There are some people out there with time on their hands, and twitter has become their medium to be standups amongst the crowd. I thought I would drop a list of choice ones, along with some examples.

@God_Damn_Batman gives us the Dark Knight’s inner monologue.

@FeministHulk shows us that the green machine has a softer side, and really hates the partiarchy.

You can gain real insight into the future of Irish Government finances with @RealBLenihan

@DrSamuelJohnson provides COMMENTARY and WIT in ye form of DEFINITIONS suitable for the GENTRY:

Lord@darthvader will choke you if you don’t RT him.

Well not really spoiler warning but hell, I don’t want to even risk it. Two things. Three. First – hurray! Awesome! Penny Arcade said ‘narrative juggernaut’ and I whole heartedly concur. I loved the story this time around.

Second – Hurray! Useable melee attack button! In fact the combat interface as a whole is rather nice, even if the gun technology has gotten a little retarded* the ‘I’m about to die’ indicator of meat injury – past shield damage – is this sort of pulsing encroaching veiny ring around the screen. This gets properly intense when you’re in the thick of a fire fight and are trying to scramble for cover. Combine this with the new melee button and you get moments of pure awesome where faced with a asari biotic about to blow the last half-inch of life out of you, it makes more sense to storm the position and beat them to death with the butt of your rifle because that keeps them too off balance to unleash force lightning on you…

Third – and this is the spoilerish bit – your Secretary? Comms Ensign? Whatever – pretty much parks herself at your terminal and coo’s ‘take me captain, I’m yours’ if you talk to her at all. This… well again … oh let me start from the beginning.

I figured out a few things a couple of months ago – that you could play ME1 again as a character, how to make the DLC’s work out here in the back of beyond etc, which all lead to me playing back through ME1 with an eye to exactly how it would crop up in ME2. I took Renegade John, who I’d thought had gotten a short shrift the first time around. This time he just went full-auto renegade – pretty much hunt down your rabid dog (Saren) by unleashing a fiercer one (Shepard). This was a lot more fun – ass kicking and crushing things, following Ubers ethos that was something like an Imperial Inquisitor; if I’m here, the time for ‘due process’ and such like is past. A Spectre getting called in means people are going to die. God will know his own.

Played though the newly added ‘When the Sky Falls’ DLC as part of this – it fit my ‘humans in imminent peril’ criteria for diversion from the mission so that was ok. Butchered everyone, lost the hostages, never mind. Lost Kaiden and Wrex on Virmire this time around – then pitched up in bed with the Asari. From there to the finale was truly awesome to see the difference between trying to do it as a low level dude the first time around and not on a second loop as the same class of character. Being able to *scare* the bad guy was cool.

But that was just prep. Set up for ME2** if you will. First time in I did it in what I like to think of as ‘Mass Effect the proper way’ – which is play through with what you think are the correct decisions, without trying to meta game it. Some times that means you stop someone from shooting someone, defend the helpless and find the dudes fish. Other times it means you chuck that fucker off a mega-scraper, beat a confession out of a suspect and leave the guys father to go down for a crime he didn’t commit. Its all about saving the galaxy – no, I don’t have time for that trivia or yes, thats a nasty threat that needs to be stopped.

So, I started as Renegade John once again and carried on as before. Started up, wandered around a bit, figured out what the hell was going on and had some issues. John had his head in a strange place by the end of ur-renegade ME 1 playthru. The first minute of ME2 is the Normandy getting shredded by The Big Bad. John wakes up in a regen tank… somewhat disturbed by this… as he wandered around, trying to untangle what the hell and getting no support from the fucking council despite hauling their lame asses out of the fire he gets access to another ship with all the aforementioned stuff – including Ensign Perky. Renegade John’s attitude has always been ‘end not the means’ but even then, theres a piratey line you don’t cross and banging one of your crew on the railing of the astro-nav console is on the far side of it.

