No Zytrons In Range

(Some spoilers below.)

The Good:

• The entire concept of basing a game on an intelligent popular book (that isn’t a pen and paper RPG sourcebook) is a great idea, and I hope more companies do this in the future instead of basing their games on crappy dumb action movies.
• This game is scary as shit. The all-in-your-mind sequences are incredible. The gas mask sequences actually made me feel like I was suffocating (I’m not kidding; when the filter was nearly gone, I stopped playing, and hid my character in a corner until he replaced it.) The introduction to the game, with the zoom out from the photograph of the beautiful untouched city, revealing that it’s just a post card in a dingy tiny apartment built into the side of a subway tunnel is brilliant. The phone suddenly ringing in the military base abandoned for 20 years after you restore power is amazingly creepy. (No, you can’t answer it.) When the companions with you start going kind of crazy, even the extremely with-it Rangers, that’s also amazingly creepy. The ghost sequence was brilliant.
• Despite that, it can also be uplifting at times, in fact at just the perfect times when you were just about to put the game away because the setting is so goddamned depressing.
• The sequence where a little kid is riding your back, which completely screws up your aim, is amazing. I loved everything about it. Especially the ending. (See the previous point.)
• The game engine and level designs allows you to go through the entire game without killing a single human if you so choose. I think this should be standard practice, frankly.
• The dual endings, represented by two characters in the game. Hunter (“if it’s hostile, kill it”), and Khan (“To break this vicious circle one must do more than act without any thought or doubt”). I was originally going to complain about how this was implemented, but then I realized: I think they did the right thing. The catch is, the game doesn’t hand-hold you into either ending (think of a Bioware game where dialog options are clearly labeled for what ending they contribute to). The only (minor) problem is that the game has no indication that there are multiple endings at all… but then again, the “good” ending is supposed to be for that rare player who really explores the game world in detail and does things a little different, and that’s basically what happens now.
• One of the characters plays a practical joke on you that’s genuinely funny. Humor is hard in video games. Especially localized versions of video games. Especially video games as dark and gritty as this one.
• The improvised weapons and flashlight were great. I liked the way you had to recharge the battery (or pneumatic weapon) during your free moments, or God help you when you run into the enemy later on and the battery’s dead.

The Bad:

• The escort missions aren’t very clearly labeled as escort missions, so you’re likely to lose the first one simply because you don’t realize that the guy you were supposed to be escorting doesn’t have infinite health like the rest of the Rangers with you at the time. This might be a localization problem.
• The second escort mission involves a hallway full of slime monsters. The only way to win this mission is to shoot the monster nests- but since the game gives no indication you can do that, you either end up accidentally shooting one or finally ask a friend, “how did you beat that damn level?”
• Additionally, when the slime monsters explode, your framerate goes to shit, making it nearly-impossible to keep playing. (In fact, monsters in the game always have kind of a herky-jerky motion. I’m not sure whether that’s a stylistic choice, a quirk of the game engine, or something specific to my particular computer.)
• There’s exactly one named female character in the game. She’s a prostitute. She steals all your stuff. No Besthesda-esque equal-opportunity bandits in this game.
• Quick time events. Ugh. Fortunately, you can easily predict when they’re coming, they all use the same key, and they aren’t in the middle of 5 minute long cutscenes. Hey game industry: nobody likes quick time events.
• The monsters are generic; they look like they came out of the “discount Doom 3 monster rip-off bin”. (Doom 3 was an awful game, but it sure influences the hell out of monster design in video games.) Plus, demons (in an otherwise realistic game) are proportioned all wrong for flight, and way too small to be able to tip over an armored 4×4 truck.
• The ghost sequence was brilliant, but it would have been nice to get another one, one without a guide where you have to get through using your own wits. Yes, one of “the bad” is, “there wasn’t enough of this great level!”

The summary:

This game is excellent and I recommend playing it and I regret not playing through it earlier.

Remember when you could just double-click the icon for your game and be playing right away?

I just ran an inventory, and I have eight games installed on my computer (the oldest being Overlord II, Oblivion, meaning they’re all newish), and six of them have launchers. Let’s take a look (as always, click to enhugeify):

Sony’s DC Universe Online

Hi-Rez studios, makers of Global Agenda and Tribes Ascend

Ubisoft’s Might & Magic Heroes VI*

Special added super-bonus: it crashed in the 45 seconds it took me to open the window and take a screenshot!

