Troll Echos

Duke Nukem Forever makes me very very sad.  I almost decided to stop this review right there.  I don’t want to sound like a mean guy, or someone that’s negative about everything or anything like that.  Well, I may not have much of a choice on this one.  Like the rest of you, I waited for the game for twelve long years.  I saw the screen shots teasing its existence ten years ago, I saw the fake videos, I got hopes up and dashed over and over as the company behind the game squandered their money.  I had high hopes for a game that would let me escape my geeky life for a few hours to be a crass, womanizing, muscle head.

Well, let’s just say my experience hasn’t been quite up to my expectations.  I paid big money for the uber version of the game that came with man cave accessories.  I installed it the day it finally showed up on my door step.  I let Steam do its little patch, and I fired it up like an excited school kid popping Super Mario Bros. into his 8-bit Nintendo…  And it locked up.

So I rebooted my computer, double checked my video driver version was up to date, fired it up again…  And it locked up.  This was starting to make me feel as though I had just dropped $90 on a game I couldn’t even play.  I decided perhaps there was another patch to come in from Steam and I wandered off for a couple hours to see if anything else would come in, but nothing did.  I started the game and somehow it didn’t lock up.  I even managed to get my character out of the bathroom where you start.  I watched my computer show me frame rate drops that would make you blush considering the hardware I have.  Then it locked up, again.

By now I had figured out a theory.  I went into a special driver program and forced the GPU fan to 100% full-time.  This time when I started it, it kept on running.  Why it overheated my GPU is beyond me considering nothing else I’ve ever thrown at it had any problems.  I played it for about three hours straight.  During that time, I got about ten cut scenes, I saw the same three sections of the same area twice, I died over and over again as I found my weapons to have almost no power against aliens or pig cops, and I eventually got bored and stopped playing it.

I haven’t played it again since.  I’d love to claim this review is based on having experienced the whole game, or at least most of it, but I can’t claim that.  The game was hard to play, had no nudity in the portion I played, and the manliest thing that happened was peeing in a urinal.  Overall, I really just didn’t have a lot of fun with it and I’d be a bit surprised if I played it again.

I’ve finally joined the masses of smartphone users and my debut phone of choice is the HTC Incredible.  Having used Apple iPhones, HTC Eris devices, several forms of Blackberry, and even a fair share of Windows Mobile and Palm Pilot devices, I have a moderate amount of experience.  I don’t claim to be an expert mind you, but being a geek and playing with gadgets has offered me a solid basis for comparison.

Let’s start with the OS.  My first device anything like this was a Handspring.  It ran an old version (by current standards) of the Palm OS and displayed in a glorious four or so shades of gray.  It helped to organize my life, track gas mileage, and of course play games.  I loved almost everything about it, except that when the AA batteries died, so did basically everything else in the device.  Reconfigure everything because your batteries died.  Very bad.  I had as “mine on loan” a Handspring Treo given to me by my employer for a while too.  Nearly the same OS, nearly the same device, add color, add a little more memory and CPU power.  After that I bought a Casio Cassiopeia.  Way more horsepower than either of the Handspring devices and ran Windows CE.  Overall it was a decent device for the two weeks it worked.  The backlight went out on the screen and it was useless after that.  In the time I had to play, it seemed cool but it was little more than an elaborate PDA or a Windows computer that was slow to the point of useless, endured a tiny screen and required a stylus to use.  This brings me to my HTC Incredible and the Android OS by Google.  The Android OS, for those taking notes, is an impressively light weight version of Linux designed primarily for little devices like smartphones.  It is far and away my favorite OS for a device so far.  To be fair, the ease of getting apps and syncing over the air and everything like that gives it a bit of a user experience edge over previous devices I had that were not network or phone enabled.

As for devices like the Incredible, I’ve played with the iPhones of several friends and I’ve generally liked what I’ve seen, but it never inspired me to buy one.  I’ve seen Blackberry devices too, but as far as I can tell those are used exclusively for email.  As a developer, I like to evaluate devices partially on the criteria of writing code to run on them.  No one seems to use extra apps on a Blackberry at all, so that’s out.  Apple’s draconian rules for developers such as “you have to buy  a Mac computer to develop for the iPhone” seemed to me to make developing for the platform way too costly.  Android doesn’t seem to have those problems.  The SDK is free, you can code on any computer you like, and you can even “sideload” applications into the phone for testing without dealing with the marketplace at all until you are ready.  That makes me a happy developer and gives me more reasons to like the OS.

