Mass Effect 2
I’ve enjoyed playing the first Mass Effect game a while back, and just finished Mass Effect 2.
The short version?
I like it! Possibly better than the first, although I was kinda disappointed that only such a small section of the citadel is accessible.
Which leads me to the one thing that did bother me throughout the game… Like so many other games, it suffers from what I call the Pokémon effect. Every object, every character, every place you encounter is there for a reason. Aside from general things like NPCs that run a store, EVERY character you can actually talk to or who makes remarks you pass by, is there for one assignment or another. Every door, corridor and room exists for a specific reason, and more annoyingly, nearly every object placed in those rooms as well. Specifically I’m referring to objects that can be used as cover during a firefight (or objects that can be used to your (dis)advantage, such as the explosive containers), because those kinds of objects are only found in the locations where you will be fighting, and just by looking what objects there are ahead of you makes it really easy to predict if/when you’ll be attacked. Also the game world is very linear; yes, you can fly your ship around in between missions, but once you’re on a mission there is only the correct way a head and every other path is conveniently blocked by stacks of crates, a door that cannot be opened, or debris (except for the occasional sideroom that’s got a few goodies you can pick up).
A good example of a game that doesn’t have this problem would be Oblivion. For instance, there are lots of houses you can visit, with one or more people living in them, that aren’t of any real significance. Occasionally you need them for a quest, but otherwise they’re just decoration (yes, you can rob them or use them as food if you become a vampire, but otherwise). Even during a quest you’re mostly free to move as you like rather than being forced along one specified route.
The tons of voiced dialogue and voice acting were outstanding, and is something I can really appreciate in a game. They could have come up with a few more lines for teammates to shout during combat though; when you hear the same lines five times over during each firefight, they tend to get boring (even annoying) quickly.
Nevertheless - Pokémon effect aside, I can definately recommend ME2. Oh, and this time around I am going to make sure I keep the save game to import it into the 3rd installment of the Mass Effect games 
Thoughts
So, like everyone else I’ve seen the movie Avatar, in 3D of course. As everyone else I agree that the story could have been a bit better and less predictable at times. But the visual quality, effects, and the whole 3D things is simply amazing. Seriously. I’m not going to be able to watch any other movie the same way again. It’s that good. No, the 3D isn’t perfect, there are occasional flaws and there is still room for improvement in the technology… but as for perfection - it’s a damn big step in that direction. I truly feel that this is going to be the future of movies and games but later on television as a whole as well.
(For those who think that won’t happen or don’t see the advantages… remember that there were lots of you when the internet or computers or cell phones or cars or many other such things were first introduced!)
I’m really looking forward to an Avatar sequal (which is coming, by the way! Mr. Cameron has confirmed that already).
I’ve also tried the game. It’s a good way to kill a some time and for a movie tie-in it’s actually not that bad, but it could have been much better.
Let’s start with this: you can choose to play for either tha Na’vi or the RDA, this is decided somewhere after half an hour or so of gameplay. You have to arrest one guy who does ’secretly’ work for the Na’vi but gets caught. He points in the distance and say ‘look what you’re doing’ and you have to decide right then and there, based on pretty much nothing, whether you’re going to betray your own species or exterminate another.
Anyway, I played through the game on the Na’vi side. The Na’vi in the game seem really eager to trust you (except for one guy, but he’s turned around later on) and saddle you up with various things that their own kind only goes through after many years. It also caught my attention how quite a lot of them just happen to speak English (and how often the subtitles are different from the actual speech). In fact, very few seem to ever speak their own language in the entire game, and when they do, it’s usually pretty poorly (more on that later). The storyline of the game is not particularly interesting (I dare use the word generic), and the ending is less than impressive. Near the end you get to fly the Toruk (I use that word because the ‘human’ name is way too long to remember), which seems awesome at first but after 200 meters or so you get off again and that’s it. A flight you could just as well have done on your own Ikran (which you receive fairly early in the game, after which you only get to fly it ‘manually’ a few times, which is fun even though the controls are terrible), and I really have the impression (as with a lot of things in the game) that they put it in just because you’ll probably recognize it from the movie and you’d be disappointed if it wasn’t in the game. But they could have done so much more with it.
Also the main character is as tactful as an untrained dog when faced with a yummy treat most of the time, and the game is pretty simple. The soldiers barely pose a challenge and if you just need to get past them to reach some place, you just jump on one of the horsy creatures, send it into a gallop, and you’ll run straight past anything and barely take any damage at all.
But all in all it’s not a bad way to spend your free afternoon (though I’d never spend the full € 50 on it. Seriously.)
