Life Outside PLT1

Gaming: Golden Axe Warrior on Sega Master System

No, not the side scroller of fame but the birds eye, top down, action adventure version that maybe a lot of people haven’t heard of released in 1991 called Golden Axe Warrior. A simple way to explain it is, it looks like the original Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo Entertainment System. In fact, I have read from places it was Sega’s way of competing with the NES at the time. If you put a play the games side by side you can see they are nearly identical.

Pros:
Quite colourful and good use of colour.
Music match mood of game.
Easy to pick up and play.

Cons:
Repetitive.
Lack of world map.
Frustrating secrets.
Unimaginative monsters.
Continue reading Gaming: Golden Axe Warrior on Sega Master System…

My new Pelikan

My latest (and 2nd to last for now) pen arrived today. It is a German made Pelikan M400 Tortoise with a Medium Nib. I picked it up from Trademe for $113 including shipping.

The M400 (like all of the Souverän Range) is a piston filler and as such holds a lot of ink. The medium nib, which writes a fine medium line, is a dry writer compared to my other pens. That been said by no means does it not lay down enough ink. The nib is smooth, the smoothest of my collection and the pen is very comfortable in my hands.

Overall I am extremely pleased with my purchase, especially I didn’t really mean to win the auction. I know  it sounds stupid but I placed my bid thinking that I would be out bid. I am now very pleased that I wasn’t!

P.S. If anyone is wanting to get into the fabulous world of fountain pens, I recomend the $45 Lamy Safari (I have an Al-Star which is the metal version).

My God, its full of arse! (Yet more reasons why Vista will chew your soul up and spit it out)

Like a bad daytime television hardsell, microsoft pushes vista. “BUT WAIT THERES MORE”… reasons to not bother.

1) 95% of existing PC’s cannot run vista. The counter argument to this runs something like “oh sure, but new computers will be able to handle it”. Freakin’ Lies: new computers will require about 2GB RAM and a high end GFX card to run Aero (not ripping of Aqua, oh no). You know what that means… the end of cheap PCs. if you want a GameBox, buy a GameBox, but what if i want a spare machine to read email / browse the web / host my porn? It shouldn’t need that much grunt for simple tasks. The argument worsens, what the hell IS vista doing to need all that power? Considered as an OS, all it should be doing is providing normal kernel functions, like process control / hardware abstraction / file management. Microkernels might not be the best idea, but is vista that monolithic that it needs all that just to manage the low level stuff? Considered as an integrated lifestyle solution (sales pitch), when you look at Tiger or KDE or windows with 3rd party apps, they don’t need nearly as much resources.

2) MSSQL server 2005 does not run on vista. I am not joking. when they developed 2005, they just assumed it would run on vista. There goes Microsoft’s major business interest. Who is going to upgrade to Vista if you cant even keep your business data online? Thats just mad.

3) Third party apps are unstable or broken on vista. About a third of common Third party apps don’t run on vista.

4) Thecurity Thecurity Thecurity. Vista promises a more secure “experience”, but does so by disabling functionality. Also the anti Phishing tool (built into the core, not even a module) has already been caught blocking safe things. apparently you can buy certificates from MS, but they have a tiered scheme. The “green” certs are very expensive. “White” certs are meant for small enterprises, but the phishing filter pretty much ignores that.

5) DRM (Dirty Rotten Motherfuckers). DRM is built into the system. For those of you familiar with microsoft’s DRM, you’ll wail now; for those not, it allows you to disable playback for any number of conditions, number of plays, time, anything. Now, that might be fine, if I am informed that shelling out 25USD will get me 5 plays of “dirty lesbian sluts go wild with dildos” ill just not buy it. The question is: are they telling you? What happens when you think you own it? Note that at NO point are they required to tell you this. More importantly though, it makes for a very poor consumer experience, i do ask you all to join me in protest against buying media in such a way.

