Year: 2012

Enjoying another chilled out Saturday again after Prometheus last night.

First up – Prometheus. It’s another in the series of Alien & Predator universe films. To be totally honest :

It’s a well made film, as you’d expect from Ridley Scott. If it was standalone or if the AvP films never happened, the script would make sense. It’s a prequel to the iconic film Alien and does a decent job of setting that film up. Bit like Return of the Sith sets up a lot for the older films and XMen First Class set up the other XMen films.

Prequels are usually very tightly bound by what they need to follow. The interest isn’t so much in how things will end (cos you already know that from the older film), it’s how they get there. Prometheus gets there very well, although there are a few liberties taken with Things That Should Not Be Left As They Are. Saying that though, the faults are mostly with the poor (but still watchable) AvP films than with this one.

But that’s enough about Prometheus. I’ll watch it again when it comes to Sky Movies, not sure if I’ll buy it on bluray though. I said that about Avatar as well and ended up buying it after a second watch. The key difference is that Avatar was something new, Prometheus is scraping the bottom of an already well cleaned barrel.

On getting out to movies – I made an offer ages ago to someone that she could gladly come along to one of the cinema outings as a “forget your troubles” relax type evening with neutral people – that offer still stands 🙂 Haven’t mentioned it much though cos I didn’t want to put too much pressure on.

Testy, sporty, Test ?

Lots of sport, this weekend and next. The England v West Indies test match finally got underway this morning and the play today has been : Interesting. Despite losing a couple of days, there could still be a result. Hopefully now the sun’s out today, it’ll stay with us.

But it’s not just cricket, I’ll be half watching the football later via my laptop (or I’ll hide behind the sofa and use my desktop’s bigger screen) and I’ll be watching the GP qualifying via SkyF1 after the cricket. I already have it set to record. Same tomorrow with the race. And similar next week :

Still Euro2012 football reminding me why I rarely watch football,
England cricket on the Saturday
Le Mans 24 hours

It’s Fathers Day too next weekend but we’ve already (conveniently!) agreed to delay that for a weekend. Tuesday 19th will see the InterServices 20-20 tournament, which will see a great chance to get to Lords for the day in support of true heroes.

However, all that clashing sport does mean that I’m missing out on one opportunity – I have access to the Guild Wars 2 beta testing that’s happening this weekend. I had a look for a couple of hours last night and it lives up to its hype so far. I’m not totally convinced though. The questing system is more freeform but it’s still very much “Kill 10 mobs” type questing. We’ll see how it develops. It seems to be a more freeform type game than previous MMOs, depending on movement to avoid damage. I need to work on that because my WoW play tended to be Damage, Damage, Damage, zzzzzz, Damage, stop, Damage, Damage, zzzzzzz etc ad nauseum.

Hopefully they’ll pull off the promise with Guild Wars 2 and turn it into a truly excellent game. I guess I should really tell them about the issues I had in creating my first character – it claimed firewall issues which I fixed by one of these 3 methods :

Restarting my cable modem (doubt it was that)
Giving it “run as admin” (could be)
Deleting the previous firewall settings (highly likely)

If it’s the firewall settings, I’ve seen that kind of issue with the iTunes updater interfering with my Airplay streaming. Annoying because it is not something an end user should have to deal with. Beta is Beta.

What I also have beta access to and am quite looking forward to is something called Planetside 2 – it’s a Massive Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter. Technobabble aside – it’s a scifi shooter with thousands of players taking place over a continent wide map. Or that’s the plan. It’s not quite at Beta stage yet so we’ve just been looking at early testing which honestly looks more complete than what some companies will unleash as final product.

It looks pretty awesome and it should get around the biggest problems in multiplayer pvp – Persistence and Rush Play. The best PvP I had in Warcraft was the old Alterac Valley, where you had 40 vs 40 players fighting it out on a North-South map. Horde (me!) would go north, Alliance (evil) would go south. Along the way there are towers to capture and destroy and generals that help out. Alterac Valley battles used to last for hours and you’d see the collecting subquests finish to bring out superunits for your side. 5 players could hold off 20. Something changed though and it turned into Rush Play, where the opening sequence of the battle would see 40 players riding past the other 40 players crossing over in the middle of the map. Battles became a 10 minute race instead of an epic 100 marathon.

Persistence is the other artificiality in most PvP, you can win the battle but at the start of the next round everything is reset. I’ve never much seen the point in that. At least in WoW’s later open world PvP, if you won the battle you would control a block of territory for a while getting bonuses from that.