Trailing about doing missions, I was struck again by ME’s judgement. The option to ‘take the soul-sucking monster for a concubine’ isn’t something a renegade does, its something someone terminally stupid would do! For the love of little apples, ‘we’re here to hunt it because it kills what it mates with’ does not logically lead to ‘hey sexy monster, lets get it on’. I did like that this time it was slightly more reasonable to get to know your crew this time. The characters of the shipmates are great – some I liked a lot, others not so much, but that was intentional according to the designers. There were some character related options I did miss; you were shoe-horned a bit into your attitudes towards certain things I could have done with an ‘ah fuck it’ option at a few places. Particularly some of your old crew – Liara and Ashley/Kaiden (depending) both give you static that you don’t stick around to argue and I’d have made other arguments. F’rinstance you wake up in Cerberus clutches but say you head straight to the Alliance they don’t want to know you, and you don’t get the option to tell Cerberus to bugger off and then have to take bullshit from people about working for Cerberus when you’re not allowed leave! But… I think thats a good indication of the depth of character interaction. I also liked that they let the fact that all these different people were stuffed on a ship come out – sometimes you’ve to go break up fights between some of the polar opposites, which is fun and also satisfying because its sensible that something like that should happen. You can have sensible conversations with a lot of the ordinary crew too which is very cool.

As before though, Renegade John doing it ‘properly’ gets the short end of the stick compared to the angelic Paragon Jane; where John was forced to make some tough calls because hadn’t gotten high enough in either renegade or paragon to unlock certain persuasive skills, Jane could just pull a Picard and make people magically see reason by the same stage in the game as all her choices had been Paragon. (Mostly. Sometimes even the best of people can’t resist stabbing up a brigand with an arc welder while his back is turned).

I loved the settings; again like the beach on Virmire, I would have loved to just wander around on some of the settings, they seemed awesome beyond awesome. The overheard conversations are fantastic, great little slices of life. Some of them are hilarious, some are kind of sad (asari girl who’s going to live a thousand years talking to her short-lived salarian step-dad about remembering him when he’s gone) but the amount of time I spent hanging around earwigging on randomers is a very good sign of how good those little pieces are. Some reviews had it that the settings were linear but given that the even slightly more open ones lead to me wandering around (as you would) trying to figure out where exactly in some giant skyscraper city you’d find an X-widget. I think the linearity was a good idea; look at all the chaos and adventure packed into just earth, in just our era. Imagine trying to sift out the signal from the noise on multiple worlds of significantly higher complexity. Thanks, but I’ll pass on that bit of realism.

Here again, where Renegade John had gone through it on ‘its the mission, stupid!’ and taken no chances with leaving live enemies behind, Paragon Jane had turned over every rock in the galaxy (even gone to new systems to find new rocks that might be unturned), fetched every stuck kitten out of its tree and councilled every stim addict and addled pregnant woman she could find. Thus, John went through, found stuff and did things, and then Jane would find the same rooms now stuffed full of people she’d helped or let live or variously touched before – crooks gone straight (John had executed them), psychic message-drones from reincarnated aliens (John had dissolved the reincarnation in acid), and addled fanbois trying to save the galaxy (John had menaced and pistol-whipped them iirc). Janes inbox also filled with random messages from people she’d helped and again had people falling over her to ‘come look me up when you finish doing whatever it is you do’.

The radio news has improved significantly between ME1 and ME2, from being kind of dull to being fantastic, often mentioning things that Jane had done in her previous adventures. The news on the scumpit of Omega was particularly brilliant, given they don’t like humans at all. Actually, one thing I do remember now – Illium, the asari planet – after wandering around for too long Jane was becoming twitchy at the ‘valley of the valley girls’ squeakiness. Didn’t affect me while I was playing John. Odd.

Missions. Mostly pretty good – I liked the unusual ones a lot too – a sneaky one with Kasumi, a sort of extended club crawl for Samarra, a stalk with Thane. All the rest were various frag fests on various terrain, fair enough, but I think a few more ‘Mission Impossible’ style ones like the finale where you can utilise the fact that you’ve got a spaceship, a shuttle, a hovertank and a buttload of spec ops people could be fun – even if its just a ‘fit the peg to the hole’ style of common sense and maybe a show down. I have to say I thought the main finale was a bit… odd, I don’t think their big reveal had the oomph they thought it had, to me it was just ‘wuh? really?’ but never mind. Essentially I thought their final mcguffin could have been given a different and far more satisfactory form, especially since they’d achieved some admirably grim and spooky settings and set pieces on some of the interim story missions. Difficulty through out was good; challenging enough that I hurt my hand pounding on the desk in frustration on more than one occassion, this is good, I want mileage out of a game. The various bad guys were interesting, the howling zombie husk hordes have gotten significantly nastier for ME2.

