Initially this technique was used mostly by a range of novelty linux distributions built to be emergency system rescue platforms, tech demos or stripped down miniature OS’s that you could carry with you in your pocket. Nowadays however use of live CD’s is widespread. Large and popular distributions such as Ubuntu use them by default on their installation CD’s for example. Such a CD can then act as a demo disk, an installer and rescue disk that can allow the user to recover his data when the installed OS gets hosed for some reason. It is a beautiful, user friendly and elegant way to package the system. There is almost no reason not to do this.

And yet the dominant player in the OS market does not even acknowledge this methodology as an option. I think that everyone would agree that a Live Windows CD would be a nice addition to the toolbox of every IT professional. Of course the windows support niche has been filled out by Linux distros quite well. The NTFS support is quite good these days and Linux based tools that allow you to edit windows registry are becoming more reliable each day. Still, it is a bit ironic that you usually have to use Linux to repair or recover a Windows installation – especially considering how much money Microsoft spends on the FUD campaigns against it. You would think that someone at Redmond would notice this, and decide to create a Live Windows version instead of offering users baroque solutions such as the “Windows Recovery Console”.

Sadly, I doubt this will ever happen. After all, Microsoft has spent the last decade trying to tie their OS to the underlying hardware and make it less portable. Reversing their policy and creating a version of Windows that could be carried around on a CD, and boot on any machine without some crazy online activation scheme is probably out of the question.

Of course trying to stifle progress is futile. If enough people want Live Windows CD, it will be made with or without Microsoft’s help. Enter BartPE – a project to create just that, Microsoft be damned. Of course since Windows is a proprietary OS, it is not possible to distribute an actual Live CD of it without incurring legal wrath of the software giant. What can be distributed however is a set of tools that will take your existing (legally licensed) Windows XP CD and turn it into a Live CD. Unless of course you happen to have an OEM version of the CD in which case it does not work.

Not so long ago I ran into a scenario that a live linux CD could not fix. I was dealing with a computer protected by Pointsec for PC full disk encryption. The windows installation on the system was hosed most likely due to a HD damage – at least that’s what I suspected judging from the agonizing grinding noises it was making while trying to load Windows. It was clear that parts of the file system are still intact though because the system would hang or crash at different points during the boot procedure. What I needed from that machine were 3 excel and PDF files that could not be easily recovered if they were lost. The user naturally didn’t back up, because hell – why for, right?

I could of course attempt to decrypt the whole drive (I had the recover file, and admin passwords to do so), but that seemed like a risky move. With a hard drive on its last legs, last thing I wanted it to do is to work real hard for several hours copying bits all over the place. What I wanted to do was to get in, and access the files I needed before the drive collapses upon itself. Live distro was the way to go.

Check Point is actually nice enough to offer a BartPE plug-in on their installation CD’s. They don’t talk about it though, probably because they don’t want to tempt Microsoft which pretends BartPE does not exist. The plugin is unsupported but it works well enough for what I needed it to do. The problem was that to build a BartPE disk I needed a Windows XP CD and the only copy I had on me was a Dell OEM with Service Pack 2 included on the disk. My initial build failed miserably because that Windows CD is crippled in some subtle way.

I did some googling and found a writeup that explains how to use Dell OEM disk to create an UltimateBootCD. It is not exactly what I needed, but following these instructions yielded quite positive results. I had to tweak the writeup in a few places, but for the most part it worked. I will reproduce it here with less atrocious formatting and appropriate corrections.

CD Used for the Build: Windows XP Pro SP2 DELL OEM
Platform on which the build was performed: Windows XP Pro SP3

The procedure:

1. Copy the contents of the CD to some directory (say C:\WINXP). Make sure you are copying hidden and system files as well as normal files.
2. Go to BartPE installation directory
3. Go to the Plugins folder
4. Create a directory named Dell
5. Inside create a file named fixdell.inf
6. The contents of fixdell.inf should be as follows:

   [Version]
   Signature= "$Windows NT$"
    
   [PEBuilder]
   Name="Fix Dell Windows XP OEM boot problems"
   Enable=1
    
   [SourceDisksFiles]
   iastor.sys=4,,4
   a320raid.sys=4,,4
   aarich.sys=4,,4
   aac.sys=4,,4
   cercsr6.sys=4,,4
   afamgt.sys=4,,4
   NvAtaBus.sys=4,,4
   nvraid.sys=4,,4
   symmpi.sys=4,,4
   megasas.sys=4,,4

7. Download subinacl from Microsoft website here
8. Install it (choose all default options)
9. Go to C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools
10. Copy the subinacl.exe to C:\WINXP\i386\ (or change WINXP to whatever you named your folder in step 1
11. In C:\WINXP\i386 create a batch file (eg. fixdell.cmd) with the following:

    reg query HKU | find /i "pebuilder" > fixdell.txt
    for /f %%a in (fixdell.txt) do reg unload %%a
    reg load HKLM\DELL setupreg.hiv
    subinacl /subkeyreg hkey_local_machine\dell\controlset001\services\iastor\ /objectcopysecurity=hkey_local_machine\dell\controlset001\services
    reg unload HKLM\DELL
    del fixdell.txt
    del /ah setupreg.hiv.log
    echo Check output to see if there are any errors.
    pause

12. Run the batch file.
13. Reboot
14. Build BartPE CD
15. ???
16. Profit

Note that if BartPE throws up warnings about missing files, you should probably go back to step 6 and add these file names to your fixdell.inf file using the same pattern as all the other ones.

