Beshiros @ Home

The CSGames are going on right now, at École Polytechnique de Montréal. At the time of this reading, ETS is leading the charge, with my home team of McGill in fourth position. I hope to be able to post some pictures soon.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I blame my thesis work, which is sucking up all my free time.  But I do find some time to
turn on a console or two, enjoying my Ps3 or my XBox 360. On the Ps3, I’m playing Assassin’s Creed 2. They managed fix a lot of annoyance from the first game. As for the Xbox 360, I’ve been enjoying Mass Effect 2 (ME2).

The first Mass Effect was a pleasure. It was like a paying through an episode of Star Trek – a 30 hour episode of Star Trek. Luckily, this hasn’t changed in the second. It feels every bit as epic as the first iteration.

Usually, when I talk about a game, I review it in the following order : story, gameplay, graphics and sounds.  This order is awkward, as story is ME2’s weakest attribute in my opinion. I’m likely to catch a lot of flack for this, but I didn’t enjoy the story as much as I did in the first episode. Don’t catch me wrong, I understand that making each episode to fit into each other is a terribly difficult task. For example, Bioware had to find a way to allow players to re-import their existing character, while allowing them to change the class of said character. That’s a difficult challenge, and their story solution was adequate. As for the main storyline, the game has you playing with Cerberus, a pro-human terrorist organization. That kinda irked me. As for Shepherd’s allies, they are a group of thugs and criminals. They grow on you, as you help them sort out there personal issues.  However, it remains that your elite team is made up of thieves, mercenaries, murderers, assassins, mad scientists and angry women with family issues. At least Garrus joins the team again.

The game play is much improved in this iteration. First, gone is the confusing inventory system. Weapon upgrades are obtained through research. In addition, the heat sink system found in weapons has been removed, no more annoying waiting because you had lined up a good shot. Instead, you have a more traditional clip system. As for the weapon selection, it’s a bit more limited this time around. You’ll only find 2 or 3 weapons of each type (rifle, gun, shotgun, sniper rifle, sub machine gun, etc), but they can shared across all characters. Still, a little more variety would have been great.

The biggest improvement in combat is the cover system, like the one found in Gears of War 2.  It really adds to the action of the game, as you character can run from cover to cover, taking down enemies. The special power scheme has been simplified, but still have a great feel to them. Although I mostly play a soldier, I greatly enjoy seeing by partners use their biotic powers to fling enemies across the room. Enemies are also smarter this time around, so it’s no use charging ahead. You’ll get gun down.

Another important component of the game is the conversation system, which guides your character along the path of the just, or the corrupt. At first, I was annoyed that the responses were always ordered. Staying honest just required choosing answers from the top part. However, some responses get a bit ambiguous, so the ordering actually really useful. In all, I’m pretty satisfied with that part of the game.

The spaceflight component of the game is okey. Me2 doesn’t confer much excitement of zipping through space. Resource mining is a shore, but a necessary evil. You are provided with a circular scanner that you move along the surface of the planet, and an oscilloscope tells you when you strike pay dirt. I enjoyed the fact that you can upgrade the Normany (your spaceship), but the cool upgrades aren’t useful until the end of the game.

Graphic wise, the game is top-notch. Although they don’t compare to Gears of War, the shear variety of environment is mind boggling.  Some of the environmental effect really add to the game, such as a foggy world where you can’t see more than 20 feet ahead of you. Also improved is the texture popping, which are completely gone in this iteration. The long elevator rides have been replaced with traditional loading screens, the overall loading being much faster. You can also cut the loading time by almost a third if you install the game on the Xbox 360 hard disk. Of course, this requires 13 Gb, which is a bit tricky for people like me owning a 20 Gb hard disk.

As for music, it’s a sound track worth purchasing on it’s own. It really conveys that epic feel to the game, like what you’re doing really matters.

All in all, I’m very satisfied with my Me2 experience. Although I might find the story a little less epic, the play experience more than make ups for it. I was a bit disappointed to see that the game was 70$, but taking 30ish hours to finish, it was still much cheaper than going to the movies. I highly recommend this game, although if you haven’t played Mass Effect 1, I suggest you start with it. It makes so much more sense.

When I think embedded devises, I rarely think of Windows at the operating system. For example, the parking meters in Montreal run on Linux. When it comes to display system, I would have though it even more unlikely. However, you kinda notice it when you walk by a crashed display.

But then PC hardware is everywhere, so I shouldn’t be surprised. I was impressed to see an STM terminal stuck on a bios screen, clearly indicating the presence of x86 hardware. Cool.

As a university student for the last 10 years, I’ve had my share of pizza. However, very few of these pizza have ever defeated me. Let me explain.

