Ranting Kenya

I was glancing through the website for the Spike TV Video Game Awards today. Noticed some interesting things about the Game of the Year nominees.

1. All the nominees are available for Xbox 360.
2. Currently, at the time of publishing this post, all the games are not available on Playstation or Wii (Orange Box hasn’t been released for PS3 yet).
3. All four games involve at least some First Person Shooter elements.

Now I own all the nominated games (for game of the year), and they’re excellent. However, I hear Super Mario Galaxy is possibly the best Mario game ever, which alone should give it a nomination. It’s nominated for best Wii game, but not Game of the Year. Perhaps it has to do with the release dates of the games (however I think it was out one week before Mass Effect, or at least the same week).

The VGAs have been accused of being a popularity contest in the past, and I’d say that critisism holds true today. Aside from The Orange Box, all those games had big marketing campaigns. Of course, that doesn’t explain why Guitar Hero III isn’t on there.

Also, other games that I own that could easily be nominated, Call of Duty 4 and Assassin’s Creed.

And on another side note, are racing games just out of style now? Forza 2 is a very impressive simulation racer.

I’m not sure when or what it was, but some time back I stopped following news about Assassin’s Creed. I saw the screenshots and I saw the demos at the conventions. It looked good. But there was something about it that just seemed to me like it would never happen the way they were presenting it. It was similar to many games, but different enough that it was still doing something new.

Anyway, I forgot about it. Which was easy since there’s Halo 3, COD 4, Mass Effect, Bioshock, NHL 08, and The Orange Box. I could easily save myself a few bucks and not buy it. But Best Buy had a deal. COD 4 and Assassin’s Creed bundled together for $90. I re-checked the reviews of Assassin’s Creed, and decided it was worth the money.

I admit, the game started a bit slow, but that didn’t last too long.

At first, I played it how I would play any similar game. I found guys, and button mashed to kill them. It was fun, but no big deal really. Then the game forced me to change my tactics. It forced me to play like an assassin. Hiding in plain sight, attacking targets unknowingly.

Now the game is so awesome. It’s open-world-like, but not overly. And there’s even spots where the graphics and the scale made me say wow out loud. Remember the first time you played Halo and the environment’s scale really jumped out at you? Same thing, when I saw Jerusalem from a nearby cliff.

My character now has counter attacks that make me jump out of my seat. There’s a lot of them too, they don’t feel like scripted actions yet. They kinda feel like moves out of a Kung-Fu movie.

Basically, everyone needs to give this game a shot. It’s BETTER than you think it is.

CBC has a feature section this week about the Canadian wireless industry. Basically it has got my blood flowing again.

I have some thoughts that I would like to add.

In my own experience, even though data plans and mobile plans are getting cheaper, they aren’t getting cheaper for me. They never have. If I have a plan that “seems” to work for me for the last two years, that plan isn’t offered to new clients anymore. Also, there is no plan available that is similar that I could use for cheaper.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that price is what keeps Canadian cell phone subscribers relatively low. It’s really simple economics. Price goes down, demand/adoption goes up. Even Sony’s Playstation division seems to be learning this finally. Bell, Telus, and Rogers have divided up the customers, and there happy the way it is.

Bell and Telus now offer the Blackberry Pearl, the 8130 to be specific. Now the 8130 is the version that has the GPS. RIM also has another Pearl, the 8120. Now the 8120 and the 8130 are identical in every way except the 8120 has WiFi instead of GPS. Now why wouldn’t those cell carriers want the phone with WiFi built-in? Oh yeah, to sell their insanely expensive data plans. Why should the carriers choose which phone I can get when the carry an identical phone with only one feature that’s different?

I was only moderately excited for the new Firefox beta since my current version of Firefox 2 is fairly customized and runs great.

However, as I was reading about the updates to Firefox 3, CSS rendering was supposed to be improved. I decided it was time to have another look at the Acid 2 test. It’s a test to see if the CSS rendering of the browser is standards complaint. Firefox 2 was pretty good, but not perfect. Well, Firefox 3 fixes all of that. Here’s the screenshot I took to prove it.