Oh, and to finish my story – it worked. I was able to create a BartPE disk with the Pointsec for PC plugin and then use it to recover the files from the encrypted drive. There is a little trick to it though – you can’t just boot BartPE from disk as usual. You have to let the machine load the Pointsec Pre-Boot Environment, log in as a user authorized to access the machine and then hit Ctrl+F10. This will shoot you over to a customized Pointsec boot selection menu, where you can choose to start the system from the CD. That’s actually the only way to do this. If you allow the system boot from the CD before the Pointsec Pre-Boot Environment kicks in, the encrypted disk will remain inaccessible.

I hope this helps anyone who is trying to build BartPE with a crippled OEM disk. I know this works for Dell OEM, but chances are it might work for other versions too.

The name of the genre is carry-over from the pen and paper based roots of the genre. The original RPG’s do entail actual role playing. These are games that require bunch of people to get together, sit around the table and pretend they are barbarians and wizards, while rolling handfuls of dice. They are governed by complex rules intended to simulate real world situations such as combat. The rules were designed so that different people could play different characters with various skills, strengths and weaknesses. They added randomness and luck into the equation to make things exciting. There was nothing about these rules that was endemic to the RPG. They were simply there out of necessity – to provide a workable framework against which the players and game masters could work of. What made RPG games what they were, was the actual role playing – people getting into character, and having imaginary adventures together.

When we decided to port RPG games to video game platforms, we couldn’t really implement the that particular social aspect of these games. We also could not really carry over the concept of a game master, or the free-form, open ended world where the only constraint is the GM’s imagination. So we ported everything else – among other things, the rules. And so CRPG’s tend to include the following:

1. A set of skills or attributes that define the character
2. A mechanism to advance these skills/attributes by gaining experience either from quests or from combat
3. Inventory system that allows you to carry, modify and sell items
4. A mechanic which allows you to add non player character followers to your party
5. A system that allows you to converse with NPC’s that inhabit the game world

There is nothing RPG specific about these things though. Skills and attributes exist because that is the only way to simulate things like expertise and proficiency in a pen and paper environment. In a computer game you can easily make a warrior visibly stronger than a scholar without actually ever exposing any number stats to the player. On the other hand inventory screens and dialog screens are simply a factor of the weakness of our chosen medium. In a real RPG talking to people, or picking up items is something you naturally do during the course of the game. After all that’s what you do in real life too – you walk around, talk to people and sometimes they give you stuff you can put in your pockets.

So originally CRPG games were simply an effort to emulate pen and paper experience in an electronic medium. They were sort of a bastard baby spawned by the unholy matrimony between Role Playing and technology. But this is no longer the case. The bastard child grew up, graduated and gained a whole new audience: people who have never actually sat around a table and never rolled dice while scarfing down potato chips, drinking Mountain Dew and quoting Monthy Python. These new players did not know what the pen and paper experience was – but they did have opinions on what was and wasn’t fun to do in a video game. And so RPG genre evolved into the shape it is today – an amalgamation of different engines, systems and mechanics.

For example, how is that Mass Effect 2 and Torchlight are in the same genre? The former has no inventory and mostly a vestigial skill/experience system. The later is pretty much missing everything other than inventory and skill/experience system. And yet, most people would put them side by side on the same shelf.

The five characteristics I mentioned above do not really apply to all video games considered to be RPG’s. Not all games have all five of them present. Furthermore, games can contain several of them without actually being classified an RPG. For example, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. had quite an extensive inventory system, but most people consider it an FPS. The Secret of the Monkey Island had an inventory management component as well, but it was a point and click adventure. In Half Life 2 you would often team up with Alyx and/or participate in rather complex scripted conversations. But no one can really claim HL2 is an RPG.

Of course you can say that the last 3 items on my list are irrelevant. What makes an RPG is numerical attributes, skill points, experience and leveling up. But it seems that even this stance can be challenged. Both Fable III and Final Fantasy XIV seem to be abandoning traditional level up dings and character sheets in favor of more organic character progression. They will hide the numbers from the player, and allow their characters to grow and become stronger based on their in game decisions. Both these games are sequels to established RPG series. And it is usually rare for games to switch genres between sequels.

