In My Experience

TrackBack spamming.

2005-02-01T09:06:36-05:00

I just removed all trackback links and removed the trackback cgi because some jackass has been pinging each and every blog entry on my site (and that sends me an email, and I hate email, especially hundreds of them).

When this site comes back into some more regular development, all that comment and trackback stuff will be off due to spamming douche bags like today's gambling advertiser (who's a an idiot because they could have just pinged the Communiblog and gotten their one set of links on all pages in one single ping).

I hope rel="nofollow" puts you fuckers out of business.

Back to basics.

2004-09-07T11:43:10-05:00

Over the last couple of months I have not been blogging (obviously) and have instead been spending time with my family, playing video games, and working. To bo honest, I haven't missed it at all, and perhaps it's because I have gotten bored with the whole thing, or my core interests have simply migrated. I'm not exactly sure what the deal is, but I do know that this site will continue on.

There are a couple of posts on this site that still prove to be useful to people (mostly the ones with javascript code ready to be stolen) and those will remain available, as will the entire archive. Hopefully I'll get back to adding to this site again, but it's likely going to be stuff more directly targeted to me (and probably more boring for you).

For a while, I was blogging items that I thought would be interesting to my (one or two) readers, and that really isn't what blogging should be about (imho). I named this site "In My Experience" for a reason, and that's the simply write about my experiences with things. I plan on getting back to that, but I really have no idea when.

Also, I'm disabling comments for the time being due to the constant comment spamming that has been going on.

Review: RalliSport Challenge 2 for Xbox

2004-06-03T15:56:48-05:00

The most telling fact about this review should be that I finished the game. There are four racing series ranging from Armature to Professional to Champ to SuperRally. The last one only unlocks when you have beaten the Champ series.

Each series plays out like a NSCA March Madness like bracket where you ear points in each race cluster you finish. A race cluster being anywhere from one to four races. If you do well and place first, you get 20 points, and you need a certain amount of points to advance to the next bracket of available races. This allows you to play thru the entire solo campaign more easily and non-linearly than the first game where if you didn't win, you didn't advance.

In the Pro series I played each and every race, won all of them and fished that series with a perfect score (720 points I think). In order to save time in the Champ and SuperRally series, I only bothered to race enough to gather enough points to move on to the next round, but I did finish the solo campaign. But, don't think that it never got tough, or challenging, because it did, especially in the snow rally races in Sweden.

The reason I played everything is due to the all around polish the game has over other such titles as Toca Race Driver 2 and Project Gotham Racing 2. The standard of visual quality in RC2 of Toca2 is an order of magnitude, while the difference between RC2 and PGR2 is not as pronounced. In many ways RC2 is just a dirty version of PGR2 with a way more organic feeling with all the dirt flying around, and with a boost in graphical realism.

Toca2 has a pretty wide range of racing styles, and within it's own universe of rally racing, RC2 offers ample variety. Hill climbs, rainy nighttime rally racing, downhill dirt fests, stadium ice racing, mud with standing water, leaf covered tarmac, etc. All of this variety is underscored with pretty well designed and well implemented environments that very much feel like the english countryside, or the cliffs over Monaco, or the snowy forests of Sweden. Add in the elevation changes, and you get something that is much more interesting than Project Gotham Racing 2.

On the other hand, the variety of cars leaves something to be desired (for me anyway). I may be ignorant about rally cars, but for the most part, many of the cars feel, drive and act the same. The Suzuki loves to get sideways, the Volvo 240 loves to bounce, the Tacoma is nice and fast, and the 206 T16 looks like an ice cream truck. Besides these examples, there isn't much car variety.

For those who want to play online, you really should (and are pretty much forced to) play the offline campaign to unlocks the cars you will need to be competitive. The Supra and the Saab are fast, and if you are puttering along in the Opel (which has the most awkward sounding clutch/shifting mechanism), you are going to lose. I liked being able to onlock everything in Toca2 (for a price of course) without having to finish the solo campaign (which is a lot harder than the RC2 solo campaign, imho).

Also, for the online play, more than four player races will be automatically set to wireframe mode, and the wireframes are stylized, and extremely distracting. If colissions were not turned off, a 16 player rally would be a terrible racing experience, so I think they made the right decision there, but the wireframes are just horrible. Also, they totally screwed the pooch on the voice communication while racing.

You can only hear who is directly in front of you, and directly behind you while racing (in the lobby you hear everyone). If you are third in a 10 player race, you can only hear and talk to second and fourth place racers. It makes it really tough to have a conversation with anyone due to the many position changes that occur in most races. what's worse is that the leader and last place racer will only hear who is second or in front of them (respectively). This MUST be fixed imho, and setting it to be three people in front and behind would be a huge improvement. I suspect bandwidth issues are at play here though, and I have no hope for a change.

