The Singaporean Gamer

Humanitarian attempt? Or ingenious marketing ploy?

Are you a politician? a candidate for real political office? an MP in the UK? A Senator or member of the House of Representatives in the US? or the equivalent anywhere in the world? If so, I…a humble games programmer from the UK would like to give you a free gift. a FREE copy of Democracy 2 for you to practice with. There are no strings attached whatsoever, I won’t publish your name anywhere unless you say I can, I’m not getting anything out of it other than the knowledge that just *maybe* I’m helping to make our current crop of politicians more prepared for the task ahead, especially with a global recession on the horizon.

If you think you qualify, send a mail to irepresentpeople@positech.co.uk and get your free “training kit”!

Anyone think Singapore’s politicians need this?

Source: Free Copies For Politicians (Because you need practice)

There’s spyware, adware, malware, etc. I would like to coin a new term: scareware.

I returned home the other day to my mother making some noise.

“The laptop got a lot of trojans and viruses! Just now it scanned and found 38 viruses!”

Of course, I immediately suspected that it was fake. But just to be sure, I asked my parents if they had visited any funny links or opened any email attachments. They denied doing so.

Yup, I have successfully educated my parents how to be smart on the internet. I told them to only visit sites that you know and trust to be legit. I know my parents like to visit travel sites like zuji.com. And just to be sure, I installed firefox with adblockplus just in case. Since they love to use email, I reminded them not to open any emails from suspicious addresses and/or dubious subject headers. I told them that email-spoofing can be easily done. So just be wary. However, I am not able to make them use gmail, since they’re already using yahoo for some time now. But yahoo is still good enough to me. This is the advantage of having a geek in the house.

Anyway, I checked the laptop and found that a program resided in the “All Users” appdata folder was set to run automatically when Windows was started. It’s ironically called “System Security”, and will “scan” and find bogus viruses and trojans on the PCs. Out of curiosity, I just let it run and it finished scanning in about 5 minutes. Yes, 5 minutes. It managed to scan the entire C:\ consisting of tens of thousands of files in 5 minutes. I snorted.

The “report” showed me 29 viruses and trojans this time (my mum said 38). And at the end, it asked me whether I wanted to “buy and clean my PC” with a jolly green tick, or “continue unprotected” with a big red X. Clicking on the red X, I went into the settings and true enough, the options “Run on Windows start” and “Scan on startup” were checked. Interestingly, I was unable to uncheck. Clicking on the checkbox prompted the same “buy and clean/continue unprotected” splash screen. Clicking on “continue” brought me back to the settings dialog with the two options still checked. Apparently there was no way you could uncheck it. I asked my mum if she had seen that splash screen before.

“Yup. I clicked on clean and then it asked me to buy it for $19.90. I just shutdown the laptop.”

Smart, mum! I have taught you well my young…err, matured, padawan!

Apparently, there was no uninstaller. No surprises there. A check using WMIC, a trick I learnt in office to check for installed software by querying the registry, showed that there was no installation entry as well. So I simply deleted the program, the shortcuts on the Desktop and Start Menu and the usual startup locations in the registry under HKLM and HKCU. Problem solved! Score one for the geek in the house!

This is a perfect example of a scareware scam. Before I discovered adblockplus, I always saw those flashing banners in bright green and red screaming “YOUR PC COULD HAVE BEEN INFECTED!!!!”, or those flash ads that show some sort of fake scan going on. I’m pretty sure a number of people did get into a panic and clicked on it, then input their credit card details. For a website to have a million hits, it’s pretty believable that five thousand people clicked and a hundred people gave their credit card information.

Scare tactics such as this thrive on our fear, brought about by the media reporting on how easy it is for PCs to get infected. What they usually don’t say is how easy it is to NOT get infected in the first place. The only antivirus on my PC is Avast Antivirus Home Edition, which is free for home use. It is a very lightweight application that does nothing more but run an unintrusive background scanner and updater. I don’t need Norton’s huge suite of security applications or some funky McAfee Super Internet Security Anti-Hack Guarantee application. And my PC hardly ever gets infected.