I guess what I’m trying to say here, is that RPG is very amorphous and vague description. There is no clear cut definition of an RPG. When asked, most of us simply uses their gut feeling to see whether or not a game is an RPG. Is Mass Effect 2 one? How about Torchlight? How about an experience-less Fable III?

Fuck if I know.

Here is the obligatory π day question: how many digits of π do you have memorized? And if your answer is more than 5, I have a follow up question: why? No seriously, why? There are so many other things you could memorize instead. Things you could actually use in your daily life such as the stats of D&D monsters, video game trivia, internet memes or, I don’t know, Quenya vocab words. Practical things. There is really no reason to memorize a hundred digits of π because there is never situation where you would need more than 4 or 5 and were without means to look up the remaining ones. In fact, if you use that much precision it would be recommended to look it up, rather than rely on your memory.

Obligatory pi day cartoon.

The proper answer to the question “What is the 25th digit of π” is “I don’t know, but I can look it up”. That is a scientific approach. Remembering a million digits of π is not even geeky. It’s just… Silly. I think the amount of respect you get for remembering digits π tops out around 5 or 6 and then starts falling sharply. It’s like: “you know way to many digits of π sir, I don’t know if we can be friends”. I don’t know if I can actually trust anyone who can sit there and memorize numbers like this. I mean, I hardly even have time to think about memorizing stuff – my brain works overtime as it is. If you can memorize so many pi digits you either don’t have that much going on upstairs (so you can spend time memorizing instead of thinking about things) or you just have a very good memory. Both possibilities disturb me.

On the other hand, calculating π is cool because it actually does something productive. It pushes the limits of what we can do with technology. The discipline is all about creating efficient algorithms. That’s something I can get behind. Everyone can memorize bunch of numbers given enough time and effort – rote memorization is a dumb busy work though. Not everyone can write an algorithm that will calculate 27 trillion digits of π within 130 days using a desktop PC. That’s the current record btw – 27 trillion.

Another interesting upgrade is the quantum entanglement communicator in the conference room. It is essentially a high bandwidth Ansible that allows for instantaneous point-to-point communication with Cerberus command from any point in the galaxy. It transmits life size holographic image and audio stream which is actually quite impressive. In most universes Ansibles are kinda crappy. In Le Guin’s Ekumen universe they can only send/receive text. The device installed on Normady is much, much more powerful.

In fact, existence of such device in the universe makes one wonder why most civilizations build their communication network Mass Relays instead of these awesome Ansibles. In fact, you can even ask the ship AI about it. This conversation pretty much goes like this:

Click to embiggen.

EDI basically hand waves this away (which is actually pretty impressive seeing how it has no hands) and gives you some bullshit about point-to-point communication. It is quite obvious that no one at BioWare reads this blog. If they did, they would know that I already came up with a clever idea for galaxy wide internet based around Ansibles. In case you are to lazy to read that article let me re-iterate it here:

1. Establish point to point Ansible connections to bunch of your neighbors
2. Plug all this Ansibles into a router
3. Connect the router to the planetary internet
4. Set it up to route outbound off-world requests to appropriate Ansibles
5. If you get an inbound packet that should go to a different world route it out using an appropriate ansible

It would take some coordination, but if everyone would do this, Mass Effect universe would have instantaneous packet switched internet that covers the whole galaxy. The best part is that all you really need to do this, is good old 20th century TCP/IP networking. And yes, they would probably still be using IPv4. Isn’t it funny that all modern OS’s and modern hardware support IPv6 but no one actually uses it for anything?

So yeah… BioWare – read my post, and please take it into consideration when making Mass Effect 3. I’m expecting a galaxy wide internet, or a good explanation why it is not there. The fact that your Ansibles are point-to-point doesn’t mean shit.

I have realized that nearly all of my favorite games have been created by 3 companies. There are dozens of game publishers out there. and many many awesome games. But the ones which are on my top 10 list all came from either Valve, BioWare or Bethesda. These development houses seem to consistently be able to produce titles that I find deeply satisfying. Every time I pick up one of their games I end up loving the shit out of it. Why is that?

Its possible that I somehow conditioned myself to think highly of these companies. It’s possible that I cut them a lot of slack, and tend to ignore a lot of stuff otherwise infuriate me. But I don’t think so. When I picked up Morrowind I had no clue what Bethesda was. Same goes for Jade Empire and KOTOR – I wasn’t even aware they were both made by BioWare until I started writing a review for KoTOR2 and looked this information up. They were just great games that I loved. I didn’t really care who made them.

3 best game companies, evar.

I think what happened is that these companies found the right formula for their games – one that draws me in and keeps me coming back for more. Valve for example completely nailed the FPS. I don’t claim they are the best in the FPS market – I’m just saying that what the do, is exactly what I’m looking for in an FPS game. But different people, like different things.