The bandwidth is, I believe, being sucked up by the car telemetry. As far as I can tell so far, the position of cars while racing is more accurate than it is in PGR2. Quite often, I will get bumped or bump someone in PGR2 and that situation played out differently on the other person's screen where the bump was more significant, or no bump happened at all. I have yet to experience that in RC2.

The online scoring is similar to PGR2 where your points only go up, and really are just a measure of how much you play the game. There is no ELO rating to tell you who is really good or really bad at the game, so it's hard to be a stat whore in this game, and I think that's for the best.

Last, I want to mention that the XSN integration in the game is very interesting, and I wish more games had it. It's too bad XSN is being shelved for the next year because it could enhance other games that aren't necessarily sports (eg, Crimson Skies). The organization of rally racing thru XSN allows for competition when you, as an individual, have time to compete. This is a great addition to the game and is a should be significant factor in your decision to buy a racing title for the Xbox. PGR2 and Toca2 are both worth the price, but the newness and overall polish on RC2 has resulted in RC2 getting all of my racing play time.

Major Nintendo DS HCI issue.

2004-05-13T15:38:43-05:00

IGN got a chance to play with the new Nintendo DS, and had this to say...

Movement is done by the D-pad: side-step left and right, run forward and backward. To lock onto a target, players hit the L trigger. Aiming, rotation and shooting is pulled off with the stylus; dragging the stylus around will have Samus turn and look up and down, offering a sort-of "mouselook" FPS control to this shooter on the DS. Shooting is performed by repeatedly tapping the screen�obviously the faster players can tap, the more shots they can get off.

Using that picture of the orange theme DS as a guide, imagine this...

The D-pad, which is on the left side of the unit, is used "side-step left and right, run forward and backward" and locking on to enemies requires the left trigger (right next to the left index finger of the person in the picture). So, my left hand is holding the left trigger down, and my left thumb is moving the D-pad. And now I'm supposed to use a stylus in my right hand to fire...

I'm left handed. And the fulcrum provided my left hand means the unit is going to get torqued down as I pound it with the stylus in my right hand while trying to kill the enemy. This sounds beyond awkward, and I hope this is one of those tech demo things where they are showing something working as opposed to showing how it should actually work/be-fun.

Transition.

2004-05-07T14:22:04-05:00

Much time and effort on this over the last couple of years has migrated from working and video gaming to working, parenting, and video gaming. For now, this leaves no time for blogging, but I have plans to keep posting items that I want to remember for more than a day or two and other plans to build the site up as a résumé platform.

I don't think I'm going to lose my job soon (but who knows) and really just want to assemble most bits of work and related materials into one cohesive unit. In the near term my plans are to...

migrate to Movable Type 3.0 (comment icons will be broken for a while)
get the blog off the home page
maintain the archives and comments as is
retire the Communiblog
redesign the main interface

and to not post very much for a while.

I have some usability of web forms interactions questions I want to post and some javascript that's worth posting. But that will wait until I have time, and with a first birthday coming up for my daughter, that's not the time.

Many thanks to the regular comment posters, and fuck you very much to the comment spammers.

See you soon/later.

Review: Toca Race Driver 2

2004-04-27T11:34:36-05:00

I have played thru 27% of the solo campaign and have played a few multiplayer races in Toca Race Driver 2 for the Xbox (Toca2) and I think the game is "better than I thought."

I have been playing Project Gotham Racing 2 (PGR2) for months now and have almost all of the cars unlocked. Almost. You have to play the game a lot and win the solo campaign on increasing difficulties to earn token and unlock cars. I'm unable to win all of the races on the most difficult settings which means I won't ever be using the two top cars in the game. But that's ok because I can still whip Action Replay lamers with my GT1.

Toca2 takes a approach to this by allowing you to just buy your way into all cars and tracks. For three quid (or a little less than 5 bucks) you can buy unlock codes. The game is good enough that I expect I will be playing it online enough to want to have all cars unlocked, so I bought the codes. I paid money for less than 50 characters of data.

A nice thing about this is that the solo campaign isn't won by paying for the unlock codes. It keeps that separate so you can play thru that campaign, which is, for the mast part, enjoyable. You go thru many races in various cars and tracks to become a racing superstar. The cut scenes are 'well produced' or so I'm told, but I think they are dumb and add nothing to the game play. Maybe I'm just more objective based when it comes to games and just want to know what that objective is without some story line matrix.