Of course, the trick is to practise a lot of caution while browsing. My overly skeptical nature does help a bit. But even then, I do get caught once in a while. It’s great that Avast has always managed to detect them and has yet to fail me.

Surf safe. Don’t get too scared. The best thing to do if you suspect your PC is infected? Disconnect it from the internet, and then try to weed out the problem. Or call your local resident geek if you’re not sure. Or maybe even me.

Image source: http://www.skyhighpartyrentals.com/houston/yard_cinema.htm

According to VGChartz.com, the best selling game of all time is now Wii Sports, whose count is at 45 million and counting. It surpassed the previous record set by Super Mario Bros., which sold about 40.24 million units.

Looks like Nintendo has found a winning formula to sell that many games. The common denominator for both these games is that they are bundled with consoles.

Of course, it is not just as easy as that. The NES and Wii are both very highly rated consoles. They are also both accessible and un-intimidating, thus there is a lot of mass market appeal. The demand for the Wii somehow has continued unabated since its release in November 2006. Of course, with such high demand, Nintendo has no intention of introducing price cuts. Yup, even though that article is from late 2007, I do not see the Wii getting a price reduction any time soon. Don’t hold your breath!

Source: Wii Sports becomes best selling game of all time, passes Super Mario Bros.

This is an amazing mock up of one man’s dream iPhone.

What Mat Brady has wanted was to give the iPhone 60GB memory size, a slide-out keyboard, a 16:9 640×360 screen, a front-facing camera and a rear 5MP camera with 3x optical zoom. All in a pretty slick package.

I have my own reservations on the improvements he wanted. Firstly, I think he forgot one very, very important aspect: battery life! It is pretty depressing to read that in a CPU-GPU intensive game like SimCity, the battery can still be drained even though it is plugged in.

The upcoming Nokia N97 was stated to have 1.5 days of continuous music playback. Of course, the phone would have to be in airplane mode, no bluetooth and no other services running. But even with those services on, I would expect the phone to have about 15-20 hours of playback. Which is un-freaking-believeable. My iPhone, while listening to music and surfing google reader on 3G in the morning for about 2 hours, will drain its batt life by mid-afternoon. Sucks. Apple really needs to work on its battery. I don’t really mind adding a bit of thickness to accommodate a larger battery pack, which is why the Morphie Battery Extender for the iPhone 3G looks mighty appealing, but I just can’t bring myself to pay an additional US$100 to get the same battery life as other 3G phones.

I don’t agree with his need for 60GB worth of storage space. The only cost effective way to get such a high storage is for the iPhone to use HDDs instead of flash storage, and a HDD means moving parts. It’s ok for a media player to have moving parts, because half the time, it’s kept safely on my bag, not jiggling about in my pocket. Flash memory is of course, more expensive, but since it has no moving parts, I would think that it is more durable. And your music won’t skip no matter how violent your phone is vibrating. My previous Creative Zen Vision M used to skip if I were to run with it in my bag. Flash memory also has way better seek time, so there won’t be additional lag. “Additional” because I still have yet to encounter a smart phone that is NOT laggy. Yes, iPhone included.

The slide-out keyboard is very much welcome. A slide-out keyboard would also be easier to implement cut-and-paste, a feature that is highly touted for by users, but continuously ignored by Apple. I could certainly learn to say “Command-C/Command-V”, instead of “Control-C/Control-V”. Of course, the keyboard solves only half the problem; the other half being the common clipboard, but that’s another story. The drawback is that it will add to the thickness. It will be a looks-vs-awesomeness fight, so that’s why I don’t see Apple putting a physical keyboard in.

A bigger and better camera is also welcome, with some simple pre- and post-processing software. 5MPs seem to be the sweet spot. I do believe the hardware and OS is capable enough to provide simple processing, like adding gimmicky picture frames and modes such as night shot, macro and burst. However, the downside is that a bigger camera probably requires more space. Another looks-vs-awesomeness trade-off.