I learned this when I gave Ark the Orange Box copy of HL2 (I already had it, but I bought the box for Portal, Episodes and TF2). I really wanted him to experience what I thought to be one of the greatest FPS games under the sun. He beat it, and summed up his experience with a shrug. “It was ok”, he told me. Too easy, terrifyingly linear with a vague, incomprehensible story. Funny thing but this is precisely the stuff I loved about it. It was difficult enough to get my adrenaline pumping, but forgiving enough to prevent me from dying every 5 minutes. Staring at a game-over screen takes me out of the game – and since I rarely died, HL2 was a very immersive experience. The linear design made it possible for the scripted events that make the game so cinematic.

I loved Portal which was a a hybrid FPS, puzzle game with an incredible story that was as funny as it was disturbing. I love Team Fortress 2 which distilled the multiplayer team play to the point of science. Few other games offers such variety and balance. Not to mention the Left 4 Dead which combined zombies, co-op play and a unique dark humor. Valve is the only company that actually managed to get me to venture out of my shell and try that multiplayer thing that I have been avoiding for years.

Bethesda nailed the sandbox RPG model. In this day and age, everyone and their mom is using the sandbox but no one does it right. Anyone following Rockstar school of game design tries to design the experience for you. They script the missions so that you have to do them by the numbers. Bethesda tends to give you some overall quest goals and then steps back allowing you to create your own adventures. They let you wander around and steal shit from people’s houses. Most objects in their games can be either destroyed, or stolen and sold for profit. Most of the doors can be lock picked. Most fences can be scaled, jumped or levitated over. There are no impassable chest high walls or fake, painted on scenery. All enemies actually carry the items they are shown wearing. In most games when you kill a powerful knight in full plate armor who is carrying some nasty enchanted blade, all you can loot from his body is 20gp and a crappy magical helmet he wasn’t even wearing. In Bethesda games, looting is a WYSIWYG operation. This is the right way to make sandbox games.

Let me give you an example: my brother once created a Morrowind character who was a Dwemer scholar and artifact collector. He spent all his points on social skills such as bartering and speachcraft and just traveled across the island collecting Dwemer related books, items weapons and armor. He funded this enterprise via theft, drug trafficking (oh, and selling the ridiculously expensive Dark Brotherhood armors to that one talking crab merchant). After a while his house in the game looked like a museum with almost every piece of furniture holding stacks of Dwemer items.

BioWare’s winning formula on he other hand is their writing team. Not that Valve and Bethesda don’t know how to write. They all do, but BioWare makes this a core part of their experience. They can consistently invent new game worlds with expansive and complex lore, and populate them with interesting NPC’s. I mean, just look at these titles: KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Dragon Age. Great story arcs, interesting characters, plot twists and and deep branching dialogs. Their games are usually very linear but let explore the game world quite extensively by talking to NPC – both friend and foe. But most importantly their games let you develop relationships with your companion NPC’s. I mean, I am still kind off shaken by how Morrigan fucked me over in Dragon Age. Same goes for the end game twist in Jade Empire.

What is your favorite game design studio and why?

I’m pretty sure this fiasco will somehow get blamed on pirates eventually. But right now there are two kinds of AC2 players out there: those who pirated it and didn’t even notice the outage, and legitimate customers who got locked out of their game for no fault of their own. I suspect that many of these people, who did not really care about DRM before buying AC2 will start caring about it now.

Personally I believe that Ubisoft low-balled their figures when they were setting up the DRM framework. That’s the risk you run into when you create a software that needs to call home. It is not enough to just set up a single server in some closet and forget about it – not unless you are a small company with only a handful of customers. When you are the size of Ubisoft, and you release a game as anticipated as Assasin’s Creed 2 you don’t need “a server” – you need “a server farm” complete with load balancing and a dedicated high bandwidth internet hookup. The problem is that this costs money. All the money you spend on that infrastructure cuts directly into your profits. Furthermore, it is an ongoing expense. You have to throw down a huge chunk of cash up front to set it up, and then steadily pour money into bandwidth and maintenance. So if you are Ubisoft, it is in your best interest to spend as little money on it as possible on the whole exercise. So you should get the least amount of servers that can support the estimated sales volume and not one more.

Furthermore, your customers don’t pay you a monthly fee. MMO’s can afford to run their servers indefinitely, because they have a constant source of income. As long as the flow of cash from membership fees covers their maintenance costs it remains feasible for them to keep their infrastructure online. The lifetime maintenance of DRM servers on the other hand must be funded directly from the sales of the game they protect. This means that despite what Ubisoft may tell it’s customers, it is in their best interest to shut down the AC2 servers as soon as it is possible. If you ever looked at sales figures of single player video games, you’ll probably know that they tend to follow a certain pattern – there is a huge sales spike on the release date which gradually tapers off during the next week or so, remains high for some time, and then takes a sharp dip dropping down to almost nothing a month or two after the release. Most of pro-DRM advocates like to bring this up this fact when they try to justify the need for copyright protection. Video game publishers make most of their money in the first few weeks after the release. So what they make in those few weeks must cover all the bandwidth and maintenance expenses for their DRM servers.

