Terminally Incoherent

Mopping up the blood…

I got my paws on the uncensored version of Atari’s Project Indigo. It’s an adventure/mystery game which was released in Europe under the name Fahrenheit. From what I heard it has been cut to pieces by US censors so much that it only vaguely resembles the original game. They actually even changed the name.

I can’t stand censorship. But in the light of Hot Coffee, it is unlikely that anything is going to change on this front. If anything, we will see the games butchered even more. So I decided to bypass the thought police and go straight to the source. The original game is about 2GB heavier than the American release, but that’s probably because it contains voice tracks in French, German and Italian.

The story is actually really interesting. Your initial character manages to kill a guy in a bathroom of a small diner in some kind of zombie-like trance. Once the guy is dead, he regains consciousness and freaks out. Now you have a dead guy on the floor, and a cop drinking coffee at the counter. What do you do? I started by hiding the knife, dragging the body into a stool and wiping blood from the floor. When I was leaving the bathroom I passed the cop in the door! So I ended up running out of the diner like a madman without paying the bill (which resulted in the waitress remembering my face).

However I’m pretty sure I could skip the cleanup, leave the bathroom, pay at the counter and leave the diner in the same amount of time. I’m not sure if this would change anything, but it is really cool to have that degree of freedom in a game

In fact there are some other really cool ideas in this game. For example, in act 2 you take control of the detective who was sent to investigate the crime scene in the diner. So you get to play as characters on both sides - which makes the game a little like watching a movie.

Furthermore they have a mental well being counter which drops whenever you encounter some scary or depressing shit, and goes up when you do cool stuff (like find clues pertaining to the case, drink coffee or have sex with your girlfriend). I’m not sure what happens when that counter falls all the way down, because I didn’t get there yet.

One thing that I don’t like about this game are the controls - they are funky. Most of actions are implemented via mouse gestures. So to open the door you have to walk up to the door, press lmb and then shake the mouse up and down. For the most part this is ok, but if you need to do something really quick it is easy to mess up.

All the dialogs in the game are timed, so you only have limited time to pick what do you want to say. When you are pressed for time, the difference between up-down gesture and down-up gesture is so small that you can easily mess up and say the wrong thing by mistake. That happened to me when I was talking to a bum in the alley. I made the wrong gesture and instead of sweet talking him to give me a clue, Ms. inspector gave the guy some patronizing speech. So I potentially missed out on a vital clue.

That’s not the worst thing though. The worst are the danger sequences, when you have to do Dance Dance Revolution style moves to avoid some threat. They actually expect you to press something like up-down-right-down using both the arrow keys, and the numpad simultaneously. I actually failed every single danger sequence in the game so far. I just know that at some point I will get stuck on one of them, and spend days trying to get the stupid sequence just right…

All, in all it’s a cool game. I wish the controls were less funky, but hopefully this will not turn into major annoyance. I like the story so far… Sigh… I wish I didn’t have a final on Wednesday. I probably won’t be able to play the game that much until I’m done with that…

What is up with that secret santa bullshit? Who came up with this? I hate these things. Sure, you can always ask to be excluded but when you don’t participate, you look like an ass. When you do, you end up having to buy some stupid gift for a person that you don’t really know that well. What do you buy? Somehow I think booze is not an acceptable gift here, but that’s the only thing I can think off at the moment.

Seriously, have you ever got anything cool from a co-worker in a randomized secret santa thing? You usually get shit. I have no clue what to get…

I’m thinking to go with the ultimate lame-ass gift - a gift certificate. But where from? I need to do some intelligence work at the workplace and scope out some store she likes or something like that.

I hate secret santa bullshit. Why can’t we just wish each other happy holidays, and go home? Sigh… Christmas cheer pisses me off

Why do users depend on silly, flimsy and unreliable features such as email auto completion in Outlook. The auto completion works by cashing the typed email addresses in NK2 and NICK files. By design these files are temporary. They are not backed up or archived and Outlook can delete them on a whim without a working. Relying on a cashing scheme rather than on the built in address book is usually not the best idea.

Especially since the cache files can get corrupted. I’m not sure how Outlook maintains this index, but my wild guess is that they use a hash file. The file grows very slowly so I’m betting that that they simply maintain the hash in the memory, and dump it into the file once Outlook shuts down. If you get only a partial dump, Outlook will try to pick up the pieces and recreate the cache. If your file gets totally fuxed, it will nuke it and start from scratch.