6) Remote Crippling. Lets say you pirate vista. You are a naughty thing. And the MS have the right to take that away from you. However, they can do so FOR NO REASON AT ALL WITHOUT PROOF. This is actually a complete disregard for due process, guilty until proven innocent. But what does this do? you can only boot into safe mode, and internet access is restricted. Nice, that’ll help contacting MS to clear this up. I claim you rape babies and now I’m locking you up, burden of proof is on you. Meanwhile you are in jail with murderers, ciao.

7) management controls. TOTALLY NEW LAYOUT! A dozen clicks to add a new user. Nothing like the old one. This means that your tech/ops departments are now flying blind. Fucking wonderful.

~INTERLUDE~

reinstalls and volume licensing. Apparently MS will “allow” reinstalls. How magnanimous, especially given that there are 50 million lines of code to go wrong and less backup support than Windows XP. Also, for volume licenses, you now have to either limit your number of installs or shell out for the hardware to manage the keys. Thats right, dedicated key management servers, that you pay for.

9) Image installs. This is supposed to help install third party apps with the system, but is actually a massive security hole. What it means is that if you get some malware on the install you want to clone, your entire organization is infected. Though apparently you cannot install kernel hooks (to prevent malware), but this is removes a major software component: no longer can your AVS watch the data for patterns, it cant get access at that level.

10) Seven different editions. So far there is no real information about upgrading your edition, and all the installs take hours. yayfun.

11) SMB2. Which is not compatible with SMB. But then, SMB was barely compatible with SMB.

12) Driver Signing. Great idea, but you have no choice to opt out if you don’t mind the risk. This is bad for industry, as smaller OEMs might not be able to pay MS for the privilege of having signed drivers. It also means that the time to get your hardware running will increase. Newer hardware will be released slower, as will new drivers. Also, if your hardware is not in the current set of supported items, ye be fucked. This is moving windows to a more integrated platform, much like apple or sun. That was one of the only things going for windows…

13) Porn. Vista is a 10G install. Think of all the porn you could have had for that space, bearing in mind that you can still using Linux or Mac OS to look at your impressive collection of fapping material.

14) Removal of support. Some protocols are no longer supported: IPX, Gopher, WebDAV, NetDDE and AppleTalk. And remember, you cant patch the kernel to support them. Also, Wordpad no longer opens .doc files: this is to make people use Office 2k7, which is vista targeted, increasing the cost AGAIN.

15) XML everywhere. I like XML, its cool. But now everything MS does is based on XML. EVERYTHING! Doesnt matter what it is, XML. Office documents: XML. System Settings: XML. XML even if a better option exists. I cant help but worry about the parser overhead for that…

Apologies to hackra, read his post too.

I’m going to go price Macs and download kubuntu for my acer.

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Tales of Phantasia

This is a review for the GBA version, mind you, not the SNES fan translation.

What can I really say about this game? Well, I WAS really excited when it came into the store on April 14th. I jumped up and down and even took hours off uni to go and grab it so I could borrow the damned thing. To cut a long story short, I played the bastard when I got home and cried after playing it for about five minutes.

Yes. I cried.

It’s so god damned painful the first time you play it again after the SNES version. The GBA lacks so much finesse in comparison. The battle system is familiar, but incredibly slow and unresponsive. Button mashing does not work in this version as it once did. The start button does weirdo shitty things in the battle screen and changes the active character mode from Auto to Semi-Auto, which is a pain in the ass. I’m sure that wasn’t the case in the SNES version.

Nothing’s been done about the graphics at all, which is understandable. The menu screens are clean (though the SNES ones through the DeJap translations were better). The status and equipment screens are not. The status screen splits in two pages, where all the information, I’m positive they could have fit on one if they tried hard enough.

Although, I have to say that the biggest disappointment is possibly the most annoying. The main character’s name has been translated from the Japanese literally as “Cress” not the much smoother “Cless”, much the same as “Claus” as opposed to “Klarth” etc. Though, you know I wasn’t really worried too much because there’s a NAME CHANGE option in the SNES version! Surely they would have ported that over to the GBA version?