Think about this – the cost of keeping a DRM server online forever is technically an infinity dollars. Eventually this cost will eat all your profits from sales, and then cut into profits from your next game and so on. So if you are smart, you will start phasing out the DRM servers as soon as you see the sales take a bigger dip. Eventually you’d probably want to reduce your server farm to a single re purposed desktop PC sitting underneath someone’s desk in the office. Or at least this is the best case scenario you could hope for.

Video game companies have nothing to gain from running DRM servers, and a lot to lose. In fact, having the servers go down few times on the release day is probably preferable to spending huge amount of money on a robust, redundant infrastructure that will need to be scrapped in a few months anyway. If you build a huge DRM server farm and the game does not sell well, you are essentially going to have to pay for the privilege of allowing users to play your game out of your own pocket. It’s actually saver to let your servers melt down under heavy load few times, catch some negative PR and then turn around and say “See, this is all because of pirates. If it wasn’t for them we wouldn’t have to do this”.

In other words, DRM activation networks are crappy by design. They are made on the cheap, because they are just superfluous expense. They will go down all the time – it’s a fact of life. That’s how this whole racket is set up. Think about this next time you buy a game with online activation.

For the record, Steam might be an exception here because it is a distribution platform. As such, Valve has vested interest to invest into it. What I’m talking about above are dedicated DRM solutions like that of AC2.

Let me say it here once an for all though: piracy is not theft. If it was theft, it would be called that. We have different names for different things for a reason – that’s the only way we can tell them apart. Sometimes several names mean the same things – we call those synonyms. But piracy is not synonymous with theft. Neither is copyright infringement. Do you know how I know? Because I own a dictionary. When two words are synonyms, their dictionary descriptions should say the same thing. If they don’t the words are not synonymous. Copyright infringement and theft have quite distinct definitions. They are separate concepts both in common usage, and in the legal sense.

It is common to equate the two but they are very, very different crimes. You can ask any judge or lawyer. If you get caught pirating movies or music you will not be charged with theft but with infringement and/or illegal distribution. It is a completely separate domain of crime. Theft is usually considered a blue collar crime, while piracy is usually white collar.

Yes, I know I’m arguing semantics but in this discussion semantics are very important. If you are pro-strict copyright enforcement and anti piracy you should want to help people understand why illegal copying is wrong. Calling it theft is simply misdirection – you substitute one crime with another more serious crime – one that caries a higher social stigma. No one can really argue that theft can in any way be beneficial to anyone. But loosening copyright laws could be culturally beneficial allowing people to create derivative works and remixes easier.

Any argument that starts with “Piracy is like stealing, therefore…” is essentially a straw man argument. You are switching the object of discussion to incite emotional reaction in your opponent. Theft is heavy emotionally charged word, and it tends to throw people off their guard. When you equate piracy to theft, it becomes extremely easy to strike it down and if you do it well it shuts people up. Straw man arguments like this are effective. But they are intellectually dishonest. When you use them you are not wining the argument at hand but rather some other easily winnable argument that you cleverly switched to.

The point is that copyright infringement is just that. There is really no need to compare it to anything else. If it is inherently wrong, the wrongness should be self evident. Whenever you have to say “illegal downloading is like…” you are basically obscuring the issue, and redirecting the discussion. There should be no question about whether or not it is right or wrong.

But if people can’t really see this inherent wrongness, and if it is absolutely necessary for you to use a straw man to convince them otherwise then… Well, then maybe there is a point to our discussions. Maybe we should talk about it, and possibly explore the idea that perhaps the copyright law as it exists right now is not an optimal solution. Perhaps it could be changed to reflect the times we live in.

The problem with copyright infringement is that sometimes it is hard to tell who is hurt by it. When you steal my apple I no longer have an apple. When you illegally download my product I potentially lose a sale, but only if you intended to buy it in the first place. If you wouldn’t buy it if an illegal copy was not available then I technically did not lose anything. This makes the whole problem much more complex than theft.

When you look at copyright infringement you have to keep in mind that:

• Some pirates become paying customers
• Some pirates never were and never will be paying customers. They would never buy from you, so you don’t technically lose a sale when they download.
• Some pirates may actually spread the word about you – so you may actually gain sales

It is easy and fashionable to dismiss all of the above as irrelevant. But these are clearly integral parts of the equation. Why should we hand wave them away? The only reason why people dismiss them so eagerly is because they don’t fit into “piracy is like theft” rhetoric. They completely wreck that argument, and so they must be excluded – otherwise the straw man can’t be spectacularly topped over.