I think the problem happens when you fall right in between a minor write error, and a grand clusterfuck. You get outlook constantly trying to recreate a file that is broken enough not to read properly on the next startup, but not enough to warrant a complete wipe. Manually deleting the NK2 file seems to solve this issue.

Outlook sucks!

Charlize Climbs Like Spider Man

I haven’t watched the animated version of Aeon Flux, but I heard good things about it. I actually think I need to watch it. It’s plot can’t possibly be as contrived, as the new remake. How did they get Charlize Theron to work on this is beyond me.

The action sequences in this movie are so over the top, that they just don’t seem believable. Aeon climbs the walls like spiderman, jumps like cat woman, and fights better than Neo on crack. She basically can take on an a whole legion of angry guards armed with just two semi-automatics. And no one ever bothers to explain why is she so bad-ass good. Did she train allot? Is she somehow enhanced, like her partner who got opposable thumbs installed her feet? We don’t know…

When her partner (whom she trained herself) tries to sneak up on her from behind, Aeon knows about her without even looking back. Yet, 10 minutes later she gets knocked out by a blow from behind that she never saw coming. Where did her super senses go?

The whole movie seems disjointed and rushed. Some parts have absolutely no transition or continuity whatsoever. People seem to just appear in various scenes at just the right moment without any explanation or logic. Many trivial, yet quite important things remain unexplained. For example, how does Aeon get off the floating ship the first time around?

The plot itself is lame. You want to tell me that a society that perfected cloning technique, can’t figure out how to deal with infertility? Let me get this straight - they perfectly can recycle the DNA, but they can’t mix it up to introduce new genetic lines? Why are some women not sterile? What causes the sterility?

Little things like that are left out of the movie completely. I really wouldn’t mind sacrificing some of the ridiculous fight sequences to talk about the science. After all, this is the integral part of the story. The general message of this movie seems to be: “Cloning is bad, mmmmmkey. Go look at some flashy fight sequence - nothing more to see here.”

When Frank Herbert introduced the bullshit concept of genetic memory, I was willing to suspend my disbelief. But Herbert used the Spice as a convenient excuse. Without the spice, you could not unlock it. But in Aeon flux, ordinary people seem to carry genetic memories of their past lives. And for some reason, each time they get cloned their minds deteriorate some more… Why? I don’t know. No one knows. Cloning is bad, mmmmkey.

I’m really trying my best to buy your shit here, but trow me a bone for God’s sake. Why is cloning so fucking horrible? Why does Aeon think that “living like this is a torture”? I should really get the animated version to try make some sense out of this.

The main kicker - the turning point of the story, falls somewhere in the middle of the movie. There is a little mystery at the beginning but the big revelation comes way to soon to build up any suspense. And from that point on, the rest of the movie seems like a filler.

The whole picture can be summarized as follows:

1. Charlize Looks Cute
2. Charlize Kicks Ass
3. Charlize has no chemistry with the leading man
4. Lots of people die
5. Everyone is a clone
6. Fuck continuity
7. Fuck details
8. Did I mention lots of people die?
9. Charlize Looks Cute

That’s about all there is to it. Don’t waste your money on this crap.

My Gaim has been crashing on startup on my windows box for few days now. I haven’t really noticed it because I have been screwing around with AIM Triton. But today I wanted to use Jabber and I could not get Gaim up.

After mucking around for about an hour, getting a headache, and reinstalling gtk and gaim several times I finally found the issue:

TCL Loader Plugin + Cygwin = WinGaim crash - Starting with 0.75, Win Gaim comes with a tcl plugin loader. The loader plugin is dependant on tcl84.dll and will use the first one found in the dll search path. If you have a cygwin installation (with tcl 8.4), and have added its bin directory to your PATH, then WinGaim will crash on startup. The solution is to remove cygwin’s bin directory from your path. Introducing cygwin dlls into the native win32 environment is a very bad idea, and is likely to cause problems with other programs.

I recently set up an ssh server on my windows box, and this required me to add cygwin binaries to my windows path. I also noticed that Gimp also wigs out on startup now. I wonder how many other things did I break. Welcome to dll hell. This is stupid!

Once the cygwin entry was removed from the path, Gaim started working again. The sshd service is still running. I hope it won’t have problems starting again because of the path. In the worst case I will need to manually get it moving after each reboot (which usually works out to be 2-3 times a month with my windows box). I should be able to manage that…