Of course, all of these features are highly dependent on battery life, which I’ve blabbed about, and the underlying OS itself. Mac OSX is already highly regarded as being super-stable with good performance. However, I find the mobile version to be highly lacking. The latest 2.2 update is great, but I am still getting crashes in Safari a few times. I still can’t believe the stock Notes app still takes very long to start, although it is just a simple text editing app. More performance fixes and enhancements will also be much appreciated.

I think my dream iPhone is one with a stable, performance-enhanced mobile OSX and extended battery life. Both of these are highly probable to be on Apple’s to-do list, unlike a bigger camera or physical keyboard.

Source: The new iPhone ELITE

It’s two thousand and NINE already!?

Here’s hoping that I will write better posts in 2009 to attract more readers so I can monetize this damn blog.

Take a look at the video below. What do you think? (I think it is a genuine case, not acting.)

This is a perfect example of why Luke Maciak has said that video game addition makes a mockery of real suffering addicts.

It is so obvious that the people around him do not understand his problem at all. He is obviously repressing into his video games because he has so little love in his life! He obviously does not love his parents at all (any idiot can see that), which is quite understandable because they divorced when he was 12, a very tender early stage of his development. It is said that he contemplated suicide at 14, but I have no comments about that. What pushed him to do so was not shown.

His best friend is a really pretty girl, and by the way he looks at her, you can see that he really likes her. At one point she did say he asked her out, but she rejected him on the grounds that he will not give her the attention since he will just go back to playing games. WTF is that all about!? She’s either being selfish, or just don’t feel that way about him. I’m inclined to think it’s the former.

During the intervention, his mother told him that she loved him very much bla-bla-bla… Of course it begs the question: if she did love him, why did she move away from him so as to further her own career? Earlier in his life, she already made the decision to abandon him anyway. (Another selfish idiot.) Why regret now? A boy growing up without his mother, with the knowledge that she knowingly left him for her career. Yup, nothing can go wrong there! Both his mother and best friend gave him ultimatums at the end of the intervention, something which I really do not agree with if you’re truly trying to help. When you back a person into a corner, he/she will definitely fight back, simply because there’s no other way to go! You can see that he didn’t care if his mother cut off all his finances, but when the girl told him she will cease all communication between them, only then he willingly went for his so-called “rehabilitation”, a 42-day camp in the outdoors.

That, to me, is pretty obvious he really likes her, maybe even loves her. Of course, if I was him, when this is all over, I’ll just dump her and find a more intelligent girl.

Of course, after the “rehabilitation”, when he gets back, he still plays games. Thus, calling this an addiction would be on par with sending a drug addict to a rehabilitation clinic, only for him to come back and still take drugs, albeit occasionally now.

This is what was meant by making a mockery of people suffering through real addictions. Obviously, the problem here isn’t the video games. During the intervention, he looks and speaks as normal a guy his age can be. I think the problem is that the people around him do not reciprocate his love towards them. Coupled with his early traumatic childhood, I am not surprised that he repressed into his games and found that the only thing he could control was his in-game avatars.

The problem, as I see it, is:

• Parent’s divorced at 12.
• Mother left him to further her career or studies.
• Teased by “best friend”.

The problem, as the others see it, is:

• Excessive video games.

They’re probably Jack Thompson supporters.

One more thing, playing DDR for 24 hours to get into the Guinness Book Of Records is actually a nice achievable goal. It is definitely not a problem. It’s actually quite amazing and he should be praised for it! A great feat of stamina, requiring physical and mental endurance. If I were to attempt that, I would probably get super-tired after a few hours, but get super-bored after just 1 hour. There’s so much more wierd and stupid things that people do to get into that book, things which will make you say, “That guy has serious mental issues to be doing that.”

Oh, and let’s not forget about his Shinobi triumph. Makes me wanna fire up my genesis emulator and play. Lucky me, I will not need to spend 8 hours to beat the final boss. Hooray for save states!

I do consider myself really lucky to have wonderful parents who, although they do not join me in my gaming, did not consider my gaming behaviour a threat. (However, my mum has played wii sports, so the tide may be turning..) I also have a wonderful fiancée who not only understands my hobby, but feeds it as well! Who do you think bought me Fallout 3?

Source: Video Game Addict Is A Real, Sad Case

This is a continuation from the previous post “GTA 4 PC Review - Part 1“.