Planetside 2 will hopefully bring Persistence where you hold what you take, plus allow defence to make Rush Play less effective. It also has tanks and most important – fighter aircraft. The earliest games I enjoyed were flight sims and space sims and it’s been way too long since I had a go at a decent flight game.

So if you’re in Planetside 2 and get shot down by an Iceangel or “Iceangel624″*, then that could well be me.

*(624 will be if, as is likely, I don’t get Iceangel quickly enough – the 6 24 are from my best bowling figures)

For now though – too much on at the moment to do the gaming thing, so it’s back to the cricket with F1 to follow and muted football on laptop/desktop.

Had been hoping to get some good cricket watching in today and yesterday, with Thursday supposed to have been the start of the third Test match between England and West Indies.

It’s 2-0 at the moment to England and looks like it’ll still be that scoreline on Monday when the game is supposed to end … Bit damp out there at the moment. Not damp here (it’s been dry since about lunchtime) but persistent rain 60 miles up the road in Birmingham has seen the first two days of a Test match washed out for the first time in almost 50 years.

Yep – despite our infamous weather, this is officially the worst spell of rain since 1964. In cricketing terms at least. Which are the most important, depending on your point of view.

Looking outside at the moment – it reinforces what I’ve been thinking for years : Global warming and climate change isn’t necessarily about Heat, it seems more about Energy.

Heat – it doesn’t actually seem that much warmer these days. It’s been getting hot, sure … but are the maximum temperatures going up ?
Energy – the storm systems seem more frequent and far more energetic. Heavier rain, higher wind and more of it.

But it’s more complicated than just that – our climate is a vast interlocking network of air currents circulating round the globe. Disrupting part of that means the butterfly wing flaps in one place have massive effects on somewhere a long way away.

It explodes the mind thinking about it doesn’t it ?

What has been on instead of live cricket is recorded cricket. It’s curious watching the old games again. Today they’re not going back as far as showing players I wanted to be when I was starting out as a cricketer but you can see again that climate isn’t the only thing that’s changed over the years.

Players now are somewhat different to those many years ago. Endless coaching is making them approach the supposed “ideal”. That coaching is refining or destroying technique. The 2003 coverage showed the legendary Curtley Ambrose, Destroyer Of Willow. He’s a 6 foot 8 giant but when you see him running in to bowl, it’s sheer perfection. It’s an easy sprint, legs eating up the ground getting him into the perfect place to deliver something filled with impending pain or shattering of stumps.

West Indies haven’t had anything like him in years. He was the last of a dying breed, before entitlement spoilt the attitude of the apprentices they had coming through. The new bowlers expected to follow in the footsteps of legends like Ambrose, Walsh, Marshall, Holding and others from before my time : Hall & Garner. These guys were made even more dangerous by being part of a unit, there was nowhere to hide. Get off strike to Ambrose and you have Walsh about to put one near your nose.

The new ones, like Jerome Taylor, don’t have the application or the attitude to show their quality on the pitch via honing their talent through hard work and practice.

To be honest – my own performances on the pitch could have done with more hard work and practice :
Hard work – I used to be first in nets and last to leave. Now I have to ration my training in order to not break stuff.
Practice – more fielding practice would mean avoiding “wake up time” where I miss chances to get run outs due to fumbling the ball. Need to work out the mistakes before taking to the field.

With me though, that’s lack of training opportunity. The international players have no excuse, although their coaches haven’t done players like the very dangerous Steve Harmison any favours – he was no1 bowler in the world at one point, until the coaches confused him. Good to see that James Anderson has gone back to his roots, after the coaches attempted to ruin him too.

I’m rambling about cricket aren’t I when I should be giving up on the garage (if they want me to use them for servicing, they gotta ring me back!) and having a shower …

It’s been curious to see some old idols in the highlights :

Devon Malcolm – not seen him but he was GOD to me as a 15 year old seam bowler. I wanted to bowl as fast as this bespectacled demon. He was awesome, as comic relief as well as bowling.
Dominic Cork – wasn’t as fast as most international bowlers but definitely made the most of what he had. Which was having the ball on a string, with control of movement as well as accuracy. He struggled desperately with bad knees but was still playing county cricket into his 40s.

Can’t think of any batting heroes to be honest. But then again, we didn’t have many to choose from. I think I’d pick out :

Robin Smith – noone hit the ball harder. A shame his career was blighted with Death By Spinner.
Michael Vaughan – another with bad knees that forced his career to a premature end. He combined Fun on the field with a blazing intensity of play. Noone wanted to win more but he never forgot to have fun along the way. And that fun continues into his Test Match Special commentary. Hell of a player too, the sheer class shows through today. The only person we have close to his class right now is KP.

