Brady's Blog

Battery life – commute in and out (2 hrs), plus a full commute ‘in’…(already it’s a touch better than the PSP)…

Edit – and a full commute out, and now another full commute in (though the battery light is red, so I’m afraid to go on any hard missions for fear I’ll lose my progress!)

So that would be more than twice as good as the PSP.

But I have to say, I think Nintendo overshot the mark. You don’t need that level of battery life – do you?

And I feel like the PSP has the right ‘mindset’ in terms of its simplicity – a ‘brick’ form-factor, single screen, conventional controls, easy to port PS/2 games (similar hardware I think)…

But I don’t know. Those load times are terrible. The PSP is losing shelf space (well, for the movies, at least). The DS has the buzz – and the new DS Lite which looks like it’s very pretty.

Edit 2 Okay, I finally ran the DS out of juice. Here’s the final results:

PSP: 1 full commute (in-n-out) + 1 commute in (running out of power right before my station, in fact, but that’s close enough). That equates to –

PSP: 3 hours, approx

DS: 2 full commutes (in-n-out, in-n-out) + 1 commute in (the light was red during the last half of this), and another 15 or 20 minutes on top of that (enough to get me another Octolith in Metroid Prime!).

DS: 5 hours, approx

Luckily I had saved before it actually ran out of power. But I was in the middle of running around on a board. See what I do for you, my dear two readers?

Okay. Here’s my review.

The controls are indeed fantastic. I said this before so I won’t belabor the point.

The universe seems a little small – as of halfway through the game, it looks like there are 8 octoliths, and you have to get 2 on each planet, there seem to be 4 planets, and I think I’ve found where the Big Bad Final Boss is going to be. On each planet, one octolith is hard to get to, one’s more straightforward. Super-nifty new guns will open doors in hard to reach areas which will lead you to the aforementioned second octolith.

There are little annoying things like in every game. The small sections of jumpey-jumpey are annoying, but not so frequent or obnoxious as to ruin the game. There’s one section of it I just passed through now which is really nerve wracking – I keep joking to myself, I’m going to throw up. But it’s not too hard or anything, and it’s very atmospheric and cool. But it is still jumpey-jumpey, and I still find that annoying.

Why, oh why, did someone think that it was a good idea to have, after every boss you beat, a thing where you have to run back to your ship? I know it’s a Metroid Standard Thing, but still, that’s really annoying. Maybe on the last guy, it would be good. Or maybe on your second run-through on a planet (for the second octolith), then they could blow it up at the end, that would be exciting. But no, you have to rush back to your ship, and then you just ‘die’ if you don’t get there in time. No explosion. And if you do get there in time, you don’t quickly escape the explosion, cuz there’s no explosion. You don’t even have to leave the planet. This is stupid. And there are enemies who you must defeat to unlock doors – on the way back. So you’re rushing to your ship, the planet is going to…well, it’s not going to explode, but it’s going to somehow magically make you die. So you’re rushing, and then there’s some enemy there. Well, first instinct – dodge the enemy, press on. But the door is locked until he’s dead. Lame. The section starts to feature some of my least-favorite videogame annoyances – attrition, also, becomes a factor, lose a second here and a second there and you die at the end. Must execute very well. Also, get shot up here and shot up there, and without time to find healey-things, you will find yourself dead too. Edit YOU FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER! I’ll FUCKING KILL YOU! One of my runs-back has – jumpey-jumpey, leading to boolean death on failure. I several times tried to jump but instead hit the chunk of the screen dedicated to ‘change weapons’. That really sucks. During the regular course of the game, it happens, but isn’t as destructive. You’ve got to bust through the enemies – and luck through it – if you happen to get a tougher load-out of baddies on your way back (it seems randomized somehow?), then you’re fucked. I had to do this thing like 4 or 5 times. Really obnoxious. And that whole time, I can’t go check out another world and try this again at some point later when I’ve cooled down – I can’t even quit this game and play another. I’m stuck in ‘checkpoint but not saved’ mode. DIE!

Sometimes running into the same or similar baddies over and over can get a little tiresome – but this is a fun, fast shooter, and the enemies act much like real people would – jumping, running around, etc.

I’m liking the puzzles thus far. No like Myst level puzzles or anything, but you’re nut just running around blowing shit up all day.

And the savepoints feel too sparse – sometimes you get locked into running the game for a long time, because you’re somewhere good but there’s no savepoints. It means you can’t let the game run out of power, and you can’t play any other game. And it’s not like I have too small a chunk of time to play in – an hour commute, I’ve got.

One Booleanized Death section of the game is called ‘piston cave’. I hated that level. roll the ball around, fuck up and die. then do it again. and again. And again. I hated that. But the stylus for controlling the little Metroid ball thing was pretty powerful – I could make to run forward and stop on a dime, in a tiny space in between two sets of smashey things.

