Entries from October 2005 ↓

Over the weekend I decided to finally give ‘Guild Wars’ (http://www.guildwars.com ) a try. I haven’t played ‘WoW’ since it went gold. Playing in the beta test was fun but, not fun enough to get me to pay $49 for the game AND pay every month just to play. No amount of added content is worth that to me. Maybe I’m just cheap. *shrug*

Anyway, so I made myself a character, a necromancer/warrior, named Shindakun Koji. You have to have a first and last name in the game so I used my nick as a family name and ‘Koji’ comes from Suzuki Koji, author of ‘Ringu’. Anyway, I’ve been half playing today at work so I could finish the intro section of the game and move into what I guess is the main story arch. I did every quest I could find and got my character up to level seven. Now, it’s time to get started on some new quests.

So far it’s a pretty cool game. And I’ve got a couple of hours left here in the office so I’m going back to playing.

A couple of days ago I was talking about the Pandora ( http://www.pandora.com ) music service that Brinstar ( http://acidforblood.blogspot.com ) brought to my attention. Well, I’ve finally had a chance to get back and take a deeper look at it. It’s a nice little package which uses Macromedia Flash to download and play songs that match with my request. The matching back end is awesome! It does a great job of finding similar tunes. The last.fm ( http://www.last.fm ) system can’t touch this at all.

Well, after checking it out for a couple of days it turns out that I used my ten hour free trial. What to do? There are two subscription choices: annual (12 months of unlimited use for $36) and quarterly (3 months of unlimited use for $12). I think we can see where the deal is…

So, in the interest of exploring the web application that makes this tick I started digging. I knew I wasn’t supposed (well according to the terms of service anyway) to disassemble the flash file they were using to play the MP3s. Since that was out I decided the easiest thing to do would be to use a proxy server on my local machine to watch the ‘conversation’ between my computer and *.pandora.com. I have to admit after watching it work for a few seconds I already knew I could trick the flash application into thinking I had logged on to the service. The flash seems to be coded to only expect a couple of different answers from the server so with two small changes to the reply from the server I was ‘logged in’ and to my surprise the rest of the application continues to work flawlessly – the music plays on.

During the dig I was able to see the method that they get the MP3s to the computer and it’s just a web address – all of the files are world readable with any web browser – if you know where to look or the url to type. Of course, it’s not nice to steal MP3s from poorly coded web apps now is it?

I’ll probably go into some more detail later but it’s time to go to the bar.

During the Prologue section of ‘Dark Corners of the Earth’ I took the time to jot down a couple of notes so I would be able to post my first impressions. Later on, I went back later and took some screen shots to put up with this post. In an effort not to spoil too much I won’t talk about the story if possible. One thing of note that I some how forgot to write down at the time was the fact that the game takes several minutes to cache a bunch of stuff to the Xbox hard drive so be prepared for that. Thank god it only does it once.

I’ll go through this in the order of my notes – the first note was “OMFG it’s out!”. If your read the other post about the game you can see the warning screen that comes up in the beginning. Believe it! Play the game in the dark. The game title screen is very cool with the sea in the background and some fitting music to round it out. Upon starting the game you are treated to a sequence which takes place in Arkham Asylum. The first thing I noticed was that the models well not perfect are passable and are decent. The ‘dust and scratches’ film effect gave it the nice old quality I think the developers where going for. The graphics aren’t anything special but they get the job done.

Jacks cell in the asylum looks terrific. There are bloody runes everywhere and Jack sits writing in his diary. After the asylum movie ends we change locations and here is the first time that we get to hear the voice actors. The voice portion of the game isn’t going to win any awards but it’s ok. Once the opening movies are over we are finally in control of Jack. It’s a pretty standard default controller setup, with the left thumbstick for movement, right thumbstick for camera movement, X for jump, A for action/use, and B for crouch.

One thing I noticed that doesn’t come across well in the screen shots is they included the effect of water hitting the screen and rolling off of it – nothing new but it’s a nice touch.

The first time you get to experience a sanity effect is pretty interesting. The game changes almost everything: sounds are drawn out (slowed down), the screen has all sorts of different effects (zooming in and out, fading in and out, colors fading, etc.). You really have to play it for the best experience.

That’s it for part one of my first impressions list. I’m on my way to the g/f’s maybe I’ll post the second half from Albany…

Maybe I’ll come up with a proper ‘review’ later. For now, though, it’s late and I have to work tomorrow. So, everyone go buy ‘Dark Corners of the Earth’ as soon as possible. Till then here is a teaser picture.

Everything is so dark my screen shots haven’t been coming out the best. I think I need a new monitor or I better tweak my video settings a bit.