Right – I think I need to give up on the garage for today. Shower then -> Prometheus tonight.

Another from the category of spotting random news stories …

Ages ago, I read a pertinent story on the Register titled “Windows for Warships“. It was written by an axe grinder who was worried we were moving away from “Good Software” into being dominated by Microsoft’s latest offerings. There’s a lot of hysteria in there that’s been proven moot with time. (Especially this one about the UK’s systems).

To be fair to Microsoft at the time, they were doing pretty well with Windows. It was moving towards the Unix ideal of a solid microkernel operating system. (Something small at the core with all the bells and whistles bolted on). The NT4 that we used for a while at work was a very solid foundation for what we needed. It’s reliable, which puts to bed the main fears of the two early articles. Business in the office doesn’t actually need much. The multimedia bells and whistles are Shiny but distract away from actually getting work done. Besides, bells and whistles should come in applications, not in the foundation.

Today, there’s another one called “Windows 8: Not even Microsoft thinks businesses will use it” (link supplied to full article). The new one is about Windows 8 and the horror that it could be bringing to us. We’ve got a preview of that horror with the newer versions of Office. Compared to the old ones, they’re just plain Nasty.

I think the problem comes with something called Business Model. I.e. “we’ve sold people this thing once and it’ll work forever. how are we going to make money in 5 years ?” Normally, that repeat business comes from stuff wearing out or something better coming along. Now it comes from a cycle that comes round every few years where we’re required to upgrade in order to use the latest hardware or software :

Windows 98 – couldn’t install this on a PCI Express machine
Battlefield 3 and other Directx 10 games – won’t run on Windows XP

My latest machine runs Windows 7 purely because it was needed for Battlefield 3 (plus it was available and Vista and XP were not). Trouble is, it also feeds a very vicious hardware upgrade cycle too :

Dos + Windows 3.11 – was happy on my first 4MB machine
Windows 98 – think this was ok on 16MB
NT4 – was happy in 32-64MB
Now ? This Windows 7 laptop is currently using 1.8GB (with Firefox, Outlook, Messenger and iTunes open). It needs 2GB as a bare minimum, preferably 3GB or more to run smooth.

Every iteration of software we get is more bloated than the one before. Much of the functionality is unnecessary too. The machines we used at work 5 years ago are smoother than the ones we use now and don’t suffer the same lunchtime slowdown (it’s when they fire off the virus checker).

You have to wonder where Microsoft are intending to go with their software. They seem bent on evolving it towards software that deliberately interferes with what the user wants it to do instead of seamlessly enabling it. That’s what an operating system like Windows should do – it’s there to enable, not to disrupt.

I suspect the day is coming when the users rise up against their oppressive masters in revolt and burn down the very foundations of society.

There’s alternatives out there – Apple have their OS X but to buy into that requires huge cash (plus their quality is slipping) or the dubious legality of Hackintoshing. Linux and its plethora of free software is looking like a more and more attractive option. I suspect Windows 7 will be the last Microsoft platform I build a machine around but it depends on :

Software compatibility – a lot of games don’t run well on Linux
Lockouts – I can easily see Microsoft pulling the Directx thing again

Hackintoshing – To be honest, I’d prefer Linux here. OS X and Linux are both built around the same foundation (Unix). However, OS X is subject to Apple’s lockdown policy. Linux is far more open. If it’s a choice between an illegal install of an unnecessarily locked down platform and a freely available open platform, I’ll choose Linux.

But that’s a while off yet. My current machines will last me ages so it’s a while until I’ll renew my flirtation with alternative operating systems.

Indulged my cabin fever earlier by escaping to Bristol centre.

As well as having the traditional munchie + coffee, I managed to pick up yet more music … And sadly the tradition is now for coffee seeing as hot chocolate is another of those “LOVETHATWANTTHAT” addictions that upsets my stomach (like pizza can do).

Aside – Don’t you hate it when people put silent gaps of 6 minutes or so in their album tracks ? It’s typically on the last track of the album. It means you either listen to silence for those minutes or you skip ahead to actual music. If you can. Car stereos don’t often give you the option to skip ahead. Kings of Leon is the latest.

