Move over, Master Chief

Few gaming franchises have the testicular fortitude to release a spin-off which does not include its posterboy. Bungie and Microsoft have just today launched Halo 3: ODST, which is essentially Halo 2.5, a side story detailing the events prior to Halo 3.

You play a rookie with the ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Troopers), sent into New Mombasa to clear it of Covenant hordes. The way the game plays is much more Halo 1 rather than 2 or 3; there’s no dual wielding, or use of equipment. There’s no Cortana-like AI guiding you along the way either, so it’s a very lonely and bleak game. Playing as a regular human soldier, you also feel much more vulnerable during the near pitch-black city sections.

One of the big complaints of the Halo series, and many other story based FPS games is how linear the gameplay is, i.e. you need to go through A, B, and C, before going to D, E, and F. ODST creates the illusion of being able to free roam using a hub world, where you then go off and unlock missions to further the story. This is all well and good, but you still need to do missions A, B, and C, before going on to D, E, and F. Oh well, at least with linearity, you never miss anything crucial.

The music is clearly Halo, but lacks any of the tunes heard in any of the other games, sounding almost like Halo meets Resident Evil; it’s haunting and fits the dark and brooding atmosphere presented to the player.

There is a new multiplayer mode, called Firefight. It is essentially a clone of Gears of War 2’s Horde mode, where you face wave after wave of increasingly tough enemies. I’ve not had a chance to play this mode yet, due to wanting to get the campaign finished though I will post my findings later.

All in all, a welcome addition to the Halo universe (much more so than Halo Wars). If I have to make one complaint, it’s that Bungie really need to work on their models for women because they look FUGLY. The female lead of the game is made out to be eye-candy amongst the ODST team, but Christ, lady looks like a dude!

Oh, also netted myself a freebie last night from Gamestation’s midnight launch. Only twenty or so of us turned up, and the store manager decided to reward our loyalty with a fetching ODST t-shirt. It’s superbly made and better than some t-shirts I’ve spent hard earned money on!

Because I’m just that impatient

Yes, it’s sad that my first proper blog entry in ages is about something as geeky as the iPhone operating system, but a proper update will be on its way…

Ever since the announcement of OS 3.0 in March, I’ve been pining after it for it’s much touted and highly anticipated features.  Much like last year’s release of OS 2.0, this for many iPhone users and fans is like the second coming (or should that be third?).  Also much like last year, some kind developer soul out there graciously uploaded the “Gold Master” release on to the torrent networks.  This is pretty much the final release from Apple and is used for final compatibility checks with developers for the App Store, which means Apple will not be changing any back-end architecture from now until next Wednesday, maybe just additional polish.

So, after a tense 30 minutes of status bar watching, OS 3.0 was finally on my precious.

On initial inspection, most would miss that anything had changed at all from looking at the home screen, bar the addition of a voice memo app (wonderful recording and playback quality), and a little magnifying glass alongside the page indicators.

The little magnifying glass is actually the Spotlight symbol, a system-wide search capable of rooting through music, emails, contacts, and so on.  Results are presented swiftly, with emails taking ever so slightly longer to sift through.  Sadly, it’s not as thorough as OSX’s Spotlight and it doesn’t appear to search within emails, merely the subject, to, and from fields.  Everything else receives content searching, though.

Landscape mode is now available as a text entry option for all default iPhone apps, and will be available to all third party apps so long as the APIs are followed.  Ironically, a number of third party apps have had this feature for ages but it is sooo nice to be able to tap out an email on a larger keyboard.

Copy and paste has finally made its appearance and so far, works pretty well.  OS 3.0 is context sensitive and depending on what you intend to do with the copied data determines how many options you have available to you.  Take for instance if you wanted to send a photo or two, you would be presented with the option to send via email or MMS.  As soon as this goes above two photos, email becomes the only option, and above 7 photos, email is no longer an option.  Copying text and numbers is superb though, and behaves exactly as expected.

MMS is also finally with us, and works nicely.  There’s no difference between SMS and MMS, and both are presented in the same user conversations.  Sending one is as simple as sending an SMS, and isn’t at all convoluted like on other phones.  This is, sadly, only available on the 3G and 3G S, and as I said several month ago, smacks of bullshit.  MMS is not dependent on a 3G signal and was around during the GPRS days, around 9 years ago.  Guess Apple has to get their monies somehow from upgraders.