NO.

They bloody well didn’t and that pissed me off to no end. So here I am playing one of the greatest RPG games in history with a hero whose name is the second half of a vegetable.

He’s very much a vegetable in the game as well, which really stuck me as odd, the Magicians in the game seem a little more hardy with some new and awesomely strong spells. Arche’s abilities have surprised me a little, I really don’t remember her being that strong.

A major change to the game is getting Suzu as a playable character now. I haven’t encountered her yet, but I’ll be re-editing this when I do.

In terms of plot, not TOO much has changed, thankfully. Though it really gets to me that the dialogue has been translated and re-written for eight year olds. It’s got a PG rating, yet the game is so freaking hard, I just wonder why they even bothered trying to market it.

In saying this, it’s only gotten harder due to the fact that you can now chain Cless’s (the name I prefer) death skills together so you can have high, mid, low range techs in absolute succession with no break in-between (provided you execute the right techs which are chainable together in a certain fashion) and totally obliterate everything on screen at once, which is cool - admittedly. This chaining is very reminiscent of Phantasia’s later counterparts: Tales of Symphonia [NGC/PS2 (Japan/US only)] and Tales of Eternia [PSP], both of which are more fluid by far.

All in all they’ve pretty much butchered one of my favourite games to the point where all I can see now are the disembowelled remnants of what was one of the most fantastic RPG’s of all time.

NAMCO, you’ve really outdone yourself now. Congratulations.

5/10 from me. Playable, and is keeping me busy, but that’s it, pretty much.

The Hills Have Eyes

As a continuation of my reviewing things I havent seen, I shall deliver disparaging diatribe of a devilishly deranged and dark diction debarring this movie.

To be clear about this, I have only seen the ads. But in this case, this is more than sufficient, since my review will bear little input from the content or style of this film. Rather I am annoyed that once more, some lack wit who has just graduated film school thinks he can scare the willies out of me. No such fucking luck there Fun Boy.

So my grudge (oh the comedy) against this movie is not so much that I know that no matter how much the ads look promising, it will bore the crap out of me, and more importantly I WILL NOT BE SCARED. Given that I will yawn and fidget from the end of the first five minutes until the credits peek up from the bottom of the screen, these bastards have failed in their intent. Unfortunately, many have failed before them, I cant think of any hollywood films that have actually scared the crap out of me. The japanese, on the other hand managed to make my skin crawl; gratifying, after my long search for something to make me scared of the things that hide in the dark. Maybe the formula became stagnant in the west, a simple formula that was sufficient for most people, but not a foul little bastard like myself (this theory is borne out by such things as scream and scary movie). No matter, I know that no matter how creepy looking or well directed the ads look, the movie will not live up to much.
Thus, I shall not go see it, but only because I know that the vast bulk of unscary “scary” films has unfairly disadvantaged this incarnation of the genre.

Instead I shall go and dig up some old UFO encounter documents. now THOSE are fucking freaky.

Mission Impossible 3

[22:48] Tapping the Q: hey
[22:48] Tapping the Q:
[22:48] Jonny Doom (I walk single file, to hide my numbers…): sup?
[22:49] Tapping the Q: MI 3 is out
[22:49] Jonny Doom (I walk single file, to hide my numbers…): meh
[22:49] Tapping the Q: and it’s got Maggie Q
[22:49] Jonny Doom (I walk single file, to hide my numbers…): yeah, but why ruin a perfectly good piece of girl-flesh in a movie i know is going to make me vomit blood?

So I’m not going to see MI:3. Before anyone moans “you cant judge a book by its cover”, you can: if you could not, they would not have covers, QED. So I still get to review this crap-in-a-film-can.
This movie sucks. It is 14$ and two hours you will never get back. You will hate yourself for it.

Doominess: none whatsoever.

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V for Vendetta

Damn this movie is good.