Conditions were pretty mixed out there today. It was a better day than yesterday, which was continual heavy rain. Today was just occasional heavy rain :

That’s from the car park of the local Tesco. I’d parked and was just thinking : “shall I wait for it to stop or just run like hell ?” And a couple of ground cogs later, it had gotten far heavier. I ran and got soaked in the short distance it took to get to cover. Twas back to bright sunshine by the time I’d raided the store.

Music ! What’s arrived lately ?

Tranvision Vamp’s (don’t laugh!) Velveteen is the first, had my eye on this one for a while since hearing Baby I Don’t Care from a collection of 100 driving songs. Just listened to the title track Velveteen so far and that one’s pretty good. Had the chance to pick up the album today in a 3 for £10 offer. Looking forward to some carefree 80s girlie vocal tunes here.

Next up is Youth & Young Manhood by Kings Of Leon (which drew the “y u put silent tracks in ?” comment) and the last one for today is Premiers Symptome by Air. The Kings of Leon album is speculative and I’ll probably end up getting all their stuff at some point because they’re not bad. They’re in no way special but at least their stuff sounds a bit different. I refuse to listen to anything by Travis because all their stuff sounds the same and Coldplay are almost of that ilk.

Air is completely different, it’s soft dance music with a French flavour. I’ll probably acquire all of Air’s cds when they become available cheaply enough. I haven’t heard anything from them that approaches the stunning All I Need for quality but it’s still a refreshing change.

More picture !

I missed that when it visited Bristol, it’s gone now. Ok, I saw it long enough to take the snap of it (just before being accosted by a junkie looking for money) but the homing instinct was kicking in (it was just before the Easter break when I badly needed some downtime) so I disappeared off home. Or maybe I just wanted the excuse to treat someone else to it. I missed an opportunity to be honest …

Reading that March 30th post again and it’s a bit sad how the “There’s more empty shop fronts now than there used to be” is even more true today than it was in March. There’s tough times out there.

It’ll be a bit of time before I can tell what those new albums are like. To give each track a fair crack, I weave them in to the iTunes DJ shuffle one by one. It means each track gets a chance to impress, I find that the experience of listening to an album straight through depends heavily on the artist. Some groups are awesome at making albums : Kate Bush, Arctic Monkeys, Dire Straits in particular are very good at interweaving their songs. But it does mean that each track melds into the next. Hence separating them out to find the favourites.

There’s another selection of albums I Want at the moment :

Garbage – Not Our Kind Of People
Edie Brickell – Edie Brickell (2011)
Katie Melua – Secret Symphony
Ting Tings – Songs From Nowhereville

Whereas I’d go straight out and buy something like Norah Jones’ latest album when it’s released (and it’s a good one – hearing that voice is as good as Happy Pills for me), those 4 are either too expensive or they’re not quite in the same league as a Norah Jones, Alisha’s Attic, Lene Marlin or Tori Amos. Actually Tori Amos is one where I need to get more of her albums.

Oh – almost didn’t mention the Alanis Morrissette album picked up from BK – definitely enjoyed that one : Thank U 🙂.

Last thought – why when there’s an effigy burning do you always get a CMOT Dibbler appearing ?

Good night, hope you’re having sun shiney days where you are !

In a little bit of rebellion against playing the same game all the time, I started off another Deus Ex Human Revolution (DXHR) run today with the promise that I’d not reload every time I made the slightest mistake. Skyrim’s an awesome world to play in but the gameplay itself has its flaws.

(today was not a day for stepping outside)

DXHR is set in a future Earth, actually not too far away. The tech isn’t that different to what we have today but one area it has advanced is in the field of prosthetics. The game itself continually asks questions around :

Lethal or non-lethal approaches
Just who is running the world
And whether it’s right to augment people

And there’s other questions too. The game steers you towards non-lethal resolutions of situations, through hefty experience bonuses for being unseen and less hefty ones for keeping bad guys alive. The biggest moral question though are those augmentations.

The augments are extensions of what we’re aiming to achieve at the moment. They start as limbs grafted on to replace limbs lost by soldiers. We’re getting towards fulfilling that aim, slowly … It’ll be great when it happens although it would be better if those limbs hadn’t been lost in the first place.

But where the moral question comes in is the logical extension of those limb replacement prosthetics. The DXHR world includes augments for pretty much everything : radar, rebreathers for toxic gasses, personality modification, hacking, built in phone and deeper into the murky world of military grade augmentations. And by military grade they mean gatling guns or swords built into arms, super strength, stealth and even a personal suicide bomber jacket …

So we’re going past the soldier being able to use 4 limbs again into a domain where we have bionic supersoldiers. And further than that, we have people willingly having limbs amputated in order to fit prosthetic augmentations. That’s where it hits very dodgy ground morally. One of the side missions highlights it by having you rescue a prostitude who has been kidnapped in order to have augmentation surgery to make her a better prostitute.

