nastybun

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.

Greetings, salutations and furniture. Are you well? I am transposed. Barley!

I installed Windows 7 on my desktop a couple of weeks ago. It’s the full proper real technet version, so it’s not pirated and not going to expire and screw me up shortly. Which is nice. First impressions are pretty much positive.. it’s certainly a set up from Vista. Given I was one of the few geeks in the world to voluntarily use Vista over XP, (on both my laptop and desktop in fact!) I really appreciate the differences. The slightly revamped task bar is definately an improvement for one thing. I like being able to pin my constantly open apps to it for two reasons; it saves on quick launch bar space and they’re always in the same order. Being the pedantic fellow I am, it’s something I’ve been wanting for a while now. There’s a pile of little changes too that all add up to a big positive change in usability. If you’re dragging a window around and pull it to the edge of the screen it’ll automatically maximise. If you grab the task bar of a maximised window and pull it somewhere, it’ll restore (go to its smaller window size). There’s native support for shuffling the desktop background image. Admittedly these are somewhat minor given there’s been basically no changes to the core UI since Windows 95, but if we’re honest it’s always been a nicely functional design. The start menu is the same as it is in Vista and aesthetically there’s little difference. But again, that’s not really a bad thing – especially given all the customisation that’s possible for those who want it.

Under the shinyness the experience feels more smooth and solid. I’ve not done any comparative boot up timing or anything (I’m not that pedantic..) but it seems to be more efficient in what it’s doing. The UAC is far less invasive now, which is definately a welcome change. Pretty much all the screen darkening prompts that I come across are due to running software that was designed for XP or earlier – other items will have the shield on the button but pressing it won’t cause the disruptive UAC prompt we all know and revile. Most everything I’ve thrown at it will install and run however, though I was out and about getting the latest versions of things before I started. Drivers for pretty much everything were fine, except for my Logitech stuff – as of writing their drivers don’t recognise 7 as an operating system that they’ll run on. The keyboard one refuses to install and the mouse one offers to install anyway.. but I didn’t. Given the mouse stores the changes I made to the thumb buttons (who’da thunk it, the on board memory is useful!) it works better without the drivers anyway. I’d really like the media keys on my keyboard to be functional though..

The only other major quibble I have with 7 is that VLC doesn’t scale properly in it. Apparently this is due to the graphics card drivers not supporting under Win7 whatever scaling method that VLC uses.. so I just use WMP. There are other players out there that will work apparently, but WMP has been remarkably non-irritating so far. We’ll see how long that lasts.. but signs are promising. Certainly it’s less irritating than it was under Vista, and there’s now the option to completely remove it if you so desire. Things for MS to work on for the inevitable Win8 include seperate background controls for multiple monitors and not burying the keyboard controls so badly in the Control Panel. Also, for some reason the icons are wider spaced now.. both in the system tray and in Windows Explorer. Not sure why.. but it’s less good. Get on it, eh?

Sperm whales sleep vertically with their heads pointing towards the bottom of the ocean.

The bats of the sea!

Or something like that. It’s been the week of Fable 2 – the game where you decide who you will become. Apparently. In short, it’s an RPG where you’re free to be a dick, should you want to. In long.. well.. it’s an RPG that plays on genre conventions while greatly simplifying the whole experience. And.. it works. Mostly..

First of all, it’s an Action RPG. This means you’re actively swording/shooting/burning band guys, rather than selecting actions from a list while waiting for the bad guys’ turn to smack you in the face. Much more preferable, for me. They’ve managed to pull off a combat system that’s both exceedingly simple to use, yet deep enough allow you to utilise many different tactics to slaughter whomsoever looks at you funny. A button to swing your sword/blunt object at them, another button to fire a bullet/bolt at them and another button to set them on fire/slow down time/make them scrub the floor. There are many moves you can build up to, and the experience system allows you to specialise in the areas you use more than the other ones, but still allows for improvements in other areas. It’s a very good system that I can see other developers borrowing. At least, they should do.

Storywise, it’s a little light on. Essentially, it’s a revenge story combined with saving the world. Nothing groundbreaking at all, yet motivation enough to go rough up the bad dudes. It’s actually the side quests that had me more motivated. Things like finding a farmer’s boy a wife, exacting revenge on a lover for a ghost and finding the sections of a body that have been scattered across the world for a gravekeeper aren’t your usual RPG fare, but this isn’t your usual RPG. It’s also all voiced by British people, which lends a certain air to the proceedings. Somehow it makes the slightly farsical nature of things more fun.

The biggest selling point though is the fact that you can choose to be nice or nasty, or just tread the middle ground. I went through mostly as a good person this time, but only when people were watching. I’m going to try it again as nasty though. This time I only stole things from peoples’ houses when they weren’t looking… Unlike most RPGs you can’t just wander into peoples’ houses and take what you want without them caring at all.. this time if they see you they’ll call the guards and you may have to do some community service if you can’t smooth things over. You can also have sex with pretty much anyone you want to.. or with multiples of them should you choose to. By the end of the game for me pretty much everyone in the game would swamp me guy trying to get me to marry them. There was a particular blacksmith guy that just wouldn’t go away.. even when my guy’s wife and kids were there. All in all it’s a fun mechanic to mess around with just to see what happens.

Another new mechanic in the dog that you have that will sniff out treasure and help you attack bad dudes. He’s a bit useless to start with, but you can train him up to be more effective. A bad dude kicked him once.. he died real quick. There’s also a glowing trail in the game that leads you do your quest’s destination. If you fixate on the trail you’ll miss out on treasures and whatnot, but it’s great to keep you on track for destinations. It’s billed as an open world game, but it’s not really. Most areas have clearly defined trails that lead to the important areas in them and the glowing trail will stick resolutely to them, but it’s open and non-linear enough for that not to be an issue.

All in all, it’s a game that has enough depth to entertain you for a while, but only if you’re willing to be sucked into it. Taken purely at surface level it’s really nothing special, but if you’re prepared to put a little bit of effort in to play with the various mechanics and experiment with what the world will allow you to do, then it’ll entertain you for multiple play throughs. It certainly managed to get me into another play through.. I’ll probably start that tonight in fact. I’ll let you know how evil I can get with it…