I have been a fan of Alan Moore since childhood, in fact some of my earliest reads were from his work for the comic 2000AD. That said, I never read V for Vendetta, but many of his other creations are known to me (such as his Future Shocks, The Ballad of Halo Jones, and Watchmen), but this was enough to cause my shameful yell-and-point outburst when I saw the advert during one of the rare times that my television is actually on. Its fair to say that i was excited. More than fair, accurate.

The movie is set in a fascist future whose tenets are built around fundamentalist christianity, though the party members are venal and corrupt. Of course, I found this greatly amusing, have long espoused that no-one in power practises what they preach. Into this is injected V, our dark horse hero, but there is no revelation for V, no unmasking and no painful creation story. Rather V is an erudite and fluently peotic character with little human elements to associate with, being presented as a kind of tragicomic vaudeville actor in a guy fawkes mask (influenced obviously by Fawkes, but also by The Shadow and Dick Turpin). I am unsure if the mask was made to change slightly or if it was Hugo (Agent Smith) Weavings excelent delivery, but the mask seemed oddly expressive for a static visage.

The movie obviously echoes Orwell and Huxley, with much of the imagery and sexual control memes of 1984 being present in the regime (only ever referred to as “The Party”). The nazi imagery was somewhat clumsy, but the idea that a government can do grievous wrongs and that sometimes violence is a solution is shown with great effectiveness through the portrayal of V as a modern Guy Fawkes (indeed, the movie began on an old poem about Fawkes I dimly remember learning from my grandmother). Similarly the theme of self-empowerment by removing all ties to society, and freedom being chaos bring back memories of Fight Club. Although i enjoy such memes, i find it interesting that a story that glorifies mitigated terrorism would be made in todays social climate, and it is laudable that someone with a spine has brought it to fruition.

The directing and acting was excelent, especially Weaving’s V. Natalie Portman appeared wooden at first, but later gives a disturbing delivery of a tortured prisoner. The images used were truly visceral, such V himself, knocking down dominoes as the movie nears its end, and the portrayal of the populace sitting in front of the telly disapproving and saying “bollocks” alot, which added to the wonderfully british character of the film (the film features an amusing benny hill tribute at one point).

For those of us who doubt the honour of goverment and want an idealist hero or for those of us that just want to see major ownage and shit blowing up, this film delivers in spades.

I’d rate this a clear doominess of 5, but Instead I’m off to see it again. [[addendum: seen it again, still doomy]]

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March of the Penguins

Antarctica must be an amazingly haunting and awesome place. Pity this movie is neither of those.

To be fair the cinematography of the cold wastes is impressive, and the opening shots made me go “ooooo”. However, the lack of variation in antarctic scenery quickly became apparent, as there is only so much translucent glowing ice cliff one can look at before one realises that it is just just alot of frozen water. “oooo” indeed. Once the initial awe wears off, it takes on a quality rather like a 2 hour moving calendar, pretty: but not exactly gripping. You are entitled to live your life how you like, but I’d rather not look at a calendar for 2 hours, and I certainly would not pay for the priviledge.

The penguins themselves are marvellous to watch… “but some of them will not survive”… if Morgan Freeman ever shut up. Normally a powerful voiced actor, for some unfathomable reason he felt compelled to drone throughout the entire movie in a monotone, and every time that the penguins encountered some trial in thier life-cycle Freeman would intone “some of them will not survive”. This was at first poigniant, then amusing, and finally about the 12th iteration it became frustrating. I cannot help but harbour the suspicion that he was deriving some kind of glee out of saying, for all the relish in his voice.

Despite the film makers best efforts to bore you to cardiac arrest, penguins are interesting birds (I have had the opportunity to stand close to the gentoo and king penguins at Kelly Tarltons), but a 2 hour movie with Morbid Morgans voice was not a good idea. Perhaps if this had been a national geographic 40 minute special with David Attenborough the tables would have turned. Alas, it was not to be, for as movies go this one does not survive.

Doominess: 1, 2 if you are feeling charitable.

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