nastybun

Hoi hoi. Etc. Gallumphing.

So recently I’ve been playing two games, Dark Souls and Forza 4. They sound rather disparate titles, but hear me out here – for all their opposing notions, they have some things in common too. I’ll start with Dark Souls, as that came out first. If you don’t know much about it, it’s basically a hack n slash RPG with roguelike elements liberally mixed in. [If you don't know what a roguelike is, check this out for a quick intro.] It’s not quite as harsh in death as a roguelike in that you only lose your souls (both currency for items and the consumable used for levelling up) and your humanity (you wander around as an undead until you choose to restore your humanity). What sets this apart from other hack n slashers is the difficulty level that is often reported as ‘brutal’. That’s probably for want of a better word – while it’s possible for any ol’ mook to kill you in seconds, you have to have rather stuffed it up for that to happen. If you’re careful about it, you’ll dispatch them fine. Where it really gets hard though are the bosses – for reference of those who’ve played it, I’m up to a rooftop battle with a couple of gargoyles. I’ve only tried it twice (and I was a little drunk the second time) but both times I lasted barely long enough to do any damage. I won’t launch into a review as those are easy enough to find about the place, but suffice to say it’s a game that presents a huge barrier of entry to and would be off putting for people who don’t know what they’re getting into.

Forza 4 is a racing sim, and it might be the best one yet. Depending on who you ask that’s either a reasoned opinion or I’m a frothing xbox fanboy who’s blind to its glaring faults. Its competitor is the latest Gran Turismo game you see, so there are many of the usual internet based arguements about which is superior in every way. Also as usual they’re unreasoned, poorly researched (if at all) and totally pointless, but hey.. it’s the internet. Suffice to say I’ve not played GT5 so am in no reason to know either way, but I can say that I’m not tempted to buy a PS3 in order to play it. Anyway, its a game that’s been geared to be fun for all players, no matter their skill. In this I can say that its been rather successful, as I (who am rather good at these things) can still have a bunch of fun playing with less experienced friends. It has its flaws; they took out the endurance racing for some reason, which I really enjoyed and the engine swap options seem to be a little less bizarre – ie, no more V8 shopping cars but still a solid effort. It’s recommended anyway, if you’re after a driving game.

So how the hell are these two related? Well, Dark Souls takes a game type that would usually see you hacking a swathe through countless mooks with nary a scratch on you and turns it into an experience that brutally punishes mistakes but ends up all the more rewarding for it. Forza 4 takes an experience that can easilly be insurmountable for a newcomer (remember this is sim racing, not Need For Speed racing) but adds layers of assists to ensure that there’s an experience in there for everyone. By working hard at presenting a cohesive experience to the player they both ensure that a deep, rewarding experience is available – in Dark Souls case to a niche section of the market who love it, in Forza 4′s case to basically anyone who likes tooling about in cars. In both cases though it helps to get very familiar and nerdy with the skills required and more importantly the physics and real world reasoning behind why such skills are required for success. Just as a little guy with no strength or endurance will survive for long in a fight, a little car with skinny tyres and a huge V8 will struggle to get around a corner without ending up a twisted wreck. Sometimes though, getting a bit sideways can lead to a big grin.

Barklars, meerkats and frustrated weasels all, it’s spelunking time again.

So it seems it’s been a tech failure time for me again recently. It kind of began with my Xbox 360 dying just past its warranty in December, though that’s a stretch – I was really fine until the past few weeks (except for that breadmaker thing). On saturday however the video card in my PC shat itself with what can only be known as pizazz – there were funky colours happening during POST and subsequent hardware check, and weird characters floating about in the BIOS. It did get to Windows briefly, albeit with severely messed up visuals, before crashing into oblivion. Long story short, I bought a cheapie ATi 5570 to get be by, set my CPU back to standard clock speeds and also had to chuck my RAM back into single channel to fix some further crashing. It’s been quite annoying all up, I must say. Some further tweaking was required though, as there was a funny line intermittently flickering down my other monitor – seems it wanted to indicate that there was some movement on one of the screens. Killing the software overclock that was on by default seemed to calm that though, so I’m back to functionality – albeit with absolutely no fancy enhancements on anything at all. My PC it seems is bored of fancyness and wants to live a humdrum life in obscurity. Maybe I should turn it into a POS kiosk or other such hardware hell. That’ll learn it…

The other annoying failure recently involves The Beastie, though its not entirely its fault. The poor thing has been neglected of late as I’ve been putting off replacing a bunch of things on it for various reasons. One of the reaons is that some prick tried to steal it, and in the process destroyed the ignition barrel so I’ve not been able to ride it. (Who steals a postie bike, honestly..) On Saturday I aquired the replacement part, this morning I installed it so I could ride it to work… but it wouldn’t start. Frustrated, I decided I was already a bit too late to be troubleshooting so I leapt upon the wee bonnie was off. I discovered this afternoon once I was back home that it was just refusing to play ball due to sitting about too long – a few kicks after checking for a spark, it was away. ‘Tis a little rattley though.. might have to check the tappet gaps.