The Na’vi language is actually really interesting and I’ve taken some time to learn more about it. It has some really nasty things in it though - word order within a sentence is pretty free for instance, but that’s mostly because a lot of information goes into the verbs, which use infixes (rather than pre- or suffices which are used by most languages). Infixes can turn a root verb into s omething that is barely recognizable. Except for the basic verb, it may contain things like how the speaker feels about it, when it’s happening (which can be the present, immediate future, distant future, immediate past, or distant past) and who it relates to (me, you, me and the other guys standing here but not including the guy being spoken to, and a whole lot of other variations). You can basically say ‘Im going hunting this afternoon, the guy over there is coming with me and I think it’s a pretty good idea’ in a single verb.
But what really bothered me in the game is that, even with my basic understanding, the Na’vi used in the game is done pretty poorly. Nearly every NPC you come accross has a different way of pronouncing things (especially the really characteristic sounds like the kx, tx and px) and if you compare all of the speech, it’s a miracle that these guys even understand each other at all. I understand that the voice actors for the game didn’t get the thorough training and exercise that the actors in the movie did, but still, they could have done so much better.
One awesome thing I’ve noticed is a fun reference in the (rather good) TV series Farscape. In I believe it was episode 7 of season 4, there’s an elevator (or rather, a guy on a screen in the elevator) talking about how boring it was to go up and down all the time and how he’d like to go sideways just once. That quote, plus the entire idea of a sentient elevator, is yet another awesome reference to an awesome trilogy that is currently made up of six books.
2010
2010 is already going pretty quickly (hell, its almost time for 2011). I was reminded by the fact that an arbitrary number advanced by one by the yearly e-mail telling me I need to renew this domain name (which is done by the way - damnleet.com is mine and stays mine!). Not that counting years means anything to me. The earth made (approximately) one revolution around the sun from completely arbitrary and meaningless starting point. And at a completely random moment in history (or well, not entirely random - mankind made a couple of other really stupid decisions at the time, most of them involving a carpenter and a few pieces of wood) we decided to start counting those revolutions. But guess what, the earth’s gonna keep doing that for a couple billion years to come. Big deal. Looking at it like that, it’s kinda like celebrating every time you’ve taken a step on a 50 km hike. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s not significant in any way, and yet, we celebrate it.
That can only lead me back to the conclusion that lots of things lead me back to: people are weird.
But I can understand that they need to celebrate something. There is so much going on that isn’t worth celebrating, that we try to make the most out of the things we can be more or less happy about. On the grand scale of the universe it’s as significant as a single drop of water is on a planet filled with nothing but oceans, but for a creature as proud of himself as a human, one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of perspective.
On a smaller scale of things, I’m (temporarily!!) taking a few things offline (specifically some of the more space-consuming parts of the photo album). I really need to upgrade the disk space I have on this server (a few minutes ago there were 7 megabytes of it available), and getting a few GB’s freed up will help to keep everything going until there is more space available. Don’t worry - everything will be back online as soon as possible!
exFAT
Why does Microsoft have to be stupid again?
Microsoft recently announced the licensing model for their new exFAT filesystem (article in Dutch). exFAT is a filesystem that supposedly is especially suitable for flash-based storage media, such as flash cards, MP3 players, USB sticks, smartphones, and so on - stuff that you carry around, basically.
Of course there was the immediate need to raise the file size limit to 256 terabytes, because that is what they did. (For comparision, that’s over 300 times the amount of space on an average home PC.) Granted, FAT32 - which is in use by most devices today - is kind of limiting with 4 gigabytes (a decent HD movie can’t be stored in a FAT32 filesystem), but 256 TB?!
Anyway, since they want to make exFAT the new standard for portable devices, obviously they need it to be supported widely by both operating systems and storage devices. So, the obvious choice to Microsoft is to introduce a paid licensing model, which is really restrictive and requires you to sign non-disclosure agreements. This way, there is very little chance that open source initiatives are going to support exFAT (think Linux, for starters). But lets also look at it from a device manufacturer’s point of view: you’d have to pay for a license (not to mention the cost of implementation) of a new filesystem, which in the end, doesn’t really add that much. Sure, we can have bigger files now, but I’m making an MP3 player with maybe a few gigs of space, where the average file size is about 5 megabytes - who cares about large files? Plus, my MP3 player will only work on Windows operating systems (while I’ve just gone through all the trouble of letting it talk on USB as a mass-storage device, so any platform/OS can use it). And there is a perfectly good, widely supported alternative (FAT32), to which specifications can easily be found anywhere in the Interwebz, and which I’ve probably already used on older devices so I can just copy that code over and be done with it.