The central character is heavily injured during the game prologue, leading to him being fitted with augments. But they go too far. Good limbs are hacked away to make him a better attack dog. One character is almost totally “shifted”, where almost all of him has been replaced by cybernetic.

That’s the key tenet of the game – Augments are good but what is far enough ?

In my own case, my shoulder is too far gone now to allow me to bowl. A very good friend has knees that cause her continual pain. Another friend with an amazing spirit has struggled with extreme heart problems since birth.

Should we replace those troublesome bits and pieces with artificial replacements ? I don’t think so. Leaving aside thoughts of “It’s a machine, how long’s it gonna last anyway ?”, I don’t think I’d trust an artificial arm. It’s not Me. It would be some Thing bolted on to me. My friend with the heart has so much spirit and fight that she has already lived far longer than the doctors expected (may she live far longer!).

Yes – I’d be able to throw again. I’d be able to bowl again. But I would never know whether any success or otherwise was down to my own ability or raw software. Furthermore, there’d be the need for maintenance on the artificial device. Our own bodies do that themselves. We each already own one of the most remarkable machines on the planet, our own bodies. They’re self maintaining, self repairing and although they’re not perfect, I’d far rather trust biological than cybernetic.

I guess what I’m trying to say is :

It’d be wonderful to be able to run faster, throw further, think better but what’s the cost. Artificial replacements of limbs lost would be an incredible technology to have available to us, hopefully it will come soon. But to replace good (or slightly damaged like my shoulder) limbs with an artificial replacement ? No thanks.

Currently sitting here (11pm) listening for randomly falling objects coming from the kitchen …

(yes – this is going to be a horribly domestic post …)

When you can’t get the ice cube trays into the freezer, there’s kinda a message there … Like defrost the darn freezer. The fridge freezer is another thing (inc oven, boiler) that I’ve had since moving into this house. The previous owner left a fair bit here as she was moving abroad (I still get BT attempting to get her to sign up – check your facts people!). It’s done pretty well actually.

Thought I might have to replace it actually because a drain from the fridge part at the top seemed blocked. Think I’ve figured that one out in a “ok, it’s a drain, where does it go ?” kind of way. Looks like it drains into the freezer (go figure) and the freezer part was blocked by ice.

I was hoping for one of the really hot days like last week but we’ve been cursed with Bank Holiday weather over the last few days. As in – continuous drenching rain. But … I have a cunning plan now for defrosting – pans of boiling water placed in the freezer to heat things up. Dunno if that actually achieves anything but it satisfies the Mad Scientist in me.

Anyway – that was today. It’s still defrosting actually. It should be clear enough to last a while but when I eventually decide to go to bed, it’ll be ok. Just need to avoid jumping into the kitchen every time a loose block of ice falls. Fingers crossed the freezer starts up again ok or I’ll be needing to get a new one. My milk was still cold when I took it out an hour ago – good sign that the seal is ok.

Been enjoying some really chilled out days here in the house.

Lots of music is getting listened to and there’s been a decent amount of cricket on the telly. Phil “Colonel” Mustard of Durham must be wondering what he needs to do to be considered for England cricket again, watched him get another 100 yesterday in the only county cricket that happened on Sunday. He had been in the England side but got dropped after breaking his nose in practice and has never been considered since. That’s rough.

I’m also catching up on recorded stuff, having recorded a little too much lately … Deciding to watch Stargate SG-1 again from the start may have been a bad idea considering it’s cricket season.

How am I physically ?

The shoulder has settled down well. It must have been just light jarring because I’d say it’d be good for the game on Wednesday if that happens (bit short on people). My legs have been improving, the bruising on my right leg is fading and the left leg got through the game on Thursday with no issues. The outward signs at last year’s infection sites are fading.

My back is another matter though. I suspect that’ll be the recurring injury for this year. It started in the first net session as a reawakening of the area that I hurt decades ago (lower lumbar, left side, sciatic nerve). It’s ok, it just feels like there’s cord or stuff in there that doesn’t want to stretch as much as it should do.

I’ll give it something to do over the next day or so – part of the prep for defrosting the freezer was to run my food stocks down real low. I need to raid the local supermarket for bits n pieces or I’ll have no munchies.