The multiplayer featureset has been reviewed extensively before (Slashdot I believe), and I haven’t tried it yet, so I won’t mention it further here.

I should also say – I hate everything, and everyone, and my mommy always told me that I focus too much on the negative. Try not to take that way from this review – Metroid is a good game, it’s exciting, you will find yourself gritting your teeth through tougher sections, picking up new weapons is always a thrill – and when you get killed you will be mouthing obscenties on the subway (or wherever) and hoping no one is looking. This game has really annoying things like any other. But most of the annoyances seem to be concentrated in little sections – not distributed throughout the game. So most of the game is actually a pleasure. And there’s nothing quite like having full, tight, total control in an FPS game – it really is very good when you’ve conditioned yourself to shitty console-quality FPS controls. If you have a DS, and you like FPS’es on a PC or Mac, you should definitely get this game.

My Blog – How much does my blog look like very other New Yorker’s blog? A lot:

• Whining about Tourists – check
• Talking about Subways – check
• Inappropriate use of the word ‘Fuck’ – check

And how much of it is like any other would-be-tech pundit’s blog? Let’s see:

• Ruby on Rails reference – check
• Web 2.0 Derision – check
• Web 2.0 Envy – check
• Java Hatred – check
• Making imaginary replies to other pundits – check

And what do we think about my list usage, hmm?

• It is nice
• It is good
• I like it

Perhaps it’s my inappropriate and excessive <ul> tagging that makes me unique.

Seriously, though, I like some of my posts. Some stuff. Some is non-unique. Some is more unique. I suppose that is about average?

PSP vs. DS – battery life – pretty excellent for my purposes. The PSP can go on my commute in and commute out of the city, and most of the way back in until it runs out of juice. I haven’t yet run the DS out of battery. I, in fact, left it sitting on my desk for a month, if not longer. When I opened it up, it popped right back up where it was left off. Eerie (sp? That word looks funny).

Shiira, Browser of Power – approx 2 hours of use, 3 or so unexplained oddities, but zero crashes. Acceptible…but the jury’s still out. Edit Another unexplained oddity. Still no crash. Have lost the occasional connection, moreso than elsewhere.

DS ergonomics – do not play the DS on your knee on the subway. The subway bumping around actually makes controlling worse. Instead, make sure to hold up the DS, then your arms can act as a shock-absorber.

Video Game Annoyances – how many of these reduce down to ‘crappy savepoints’? It’s interesting – continuous savepoints is Bad (I think) (Luck Through it, multi-savepoint arc), and super-sparse savepoints is bad (Makes Learn-by-dying, Jumpey-jumpey, Attrition Death, and some forms of Cruel and Unusual Punishment as obnoxious as they are.) Only I can do that, but my character can’t, My own AI is dumber than me and Camera’d to death have nothing to do with them. Perhaps this is my own savepoint phobia. I have seen that I get stressed and play worse the farther I am from a savepoint…

Considering my terrible troubles earlier today, I thought I would compose a little post comparing and contrasting the various web browsers I’ve used, and my opinions of them.

1. Firefox – Sucks.
2. Safari – Sucks.
3. Opera – Sucks.
4. IE/Win – Sucks ALOT.
5. IE/Mac – Sucks in such a fashion as to try to collapse the universe around it.
6. Lynx – Sucks
7. Links – Sucks
8. Flock – Sucks
9. Camino – Sucks
10. Mozilla – Sucks
11. Netscape Navicommuniwhatever – Sucks, bloatedly
12. Telnet Port 80 – and its sibling, openssl s_client -connect – Good

Thank you.

I hate you all.

Edit PS – Bryan wants me to try Shiira. I will do so, but only out of spite. Hate hate hate.
Edit 2 PPS – My re-attempt at using Camino has now ended. Test duration: 15 minutes. Thank you.

This is terse, because I am Angry, because Firefox crashed. Angry angry.

PHP Sessions lock. only one page (or resource) will load at a time. Especially visible if you load up several iframes or frames or something and they are session’ed. Also will be very nuisancesome with AJAX and XMLHttpRequest – while page is loading or XMLHttpRequest is running, no other content will load.

Solution 1 is to say session_write_close() after you’ve finished writing to the session. This is okay, but there’s still some lock contention before you say session_write_close().

My solution was to write a custom Session handler that doesn’t lock. It only locks when the session is being written (don’t want to have two processes writing to the session file at the same time, that’s just a recipe for complete disaster). It’s a little dangerous – if you store important data in the session, it could get mangled. But if you mostly read from your sessions, and don’t write to it too often, and don’t care if your writes to the sessions get stomped, you can try my method.

I put it on PHP.net, but in case it should ever disappear, here’s what I did:

1) Steal the example from session_set_save_handler().

2) Modify the write() method to do an flock() on the file before it writes to it, and unlock the file after the write is finished.