4) Story

I can’t comment very much on it, since I have yet to complete the game. Niko Bellic seems to be a gun-for-hire with loose morals but loves his family very much. As with all mob stories, there are betrayals after betrayals, and you also have your veritable mob-cliché cast, from the undercover agent to steroid-pumping flashy I-suspect-he-must-be-gay dude.

You have to get to the top, doing odd jobs for these over-the-top portrayal of characters, pretty much your standard GTA fare. A new addition is going on dates or just hanging out with some of your new-found friends, which may or may not be a good addition, depending on how you look at it. On some missions, you also get to decide to kill or allow some people to live, and you may even decide which NPC to kill off. So far, I haven’t really felt the repercussions of my choice. It seems like a pseudo-adventure-RPG and the story choices is definitely a good improvement to the GTA series.

Typical mob boss story with a lot of drama and betrayals. What’s there not to like?

5) The Game Experience

The game world is huge but I find it not too overwhelming. I do occasionally feel lazy to travel all the way to my safe house, just so I could save after purchasing ammo, body armour or that cool new rifle. However, although you may need to do a lot of driving from one place to the other, like all GTA games, it is a lot of fun to do so, plowing through people and traffic, trying hard not to crash.

I find that the car handling has become a bit more loose from earlier games, which means that handbrake turns are not as easy to do anymore. Ripping up that handbrake will definitely cause your vehicle to turn wildly around and become uncontrollable. However, if you do manage to pull it off, timing the turn nicely while tapping on the handbrake, it is unbelievably cool! However, the brakes for every car seem to be missing a few pads as the stopping distance is quite far. There’s no such thing as an e-brake in the GTA world.

Another cool thing is the new combat mechanics. I still prefer the keyboard-mouse setup for shooters, and GTA 4 is no different. I have tried shooters on the X360 before, and I never really liked the feel of controlling your character using a gamepad. The cover feature is pretty nice if you know your enemies are all on the other side.

You could even surf the internet or watch some TV while you’re at it. Like how Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw have put it, “Hang on, am I playing Grand Theft Auto or Grand Theft Normal Boring Life?” Granted, the internet portion does see some use in some missions, but the TV is probably too much. Would you want to watch TV in a game? The radio stations are a great touch and at least adds some depth to the game. You appreciate the radio much more because a bulk of the time is spent driving on cars or motorcycles (modified with a radio apparently), and you’ll invariably listen to them. One nice thing is that sometimes after a mission, there will be a breaking news about the explosion you have caused, probably done by terrorists. It makes the game world feel more alive, like your actions do have a great impact on it.

Economics-wise, it’s pretty easy. It’s actually quite easy to acquire the dollars: just do missions. At the start, you’ll probably be scrimping for awhile, but once you reach to the second safehouse, you’ll pretty much be rolling in dough. By the time I unlocked the third island, I had more than a quarter-million in cash. A lot of the things in the game costs money, but I rarely do stop to pay for them. The only two items that I pay for are body armour and food; the former being hard to find and the latter being unable to steal from the hotdog and hamburger carts in the game. I also buy ammo sometimes, but it’s usually quite plentiful as you engage in a lot of firefights and every enemy drops ammo when killed.

The stars mechanic has also changed. In the previous games, the only way to lose your star rating is to visit a Pay-N-Spray shop. Now, it is entirely possible for you to outrun the police. Each star rating is correlated to the search radius the police will conduct. As long as you remain within the search radius, your star rating will remain. Each time you encounter the police, the radius will re-centre to your last known position. This makes it possible for you to actually outrun your star rating, no matter how high it is. The good thing is it adds a nice variety for you to strip your star-rating. And at 4 stars, the circle gets quite big that it is quite impossible to simply out-run it. The bad thing is that I feel wierd when at one moment, the whole of LCPD (Liberty City Police Dept) is searching for me, and the next, I’m a free man! Cool! Of course, at 1-star, outrunning the cops is so easy that it’s more of an annoyance. This only gets challenging if you manage to raise your star-rating to 3 or above. The radius gets quite large at that point and you must make clever turns in order to escape and not encounter any police, which is shown on your mini-map. So it is particularly gratifying if you manage to escape the police at higher ratings. Thus, this gameplay mechanic is particularly split for me. It gets annoying when you commit petty crime, but becomes a nice challenge if you manage to raise it high enough.