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft

There’s certainly a pattern forming here:

1. Either a non-rectangular window shape, or (what we in the Mac Classic era used to call) a “borderless” window. None are resizeable, and finding a “handle” with which to change the window’s position is difficult.
2. No standard Windows controls in sight! Forget that they’re well-designed, have been tested to rock-solidness over 20 years, and are instantly readable. Not good enough. Only the WOW launcher deigns so much to have menus.
3. Everybody loves black. “Make the background black”, the designers say, “it’ll make us stand out!” Look at how much those launchers stand out! Color schemes are either black with offensively-colored call-to-actions (Hi-Rez, WOW), or just plain offensive all-around (DC Universe Online).
4. The primary purpose of the launcher seems to be “buy downloadable shit!” (Or, in a noble exception for WOW, “watch a TV commercial!”) Sure, the launcher also patches the relevant game, but that is obviously a tiny, secondary concern.
5. 75% of the launchers have creepy people/things staring at you. (Maybe 100%, depending on what the Tribes dudes are looking at under those helmets.)

Now that we have the pattern down, let’s look at the last two:

Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

What… what are these? They’re actually… tasteful? They’re not offensively-colored, or animated, or trying to sell me some worthless downloadable junk (and yes, both games have downloadable content for sale)? There’s no Twitter feeds, no Facebook links, no social features of any kind? The options presented are actually all relevant to the actual game itself? Nothing creepy staring into my soul?

Of course you still have to ask, “why do these launchers exist?” (Actual answer: because PCs don’t have a unified way to handle installing/uninstalling content packs and mods, and console versions don’t have advanced rendering settings necessary on PC, and thus the PC version needs a UI for those things somewhere, and they didn’t want to put it in the actual game because then the Xbox and PC versions of the game code would diverge too much. It’s a good reason, but still an compromise that makes for a worse product.)

So what is the lesson we have learned? Fuck if I know. Maybe, “launchers are only present for games that are trying to nickel-and-dime you to death, or bad console ports.” Maybe, “don’t have creepy things staring at the guy trying to play your game, sheesh.” Or maybe even, “Sony sucks.”

I think it’s really, “details matter.”

*) Note: the name is no longer “Heroes of Might & Magic”, it is now “Might & Magic Heroes”. So in addition to a awful launcher, it breaks alphabetization on my Steam games list. Yes, I also complain about the first DOOM showing up in Steam as “Ultimate Doom” and thus is near the U’s instead of D’s. Details matter, people. Pay attention to the details.

Quick post this time. An email I sent to the Contact Us link at a company called TownNews.com. I just thought I’d echo it here, since I think the Internet-at-large deserves to know what happens after you do business with these guys.

I was attempting to read a movie review from 2004 using this link:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/life_of_david_gale/articles/1235143/_alan_parker_lures_you_into_the_theater_but_then_you_sit_down_and_all_he_has_waiting_for_you_is_a_whoopee_cushion
only to find a splash page saying that “The Star Democrat is no longer a website affiliate of the Zwire product.”

Following the link on that page to TownNews.com, the first thing that greets me is your motto:

“Our mission: To help newspapers thrive in an online world.”

Does your company feel the best way to implement that mission is to completely break all links to the Star Democrat’s content?

Breaking links is a sin. Don’t do it.

And if you’re a content creator, and you’re about to sign up for TownNews.com… make sure you put something in your contract to prevent them from totally screwing up your Google ranking and advertising revenue after you stop using… whatever service they provide.

(BTW, visit the real Star Democrat site to give these guys some ad impressions that TownNews.com is stealing from them.)

Inspired by this article in The Guardian, I present:

Original story on the Washington Post: FAA Criticized In Report on Airline Parts

At first glance, this story sounds pretty scary.

Passengers have flown on jetliners built with “substandard” parts, some of which may have been made in foreign countries, because the Federal Aviation Administration lacks an adequate system for checking the quality of airplane components, according to a federal oversight report.

Wow! That’s quite an opening paragraph. Next time I get into an airliner I just know it’s going to corkscrew directly into the ground. Let’s see what they back it up with.

The parts for commercial airliners such as the Boeing 727 and 737 were once manufactured almost exclusively in the United States. But the parts on today’s big jets, such as Boeing’s 777 and its planned 787, are made in such countries as China, Japan, Brazil, Italy, France and Australia, in addition to the United States. Boeing, Pratt & Whitney, GE and other plane manufacturers buy parts made overseas largely because they are cheaper.