Like it said on last night’s Facebook update :

“jaffa cake supply : exhausted 🙁 cookie supply : plentiful ! :-)”

Must … have … jaffa … cakes … Jaffa cakes are life.

6 months after comments :

Thermaltake case – I wouldn't get another. The feet fall off if you try to slide the case along the ground.
SSD – is an essential item, it increases smoothness no end.
Bluray drive – don't bother. Copyprotect paranoia means you can't take screenshots and I doubt bluray data will become a big thing for PCs.

It's been 99% stable, with only a couple of "grr-crash" dropouts. Battlefield 3 wouldn't run but that's either overclocked graphics or incompatibility with sound. If just one game has stability problems, I'm included to blame bad software.

I haven't overclocked the machine but with max temps of 52degrees C for cpu on load in the summer and 62degrees C for the graphics, I reckon it could go past 4GHz easy. But as I don't intend to burn the machine out any time soon … Overclocking is not something I'm going to do.

This one’s about the PC I built just over 6 months ago now. What lessons have I learned from it and what advice would I give to people looking to build their own PC ?

Firstly – if you’re not bothered about gaming, then there’s no reason to be building or buying a desktop PC. Laptops do videos, browsing, messenger’ing, iTunes playback and the rest just as well as a desktop. The only advantage a desktop PC has it that you can fit a proper graphics card plus you’d be using a proper keyboard and mouse. I use my laptop ahead of the desktop for everything but gaming and checking the emails in the morning.

So – you’re going to be gaming so you want a desktop anyway … Why go custom built ?

Easy – you select every component, you can prioritise where the money gets spent. And it’s not the obvious places where I’d advise extra money to be spent or money to be saved. Let’s start by picking on something to compare against, or rather – butcher its spec. Novatech’s Destroyer V3 is about the right price level.

The most important thing to PC buying is not spec or bundled software (which is often annoying). It’s reliability. That’s where the main focus should be in picking the components and it’s worth spending a bit extra here to get a better foundation.

Case – nothing wrong with the Novatech case here. It’s probably quite a decent case. If you’re selecting a case make sure – the feet are rubber (to absorb vibration and make it quieter) and that they won’t fall off (they often don’t go back on right if they do). Removable motherboard trays are for enthusiasts and add no value for most people. I’m not intending to take my desktop to bits again, so a removable motherboard tray would be gold plating.

Power supply – Novatech supply their own here. I’d argue with that. If a power supply breaks, it will damage every component in the machine. Spend extra on a quality one. You also get more reliability out of it. Saying that though, the 600W Novatech psu is only £2 saving on a quality assured Corsair unit.

Cooling – bigger is always best here. A bigger cooler means its fan doesn’t have to spin so fast. Fast fans = noise, lots of it. Spending a bit extra on a cooler also means the machine will be happy in hot conditions. That said, my desktop is quite happy at the moment and I should look to reduce its fan speed a bit …

So – grab a £40 cooler instead of a hard disc that’s the next size up. It’ll improve reliability plus it’ll keep the noise down. Dunno what the cooler is in the Novatech machine, it could well be the stock cooler …

Hard drives – when I bought my bits, hard disc prices had gone through the roof and then some. So I was forced to go Plan B and borrow the hard disc from my old machine. Plan B involved getting a small Solid State Device drive to run Windows on, combined with the 250GB drive from my old one. It’s one of the best building decisions I’ve ever made. Seriously. The machine will reboot in under a minute and never experiences hard disc slowdowns. It still does the same amount of hard disc chatter as any Windows machine but because the drive is so much faster, you don’t notice.

Here’s another plus a bit, minus a bit … A 60GB SSD (no smaller, Windows eats 41GB of my 60GB drive) costs £65 for the Crucial m4 that I have. It transforms the performance of the machine. It’s an essential component. The Destroyer machine comes with an Intel i7-3770 cpu costing £230. A step down to the i5-3570k cpu costs £180. It’s better to have the cheaper cpu plus an SSD than to have the marginal performance benefit of the more expensive cpu. All that said though, the Destroyer also has an SSD, it’s just bigger than is needed (i.e. +£50)

I have my fingers crossed that the upgraded work machines that are supposedly on the way have SSDs instead of normal drives. All our data lives on the network, so there’s no point in us having big conventional drives. The SSDs are also cheaper. Will we get SSDs ? I doubt it. I have too little faith in the people providing our machines to expect good sense.

