Aquarionics

Today I went to the Game Affilate event, which was an excuse for Game to say how it’s split up its market (Into 7 bits. Including “Pestered Parents” and “Cyber Lords”) and for the various publishers to demo stuff.

We watched videos of Beatles Rock Band, FIFA 10 and stuff, and watched people play Blur (The new racing game from the people who did Project Gotham. It’s a lot more arcadey and fun, most like a slightly more real-world Mariokart) and Split Second (Another racing game, this one with the twist that you can blow up half the track and reroute it to your advantage). A new room full of people was convinced of how awesome Brutal Legend is going to be, which is good for Double-Fine, and we saw some other stuff.

I only got to play two things, the first was “Toy Story Mania!” (yet another) minigame collection for the Wii. This one more polished than most – even with the half finished code I played – and something that if I had any kids to put it in front of, I’d put it in front of them.

The second, though, was Arkham Asylum.

Arkham Asylum is a game where you play batman. It is a batman-em-up. It is a game where you are trapped in Arkham with a best-of all the villains batman’s ever put in there. It’s a game where you have a button that analyses the room around you to tell you how many people have guns, which is important as people with guns can kill you straight off.

It’s a game where you rappel up onto a gargoyle, knock out a guard and rappel to another gargoyle before his mates find out. It’s a game where if someone is stupid enough to stand beneath your high place, you can drop down, string him up, and wait for his friends to find him so you can knock them out from the shadows.

It is a game where, in the absence of high places to leap from, and dark places to hide in, you will hit people with your fist until they stop moving. You will still not kill any of them.

It is a batman-em-up. It plays like a batman-em-up.

I’m probably going to be buying this game.

Back to the fluff soon, promise.

So, sil said that norm said that jwz said that…

gosh, an OS war.

This is my environment:

(Interstitial lyrics in this post are from “Every OS Sucks” by Three Dead Trolls In A Baggie. You can find a video of it on youtube)

Now there’s lih-nux or lie-nux,
I don’t know how you say it,
or how you install it, or use it, or play it,
or where you download it, or what programs run,
but lih-nux, or lie-nux, don’t look like much fun.

On Waterwheel at work I use Ubuntu Jaunty, 64bit. I use Gnome and a heavily sparkly compiz setup (because desktop cube with a transparent desktop means I can see all my virtual desktops at once). I can entirely ignore any of the buzz about how good Air apps are, or the latest cool thing Youtube does, the new Chromium builds and any of a dozen other nice bits of technology, because my desktop is 64 bit and making things work on it is so much of a faff that I don’t bother. Sound just about works – sometimes the volume goes screwy – and occasionally a reboot will bugger up my gnome panel so the clock won’t appear for ten minutes. Despite having the fastest desktop in the office, HD Youtube won’t play on my desktop because of faff to do with 32 bit interfaces to 64bit programs or something. It goes at 3 frames per second, and my amiga 600 could do better than that.

Then Windows 95, then 98,
man solitaire never ran so great,
and every single version came out late,
but I guess that’s the way it goes.

At home my desktop – Tsunami – is a triboot system. My prefered environment currently is the Windows 7 RC, which generally Just Works, except that the network cuts out after a while, my sound card no longer records properly, and I can incapacitate any other player of Left for Dead by turning on “Push to Talk”, which blasts the rest of the game with high level static.

Other than that it runs XP, which is fine except for the bit where running it for more than four hours slows down to a crawl, the system has reached the half life when it needs to be reinstalled until I find the time to do it, and if anything attempts to put the machine to hibernate it will crash so hard it won’t recover for three reboots. The default browser for both the above is Google Chrome, because it has given me a browser window before Firefox has realised I’ve clicked the icon.

Thirdly, it also runs Jaunty, upgraded from Feisty, which would be my standard environment if it ran games. Mostly I don’t boot into it because it can’t find my sound card either, despite it working fine with Feisty, and because something in the upgrade broke the XConf so it only sees one monitor and I haven’t got around to fixing that yet.

Oasis – my laptop – is a Compaq Mini 700 that is sold in the states with a variant of Feisty on it. Oasis runs Jaunty and will either record or play sound and not do both, and is running a non-standard kernel because otherwise the wired network doesn’t work.

Cenote, the server Aquarionics is hosted on; and Fjord, my home server; run Debian Lenny. It works fine. I assume this is because neither of them have anything to do with any graphical interface.

Well Stevie said to Xerox,
“Boys, turn your heads and cough.”
And when no-one was looking,
he ripped their interfaces off.

Stole every feature that he had seen,
put it in a cute box with a tiny little screen,
Mac OS 1 ran that machine,
only cost five thousand bucks

In previous working environments I used to run on OS X full time, which I didn’t have any UI problems with, but massive arguments with whenever something that wasn’t case sensitive on the system interfaced with something that was, and the occasional block of doing something Not The Mac Way because it had to be consistant with something that was Not The Mac. Also, I stopped using a Mac because I can’t afford to buy the hardware.

My iPhone was fine until… well, that’s another Choose Your Own Adventure Post.

I use Windows because it runs almost all the F/OSS I use day to day, plus the games I enjoy. I use Ubuntu because it’s free and Free and mostly Just Works, and I can get a server development environment without faff. I use OS X because its interface works the way I think, install and uninstall is generally easy, and it rarely explodes.

From Microsoft, to Macintosh,
to Lin– line– lin– lie… nux,
Every computer crashes,
’cause every OS sucks.

In conclusion, everything sucks somewhat to someone, and they all suck differently. Pick your own damn operating system, use it, and don’t feel the need to “fix” other people who *have* made a decision.