Thursday, 28 July 2011 by Marcus Aquinas.

I received a couple of emails today notifying me of changes to the Nook and Kindle iPhone/iPad apps. It seems that Apple has made a policy change necessitating their removing the ability to make eBook purchases in-app and requiring customers to go through the device’s web browser to make purchases from their mobile devices (clarification: Apple mobile devices – Android stuff is unaffected as is, I suspect, Blackberry).

After a little checking, the root of the problem seems to be Apple’s desire for a cut of any eBooks purchased through their devices. ZDNet reported that Apple wants 30%, but I have no way of independently verifying that assertion. It sounds like Apple, but that could just be confirmation bias. Yes, I think they make decent-but-way-overpriced products, but their corporate dealings rank them just slightly higher than the Antichrist in my book. Here’s an analogy.

Let’s suppose I own a television and use a cable service for content delivery. Not unlike owning an iPod/iPad and using AT&T/Verizon as the service provider. Now imagine the television manufacturer demanded a percentage of each pay-per-view movie that I purchase using my TV remote. No cut if I pick up the phone and order manually or purchase online; just for stuff purchased with the remote.

About the only mitigating point is that reading on a handheld device of any kind is not the most pleasant experience, so it’s reserved for those times when I don’t have my eReader with me. Consequently, I would have little reason to be making purchases through a handheld. iPad’s reading experience is better and it can be a fully functional eReader, but that still takes me back the analogy. I’m not sure whether to chalk this up to greed or rank stupidity. If memory serves, authors only get somewhere between 10% and 15% of the book’s price unless they’re A-list. Where does Apple get off wanting any cut, much less 30%?

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Sunday, 24 July 2011 by Marcus Aquinas.

For various reasons, I started a different blog here at TESGuides. The main purpose was to keep the gaming stuff off of this one and put it in its own little cubbyhole. Although I’m leaving my gaming posts in the archives here, I have reposted them at the new site:

The Adventurer’s Journal: http://www.tesguides.com/blog/

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Sunday, 24 July 2011 by Marcus Aquinas.

After playing through the new “Old World Blues” DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, I decided to go back and start a new character and run through the game again with all of the existing DLCs in place. I’ll post a review of OWB in a bit, but I need to take back a couple of comments about “Honest Hearts”. On this playthrough I noticed a couple of issues that I didn’t mention in my original review, so I want to add those. Overall, I’m downgrading the DLC to a 7 (out of 10) because of them. Again, I’m tacking on half a point because they rendered Zion so nicely. I’m relatively sure that this is not something that’s unique to my installation, hence the downgrade.

Problem 1: companion pathfinding. You have three companions that you can pick up in your travels through Zion National Park. All of them exhibit the same behavior. Because of the layout, their pathfinding algorithm falls way short of where it needs to be. Because their pathfinding is so sucky, you end up at the top of the canyon, while they’re running around looking for a path to your location. It gets so bad at times that they will completely disappear from your radar. If you’re a Lone Wanderer, this isn’t such a big deal. But when you’re needing someone to watch your back and they’re nowhere to be found, you can get really hozed really fast.

Problem 2: companion aggression. This might be something that manifests in the basic game, but I hadn’t noticed it being as bad as it is here. With the great differences in vertical distance between points in the same map area, this could be due to the layout of the place, but your companions will run off after enemies at the drop of a hat. This is not such a problem in casual mode because they won’t die on you. In Hardcore mode, though, you’re going to be lucky to keep these folks alive through more than one or two encounters.

Problem 3: critter spawning. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it happen right in front of me. My character had a 10 in Perception: 8 in SPECIAL, +1 for an implant and +1 for the hat. That means I will almost always be aware of the bad guys before they’re aware of me. But I had wondered why it seemed like I was getting ambushed so frequently. I would fast travel to a location, immediately scope out the area, see no signs of hostile activity, start to go about my business and BAM! Attacked. I finally saw the problem in action at the General Store and Park Ranger HQ. I had just finished cleaning out the store and was walking to the HQ building when a Radscorpion materialized right in front of me. It didn’t come up over a rise in the ground or anything like that. It just appeared. What’s the use of pumping all of those points into an attribute that won’t help you avoid this kind of thing? I don’t think this is a game engine problem because it never happens in the Mojave. It must be something unique to this DLC and it aggravates me no end.