Duh – what that mean ? Outside of technobabble, my home desktop can start up and open the emails quicker than I can put my tie or shoes on in the morning. At work, I could make a coffee in less time than it takes the machine to start up. Same with the laptop at home. And after the non-SSD machines are in Windows, it still takes ages for them to sort themselves out.

All that said – what spec would I recommend for a decent game machine capable of running Skyrim well at 1080p and max detail ? Here we go, right now it’s :

Intel i5-3570k processor – above that and you don’t get any gain worth the money
8GB Ram – memory is incredibly cheap. 4GB is the minimum now but at £44 for 8GB ? Get more.
Drives – get a SSD as the boot drive, you won’t regret it.
Graphics – nVidia 560Ti. AMD/ATI graphics have poor software these days. But watch out – nVidia have a new chip design coming out called Kepler which will change things again.
Optical drive ? I wouldn’t honestly bother with blu-ray on a PC, you can’t take screenshots because people are too paranoid about copying. Plus download is taking over from optical discs as a delivery mechanism.
Cooler – get the biggest that will fit but don’t bother with water cooling. Water + electronics = bad news.

Think that’s enough for now. Remember – PCs are so powerful these days that spec is fairly irrelevant. What’s most important is usability, reliability and quietness.

Usability – get an SSD, they improve smoothness more than any other component
Reliability – comes from making sure the power supply is up to the job
Quietness – big cooler being run slowly

PS If anyone reading this in the Bristol area wants a PC built, lemme know. Will Build PCs For Food (as long as you’re buying the bits).

Been meaning to do a mini (okok, I read back before posting as always and it’s a Mountain of Text) review of Skyrim for a little while now but I’m going to have to keep comparing it to a few other games as I go.

Skyrim – is the latest in the legendary Elder Scrolls series of games. You’re a lone wolf warrior / rogue / mage trying to find your way in the fantasy setting of the Skyrim continent. When you enter the story, Skyrim has unrest bubbling up into a potential civil war (not got there yet). And you’re about to get executed for We Dunno What (possibly being in the wrong place at the wrong time).

Mass Effect – is a scifi epic done by Bioware, where you play the central role of Commander Shepard come to save the galaxy from ancient alien machines.

Star Wars The Old Republic (SWTOR) – is a very disappointing MMO where you’re forced to run through scripted areas which are hamstrung by hamfisted instancing. Oh and you have to subscribe to play it too.

Skyrim – it’s a potential classic but … Yeah. It’s got a hell of a lot going for it but the combat system and other elements are still somewhat frustrating. Let’s talk about what makes it awesome :

Completely open world.

This is a very rare thing in gaming. It’s where you can walk from one end of the world to the other without a loading screen. Mass Effect 1 had a fairly open world, albeit broken up into separate maps linked by elevators. In Skyrim and World Of Warcraft, you can literally do that long walk without a loading screen. Sure, the loading screen will come up when you enter a city or dungeon but – it means you’ll be running from place to place and suddenly you’ll come across something unexpected.

If you autorun in Skyrim, you may well end up in autofall courtesy of a giant’s club or in autobelly courtesy of a randomly spawned dragon. The Skyrim world feels alive.

Mass Effect 2 and 3 locked down their open world considerably. SWTOR doesn’t really have an open world. It has small zones but they’re all bunches of mobs. To get from one city to another, you have to go through a bunch of transit locations. Yawn. There’s no dynamism in the SWTOR environment. No surprise at seeing the unexpected. It’s all part of a story that you’re railroaded through.

Storyline …

Massive Multiplayer Online games are all about the end game. They shouldn’t be … World of Warcraft used to be a very different game. The levelling to get you to end game was much slower. You could play through the storyline connecting the zones without racing past the difficulty level. Now, you’re like level 30 playing a level 22 zone because that’s how quickly you level. There’s no challenge. It’s boring. The dungeon instances used to finish off a zone’s story, now you race through the zone so quick you don’t bother with the instance. The only challenge comes when you skip between expansions and then the difficulty becomes a frustrating cliff.

But that’s not the reason I gave up WoW and SWTOR – it’s the end game. I really don’t want to be playing the same content over and over again. It’s boring. And such a waste of all the content available on the way there. It’s also dependent on the people you play with. VR, Mercs and Guildlink had a lot of awesome players but all 3 also tolerated and encouraged idiots who repeatedly made us fail.

Mass Effect and Deus Ex HR have excellent storylines that sheperd you through the game. However … you feel somewhat railroaded by that storyline. I’ll still play those games over and over though because I like the storyline.