Here’s hoping my tech holds out for a little longer.. I’ve gotten rather fond of having it around. Oh, and also, three toobz later and the rear tyre on my bicycle still refuses to hold air for more than a week. It’s rather frustrating to say the least. Hulk rage.

Bonjour, reader. I hope you’re well. Has that rash gone away yet? I hope so, it looked a little dodgy there for a while.

I got a new ipod touch a couple of weeks ago, the drambuie¹ model. It’s an upgrade from my trusty 5G 60GB model. There are many things about it that I like, it’s a good music player, it can has many useful apps and all that whatnot you’ve already heard about. Given I’m a miserable bugger I’ll point out the things I don’t like about it. The most irksome thing is the way it deals with compilation damons². On my old 5G, when a damon was set to be a compilation the artists on it would not appear in the main artists list. This was great, as it kept things tidy. On the new one however they do appear. When a damon artist is set in the info the various contributers are grouped where than damon would appear in the list so it’s not too catestrophic, but for a pedantic git like myself it’s very irritating. Especially when a damn near 5 year old model does it right. Googling shows much rage aimed at Apple about it, but they seem to be steadfastly ignoring it. In my spite I removed most of the compilations from itunes, but the nerdrage smoulders. If I’m utterly wrong about this, please feel free to correct me. I’d welcome being proven stupid in this case.

The other two things are a bit less irksome. Firstly the RAM is left at 256MB, rather than the 512 that the new iphone has. That’s not too much of an issue, as apps and whatnot are still being made with the old 3GS in mind, but it’s a limitation that could prove to annoy in the nebulous futuretimes. Lastly the camera is far worse than the iphone – a 0.7 megrepixel senser vs a 5 megapixel. I took a few photos today on my ride, this one for example, which you can see is rather less nice than this one that was taken on my Nokia E72 workphone which has a 5mp camera. Not a deal breaker, but something to consider against the ‘ipod touch is an iphone without the phone’ position. Also the body has a rounded back rather than the iphone’s nice square one, but is a little thinner – hence they couldn’t fit the nicer camera in. It does all the rest though, including facetime – I’ve not tried it, but I believe the front-facing camera is about the same as iphone. The retina display has a silly name, but is a very nice little screen. All in all, I probably should have stuck with my perfectly functional 5G ipod.. but it’s fun to mess around with some of the apps.

I might briefly (can you breef?) mention the Nokia E72 here actually. It’s a smaertphone without a touch screen, but it has a full qwerty physical keyboard to partially make up for it. The web browsing is not as nice as anything with a touchscreen, but it has ample social media apps for all that sort of need (it’s called Snaptu and it works great), the call quality is great and the battery life is phenomenal. I charge it once once a week, and usually only because I plug it into my PC to get some photos off. It shows that Nokia can make some fantastic hardware, but they really need to get back into their design-fu. I maintain they make the best mobile telephone hardware you can buy – it’s just that their UI needs some serious work. Every mobile phone I’ve had – including workphones – have been Nokias, so I really hope that the new CEO (Stephen Eloop, ex Microsoft and the first non Finnish CEO ever!) can fix whatever is holding them back there. I don’t want them to out-Apple the iphone, I want them to out-Nokia the iphone. I’ll buy it, if they can pull it off. Wow me, Nokia! Make me a phone I don’t have to be defensive about liking!

That’ll do for now. There’s a few things in the pipeline for future posts that I might even get off my arse and make happen in the next few weeks, but you know.. we’ll see.