Theft causes an actual loss of some resource that then has to be replaced. Copyright Infringement causes an assumed loss that you could potentially incur from sales under a specific set of conditions without actually being deprived of the original resource in any way. They are very different concepts and they should not be used interchangeably.

I wander what would happen if we started using this same strategy to put an equal sign between unrelated crimes – one of which is a minor infraction that millions of people commit every day, and other a serious crime that is contemptible. I know, let’s try this:

I know, I’m going to start saying that speeding on the highway is technically a premeditated vehicular manslaughter. I mean, look at the statistics. Thousands of people die due to speeding every year. You are probably going to tell me that you can exceed the speed limit without actually killing anyone. You will probably try to tell me that people do it all the time without serious accidents. Bah! I say that’s rubbish. That’s crazy talk. You are just saying that because you think breaking the rules is cool. You like to stick it to the man and drive above the speed limit like a maniac. You are trying to rationalize your crime away, but you are nothing more than a murderer. Every person who speeds should be charged with premeditated vehicular manslaughter because under an optimal set of conditions the two become equivalent.

Wait… That kind of makes me sound like some crazy person. Kind of like you sound when you start comparing piracy to theft. They are not the same thing. If piracy was theft, it would be called theft. The fact that somewhere deep down in your heart you feel it is “like theft” does not change how the courts look at it. I’m not making excuses, I’m not rationalizing piracy. I agree that it is illegal under the current law. But can we please just call it what it is, instead of strawmanning?

Why do we need to keep having this discussion. It’s like watching a bad sketch that has all the absurdity an irony of a Monty Python skit, but none of it’s humor:

“But piracy is not theft.”
“Yes it is!”
“I have a dictionary here that says it’s not”
“Bah! It feels like theft to me, so I shall discard your logic and go with my gut feeling on this!”
“Ok, but what you feel doesn’t really matter here. We are discussing facts.”
“Yes it does”
“So you are saying that your gut feeling trumps common sense, logic and a legal definition of the crime?”
“Yes.”
“I give up.”
Ha! So you admit you were wrong! I win.

It’s a bit like that. Only more stupid. And usually someone calls you a fag or a hippie midway through the discussion if you don’t immediately agree with them.

I’m mainly posting this here, so that when we have this discussion in the future (and we will have it many times – it keeps comming back like a bad venereal disease), I can just respond to silly arguments with “Piracy is not theft” and link those words back here. In fact I will probably have to do it in the comments thread below, at which point it will create a recursive loop with no exit. So please, don’t force me to use recursion.

I really complained and nitpicked a lot when I reviewed the original Mass Effect. This does not mean I didn’t like it. To the contrary, I liked it very much despite the numerous jarring flaws that I mentioned in my reviews. I have the same relationship with Mass Effect 2. I love it even though it is flawed in many ways. I will probably rant about all these flaws in the next few posts, but please don’t think I’m trashing the game. I do this out of love.

Mass Effect 2 Cover

In many ways, the new game is an improvement over the old one. For example, do you remember how I said the inventory management in Mass Effect was a train wreck? Well, they fixed that problem quite definitively. Inventory is no longer annoying because it is simply not there. They removed it.

At first I raged at this, but then I realized it’s actually not such a bad thing. They simply got rid of a broken, under-designed feature and routed the game play around it. You can still find new guns and armor upgrades, but the process is much more streamlined and organic now. When you find a weapon upgrade you pick it up and equip it immediately, discarding the old gun – which is what your character would probably do in real life. The new weapons are always designed to be better than the base models they replace so you never actually end up with a gun that sucks. Similarly, instead of carrying 17 different models of heavy armor in your backpack, you collect blueprints that allow you to upgrade your personal armor when you go back to Normandy. The lack of inventory also removed the irrational requirement that each character carries 1 weapon of each kind strapped to their back, even if they are not skilled enough to use it. Now you manage your weapon load-out before a mission, and those characters who for example are not trained to use an assault rifle, can’t be issued one. When you pick up a new weapon upgrade, only those characters that posses the skill to use it are affected. It works much better than the former system.

Inventory is not the only much maligned game element that got axed. They also removed the silly Mako driving sequences. They were repetitive, boring and annoying due to the fact that the random terrain generator seemed to love huge mountains and canyons that were really hard to navigate using the four wheel vehicle. They could have fixed this issue by tweaking their terrain algorithms, but they got read of the headache altogether. Instead of being dropped 50 miles from the mission objective and having to traverse 8 mountain ranges to reach it, you now land right on top of it using a shuttle, which is a vast improvement. They also replaced the generic, super repetitive “land on the planet, kill all Geth and get out” missions with actual quests that involve interesting NPC characters, plot twists and expose you to a lot of new information about the Mass Effect universe, it’s history and the races that inhabit it.

Similarly, Geth are no longer your only enemy. In original Mass Effect all weapons and powers that had diminished or no effect against synthetic enemies were completely useless since 99% of the missions had you fight against the same 5 or 6 Geth models. The sequel has a wide variety of organic and synthetic enemies, forcing you to switch weapon based powers and strategies with each mission. It is a welcome improvement.