I’ve heard complaints over the number of apps available for Android when compared to the iPhone.  As I write this, I’ve heard the numbers placed at roughly 50k on Android and 100k on iPhone.  I don’t know about you, but that seems like way more than I could ever need on either.  Everything I search for I find about twenty of, and I’m left to find the one that seems to be the best rated and the cheapest.  Doubling that to forty results to every search honestly wouldn’t change much I figure.  The quality of the apps I’ve found seem just fine to me.  Generally few bugs, remarkably few crashes, none of the crashes take down the OS itself, and in fact many of them don’t even fully down down the app that crashed.   That last tidbit is quite remarkable and I think it has something to do with apps being made up of bunches of “Activities” that run almost independently of each other.  Since I got the phone about a week ago I’ve used it almost non-stop and I’ve seen about five crash popups, so we aren’t taking a lot of crashes.

There have been random complaints about the scree style used on the Incredible and Nexus One phones.  They use what is called an AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen in a RGBW (Red Green Blue White) layout called a PenTile pattern.  Complaints about the AMOLED part are that the colors are almost super saturated or “blown out.”  My experience so far is that the colors are spot on beautiful and the impression that may be causing that is the lack of gray colored washout common on basically all backlit LCD screens.  Since in an AMOLED screen each pixel puts out light by itself, there is no backlight at all so the grayish-white cast created by the backlight is missing entirely.  The other complaint is that the screen’s PenTile pattern is ugly or distracting.  There have been loads of pictures taken of this style screen that make them look very bad but look at one in person before you decide.  I see no oddities in color or pattern at all, and I don’t think it’s fair to evaluate a screen at an insane magnification.  That would be like looking at a nearly perfect diamond under 100x magnification and being disgusted by flaws that no one would ever seen without that level of zoom.  It’s frankly silly.

The camera in the phone is quite impressive.  Clocking in at 8.0mp it’s capable of capturing more of the scene’s details than even some point and click cameras.  The disadvantage of the camera is that it’s got an insanely little sensor and an equally tiny lens paired with an “in software” set of features like auto-focus and zoom.  It takes excellent pictures in daylight and the twin LED flash system does remarkably well at night as long as you are reasonably close to your subject.  My personal take is that if you want a camera, you should buy a camera.  If you want a phone that can take very decent pictures, you should buy the Incredible.

Overall I’m very happy with the phone.  I’ve done side-by-side comparisons to the HTC Eris (the Incredible’s predecessor) for things like boot up time, speech recognition time, and a few other identical apps performance levels, and it somewhat obviously blew the Eris away on every front, every time.  I highly recommend the HTC Incredible, even to dedicated Apple fans.  You won’t be disappointed.

This is a sort of addendum review now that I’ve seen Avatar in 3D, for the base review please see my Movie Review – Avatar post.  Most of this post I realize is more about 3D movies in general than about Avatar 3D specifically, but again if you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to avoid this review for the couple of minor spoilers that could have gotten in.  I would like to preempt my own review with the information that I loved the movie, and would like to see it again in fact, and that things I say are observations more than complaints.

In the realms of 2D and 3D there are some important, and likely obvious, differences.  A 2D movie is like really any other movie you’ve seen at the theater or on your TV at home.  The picture you see is the only picture being projected on the screen when you are watching it.  This may also be obvious, but 3D movies need to project two movies onto the same screen at the same time and then provide your eyes some way to let each eye see only one of them.  With each eye seeing a different image there is really nothing that makes it any different than the way your eyes actually work, thus things can pop out of the screen or fall into the screen almost like magic.

The chosen method of “letting each eye see its own image” for the IMAX 3D version I saw was a pair of opposing polarized glasses with a light green tint in one lens and light purple tint in the other.  The glasses were light weight and reasonably comfortable even over my normal glasses, but in the warmth of a theater full of people made me feel a bit clammy with sweat after about half of the movie.  The effect the glasses have on the movie is that everything is a little bit darker and the colors are a little bit skewed.  It also left the whole movie just a little bit out of focus.  I’m not sure if that changes based on where you are sitting in the theater, but I suspect not thanks to the polarization that seemed to be at 45 degrees off of horizontal or vertical.  These two problems took away from the vibrantly colorful and amazingly beautiful scenes of the movie for me.

The most commonly used effect for most of the 3D in Avatar was that things fell into the screen providing a parallax scrolling style depth to things.  Occasionally things felt like they were out in the theater with you, but generally never in the hokey need to duck and flinch to keep from getting hit in the face with things kind of way made famous by older 3D movies.  The most common thing that was in the foreground was the seeds of the spirit tree or an occasional bit of plant life.  These effects were cool and didn’t feel overused to me, but I also felt they didn’t really add much to the movie.

My final determination having seen the movie both ways is that I prefer it in 2D.  A movie full of such bright colors and clean crisp graphics genuinely loses a little bit when darkened, color skewed, and slightly out of focus.  I highly recommend you see it both ways to compare for yourself since it’s a great enough movie that seeing it more than once is a wonderful thing indeed, but if you are only going to see it once, see the 2D version.  The true beauty of the movie speaks for itself without the need for added depth from forced 3D.