Alot of the other new features are buried away within the OS.  Call list management is now more in-depth, behaving much like how Nokia logs calls.  Contacts now have more fields available, going as far to give “iPhone” its own category amongst “home”, “work”, and “mobile”.  Apple has moved some settings about, too, making some easier to get to and some now harder.  Buried deep within this section is an option to switch on “Find my iPhone”, using cell tower triangulation and GPS to locate your lost/stolen iPhone if you’re a MobileMe subscriber.  The service is fast and very precise, though more useful if you suspect you’ve lost your phone in a location you can easily retrieve your phone from, unless you’re more the vigilante type, tracking down the thief with your iPhone.  For those who aren’t as brave but value their data more, there is a remote data wipe so long as the phone is within reach of a network of some sort.

The rest of the OS update is down to performance gains, with all areas of the system I’ve played with operating faster than before.  The GPS in Maps as I said before is blisteringly fast now.  There is less hanging, and the UI feels smoother and slicker.  Sadly, the same can’t be said about all third party apps.  Some have visual glitches, and the odd few are so fundamentally broken that the developers may have to go back to the drawing board (Night Camera, I’m looking at you).

On the whole, it is a superb update and some will argue that this should have been iPhone OS 1.0 or 2.0.  It brings many refinements to the table bringing it in line with less elegant competitors’ offerings.  The big question now is, where does Apple take its OS for the next big update?

Andy’s blog, stardate 2009-05-10

Went to see the new Star Trek movie with Daniel, Ian and Elsa tonight.  Not being a Star Trek fan (one of the few geeky things I just couldn’t get into), I wasn’t really sure what to make of it before going in.  I’d heard good things about it from reviews and accounts from colleagues and being a series reboot, it should have been accessible at least.

The creator of Lost has certainly outdone himself this time, after the piss-poor Cloverfield.  The choice of actors was pretty much bang on and the special effects are literally out of this world, creating a world nodding towards the original series, but less camp.  It also breaks the odd-even Star Trek movie rule at long last!

The summer season of movies has once again begun.

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas

I absolutely adored Dead Rising on the 360, being one of the games that sold the system for me.  It had it’s so called problems do with some people not being able to get to grips with the time based missions, though I personally had no issues with it at all.  To hear that Capcom have farmed out the sequel to a Canadian developer was worrying at first, though from the looks of the above trailer, it appears to be in good hands.

I’m loving the suggested ability to combine weapons together to create crazy make-shift combinations, like the twin chainsaws attached to a broomstick.  The moosehead mask is also very creative.  The new setting looks like it’ll be just as varied as the original shoppingmall location, obviously based on Las Vegas.  Since our hero this time is not a journalist or photographer, I hope they’ve gotten rid of the whole photography sub-element.  It made sense froma  character design point of view, but it felt horribly tacked on.  I would also hope that they decide not to ditch the time sensitive missions, since the freedom to pick and choose what you participated in gave the game a charm that breathed life into the setting.

More of the same, please!

Would you get behind a wheel if you didn’t know how to drive?

Bill Thompson, one of my favourite tech journalists of the BBC, recently posted an article about an emerging divide of those who can use a computer, and those who can’t.  He uses examples of things like not being able to install simple Windows updates to protect themselves, and how “computer experience” does not end at being able to word process.

Naturally gravitating towards friends with technical minds (I shan’t say geeks because I have geek friends who wouldn’t know a toaster from a computer) during school and university, I suppose I was living inside a bubble and did not see the reality of the technophobic real world.  Stephen Fry in the article uses the analogy of cars and computers, which isn’t a bad one to use.  Most people wouldn’t dream of sitting in the driving seat with some practical driving experience, yet people are happy enough to go online, shop on eBay, share their personal details with Facebook, and run their wireless networks unprotected without batting an eyelid.  Actually, it’s not really that they even know that they should be worried.  A colleague of mine recently revealed to me when he was having connectivity issues at home (AOL, need I say more) that he had been using a wireless network at home for over two years without any form of protection (not even MAC address).  I told him how dangerous this was and almost a month later, he still hasn’t taken any action.

