pile of crap. Shouldn't media be as close to silent as possible so you can actually hear what's on it as opposed to the clattering of a cheap mechanism?!?

BETAMAX. We can thank Sony for fucking it up on this one. VHS was actually poorer quality but had lower construction costs. Well done Sony for again pricing a product out of any normal human beings budget. VHS vs Betamax is a fairly similar format war to the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD one that's only recently been lost by HD-DVD, with the exception that Blu-Ray is VERY much more costly to produce than HD-DVD was... Nice one again Sony, you fuck-tards.

Surely at this point in time, they should have been working on Digital downloadable media instead of a tangible grab-able product that's going to be obsolete before it gets mainstream acceptance?

Whatever way, look hard at Sony, and if you discount the Walkman and some better than average TVs, it's a company with a history of failure. I'm privy to certain sales numbers, and during the late 90's (actually, maybe the early 2000's) every single section of Sony was losing money apart from PlayStation; which kept the rest of the company afloat... Is this a company with their customers in mind? Do they make well balanced beneficial decisions? Does the PS3 look like the George Foreman Grill? No, No and most definitely YES!

* - Apologies for the awful and politically horrific opening joke. I've since punished myself for it by beating myself around the head with a turquise sex toy.