1. Brand new-ey
2. Damon Albarn – album

I thought I might wax lyrical about the beastie a little. It’s come time to part ways with it, see. It’s been a good little steed, got me going admirably on two wheels and provided mirth and merriment in the process. One chap I was talking to suggested that given it’s so cheap to keep and will likely never die, maybe I should keep it as a spare vehicle. I dismissed this immediately, but then when I took it out for a ride a couple of weeks ago the thought came up again. It’s actually more useful than the new bike in some ways, and certainly is cheaper to run. Its fuel efficiency is at least double for one thing, and its load carrying capacity is admirable for a little bike. Its brought home a printer, a vacuum cleaner, a monitor, an amp and a few dozen bottles of wine in its time. It could be my own personal Toulouse le Truck…

Ok, some explaination required there. Toulouse is a ute who is part of the extended household of my yoof. It’s a 1982 4 cylinder diesel Ford Ranger that’s lived a hard life. I learned to drive in it, as did the rest of the young’uns and everyone else we know has borrowed it for picking up furniture, taking crap to the tip (en-us: dump) and anything else you can think of. It was my first car for a month while my Rover SD1 (the V8 one with EFI!) was being made roadworthy, and I borrowed it again when I was working on a tv show. In short, it’s the most useful vehicle anyone’s ever had, and once you’re used to having one available there’s really no turning back. Once his roadworthy life has ended, I believe he should be retired to a plinth somewhere.

So anyway, there’s several reasons why the beastie could aim for such heights of automotive greatness. Firstly there’s the aforementioned handy/dandy load carrying capacity. Then there’s the impecable reliability that can be attained with such a utilitarian vehicle. The beastie would want little more than its battery kept charged and a run every now and then to be kept happy. The downside to this whole thing is that I don’t really have somewhere to keep it. At the moment it’s staying in a mate’s garage until I move it on, which is ok in the short term but I don’t really want to turn that into anything long term. Also without it being at hand it means that doing any maintenance or going for a ride required forethought and planning, which are two things I’m not historically much good at. So alas and alak, I must put it up for sale. Anyone want to buy a much loved postie? New clutch and rebuilt carb, runs excellent, some money ono.

I worked out today that the new bike gets about 4.5l/100kms, or 55mpg (imp). Which is actually not all that great if you think about it, but it’s really not designed for fuel efficiency. For one thing the design dates back to 1989, and even then it was but an evolution of an earlier bike. Still, it’s better than most cars. Otherwise things are going well with it, I know where the fuel tap is now so I can switch it to reserve when it starts coughing… as it did this morning. Not that that’s an issue, there’s still heaps of fuel in there when that happens.

I shall attempt at this point to write something that’s been a ponderance of mine for a while now. The music I’m currently listening to is the soundtrack to a game some of you may have heard of called Chrono Cross. Chrono Cross is the erstwhile sequal to a game I’m rather fond of called Chrono Trigger, which was released for the SNES back in the day and recently (ish) re-released and optimised for the DS. You can read about Trigger here, the (excellent) article from the current book about the pair of them isn’t available online yet but will be at some point. Read the rest of that site anyway, it’s tops.

So anyway, why am I listening to a game soundtrack from a PS1 game that I never played. The best answer is of course ‘it’s nice’ but that wouldn’t make for very interesting reading, so I’m going to have a go at some sort of reasoning. It was done by a chap named Yasunori Mitsuda, who also did the soundtrack to the Chrono Trigger (as well as a host of other games) so there’s some definate familiarity to the style. It’s also from a PS1 game, which means it’s much more instrumenty than the SNES allowed for due to the CD format of the system. Most of all though it’s really just a nice series of music to sit down and listen to while, say, blathering about crap on the internet. It flows through lovely guitary pieces describing a town or its surrounding countryside to upbeat songs for battle scenes and creepy songs about a mansion or a fortress, and because it’s a game soundtrack it climaxes with epic battle scores and wraps up with peaceful melancholy befitting the game’s apparently rather sad at time story. Apparently the game wasn’t well received by fans (something along the lines of all the Trigger characters being killed off and whatnot.. there are treatises around, as mentioned earlier) so for some the soundtrack might even be the highlight of the game. If, that is, they ever got the chance to listen to it in entirety.

The other thing about a lot of game music from the PS1 era is that it’s an era from before game music when all hollywood blockbuster. Back in the early days you’d have a catchy tune for a town, a shop, an overworld, a battle.. the soundtracks had real character to them. Nowadays many soundtracks are unremarkable, uninteresting and not memorable at all. Or it’s just licensed music chucked in because you need music in a game. There are exceptions to this of course, and I’m sure if I delved into it sufficiently I’d disprove my own point so I’m not going to. Suffice to say, the game music I listen to is pretty much limited to SNES and PS1 stuff (even though I never had a PS1). Or the Diablo II soundtrack. Or Need For Speed 3. Or.. shit, there goes that point I was making..

Suffice to say, there’s a remarkable amount of care and attention in many game soundtracks. They’re still out there, ready to be aquired and sampled, so if I’ve piqued your interest get your googlin’ on have a listen. You may be pleasently surprised… or find I’ve wasted your time. Either way, my work here is done.