3) Add a proper Garbage Collection routine.

And our testing has shown that now you can get multiple concurrent loads running. Be very very careful though – the lock-free nature of this means you could scribble all over yourself. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. We haven’t blown anything up yet, but QA is doing their damnedest to.

So two big handheld consoles Out In the Wild are the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS. In Japan, the DS has outsold the PSP 80 gajillion to one. But in the States, they’re more even. The question is, which is better? And the answer is hard.

Graphics – No contest. The PSP completely smokes the DS. It’s not even close. It’s like looking at a child’s toy versus a graphics workstation. However (on the PSP), on some games, if you hold the screen at too much of an angle, suddenly you can’t see anything at all. This is because of the stupid shiny finish they put on the thing.

Ergonomics – The DS is uncomfortable to hold, it’s top-heavy, and using the stylus tends to make you inadvertently press the buttons. The PSP, on the other hand, is comfortable in your hands, works well in subway cars and is overall, just better.

Controls – The PSP’s analog controller is a waste of space. You might as well stick with the D-controller, because you can’t get any precision or control on that analog stick. It’s garbage. The DS, when playing an FPS game like Metroid, has the best controls next to mouse-and-keyboard I have ever used. An example – in Metroid, my character walks into a room – there are 4 or 5 hovering enemies, each above my vision line, not horizontally lined up. In 2 or 3 bursts, I’ve levelled them all. It’s right up there with mouse-and-keyboard, really. And I’m an old-school mouse-and-keyboard guy from the days of playing Marathon on my Quadra 630. And I’m not bad 🙂

Gameyness – The second you flip up the DS, it’s ready. You’re right in your pause screen, or wherever, and ready to get back into gear. With the PSP, the loading times are ridiculous. It makes me sweat more when I play the PSP – the fear of dying is not that I will fail, but that I will have to tolerate 2 or more loading screens before I can get back to try again. Conversely, if I die in Metroid, I’m already mid-try before the PSP would’ve finished even its first screen.

Durability – I think the DS wins here. No moving parts. Games are on memory card things.

Age – I should note that the games for the PSP tend to be more ‘M’ rated style games, and the DS tends to be more kid-friendly, but there is Resident Evil for DS, and there are cutesy games for the PSP, so I don’t imagine the line will always be so clear cut.

Looks – The DS looks like Doodoo. The PSP is shiny and sexy.

Cost – DS: $130, PSP: $250 (EDIT: I’m told it’s now $200). DS Games are $35 or less. PSP Games seem to be more, closer to $50 (or less). I think Nintendo has underpriced the market here – people are probably willing to spend more than $130 for a portable console, don’t you think? Maybe. Anyways, another interesting thing – Nintendo may very well be making money on each console sold – and _that’s_ very impressive, if that’s the case. Sony and even Microsoft can bleed out as much money as they want, selling consoles (portable and otherwise) at a loss, but good ole’ Nintendo is actually making dough, I bet.

The DS Lite coming out soon may be Nintendo’s answer to my ergonomics problems, and the fact that it looks like shit. If Sony’s next PSP simply has a Gig or 2 of cache-flash, or cache-RAM, then that could fix a lot of the problems I have with the PSP, too. So it’s definitely very close. But I have to say – the controls on the DS, at least for FPS gaming, are better than the controls on _consoles_. Really.

And an Addendum to my previous post, about Joel On Software – I think I see the difference between you and I, Joel. When your developers need a Subversion server, you install a multi-ton air conditioning unit. Whereas I would just get a small enough server that it wouldn’t need one. You integrate a Bayesian spam filter into your Bug-tracking system, but I would just make you put in a username/password, or one of those “type in this mangled text!” things. I’m not saying I’m right – I bet your solutions are more complete – but I bet mine get 90% of your results with 10% of your effort.

Here.

That Joel – he’s clever, and I disagree with a lot of the technical decisions he makes (I have a different mentality about it), but on this particular issue, he has really hit the nail on the head. Wow.

The (sad?) fact is that I am becoming more the abstraction Layer, and less the Programmer.

We had a server problem at work – not my Main Premier SuperDuper Redundant Awesome server, but my Shitty OS X Server cobbled-together software RAID server. And I got literally zero sleep. Until I went home at around noon to catch a few hours and come back and finish the job. These are my thoughts without any organization. If you don’t like it too bad.

#1) Jumpey-jumpey is actually a specific incidence of boolean death, which is teh real problem. Most games nowadays avoid it – for instance, in GTA, if you’re at full health, a sniper rifle shot will not kill you, it will just take you down to a sliver of health (the same with a Chainsaw hit). Boolean death is really only a sin in a game which has a continuous health system. However, a heavy-hurting thing (like the chainsaw or sniper rifle) PLUS a long level where it’s almost impossible to get through wihtout losing a sliver of health can result in you getting attritioned out

#A) HFS+ is not a file system. HFS+ is a Shit System. It’s a system for being Shit. If you think data is nice, and you like your data, you would be wise not to put it on an HFS+ Volume.