So basically the game splits in three blocs – main arc missions, recruitment missions and sidequests. The recruitment missions come in pairs of aquire team member and assist team member tidy up loose ends prior to suicide run. John, on ‘its the mission stupid’, again (again!) made the cardinal error of believing his briefings that ‘its of the utmost urgency’ that he go retrieve the SignalWidget. So he did. This then slightly later triggers the Kicker. Now, sensibly, the Kicker opens the Finale but also has a clock built into it. John was set to go deal with it but a bunch of the team were complaining about unfinished business. He threat assessed, dealt with the ones that were Clear and Present (you, with the plan to cripple a geth beachhead, we’ll do that – you, with the sickness, take some pills we may not survive this anyway), then set off to fix the Finale. Alas, he’d done too much before setting off on it, so by the time he did it, even doing quite well, the whole expedition turned into a blood bath with massive casualties, both recruited operatives and among the crew.

So, when the credits rolled and the option to continue or restart came up, I hit continue to do some of the missions I skipped…. and then was horrified to find it really was a ghost ship. Those two crew who were usually thick as gossiping thieves in the crew quarters? One of them didn’t make it, the other one just sits there alone now. Ensign Perky? Eaten. The wisecracking heatsink crew? Eaten. The two scots engineers who had some of the best lines in the game? Now theres just one of them. It was like the Ship of the Dead, I swear any sense of victory or satisfaction turned to ash.

Thus, replaying as Paragon Jane I ignored the boss mans prompt entirely, made sure that every single one of my crew were recruited and all tucked in snugly in the ship with loose ends tied up, closure achieved and various wayward children stomped on (yes, this was the Paragon path, I swear). Similarly, Jane looted the galaxy for ores and cash to make sure that the ship was kitted out and that everyone was holstering state-of-the-art and nothing less. Thus, when the Kicker came up again she struck a dramatic pose on the bridge and said “Do it NAU!’ sending the ship racing through the gates of hell and putting high cal cryo rounds from her Widow anti-tank rifle though the heads of anyone who got in her way. So, mission accomplished with much the same outcome***, except Jane returns to a ship full of cheering crew (even if Ensign Perky was a bit traumatised by nearly being liquidated) and sets out saving the galaxy again, this time with her squeeze on tap in the captains stateroom (Private sector – has its benefits over the old public sector Alliance Navy). Again. Even where this time John got the girl, it seemed cold comfort.

Thus ends ME2, with the teasers along some of the load screens of ‘hang on to your saved games to port to ME3′. Hurry the hell up Bioware! Though, from their pov, no hurry at all – I’m both shelling out for every DLC they drop and I even shelled out £50 for a Limited Edition Collectors version of the game just to get the DLC code for the limited armour and rifle. I am revenue stream for them, I’m guessing they’ll feed us DLC’s for a while yet. I can live with that :)

Mass Effect – if you haven’t played it (you shouldn’t have read this far) but do anyway.

* Two general technological things that hacked me off were the new ‘improved’ gun tech and the replacement of the Mako tank with the Hammerhead hovertank. First the gun-tech; I liked my old weapons; if they overheated up, then they took a while to cool down & become functional, you worked it into your strategies. Sometimes it was a pain, but you could always switch out to alternative weapons if the fighting was really thick. In ME2, all weapons use standard heat-sinks, basically universal ammo packs in function. The heat builds up as before but then you eject the heatsink and slap in another. Great, keeps a rapid rate of fire going… until you run out of heat sinks. This is gruesome if you’re using an Assault rifle which is supposed to be a storm of lead; multiple times I ran out of ammo for the rifle, then the shotgun and was reduced to plinking at the swine with my pistol. I could very much empathise with Zaeed’s long wistful discourse on his old assault rifle and how much he missed it. Solid step backwards in tech, plus I thought the old version with its ‘future, different’ feel was just more spacey and cool.

Second – Maaaako, come back all is forgiven. I was never one of the anti-Mako fanatics, especially since the replacement is ARSE! Again, maybe the maneuverability is better but the armament is crap, a rocket launching main gun, compared to the heavy railgun and coax machine gun of the Mako – in fact, all I want is my coax back, is that too much to ask? Why did you take it away in the first place!? When you’ve had to drive up to some stubborn Geth to pry him out of cover, you don’t want to pound him with high explosives – you want to shred him with machinegun fire or squish him under your tires. Oh yes, the Hammerhead doesn’t have tires. Boo. I want my Mako back.