The races are not easy, and there's no difficulty setting (that I have found yet; more on that later) like there is in PGR2 (where you can do each races in one of five difficulty levels). But, you aren't expected to win each but instead get objectives like 'place in the top three' or come within two places of these other racers. I like that because it makes it possible for the race to be set up with many more cars and it places in back in the pack, so there's lots of overtaking (out braking your opponent is how to win) in the races. Overtaking is fun.

It's a racing sim instead of an arcade racer like PGR2. When you make a mistake, it costs you, especially if you break the wheel off of your Formula Ford (an open wheel race car). Power sliding is something to master just like it is in PGR2, but it's a more delicate art than the brute force, point grabbing slide-a-thon in Gotham. The different types of cars in the games this tough to do, because just as soon as you get used to the slow turning Formula Ford, you get into carts that turn on a dime. This variety is one of the major underlying features of the game and gives it at least as much depth as Gotham in the 'each car is different' category. I think Toca2 may do this better than PGR2.

Another variety factor in favor of Toca2 is the types of cars available to you. Open wheel racers, rally cars, classic street cars and modern super cars are all there. So, in one session you might be on the world renowned Nurburgring F1 circuit and the next may be a rainy, muddy Rallycross sprint over the moors of England (on and off road). PGR2 offers pavement in the day or night, or in the rain.

What Toca2 doesn't do better is the menu systems. The UI is nice and clean, and the loading screens are clever, but navigating around is confusing with odd names for some menu options (to get to Xbox Live games, you have to hit the 'Simulator Modes' menu). Also, one menu with 5 options might have three of them on the top of the screen, and two on the bottom, then when you select one of them, the next menu may be along the top of the screen in a horizontal row. There's a confusing quality to the menus that requires you to learn them.

Menu systems are not gameplay though. We buy and 'play' games, and Toca2 is certainly worth buying and playing. Since it's a budget title ($29.99) it makes the purchase of unlock codes easier to swallow and raises the 'value' of the game higher than if it was the typical $50. In an ocean of racing titles on the Xbox, you may overlook this one, but you shouldn't.

Rare Sky.

2004-04-14T14:00:15-05:00

The sky as seen from my living room window yesterday afternoon.

Some video game menus need SERIOUS work.

2004-04-05T15:24:33-05:00

I can't imagine there were conscious 'UI decisions' made (I assume that the disease of familiarity played a part) about the process that makes it necessary for me to go thru the following to see if any friend's games on Xbox Live are joinable in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow...

Push the 'on' button on the Xbox, wait for Ubisoft logo to play IN FULL, then hit "start" which is the only button you can push to get past the first screen, then push "a" again to interrupt the movie already watched (why doesn't it remember that?!? I have 50,000+ sectors available on the HARD DRIVE), then wait for the movie I don't need to see again to be flushed from memory and then wait for more loading, then hit "left" on the D-pad for the multiplayer option, then "a" to select it, then "a" AGAIN to interrupt the multiplayer movie that is useless that I have also already watched, and then "a" to select the one and only profile, then "a" again to confirm that I want to use the one and only profile I have, then "a" AGAIN to start the login process (which could be happening in the background because the profile for the game is decoupled from the profile used for my Xbox Live login) and then wait for login to succeed, then D-pad "down" twice then "a" AGAIN! to select "Friends" from the menu, then scroll down thru the list of friends using the D-pad.

This last screen is where it gets a little smarter because there are two portions to the screen. The list of players name and status area giving me a range of options when I highlight a player name. I can infer from that status that "Join Game" means it's a joinable session and that a lack of that choice means the session is full. Now, there is a little bit of making me think in there, but it's WAY much less than the conscious effort I have to put forth to get to this screen (and use of this screen is typical of all users).

In Tribes1 and to a lesser extent in Tribes2 the amount of clicks to get into an online game was minimized and also lined up on one critical path. There was no moving thru menus to do what you would most likely do so you could just click like mad without thinking and that would eventually land you in a game. Also, if memory serves me correct, after you went thru the menus once, it remembered which option you selected last time expecting that your behavior would likely not deviate.

An underlying issue to all this all is that multiplayer gamers will replay the game more than solo gamers which puts the burden of menu navigating on the online players and multiplies the time spent in menu jail by the number of players multiplied by the typical amount of replay sessions.

April Nerd's Day.

2004-04-01T13:28:07-05:00

The first day of April brings out the inner dork of many content producers on the Internet, and to be honest, I think it's just a wasted day out there on the net with April Fools jokes that aren't even worth a "heh"...

Please be funny instead of bitter (savor the recursive irony please), obvious or annoyingly incoherent.

Old news.

2004-03-24T09:58:19-05:00

A voice enabled browser? Bah, I was doing that years ago.