Skyrim handles it somewhat differently. Most RPGs, you get railroaded through the story. In Skyrim, the story is just some incidental thing that’s going on in the background. You can ignore it as much as you like. I need to go see the Hrothgar monks of the main story some time cos I didn’t get their horn but they can wait a bit cos I have to sort out the Markarth conspiracy first. The Whiterun people want me to hunt a dragon but it’s the other side of the continent from me.

The important thing in Skyrim is that it’s the player character’s story first and the civil war story second. It’s more immersive and keeps you going in the game but …

Questing system issues …

While there’s a huge amount to do in the game, I have issues with how some of it’s done. Better games have branching questlines. 2 Skyrim examples – 1st there’s the group of cannibals who try to get you to entice a priest over for dinner. What I’d like as an option is where you realise “They’re going to do something horrible here!” and you’d be able to save the priest. But you’re railroaded into dragging him along for his untimely demise. 2nd is the group of pirates who want you to put a lighthouse lamp out so a ship will run aground. You then loot the shipwreck. What I’d like to be able to do there is rat ’em out to the city guards and then you’d chase them down. Ship survives. Nah – can’t do that, the flex isn’t in the quest scripting.

But – compared to the weight of stuff to do in Skyrim, that’s a comparatively minor issue. I’m currently at 63 hours playtime, which is split halfways across my two characters. There will be much more.

I’m investing more quality control in my gaming time these days. I give up on them very quickly if they’re not for me. Battlefield 3 didn’t get 5 hours, mainly due to stability (also the gameplay was not for me). I will never buy from DICE again. SWTOR didn’t get long, because I could see the signs of bad endgame from the earlier levels. SWTOR really should have been a single player game. SWTOR + Mass Effect 3 means I’m thinking carefully as to whether I get anything else from Bioware.

Conclusion – Skyrim is potentially a classic. It’s ridiculously open, which is a + and a -. Gamers these days like to be spoonfed their content. So a game that lets you do your own thing can lead to a lack of “where do I go now ?”

Spec wise – I don’t have a problem on my main machine … but it’s a good one. It’s an Intel i5-2500K with 8GB Ram, an SSD boot drive and a 560Ti graphics card. (Translation – high spec for today, it’s quick but not ridiculous)

Should gamers get Skyrim ? Hell yeah. But wait for sales. There’s no reason to buy things at full price when patience means you could get enough money off to let you buy a pizza. I got Skyrim for 33% off.

And I think that pizza reference means I’m starting to get hungry – pizzahut’s online system let me down yesterday – it went ultra slow at about the time I needed food and didn’t let me order. Meh. Pizza had to wait.

PS Other stuff – I have a Planetside 2 beta key, this is a massive multiplayer first person shooter. Like Battlefield 3 but in a persistent world. Wondering if I can specialise in piloting aircraft for this. I also preordered Guildwars 2 …

Definitely :

Excellent sentiment. Arrived home late after the cricket yesterday, which meant a visit to the Chinese (really quick way to get a big dinner here) had me finishing up dinner at like 10.30pm. Actually, I think I was still eating at 11pm.

Not good if you’re already feeling sleepy but know that dinner will take time to settle. I ended up disappearing at I think 2am and was out like a light. And then slept until I ended up starving (actually 9am, much earlier than I thought I’d be emerging)

Pretty sore now today after the game yesterday but :

Currently thinking a bit “yeah right” as a response to that.

I have the usual soreness (legs, back, hip) but I expect that. It’s all part of my body setting itself up again for running around. The shoulder is not too bad. Now the adrenaline and endorphins have worn off I can feel the damage. It’s usable but a little numb. I must have pushed it forward and maybe a little out when I landed on it. I’m lighter than last year but that’s still a little too much weight landing on a weakened shoulder joint.

It’s nothing serious – I can still use the arm properly. I wouldn’t be able to bowl and it feels a bit loose but apart from that, arm’s fine. It’s not cold, which is the usual sign that it’s not in the right place. But it would appreciate a bit of TLC from some strong fingers. Mind you, it’s also been too long since I gave someone else a neck rub or a back rub.

It’ll have time to recover – I’m off work for the next week, starting today. Back on Monday 11th. We had a few freebie days off but I’ve been feeling run down, so I decided to take the chance for a cheap week away from work to chill out and de-stress. Some of the interactions can get a little … tense. (We push ourselves hard)

Yeah – today was a bit of a write off due to soreness but I’ll be up and about more over the next few days. And I know I’ve earned that soreness due to the amount I throw myself around on the cricket field 🙂