** I finally got my grubby paws on it after a half dozen tries involving lots of different online and real stores and two different versions. Finally, finally I get it, install, start noodle about making sure the settings are optimised and that the online bit works, then I hit go. And stare at the screen as it flickers between two frames for a while before I realise, seeing this for the first time of course, that it had crashed. Never mind. Reboot. ME2 crashed a lot on me, at all sorts of random places, but I think it was mostly due to my machine over-heating.

*** The big choice at the end if ‘destroy the McGuffin or bring it back’ but doing it ‘properly’ I can’t think of any reason to bring it back. The entire game has been spent going site to site where research teams have been overcome and monsterised by dead and dormant pieces of kit from just these same people. Everything I’ve witnessed through out the two games says that contact with these technologies equals madness, death. Keeping it around and worse, flooding it with researchers/fodder is practically guaranteeing trouble. No way, not on my watch, boom was Johns thinking. Janes thinking ran more towards ‘even if I thought this was a good idea, you sir are an untrustworthy arse and you can kiss mine’ – Boom.

Thesis writing. Thankfully, I am not long under that particular burden. It really feels like having a heavy sack on your back. Each day you take a brick out of the bag and put it on the ground. The pile of bricks gets higher, but the weight doesn’t seem any lighter. The bag is with you all the time, you never get a break and you always feel like you should be writing or working — even when you’re out for a break after a lot of progress. The rub is, that I almost felt as bad when I was making progress because I felt the need to keep going more.

My status now is that I am awaiting a date for my viva voce. It should really have happened by now, but this process has been nothing but missed deadlines and remorseful “should-a’s”, “would-a’s” and “could-a’s”. I’m working, and at a job I really like, so it’s less of a burden.

But back to writing, apart from my incredibly insightful tweets, I am writing a lot. Proposals, papers and status documents take up a surprising portion of my days. It’s shocking how little technical time there can be in an ostensibly technical job. I can see how people get frustrated. It seems that you have to write constantly as an academic, that you have to sell constantly as a member of a startup, and have constant meetings if you’re in a big company. Communication is 90% of most jobs that I have seen, and technology is only 10%.

I’m sure that there are skunk-works labs out there where people can really spend their days with their text-editor of choice, not a care in the world other than compiler errors and ensuring the coffee supply is plentiful. It sounds nice, but I am sure even secret facilities have status updates, even if they are punctuated by mad laughter. In fact, the evil-HR departments probably impose a minimum mania level on their reports.

“Dr. Malevoface, this quater you have used fourteen percent of your allocation of manic laughter, but we have yet to hear you exclaim that the mainstream scientists who shun you are ‘fools’, nor have you submitted the mandator Gantt chart detailing how you will ’show them all that the monkeysaurus is the ultimate doomsday weapon’. This is unacceptable, I will be forwarding a memo of concern to all nineteen of your line managers.”

Leprecon was fantastic, even though my work schedule interfered with any actual gaming other than the pub quiz. (We came in second place, but it was a good and fun pub quiz which is the important thing.) I finally made it to Goldsmith hall Sunday evening long enough to do a circuit around the main room then head across the street for a quick dinner with friends. After that I broke from the Leprecon party and hashed out the future of my weekly game, then met up with Himself for the walk home.

As far as cons go, I know nothing about how well it went or whether it was a Good Con. My part was essentially attending a party that went on for three nights. I love going out with my friends on “normal” nights, but there’s something extra special about the con setup where everyone in an extended social circle is in the same pub, and you can drift from group to group. I know none of this is news to people who have been here all their lives, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been to a Dublin con (9 years!). I got to hang out with lots of people I wish I could spend more time with, and that’s a good thing.

Crossposted at DixieStix.

Friday night I attended a staff meeting, my first with This is Knit. We went over the stuff that needed going over, then we broke out the wine and pizza and crochet hooks. Our all-star crochet teacher had agreed to come and teach us to crochet, as most of us weren’t that familiar with the technique and we decided it was time for all of us to broaden our horizons. They were duly broadened.

Saturday night we had belated birthday pints for the Wanderer and cb, who share a birthday. I hadn’t seen cb since Christmas, so it was great to spend time with him and the clutch of other friends who showed up. I think everyone had a good time; I know I did, and I’m pretty sure both birthday boys did. I don’t go out as often these days as I used to, but nearly every time ends up being a great night. This is one of the many reasons I was so excited to get back to Dublin.