For a pizza to defeat me, it must have a certain level of awesomeness that I cannot completely consumed the piece placed in front of me.  Not to be confused with disgusted, the winning pizza has a certain composition that makes it incredibly good, but fills me so that I cannot consume much of it.

The first time this happened was 5 years ago, in Amsterdam, in a small pizzeria I will most likely not find again. The second was about a year ago, when I ordered pizza from a random pizzeria close to my place. I have since lost the address of the place and cannot re-order. The third was only recently, with this piece:

This piece came from a random New-York pizzeria, from one of my recent NY trip. It was so full of meat, I could not finish the slice. However, I will always remember the lesson I learned, it is possible to over-meat slice of pizza. The result, however, is awesome.

In the last few months, I got to visit New York and New Jersey twice. Both times, Friday in the evening, I headed to the Whisky Bar, in Hoboken, for some awesome live music.

First time I was there, Big Band Baby were playing. They really rocked the place out. Second visit, Trimm was playing. Also good, but no match for the Big Band Baby.

Once thing is for sure, next time I’m in Hoboken, I’m definitively going back there for some awesome music groove.

Yesterday, I went to get my H1N1 flu shot. The clinic for people living in my region of Montreal was set up in the Olympic Stadium. People were scheduled in hourly blocks : 12h00, 13h00, 14h00, etc.

To keep track of which hourly block you were scheduled for, they distributed TicketMaster-like tickets, as if the flu shot were a sports game. Here is a quick pic of the ticket I snaped with my camera phone.

I found it’s a pretty cool idea of using what you have at hand.

Winter just rolled in with a blast!

Back in September 2008, I wrote about a new company called Good Old Games. They sell old games, DRM free, which is especially cool. This has become a very lucrative business. Last year, GoG started with only a few games, two of which were Freespace and Fallout. Today, is a great day for GoG, as it added Myst and Creature to it’s catalog. I’m not a big fan of either, but these are pretty heavy weights.

In honor of a late 1-year anniversary, I decided to high lite a couple of the cool finds on GoG.

• Might and Magic 1-6
• Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Complete
• Duke Nukem 3D
• FreeSpace 1 and 2
• Canon Fodder
• Beyond Good and Evil
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• and so many more …

Another good place for classic games is Steam, which has a pretty impressive game catalog. I’ll talk about it more in another post. Just be careful, Steam uses some pretty powerful DRM.

Have you ever heard about iPod envy? I’ve heard it’s when you buy a second iPod, the first gets envious.

I bought my first iPod about three years ago, a all 2gig nano to replace my dying rio player. About a year after, I upgraded to a 80gig iPod video, which I’ve never been able to fill completely. I was in love, I carried the little thing everwhere. But, as with all consumer electronic, the honeymoon period ended and I upgraded.

As the title suggests, I purchased an iPod Touch, the 32gig model. I must admit that this is me giving into peer pressure. A large number of people in my environment have an iPod touch or an iPhone and they love it. I refuse to get an iPhone, as it is pretty close to a blackberry and those things ruin lives. But the iPod Touch seemed like a good buy,since I use my iPod daily. I’m actually typing this post on it from the train. So how does it fair?

Music, video, and pictures, it does perfectly. This should be a no brained, iPods have been doing this for years. The real magic lies in all the applications available for it. So far, I’ve only played with the wordpress application, skype and a game called dungeon hunter. Still, I’m impressed. I would say the biggest challenge has been learning to type on the thing. It coming along slow, but good.

So should my other iPod be envious? Well, I will be using it a lot less often, but I still plan on using it, especially given the lousy reputation the Touch has with battery life. But yeah, it should be really jealous, it just got totally outclassed.

Yesterday, I had to defend my thesis topic in front of committee of my peers. At McGill, it’s called the thesis proposal defense. No problem, the defense went well and I passed the test. This means I only need to finish my implementation, run some experiments and write a thesis. Shouldn’t be too hard.

I just realized that I never really talked about my research in this blog. Sparing you the blow-by-blow description, I can still give an overview of what I am doing.

The first piece of the puzzle is Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), videogames where thousands of players play a game in a shared virtual world. Making these games is an incredible difficult task, given the complexity of the technical challenges developers must face. Three of these challenges are scalability, reliability and cheater prevention.

Given that thousands of people play these games together, the technology has to scale to allow for that many players. It’s an impressive challenge, given that most multiplayer technology is designed for 16, 32 or 64 players. Reliability is key in these games, as players don’t enjoy being disconnected from the game server. Cheaters are also a serious problem, as they prevent honest players from enjoying themselves.

There exists individual solutions for each of these challenges, but very little has been done to solve these problems in a unified way. My research is to use replicated object technology to solve these problems in a unified way. I will then run experiments using Mammoth to see how fast and efficient is my solution. Might not sound very exciting, but it’s a pretty cool challenge.