I’ve started profiteering from this technophobia.  Colleagues have been coming to me and asking about so called PC health check services offered by PC World.  I blow them out of the water by offering a full OS reinstall with updates and backup of their files, all for £30.

I think for many people, they’re probably too far gone to give a toss about learning a trick or two about computer maintenance.  Living in the disposable society that we have now become and with laptops being had for less than £200, people seem happy enough to just buy a new computer every 2-3 years once the OS has become riddled with malware and spyware.

Mike, you do this for a living so what are your views on the article?

It’s almost as if it’s a new Mac

Finally got my replacement hard disk and RAM for my MacBook Pro yesterday.  Fitting the new hard disk was easy as pie and replicating the data from the old disk was as simple as a few clicks; even the Windows partition copied over nicely.  I now have over 200GB spare on the main disk for my growing digital media library.

Since I was in the guts of the MacBook Pro, I installed the 4GB of RAM that now makes it fly.  After initial launch and quit of apps, they all now open again in only one bounce of the Dock since the data is still stored in RAM and as long as I don’t shut the machine down, they should stay in this state indefinitely.  I did a resource test to see how much of the 4GB would remain after opening EVERY single app and the result hovers around the 1.8 to 2GB mark – plenty of room to play with.

All in all, these upgrades cost me less than £95 and just a little elbow grease.

Lightning striking twice

Went to Leeds on Saturday for the day to visit Sammy-boy and  I’d happened to catch a cold just a few days before.  The same thing happened last year when I visited Leeds with Jim-bob and company.

I arrived roughly an hour behind schedule due to setting off late from Birmingham, and coupled with severe roadworks on the M1 limiting traffic to 50mph, I hit Leeds at around 12:30pm.  I had a look around Sam’s new pad and boy is it gorgeous.  He’s living in an awesome studio apartment literally 2 minutes away from the Leeds Hilton, affording fantastic views of the surrounding area.  Rent is a bit steep he tells me but he’s got so much more free time now since he’s not having to do his previously ridiculous commute.  He does however have a ridiculous cupboard in his kitchen as you can see from the photo above.

We didn’t really have anything to do, though I did need to visit Maplins to pick up a few bits and pieces for my pending MacBook Pro upgrade.  Using Google maps on the iPhone, we got there swiftly and had a look around.  Sam had no idea a place like Maplins existed and was rather impressed by all the components available.  I picked up a precision screwdriver set, which happened to be on buy-one-get-one-free so I gave one set to Sam.  I also bought an external 2.5″ SATA hard drive caddy to recycle the hard drive I’m taking out of the Mac.

We had a wander around Leeds city centre, which I do prefer to Birmingham.  The sun was shining and the place seemed to have character, unlike Birmingham’s mish-mash of 70s and modern architecture.  We had lunch at Wagamama since Sam loves the place and none of his friends do, so I couldn’t deprive him of a visit. We’d noticed that Zavvi seem to have been bought out by a company called Head.  They had 25% off everything, meaning you could pick up a mainstream Blu-ray for just under £10!  This co-incides with the Zavvi on Oxford Street in London apparently reopening as a Virgin Megastore.

Due to the cold I had, I was drinking an inordinate amount of water so was pissing like a racehorse.  The huge Starbucks coffee I had below Sam’s apartment complex didn’t help either, though it had to be the quietest and plushest Starbucks I’ve ever seen.

We had a quick blast through a few chapters on Resi 5, and it’s clear that the game benefits from two co-op players.  Incidentally, I cleared the game again on veteran difficulty and unlocked the infinite ammo gatling gun.  Mowing down enemies in a hail of bullets has never been so fun.

It was now time to head back home since Sam had friends to meet up with and it would take over 2 hours to drive home.  I might get the train the next time I visit him again seeing as he lives virtually next to the train station.

Supercharging a slab of aluminium

Please note, the above is not my setup because it’s far too organised and professional.

A couple of nights ago, I was doing some system maintenance on my MacBook Pro and I noticed that the internal hard disk was getting quite full. Since moving to a digital SLR, the photos I archive are bloody huge averaging 10mb or so each compared to the 2-3mb photos that my Canon Ixus point and shoot could achieve. Granted the initial size is only 120gb (111gb usable) and I have a separate 15gb Windows partition for Bootcamp. Couple that with a large music library and things start to get claustrophobic quickly.