Problem 4: appearing/disappearing map points. On my first playthrough I had missed Clark’s final resting place at Red Gate, so I had only collected five of the six caches. I made it a point on this playthrough to try to collect all of those and still only came up with five of six. Somewhere near the northern center of the map I noticed a map point that I hadn’t discovered and headed off in that direction only to have the empty triangle marker disappear from my HUD. I circled around the area and the silly thing would appear and then disappear again. I’m pretty sure this is a cave containing the last of the caches and it frustrates me no end that I cannot find it. This might be something on my system (FONV does tend to crash and burn on occasion), but either something is on the HUD or it isn’t – there shouldn’t be any smoke and mirrors.

Because of all of these problems (most importantly the pathfinding and ambush issues), I’m going back and docking a point from my initial rating. I’ll still give it a half-point for being so pretty, but that only leaves it with a 7 instead of an 8.

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Friday, 15 July 2011 by Marcus Aquinas.

Like many of you, I receive several emails per day from various people that are humorous, inspirational or just plain weird. Several weeks back I received a link to a YouTube video entitled “Keynes vs. Hayek, Round 2”. This turned out to be a follow-up to a video from early 2010 called, “Fear the Boom and Bust, a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem”. The original video deals with some basic macroeconomic theory in an accessible way and the follow-up video questions the role of government spending in the economy. Both videos are cute in a thought-provoking kind of way. I used them in my summer school course and the students got a kick out of it. Last week, the “Q&A” segment on C-Span interviewed the producers of the videos.

While the interview is pretty much what you’d expect, a couple of references to works by Hayek led me to his 1974 Nobel Prize acceptance speech entitled, “The Pretense of Knowledge”. It’s not terribly long or complicated (some background in economics is helpful, but not required) and I commend it to your consideration.

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Saturday, 9 July 2011 by Marcus Aquinas.

I guess this could be taken as a sort of open letter to the Ubisoft Montreal developers. Doubt they’ll read it, but I can at least vent my spleen on “Assassin’s Creed 2” and “Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood”. On the bright side, they might do something to fix the problem before “Assassin’s Creed: Revelations” hits in November.

I’m not generally a big fan of third-person games, but a few things combined to get me playing in this franchise. First the opportunity to go roaming around in the medieval period, even if only as it exists in the minds of game developers, was a major attraction. Second, and probably most importantly, Steam had a sale on “Assassin’s Creed” and “Assassin’s Creed 2”. The big draw was “Assassin’s Creed 2”. Roaming around in Renaissance Italy was much more attractive than Crusades-era Jerusalem. On the whole, I found AC2 to be much more polished than the original, which is to be expected if a developer is doing their job well. Then, lo and behold, Steam had a sale on “Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood”, so I picked that up after completing about half or two-thirds of AC2 and found it to be even more polished than AC2.

Overall, I would not put these among the “must play games” (hate that term - I’ll do penance for using it later), but if you like third-person stealth shooters, a lot of running, jumping, special moves, cool gear, and a good mission-oriented story, then you’ll definitely enjoy these. The games are available for Windows, xBox360 and PS3 (Brotherhood is also available for Mac). Unless you’re a real franchise “gotta have it now” fanboy, catch them on sale somewhere. Careful, though. They’re pretty good games and might well turn you into a franchise fanboy.

All games have their quirks and oddities. They’re what makes an Ubisoft game different from, say, an Eidos game. But when those quirks and oddities get in the way of gameplay, then something needs to change. My biggest gripe about AC2 and AC Brotherhood revolves around camera control. In normal gameplay, this isn’t a problem. In certain parts of the game, however, the camera controls lock, essentially changing the third-person game into a platformer.

These changes happen without warning and at points where falling necessitates either a checkpoint reload (because you died and neither game does saved games) or a long climb back to try again (assuming you survived the fall). When this happens, the normal movement controls also change. Forward, back and strafing are not what they normally appear to be because you’re not in a third-person environment. This probably accounts for the falling, dying, reloading and general frustration: the controls don’t work the way you expected because the game changed.

Short version, Ubisoft? Don’t change genres. If you’re going to be a third-person game, stay third-person. If you can’t do that, then either give warning or give some on-screen help showing the new control orientation.

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