Congratulations to Mozilla for fixing the last remaining significant argument against Firefox! As a designer, I’m very happy.

I’m not a super huge fan of guitar hero or anything, but I know people who are into it. But this is the video review of Rock Band. Somebody I know get this so that I may try out the drums.

 In my previous posts regarding Safari on Windows, I was a little underwhelmed. There was no real super feature that made me want to switch. To be honest, I’m too connected to Firefox and all my extensions to leave it on a regular basis anyway. However, I fired up the new update to Safari today. Version 3.0.4. I just wanted to see a couple pages without any cached version available. And I wanted to check my yahoo mail, which for some reason the new version crashes Firefox at my work when you exit it. Anyway, to my amazement, Safari 3 is fast. WAY fast. I was loading fresh pages faster than Firefox was from the cache. I tried different types of pages too. This blog, my portfolio site, digg, Bioware’s website. All loaded so much faster. Not even comparable. It even seems to load pictures faster once they start downloading. On a side note, I had another look at the MacBook Pros the other day. These ones were running Leopard and were brand new. The public hadn’t spoiled them yet. There wasn’t even fingerprints on the screens. Anyway, man, those machines are nice.

Let me begin by stating that I have an HD-DVD player (the Xbox 360 attachment). I believe it’s a better format than Blu-Ray, however I also believe a lot of the differences don’t matter that much. You still get great HD and great sound.

However, now I’m really in the middle. I’m starting to feel the effects of some movies on one format and not on the other. It hurt me way back when after I realized that the Bond movies are Sony properties. Now I’m realizing that Superbad is also Blu-Ray only.

This war really feels like Playstation/Playstation 2 versus Xbox/N64/Gamecube/Dreamcast. There is really little difference in the capability of the competitors, it’s the games that made playstation. Blu-Ray feels the same. There’s just more movies on Blu-Ray. Most of them I have no interest in (Stealth, Hitch come to mind due to their big Blu-Ray campaigns), but there are some good ones.

So what’s my solution? Buy a Blu-Ray player too. Ok. Those Toshiba players are going for 100 bucks in the States, how bad could it be?

Well, the cheapest Blu-Ray player is still the PS3 at $400. The standalone players start at $500. Add the cost of 30-40 dollar movies (there’s lots of Bond movies). So factor in a modest 4 movies and your price tag basically starts at $550 (Blu-Ray has a promotion where you get a number of movies, 5 I think, that come with the player, restricted selection however). That’s kind of expensive.

I finally got my hands on the iPod Touch at Best Buy the other day. It was a rather impressive device. I didn’t have any headphones, so I didn’t check out sound quality or anything like that.

My first impressions were that the screen was impressive. I have seen posts showing the superior screen of the iPhone, and I could see the iPod Touch’s screen limitation, but it was nevertheless a good looking screen.

The text entry was difficult for me on the narrow screen. The first time I tried to enter a url, everything that was typed from my left thumb was one letter off. I continued typing trying to “trust it” but it was way wrong. The wide keyboard was way easier. I did get better however in a few minutes. Not good, but better.

Scrolling through lists and using coverflow was surprisingly awesome. I was skeptical before, but it’s quite efficient.

But seriously, how awesome is the web browsing on that device. I personally have a Motorola Q. I’ve used Microsoft Deepfish, and the regular IE. Safari on the iPod Touch blows it out of the water so completely, I can’t even compare them. Some of the sites I visited loaded very quickly, others less so. I think the WiFi was a little sketchy in the Best Buy so I’m not convinced that the slowness was necessarily the iPod.

If I had any gripes about it, it would be that moving from some of the applications back to the home screen was sluggish at times, also switching from landscape to portrait or vice versa wasn’t as snappy as I would’ve liked.

All in all, when the iPhone comes to a carrier in Canada that is good (i.e. NOT Rogers), I will seriously consider it based on the iPod Touch. The web browsing alone is enough to sell me. The integration that I’ll be missing (potentially) with my computer and Windows Mobile 5/6 is the lesser evil when compared with the impressive web browsing.