Since the warranty was now over (unofficially, it’s still intact with John Lewis), I thought I’d have a look at upgrading the internal hard disk myself. Trotting over to Ebuyer, I find a couple of very nicely priced laptop SATA drives for £50 or so. It had to be Seagate since these drives are certified to work with Apple’s drive parking and energy management software, though any 2.5″ SATA drive will work if these features aren’t important. I settled on a 320gb 5400 RPM drive with 8MB cache since it would be a like for like replacement bar the size. I’ve heard the performance gains from 7200 RPM drives are immense, but I’m worried about heat dissipation due to the insides of the 15″ MacBook Pro being very tightly packed.

So, I get all my tools together (a very small flathead screw driver and a credit card) and start cracking the thing open. Testament to Apple, the MacBook Pros are very well put together; removing the top keyboard casing requires removal of 30 or so screws (very nicely machined screws at that). The inside is almost entirely dust free which isn’t too surprising considering the fans rarely ever kickup. I decided to do a bit of a mod on the ambient light sensors for the keyboard and screen. I simply want the keyboard LEDs to either be on or off, at maximum brightness, but with with the sensors in place, they dim or brighten according to the lighting in the room. I stuck some black electrical tape over the sensors and voila, they work the way I want them to now. Removing the hard drive is fairly simple once you’re inside and putting the MacBook Pro together again is simply reversing your previous actions.  Backing up and restoring the drives and partitions is done using the wonderful Superduper and Winclone which makes everything a doddle; why can’t Windows have something similar and lightweight?

The drive is due to arrive tomorrow along with 4GB of RAM from Crucial, thus future proofing it for a few more years to come. Performance impressions to come soon!

The Steve hath giveth

Apple has announced the next major version of its iPhone software and boy, does it sound like a doozy.  A whole host of features which have been missing since day one are finally going to see the light of day.  My most anticipated are probably similar to most people’s:

• MMS messaging
• Copy and paste
• Turn by turn navigation
• Spotlight search
• System wide push notification

MMS should never have been left out seeing as the iPhone has a huge audience in Europe where the service prevails.  It is actually an overhaul of the messaging app on the phone, allowing users to forward and delete individual messages, rather than clearing whole conversations.  One will also be able to send business cards and data such as voice notes through MMS.  Huzzah!  MMS is limited to the iPhone 3G though which has pissed me off, not because I own a first gen iPhone anymore, but because MMS has been in use since around 2002 and for Apple to claim it’s “hardware related” smacks of bullshit.  They’re obviously building in designed obsolescence to keep the lifecycle as short as possible; in other words, expect a new iPhone in June and a new iPod touch in September.

Copy and paste does what it says on the tin.  Users will be able to select text to copy, cut, and paste to and from apps.  Apparently, this function will work in all third party apps so long as developers have followed Apple’s newly released APIs.  This will be very handy for forwarding text from Safari to emails etc.  This also extends to being able to select more than one photo to attach to emails.  Double huzzah!

Turn by turn navigation will work so long as developers provide their own maps due to licensing issues with Google’s maps.  This should be the nod that TomTom have been waiting for to get their app finally released.  I already have a dedicated TomTom but this will be handy for travelling abroad where I can just download a map I require.

Spotlight search is coming to iPhone!  Anybody who has used Spotlight on a Mac will realise just how powerful a search tool it is by being able to search syetem wide and throw up results in near real time.  I use my iPhone as a work horse and for personal use and the number of contacts and emails I have saved border on humungous; imagine sifting through all that just to find one piece of info?  This will work for every app on the iPhone again if developers follow the APIs.

Push notification for all apps will be welcome since it will truly unlock the power of some third party apps.  Currently, instant messaging clients need to be open permanently for a session to update, which is just silly.  If you get a call or an email, you must start again.

Another bonus feature I didn’t mention was that all “core” apps will have the ability to move into landscape mode to enter or edit text.  Before, this was exclusively for Safari only.

Thoughts on the new software are good so far.  A colleague mentioned a good point that a lot of this could have already been up and running behind Apple’s closed doors, but merely held it back simply so that they would have something to unveil each year.