I) Cyrus is an imap/pop server that CORRUPTS its mail database when the server is full. Let me repeat that, because, well, it bears repeating. Cyrus corrupts its mail database when the server gets full. That such a thing actually exists in production, and it is the default mailserver (MDA?) on OS X is an abomination.

α) Mac OS X Server is not my favorite server platform. If I see another rainbow beachball I will kill someone. But Mac hardware rocks. Firewire is your friend. So nice.

0) Being good at what you do doesn’t mean Not Failing. Because if you don’t ever fail it means you aren’t really trying very hard. It means instead Failing Well. Not just giving up and saying ‘eh, fuck it.’ It means trying your best, and making sure that other people get what they need. I think it can be kinda Noble

∞) Subway Stories Volume infinity: So I was sitting othe train playing Backgammon on my ridiculously shitty and cheap (but very cheap on the minutes) phone. I win one, I lose one – and I realize that it really depends more on your die rolls than how well you play, because the end result is to try to move your pips….

HEPP! PRAISE GOD! Praisehimpraisehimpraisehim JESUS! JESUS IS LORD! JESUS…<breaks into song>Jesus is wonderful, god is blah blah…SEVENTH DAY!

Nearly scared the shit out of me, that lady.

Anyways, thank you for hearing my disconnected rant. I am on 4 hours sleep. So be nice. Due to the fantabulousity that is Firewire, the files on my busted server are being transferred as we speak to the Not Busted Server, and all shall be well soon enough.

Though they aren’t fatal.

1. Learn-by-Dying – No matter how clever you are, no matter how good you are, no matter how careful – the only way you’re going to get past this one particular area is by going through the first time and getting killed by it, and then knowing that it’s there beforehand the next time you go through. Any pretense you had about being in control of your situation or surroundings is far, far gone. Sorry. Only one way to learn it.
2. Luck Through it – Just keep doing it until your luck happens to turn for the better. Games that feature instant-saving and instant-load actually will run into their own player workaround for this – where they save every time they have a lucky run through an area, and either ‘load’ every time they have an unlucky run, or die and just reload at their last lucky spot. The end result of this, is that the player’s ‘arc’ of save points appears as if he’s made every lucky break that’s possible.
3. Jumpey-Jumpey – A long, complicated series of platforms or crates or whatever to jump between. Any false jump is death and starts you back at the beginning. Whenever you find yourself in this situation, you are supposed to exclaim,
   “Jumpey-Jumpey!” in an exasperated voice. Some platforms completely live in this world. I tend to get infuriated with this.
4. Attrition Death – A long board or level which isn’t particularly hard, anywhere. However, you have to executed it near flawlessly, because any mistake you make reduces your life by an ever so small amount, and by the time you’ve gotten to the end, you have no health to do whatever it is you need to do, or you get killed by a lame low-level boring creature. You have been ‘attritioned out’.
5. Cruel and Unusual Punishment – Death and failure are an inevitable part of video gaming. Video Game Makers, please, don’t make it more painful than necessary. For example, In Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, if you die, you lose your weapons and a chunk of money, and your car. You have to go and buy more, which means you have to steal a car – preferably the one you like, I’m partial to one particular model which I try to use for everything – and then you have to go buy weapons. Then you have to go drive to the mission-launching point, which may make you drive somewhere else. All the while, you have several ‘loading’ segments that kick in. Brutal. If I die, I just load my save game, because I don’t want to fling my PSP across the subway car in anger.
6. I can do that, but my character can’t – This can drive you completely insane. There’s a little tiny step, about 6 inches high. Your character cannot get over it. You have to go around. That’s really really obnoxious. Notice that the converse of this (my character can do this, but I can’t) is fine.
7. My own AI is dumber than me – Every time someone tries to make a 3/4 perspective game, or an over-the-shoulder game, they have to do some kind of AI for targeting and shooting. And inevitably, you get in a situation where you want to shoot that guy over there who is right in front of me, but when you say ‘auto-target’, it inevitably tries to target some other guy. Maddening.
8. Camera’d to death – You’re walking through a simple straight sidewalk, but the camera is managing to do some crazy flip or pan at the same time. So you actually have to carve out some kind of crazy parabola on your controller in order for your hapless player to walk a straight line. I’ve also seen this in a 2D platformer where your character would go _behind_ some scenery, and you would have to just ‘know’ where he was. And you can’t see the enemies. Craziness making.

Funny, so many of my video game problems are related to external-view 3D FPS-esque games. Perhaps that says something.

And there are probably more, but I can’t remember them right now. Maybe I’ll do an edit and put them in if I think of them.