The GPS system is another mechanic that I’m split for and against. For one thing, it’s a great guidance system. In some of the more luxurious cars, there is even a turn-by-turn voice navigation system. However, in most cars, it will just be your mini-map, showing you the exact route where to go and where to make that turn. I find that now, I will always create a checkpoint on my main map and the GPS system will automatically map the route there. In the previous games, I would have to periodically check my main map and remember which turns to take. Now that challenge has been totally diminished by this system. I am tempted to turn it off, but I find myself getting lazier each time I play. Less challenge and instant route gratification, today’s GTA players are really getting pampered!

6) Realism

This is one aspect of the game I have my doubts on. Real-life isn’t always fun. That’s why I play games, as a form of escape. So it is quite disconcerting having real-life elements in the game. Half the time, one of your friends will call you, asking you to go bowling, play darts or go to a club. If you turn them down, your standing with them will go down. Occasionally, I do get called while on a mission, but Niko will automatically say he’s busy. If you do want to stay friendly with these chaps, for some reason or another, you will have to call them up, pick them, go to some place, and then drive them back. A game mechanic that I am certainly not fond of.

Also, it seems weird that your girlfriend might reprove you to stop hanging with drug dealers, but wouldn’t bat an eyelid if each time you pick her up in a new car, steal a car while on a date or run someone over.

There are toll booths in the game and you encounter one early on when you frequently travel between the first two islands. This is quite a pointless aspect on the game. I have no motivation at all to pay the toll, and since outrunning the police is quite easy, I almost always just ram the toll gate. The only times when I do pay is when I’m on a mission, as I do not want to add the annoyance of the police while doing my errands.

GTA has always been an over-the-top portrayal of a great freeform game world. Which is why to me, GTA 3 is still the best one that I have played so far. It still amazes me that I have completely memorized the whole map of the first island of GTA 3. That game simply has the right balance of size, humour, missions, the whole nine yards. Subsequent GTA games have failed to impress me the way GTA 3 did. Vice City was still wacky, but too big for me. San Andreas added more game mechanics (and a whole lot of stereotypes), which I feel was a tad unnecessary. GTA 4 seemed to focus more on the realism part, which again, I feel is unnecessary and doesn’t really contribute much to the fun factor. Instead, it’s more of an annoyance and just gives you more things to do.

And quantity is never linearly correlated with quality.

7) Overall

I really loved the game, despite its asinine copy-protection scheme. It is nice successor to the GTA series, and to me, the second best GTA game after GTA 3. I would like to say the third, after GTA 3 and GTA, but I guess I really shouldn’t count the original GTA. That game is already bronzed on my Hall Of Fame list, the one that started it all, so it belongs in another world altogether.

I would say the game is really worth the cost, considering the sheer size and scope of it. However, it is quite a shame for a game this good to be marred by the draconian DRM system and performance issues. Some may be turned off by this, but I’m sure a savvy gamer like yourself will know where to get “insurance”, in case 10 years from now, the online activation scheme remains yet the servers have been taken down.

Image source: http://www.gamespot.com/users/Nicholai69/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25574435

First off, let me start by saying I have only played up til the 3rd safe house. I am, by no means, anywhere near completion. This is because of the huge time constraint in my life. Having a regular job and a fiancée does not bode well for playing such huge games (not that I’m complaining, of course).

Hence, this will not be a very good review, if you can call it that. I would rather much prefer “impressions” or “take”. Because, let’s face it, I’m not much of a writer, nor am I that good a reviewer. Attempting to give my opinion on a game of this magnitude is very overwhelming for a stooge like me.

Anyway, during the course of writing this review, which took me about a week, I realised that I may have been too verbose. I am definitely not willing to backspace all the nonsense I have spouted thus far, so I’m splitting this up into 2 parts.

(Wow! My first ever 2-part review!)