June can’t come soon enough.

“Fear you can’t forget”

Capcom really have been spoiling me as of late with Street Fighter 4 a few weeks ago and now, Resident Evil 5.  I’m a huge Resident Evil fan and ever since the first release on the PlayStation, the campy acting and dodgy B-movie story captivated me and over ten years later, it is arguably my most treasured gaming series.

I attended the midnight launch at Birmingam’s main Gamestation branch and they get two thumbs up for effort.  They’d rented some smoke machines and all staff members had dressed up as something from the Resi universe, such as zombies, scientists, or some sort of soldier; they even had some pot plants on the counter resembling the herbs you collect throughout the games.  I was second in the queue and actually wished I’d been further back because the guy in front of me was a few nuts short of a fruit cake; what else would I expect from somebody who has the dedication to be first?  Once we were let in, the queue moved fairly swiftly and I bought my limited edition of the game with free crazy axeman figure, which for a freebie is actually very high quality.

I’ve installed the game on the 360, which takes up 6.8gb but reduces the load times to mere seconds and considering how impressive the graphics and textures are, is no small feat.  Anybody who has played the demo will know that it is really Resident Evil 4 with HD graphics. They play virtually like-for-like but personally, I feel the gameplay is worse than Resi 4’s due to a number of new inclusions and ommisions.  When it was announced that Capcom had included co-op, many felt that they had done so purely because co-op and online play is the “done thing” right now.  Thing is, Resident Evil has always been a solitary experience.  Even when you have had a partner AI character, it never made the game feel any worse because it was the only option available.  This time around though, certain levels have been designed to maximise co-op play and as a result, you feel like you’re missing out if you are not playing with a human co-op partner.  Some of the boss battles suffer because the AI partner doesn’t cover you quickly enough, or position themselves in the right place at the right time.  Only a few of my friends have bought the game, and nobody wants to participate in a co-op game until they have finished through on their own first so that they can soak in the story.  People new to the franchise will no doubt play through on co-op first and it simply feels like a slap in the face to fans of a more traditional Resi game.

It’s taken over five years to develop this?

The above isn’t entirely game breaking, but definitely makes the game feel more like one of the many action-adventure games out there.  What is saddening is that this looks like the direction that has been laid out for future Resi games…

There are some major spoilers below so only read on if you have no clue about the Resident Evil universe, or don’t plan on playing the game:

Last chance to stop reading!

After playing Resi 4, the story was severely lacking and very little of it made any sense.  The inclusion and introduction of Leon’s old comrade, Krauser, lacked any tension because we’d never heard of him until that point!  For Resi 5 (according to the making of disc at least), they tackled it as if it were a big budget action movie and had real actors and motion-capture to help the audience believe what they were presented with.  The story and plot is lavish and saves the game for me.  Seeing as it features Chris Redfield, it was always going to be plot heavy and would undoubtedly see cameo appearances from Albert Wesker.  For some, Jill Valentine’s inclusion will come as a total surprise, though a pleasant one.  Based on the trailers, I knew it was coming and you could tell from a mile away that she was the hooded character, pulling the strings in the background.  It was nice to see Chris and Jill together again in a canon Resi game, something they haven’t done since the original.  There are plenty of information files littered throughout the game and even suggests that Billy Coen from Resident Evil 0 was present at the events which lead to Resi 5’s outcomes.  Pure Resi fan-service.

Ultimately, it feels as if the creative team at Capcom are having a bit of an identity crisis with Resident Evil.  Resi 4 got the gameplay right but was sorely lacking in story.  Resi 5 has the story in spades but has broken the gameplay to cater for what could be said to be a Western audience.  This change in direction is largely reflective of the entire Japanese games industry, which seems to be stuck in a lull.  Their answer to a next-gen title is to spruce up an existing franchise with HD graphics.  There has been very little innovation from Japan this generation and even the Wii has been abused to churn out party game, after party game.  Seeing that it’s taken so long for a entry this generation, I’d hazzard a guess that it won’t be until next generation before we see a main canon game.

Plus points:

• Amazing graphics and set pieces
• Meaty story
• Replay value

Minus points:

• Forced co-op gameplay
• Basically Resident Evil 4 in HD
• Setting is at odds with series’ roots