Really, it’s almost as if BioWare developers listened to customer feedback, and re-designed their game removing the disliked or controversial features. But I know that this is a silly notion. I mean, it’s not like these companies ever listen to our rants, do they?

All these improvements came at a cost of course. The game was significantly dumbed down compared to it’s predecessor. The skills and abilities were another major causality. Now each character gets 3 special powers (except Shepard who gets few more) that have exactly 4 levels of power. The system is dumb simple, but, very, very intuitive. I remember spending lots of time in Mass Effect 1 agonizing over spending my XP into the right skills, trying to figure out how they worked and why they were needed. And it was not the good kind of agonizing (like in Dragon Age) but the frustrating kind. The original system seemed a bit dumb, and stripped down compared to the RPG games I was used to. It felt simplistic and silly, and yet clunky and awkward at the same time. The new system doesn’t even pretend to be a fully fledged RPG game. It is a neat skill leveling system attached to a great shooter.

That’s really how I view Mass Effect 2 – a Gears of War/Halo like game but with a very, very good story and interactive dialogs. After an awkward first installment, Mass Effect finally got the guts to come out of the closet and say “Fine, I’m not an RPG. I’m an action shooter with RPG elements”. And you know what? It is not a worse game for it. I like it this way. I can’t blame BioWare for trying to make their games appeal to a wider market of FPS enthusiasts, especially since they have retained the best elements that make all of their games so damn good – well written story, great characters, interesting quests and deep dialog trees. Besides, Dragon Age proved that they are not abandoning us RPG nuts and they will keep making classic RPG’s for us. They are simply using Mass Effect to branch out and explore new markets.

Now that I mentioned that I like the story in the game, let me point out that I do have quite a few nitpicks. But we can talk about them later. In the meantime let’s talk about the differences between the two games, and how they affect the game play. Do you like these changes? Do you think the game was dumbed down to much? Or is it just right? Let me know.

Please keep this thread free of spoilers. I will have another thread to discuss the plot and the end game/

1. I love to read, and this blog is basically about thins I love so it would be silly not to include it
2. I’m always looking for good book recommendations, and every time I post a book review I get “if you liked this, you should check out that” type of responses in the comments which makes me happy
3. I know some of you folks don’t read fiction on a principle, but I keep hoping that if I expose you to these good (or bad) SF titles you might be tempted to pick one up at some point

So yeah. Those are my reasons. Now, on to the reviews.

Reality Dysfunction Part 2: Expansion

If you have been following this blog for some time, you might remember my rather positive review of the first part of the book. It was not the greatest piece of literature I have read, but it was somewhat original and interesting. Alphast warned me that it does not get any better than that, and he was right. Hamilton has some good ideas and opens up some very interesting plot lines but he often fails to capitalize on them. It almost seems that his universe would actually be more interesting without the possessed who are overpowered to the point of being boring.

For example, I really enjoyed the idea of a colonist group on a maiden world being subverted from within by a former cultist serving his “jail” term as a forced laborer. Quinn Dexter was over the top evil, but the idea was quite good – this clash between group of idealist searching for a better life and cynical, hardened criminals who were nevertheless ensnared by charismatic demagogue. Of course shit hits the fan, possessed appear and the planet becomes some kind of dream-like realm full of phantasmagorical beasts, buildings that don’t exist and armies of mounted bulletproof knights who can shoot energy beams out of their eyes.

Joshua Calvert graduates from an endearing underdog to a walking paragon of perfection. It is really hard to root for a guy who can’t do no wrong, gets the girl every time and is exceedingly cocky about it too. Most of the characters are flat, one dimensional and stereotypical like that. Calvert couldn’t be more awesome if he tried, while Dexter is so fucked up and evil, that even the souls of legendary psychopathic murderers, villains and baby killers of previous centuries are scared and repulsed by him. The plot develops at a glacial pace. Which is actually quite an accomplishment considering Hamiltons fast paced narrative. I noticed for example that he very much likes to go on tangents and introduce new characters which he will then follow for for 20 or so pages, describing their experiences in painstaking detail only to have them die or be possessed at the end never to be heard from again. Then he turns around and glosses over crucial plot points – such as a visit to the alien village. What should have been a major development becomes just one of the few stops during a crazy escape sequence, with hordes of angry enemies chasing the heroes.

There are two more books left in this series, but I actually didn’t even bother picking any of them up.