I’m very close to being done with the third log cabin block for my sock yarn leftovers blanket. I never photographed the second block, but I finally draped this one over a chair and took a picture for y’all:

The next block will be dominated by Koigu in the middle, as I’ve been swapping sock yarn bits with a friend. I’m excited about getting it started, and about retiring this block. It saw me through my thesis writing, and a lot of the stress of moving here. It deserves to rest a little while with the first two blocks.

I haven’t been blogging as much on Cobweb lately; when I end up blogging things that aren’t solely about knitting, I’ll crosspost them here. Otherwise, I’ll sequester them away at DixieStix so those who are not fibre-inclined don’t need to wade through endless knitting content.

But seriously – a shuttle, for sale. How many movies have told us that some day we’re going to need to be able to use it in a hurry to save the earth from [insert problem here] so at least one of them should be properly mothballed somewhere. Though if its in the hangar next to the USAF’s 3rd Space Interceptor Squadron then I gets its not such a priority…

I am very glad though that Shuttle isn’t pulling a Concorde and being a big chunky evolutionary dead end. Its a damn shame we’ve no Concorde equivalent any more – have we passed Peak Supersonic Airliners? I do like Spaceship One and its various halfbrothers and cousins – they’re worthy successors to shuttle whereas Aires and Ariane are … just missing the point. One use rockets are not how we want to be tackling the gravity well. I’d far prefer we had a space elevator or zeppelin-mothership or some sort of magnetic launcher so we didn’t have to burn so much fuel getting fuel up the well but I’ll settle for whats there for now.

Effectively all her time since college has evaporated – she has no work experience despite being 6-10 years in (not sure exactly). Rumour has it she’s working these days in a field that requires no higher education and given that my appealing physical attributes are nil, this for me would be bad.

Thus, the ongoing embargo of truly interesting stuff goes on. Apologies to all. Invite me over some time and I’ll tell you a story but I’m not putting anything online.

In both cases, these games demonstrate really nicely how developers should create sequels. the best sequel keeps the core feel of the original game, and adds new depth and interesting features.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2 is a Titan; it is the largest dollar-value entertainment product launch ever. The original COD4 was something of a sneak success. The single player campaign had all the qualities of a full movie, with interesting and distinctive characters, and varied plot.

What drove the game to real success though, was the multiplayer system. The main innovation of COD4 was that it introduced MMO-like qualities such as XP, loot (in the form of weapons unlocks) and quests (in the form of challenges such as kills requiered for particular weapons). BattleField 2 had some of these features, but COD4 took a much more arcade-oriented, small-squad tactical model. It was twitchier, and combined with the XBox matchmaking system to make a tight game with accessible progression.

The sequel, COD4:MW2 extends the multiplayer and adds a new mission-based cooperative ’special ops’ game type. If, like me, you dive straight into the multiplayer, the game asks you to consider the single player missions. Infinity Ward correctly inferred that the real meat is in the online multiplayer.

Your loadout in the new game includes an expanded secondary weapon list, including shotguns and rocket launchers. They have moved some of the more broken perks into death-streaks, which are activated by dying lots. This means that you get a chance to come back with a bit of help if you’re having a bad round.

There are also new kill-streak rewards. You can now unlock them and pick three from the list which runs from UAV to the 25-kill-streak, round-ending nuke.

Everything also has a challenge associated with it, all the weapons and all the perks. They give unlocks including thermal sights and heartbeat sensors.

The whole thing makes the game far more customisable, and rewards almost every choice you make for your class.

The original Assassin’s Creed was a great game, but was widely regarded as being too repetitive and a little shallow. On the plus side, the core mechanic of free flowing parkour was the best of any game. The sequel took the criticism head on, and added more side missions and the ability to buy upgraded gear, as well as an upgraded base of operations. While these aren’t super-deep, they add up to a very nice increase in the depth of the game.

It’s possible for games to go too far. I found GTA IV extremely frustrating because there was hour upon hour of tutorials for the many different mechanics that were added, which all needed their own tutorial, and which were not really skip-able.

It will be very interesting to see what the next two editions of these games are like. The third Assassin’s Creed game is likely to be set in the game’s near-future setting. I was thinking that I would like to see a 19th-Century setting, but I presume they won’t go for a third historical setting, though it is possible.

Overall, both sequels are excellent; I recommend them to anyone who might like them.

Onwards.

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