1) DRM

Image source: http://torrentfreak.com/anti-drm-t-shirt-design-contest-the-winners-are/

In order to play GTA 4, you will need to, at the very least, perform an online activation, sign up for a Games For Windows Live account and have the disc in the drive. Also, there is this Rockstar Games Social Club program which has to be pre-installed, ie. you must install it before installing the game. It acts as a launcher-cum-news-grabber-cum-multiplayer-thingmajig. It will lie in the background, doing God-knows-what, and is by default set to automatically run when Windows starts. I wonder which executive IDIOT came up with all these!?

Of course, you will need to sign up for this more-useless-than-useful service. If you choose not to, the game will nag and nag at you until in your exasperation, you will. Yes, it actually nags in-game. For me, I got tired of the nagging, so I set everything to automatic sign-in and my disc is permanently in the drive. Right now, I’m researching for ways on ripping it and mounting it on a
virtual drive. I should save up and get myself Daemon Tools Pro Advanced with the vIDE drive.

2) System Requirements

Take a look at the minimum, recommended and other requirements from the Rockstar GTA 4 PC support page. For the purposes of saving space and words, I am not going to quote them here.

I have absolutely no idea why Internet Explorer or Adobe Flash in required. The minimum specs seem to already be the recommended specs, or even exceed them, for a lot of the current crop of games. And forgive my ignorance, but this is the first time I am seeing a quad-core CPU making its appearance on the recommended specs. The amount of hard drive space needed is really asinine. I think only 1% of the people in the world can actually play this. Which is dumb from a marketing standpoint. Is it really impossible to make a game with nice graphics on a playable setting which runs on mainstream graphics cards?

3) Performance

The game is a mighty resource hog. My graphical settings are set quite low so I could run it properly on my gaming rig, which I consider to be semi-powerful: an Intel E6750, 4GB ram, ATI Radeon 4850 512MB and Vista 64 SP1. However, starting the game is still a slow and frustrating process, enough for me to fire up Bejeweled on my iPhone, so that I can be entertained while waiting for my game to actually load. On those specs, I am running the game semi-comfortably on these settings:

To me, these are fairly low graphical settings. Even then, while making quick turns, or if I jerk the mouse too much, the game screen will blank out parts in white, supposedly because it is unable to draw them on the screen. GTA 4 is obviously not optimized for the PC. The lame excuse that RockStar gave was that it was for “future-proofing”. Yup, this is a game that is so unbelievably advanced that no current generation hardware can run it at maximum settings. Which makes no business sense whatsoever to me. But hey, I’m no businessman. I don’t have an MBA or wear a suit to the office. So what do I know?

With such settings, I get a paltry 20-25 fps while driving. I may need to scale it down some more, since it does give me a bit of a headache sometimes when the screen stutters too much.

The Games For Windows Live client is built in directly into the game. I feel that it is quite amazingly done. The way it can be brought up and hidden away is very seamless. And because of it, I am curious. Did RockStar commit a lot of time and developers into doing that, so much so that the performance issues got sidelined? It wouldn’t surprise me, since I am working in the software industry. Managers and executives always love to see more features into their product, and some issues will certainly be moved into the backlog, almost certainly never to see the light of day again. In this case, I could really envision the GFWL client being a top priority for the executive management at RockStar. It has community features, allows RockStar to monitor their player habits, bring RockStar in bed with Microsoft and act as another copy-protection system. The opportunity cost? Getting the game to actually work on normal PC hardware.

Ok, maybe this first part is a tad depressing to read. Hopefully, the second part will perk you up a notch.

My kid has got to be like this someday! Eating cookies and naming game characters off the top of his/her head.

That is, as long as the missus don’t find out about it…

Will we be prepared for the ultimate Mac-vs-PC battle?

Great animation! The 3D robot animation is simply superb quality. However, the transformation audio, most probably ripped from the cartoon version no doubt, could probably have been better. Makes it sound too kiddish. Also, having some laptop parts be visible on the transformed humanoid robot would definitely bring up the cool factor a lot.

Anyway, just sit back and enjoy!

Creator: http://www.nickgreenlee.com/