Divine Invasion

Divine Invasion is technically the second book in the theologically themed trilogy of Philip K Dick, that starts with VALIS. It is not a sequel or continuation however. It does not even take place in the same universe for that matter. It is by far the most Science Fiction themed of the three books. Unlike the other two it includes space travel, powerful AI, paranoid totalitarian nation states and etc. Of course it also contains Yah – a god (or the God, depending on how you look at it) who was banished from Earth, but tries to reclaim it by being born as a human child. Sadly, the child suffers severe brain damage, and forgets his true nature until he meets a mysterious girl that helps him to remember. Of course all of this might actually be a bad hallucination experienced by a guy who is sleeping in a cryogenic fugue waiting for a spleen replacement. Dick dives into mystical gnosticism, muses about the nature of divinity and faith itself and never really bothers telling readers what is real and what is imagined or hallucinated. It’s trippy, thought provoking and awesome. You should read it.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

This is the third book in the series started by VALIS but just like the previous two it stands alone, sharing no characters or plot elements with the other two. In fact, the book is not even Science Ficton. If you go to a book store, you will of course find it in the SF section among other Philip K. Dick books but it is not really where it belongs, because it contains exactly zero fictional elements. It is a story about life, death, coping with loss and about irrationality in face of a tragedy. It follows Angel Archer, a young woman who is a friend to a popular, Episcopalian bishop, and a wife to his son. When her husband commits suicide it puts both the bishop and his mistress on a downward spiral that eventually leads to their deaths. A fate that Angel sees coming but is powerless to stop. It’s a story about guilt, religious zeal, faith, fate and insanity. It is the examination of the thin line that divides rationality from pathological irrationality, and how easy it is to cross it.

It is the most coherent, down to earth and possibly the best written out of the three books. The plot unravels slowly, and the story is contemplative and philosophical. It will not blow your mind the way VALIS and Divine Invasion did. It does not feature shocking plot twists or crazy revelations. It’s just a damn good book.

Titan

I picked up Titan by John Varley along side Reality Dysfunction and Startide Rising because it was in the same batch of reviews I have read. It starts of as hard SF but quickly devolves into almost a Fantasy story as the group of astronauts explores gigantic alien made habitat that is orbiting Jupiter. This artificial satellite turns out to be inhabited by many intelligent races such as friendly centaurs and aggressive winged “angels” that seem to be at war with each other for reasons neither side seems to understand. Neither of these races seems to posses the technology required to build the structure or even maintain it – though most seem to worship or at least venerate some sort of mysterious god-like entity that seems to at the hub of the station. Since the astronauts crash landed on the station losing their ship, contacting this entity or at least reaching the control center of the station may be the only hope for their rescue.

It is a decent read, with some pretty good ideas. Varley is pretty good at describing his wacky alien world an its inhabitants, though the friendly singing centaurs with two sets of genitals were a bit jarring. The ending is a bit underwhelming too. The author spends a lot of time building up to this final reveal, which turns out to be a classic wizard of Oz scenario. Then everyone sits down, drinks some tea and listens to plot exposition that explains how the habitat really works.

Titan is for the most part a decent SF/Fantasy adventure novel. It is not ground breaking or mind shattering in any way. But it is a decent read. I think I enjoyed it a bit more than Reality Dysfunction sequel. Unlike Hamilton, Varley does try to give his character some psychological depth and make them quirky, conflicted and interesting. Supposedly the saga gets better in the later books, as he describes even weirder sections of the alien habitat and its effects on the newly arrived human inhabitants. I might pick up the next volume at some point just to see if he goes anywhere with the ideas he established in the first one.

As usual, book recommendations are greatly appreciated.

• Reddit
• Digg
• Slashdot
• Boingboing

Do you visit any of them? Or all of them? Personally, I spend most of my time on Reddit because it tends to have the best signal to noise ratio without actually employing all powerful editors that hand pick best submissions. Of course there is a downside to this. On some days the front page of Reddit looks like this:

Yes, I posted a FUUUU joke. Se me

Then again sometimes Reddit is incredibly awesome. For example, some time ago I submitted a theoretical question involving special relativity and use of ansibles to the science subreddit and actually got some serious and thoughtful responses. The question received 17 upvotes and 6 downvotes but still generated a rather interesting theoretical discussion in the comments. The only other place on the interwebs where I could ask such a question and actually get replies is… Well, here. So that’s why I like Reddit. Like minded folks and good content.

I also visit Slashdot and Boingboing from time to time as well. Especially on the days when Reddit turns into 4chan meme recycling mill. I hardly ever go to Digg though… Which is probably a side effect of hinging out at Reddit so much. How about you guys? Where do you spend your time? Feel free to pimp out your favorite geek news and trivia sources in the comments.

Btw, as a rule I do not subscribe to RSS feed from any of these sites. I subscribe to blogs and online comic strips but not news aggregators. I access those the old fashioned way by going to the website and/or clicking refresh. Why? Because these sites have astonishing output rates. I tried subscribing to them once, and I could never keep up with their pace. After just a few days I would have 1000+ unread articles in each of the feeds (half of them probably dupes). Whenever I managed to clear one of these piles, new articles would start piling up within hours. It just doesn’t work.