Gee. Difficult choice.
Games
I’m not much of a gamer person. I do enjoy the occasional game every once in a while, but many games can’t really keep my attention for long. Occasionally there is a game that does manage to do just that, and if there is it’ll quite often keep my attention for a wee bit too long (the “oh crap, it’s 5 AM and I have to get up at 6:30″ kind of too lon), but luckily that only happens a few times a year.
One such time has just passed. The game in question is Dragon Age: Origins, which is a very nice RPG from Bioware. Even the main storyline alone is really really long, but it’s also really really addictive (those two don’t mix well together if you want to avoid the 6:30 problem I mentioned earlier). I just finished playing the game today… it took me about 60 hours to get through the entire main quest (without doing too many sidequests, but not always taking the easiest route either). It generally ran smoothly on my PC - which is not known for its awesome performance in the graphics department - and there are just so many things I like about the game. For instance, I like how you can make all sorts of decisions that can affect the game world in a fairly important way. I like how one of the characters in the game is voiced by Claudia Black (also known as Vala Mal Doran in Stargate SG-1), which is particularly fun because those two characters are quite much alike in terms of personality (and if you know the Stargate character, you know how much fun that can be ^^)). I like… well, there isn’t a whole lot not to like actually.
I did also play Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (yes, on easy, because I suck at shooters big time :P). Went through the campaign in one day and thats pretty much the only interesting bit to me. It was pretty good though.
For the rest… I got myself a copy of DCS: Blackshark, which is pretty cool, a hell of a learning curve though (but that was to be expected). It’s not that I’m doing badly at it (actually I’d say its not bad at all considering my all of perhaps 2 hours in the game so far), but it’s just the getting used to the million different keyboard commands (which often involve ctrl/alt/shift keys, and even more so you need to specifically use the left or right one, because otherwise you’ll probably activate something entirely different) and procedures that makes it difficult.
On an entirely unrelated matter, I just came accross this little Flash game. It’s a Hitchhikers-themed game where you’re destroying as many Earths as possible. It’s quite entertaining to play for a bit (random tea breaks? what the hell? :P).
“Unconventional”
In my life, I have seen many bad websites. I have seen many terrible websites. I have even seen websites that, were they publicly known, could likely become the cause of WW3.
But rarely I have seen pages that are so fucking terrible that there are not even words for it (except perhaps ‘oh my god, fifteen minutes and the page still isn’t done loading’, which actually sums up many of the shortcomings of this particular website).
I has it!
Now on to reading.
Forty-two
I just came up with one of the better quesions that I’ve came up with in a while.
“What is the maximum IQ of any person who posts comments on YouTube-videos?”
“42.”
Which I’d like to use as a reminder - “And Another Thing…”, the sixth (and presumably final) part of the Hitchhiker’s trilogy, written by Eoin Colfer, is out since today! I definately plan on getting it soon, I’m very curious to see what he’s made of it
Newfound powers
Oh, hai!
As I have probably mentioned at some point, some of the bands I like include Behemoth and Belphegor. Both came with new albums recently. Behemoth’s new album ‘Evangelion’ is definately different from ‘The Apostasy’, but it definately kicks at least as much ass (which is quite a lot!). Since ‘Walpurgis Rites - Hexenwahn’ from Belphegor is far more recent, I havn’t really listened to it enough to form an opinion, but there are definately things that I like here 
Also, a few weeks ago someone mentioned something math-related. As you may know, x0 (x being any number except 0) is 1. I was told once why that was, though I couldn’t remember it and it bugged me for weeks. But I found it again (and it seems that very few people know this), so if you’re interested:
Basic rules when working with powers include that xa · xb can also be written as xa+b. For division, a similar rule exists which says that xa / by xb equals xa-b. Now if we take the second rule, and assume that a and b are equal, we find that xa / xa = xa-a, which is the same as 1 = x0 (which is valid as long as x does not equal zero, in which case it is undefined).
Yay!
Common sense
Just an hour ago I noticed a commercial on TV, which was done to encourage people who immigrate to the Netherlands to learn Dutch, since after all being able to make yourself understandable is pretty important if you live somewhere (semi)permanently.
But… why are they trying to explain to non-Dutch-speaking people that they should learn Dutch by airing a commercial in which the actual message is spoken only in Dutch?
I wonder where the common sense of these people went to. Probably enjoying a nice long holiday (albeit not terribly well-deserved).