Ok, so parts are made overseas. So what?

But the bargain-hunting has come at a price, according to a new report by the Transportation Department’s inspector general.

“Neither manufacturers nor FAA inspectors have provided effective oversight of suppliers; this has allowed substandard parts to enter the aviation supply chain,” reads the report, dated Feb. 26. The agency released the report yesterday after it was made public by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit organization that focuses on government accountability.

SourceWatch: Project On Government Oversight

The report cited four engine failures in 2003 — three on the ground, one in flight — that were traced to “unapproved design changes made by a . . . supplier” of speed sensors on engine fuel pumps. It did not cite any more recent incidents, nor did it specify the degree to which continuing problems with parts threaten to cause similar failures.

Even the journalist sounds unconvinced at this point. They didn’t cite anything more recent than 2003, and they didn’t specify the possible danger of unapproved design changes.

And, frankly, only four engine failures in all of 2003? According to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, there are more than 87,000 flights a day, and an average about 64 million flights a year. Only four failures? Sounds like these parts suppliers are doing pretty damned good to me.

During a visit to one parts supplier, the inspector general’s office observed an employee who “used a piece of paper, scotch-taped to the work surface, as a measuring device for a length of wire on an oil and fuel pressure transmitter.”

And here’s the line that prompted me to write this blog post, after seeing coverage of the article at The Consumerist blog.

My immediate reaction was: so what? The article obviously implies that measuring the lengths of wire with a piece of paper scotch-taped to a work surface is bad in some way, but it doesn’t tell us why it’s bad!

• It doesn’t say whether the wires were the correct length after being measured this way.
• And even more important, it doesn’t even tell you why the wire needs to be cut! If it’s just being cut so it’s short enough to fit in the casing of this particular component, does it really matter how precise the cut is?

Sure it sounds scary, until you actually engage your brain and realize that paper can actually be cut to a specific length! And it can be marked, too! It’s a miracle material! Well, since the article doesn’t explain it, I can only assume it’s there merely to sound scary to people who don’t make use of their critical thinking skills or have never seen paper before.

So far, no airline accidents have been attributed to faulty overseas parts, the FAA said. “There are absolutely no imminent safety issues raised by the report,” FAA spokeswoman Alison Duquette said.

A confirmation that these horrible systemic problems you should be terrified of haven’t actually caused any accidents whatsoever, directly from the FAA.

The report identifies 17 major components of commercial airliners made by Boeing, including the wings, rudder, nose and engine nacelles. When the Boeing 727 was introduced in 1964, all 17 of the components were made in the United States.

By contrast, of the 17 major components of the Boeing 787, which is scheduled to make its first test flight this year, 13 were made exclusively or partially overseas.

“FAA’s process for supplier audits should be designed to address newer manufacturing business models, which have expanded the number of foreign suppliers, locations where parts are assembled, and the degree of independent manufacturing responsibility suppliers now have,” the report reads.

“Exclusively or partially overseas” is a handy statement. Since you bucket “exclusively” and “partially” in the same bucket, there’s no way to know whether all 13 of those components are made entirely overseas, or if all of them merely contain one small screw made in China. It would take a lot of effort to be more vague.

So what is this article really saying?

Ignoring the parts designed to scare you, like the idiotic paragraph about (gasp! shock! horror!) measuring wire with a piece of paper, every other part of this article is basically saying: “getting airline parts from foreign suppliers is bad.” Of course, it never explains why it’s bad. (It does, however, explain one way it’s good: it’s cheaper.) It also doesn’t mention airliners made by the entirely-foreign Airbus cooperative at all.

I’m a pretty patriotic guy, and I even make an effort to buy American whenever I have the chance, but this article is nothing but scare-tactic propaganda. Airliners are perfectly safe, whether we cut the length of wire in Mexico City or in Dallas, specifically because companies like Boeing, backed up by government agencies like the National Transportation Safety Board, have expended great effort to make sure they’re as safe as possible. And yes, that’s not 100% safe… nothing is.

And the part that bugs me most is that blogs like Consumerist are sharing and re-printing this article, with the scary wire cutting quote in the headline, all over the Internet without even stopping to think about it. If you run a blog that reprints stories, please at least spend 5 minutes thinking about the story first.