Unreal 2 is... uh, not so great.

2004-02-29T16:06:54-05:00

This is of course all IMHO, but...

I bought Unreal 2 based on previous Unreal experience and the prospect of adding vehicles to the mix. To bad the game is unpolished, unnecessarily complex and self-imbalancing.

The character animations are just weak. It's 2004 for crying out loud and Epic could only manage death animations that are rough approximations of falling down, and doing so within a few frames. Everything in Tribes 1 was better than everything in Unreal II.

The Multiplayer game is far to complex for its own good. The not-immediately-spawning thing is pretty cool and allows you to change your character class before you choose to spam. That's cool. But the choice on where to spawn based on which spawn points your team has captured accelerates unbalance team play when the other team gets forward spawn points. And don't bother using a vehicle to get anywhere because they are easily killed and they go from 'just fine' to 'blowing up.'

As the game goes on you capture generators to get energy for your team. The more energy, the more weapons and tech available to you. It doesn't take too long before one team has captured enough gens to rob you of any energy, so they have all the toys and you are stuff with your pea shooter. It's as if the game is designed to unbalance itself as you play and allows a critical mass to develop that should NEVER exist in a multiplayer game. May God help you if you are on a shitty team, because if you are, you will lose, period.

Also, a major gripe is the user interface in MXP mode (why call this MXP?). The HUD has sooooo much crap on it that getting an accurate or meaningful status is difficult and since this is a first person shooter I have no time to be scanning the interface for multilayer status indicators...

That's right, weapon status and energy have two layers. With the weapon portion of the HUD there's a bar for ammo in the current clip, and a bar for how many clips. And for energy there's you energy level and the team's level. There's about 10 icons for the tech items and diff colors for their status. So grokkable, no wonder it's #1!

There's a bunch of other crap on the screen that I have no clue about and the manual gives no info about. Thanks Epic. And thank you too Best Buy for not taking back opened software products.

Video Game legitimization.

2004-02-27T09:56:55-05:00

I hadn't thought that playing video games would be characterized as "going mainstream" (because I've played them since the 2600) but more and more often I see stories in the news saying that video games are indeed doing that. As far as I can tell, this happened a long time ago in a Mushroom Kingdom only a power switch away. This audio stream (Real; bleh) from the BBC discusses how the BAFTA's (the Brit Oscars) are adding games to their awards.

When I was in line at the local 'Hair Sluttery' waiting to get my mop cut I was playing Mario&Luigi with a kid right next to me coveting my Gameboy with sidelong glances and likely wondering why this old dude was playing video games... oh wait, games are "going mainstream."

Random access info architecture.

2004-02-19T14:00:42-05:00

One trend I have noticed in many video games produced within the last couple of years is that the game teaches you to play it as you play it and assumes that you haven't read the manual. More often than not, those assumptions are well founded. Mario&Luigi: SuperStar Saga is one of those games where I need the on-the-job training, and Project Gotham Racing 2 (PGR2) isn't.

The manual for Mario&Luigi is so bad that it should be training me on how to use it (like the O'Reilly books do). On every page of the manual there are page numbers for more in depth explanations of the game mechanics, and quite often, there really isn't any info at all except for the page reference. IMHO, good manuals cover the basics up front in a linear fashion (ie, know this, then know this second thing and then know this third thing and you should have enough to go on). The manic, random access info architecture of the Mario&Luigi manual makes it a complete HASSLE to read and nearly impossible to grok when your job, wife and daughter are placing high premiums on your time.

Too soon.

2004-02-12T15:11:43-05:00

C|Net news has this story about Lycos today...

Lycos laid off about 90 people in the United States, according to a company representative. Sources inside the company said many members of its U.S. ad sales team were laid off Monday, along with the engineering and Webmonkey staff in San Francisco; employees of financial services site Quote.com and others in the Mountain View offices; and most of the staff in the New York office. Employees at Wired News were not affected by the layoffs.

And this advertisement runs underneath it...

I want my P2P.

2004-02-04T16:37:32-05:00

When a judge last year ruled that P2P apps couldn't be outlawed due to the fact that they have valid non-copyright-infringing uses, he made the right call. I'm sure we can all agree on that, and I have an example of how P2P networks could be leveraged in such a way (to my benefit no less).

access-music has made a batch of loops available for use in GarageBand, but of course, the low price and hordes of wannaba musicians made the download popular. That of course was a bandwidth drain and access-music pulled the download. They should have just put the thing on the various P2P networks and called it a day.

For what it's worth, the file name of the loops collection is "AccessVirusLoops.dmg" which I'll be looking for tonight via Limewire.