The Flow of Consciousness

Just Cause 2 is one of my favorite games from this year. It’s mindless, lawless violence in an open sandbox game at its best. It’s like the Grand Theft Auto series, but more focus on basically being a guerrilla, or, really, a terrorist, in charge of bringing down a Pacific regime unfriendly to “the Agency” and “the Government”. The Agency is clearly the CIA, while the Government is clearly the US. The Pacific Regime is likely supposed to be North Korea.

Rico Rodriguez, the Scorpion

You play Rico Rodriguez, a hired man good with guns, vehicles, parachutes, and a never ending supply of grappling hooks. Seriously. The game mechanic used throughout is “hookshot this”, “connect the hook to this and this and watch chaos ensue”, and “climb this building using only the hookshot.”

I know it’s called the grappling hook. Shush. It’s the hookshot from the Legend of Zelda games, on steroids.

Anyway, to the meat of the matter.

I’ve had the retail version of Just Cause 2 for some time now. Earlier this week, Steam was selling Just Cause 2 for approximately $7.50. I decided to take advantage of the offer and add yet another game to my mindlessly-maintained Steam collection. While I was at it, I bought some DLC, including the Air Propulsion Cannon (I’ve found my new favorite weapon).

Much to my dismay, the Steam version didn’t pick up my retail version saves. Having played approximately 40 hours since March and being approximately 30% complete with the game, I didn’t want to abandon all my hard work!

I tried copying the saves from Documents\Square Enix\Just Cause 2\Saves into my Steam userdata directory Steam\userdata\<userid>\8190\remote\, to no avail.

Here’s the trick that did it for me. Start a game and save it to the slots you want to have restored. In my case, I just wanted slot 9. So, in the Steam version, I saved a game to slot 9. While the game is running, Alt-Tab out of it after saving and replace the save, copying it from your Documents directory to your Steam userdata directory mentioned previously. Exit the game and restart it. Hopefully, you’ll see your old saved game. If not, let me know.

The great thing about JC2 on Steam is that it is Steam Cloud enabled, so saves are stored on Steam servers. No more worrying about lost saves! Well, that is, until Steam dies, but I don’t think Valve is going down any time soon.

Faith from Mirror's Edge

I just finished playing Mirror’s Edge this morning on my PC. I bought the game late last year through Steam when it was on sale. It came out early last year with much fanfare, but the game was a mixed commercial success. It has an 81% Metacritic score, though, with slightly less for the console versions.

The story revolves around a twentysomething Asian girl named Faith. She lives in a city or country dominated by a totalitarian regime with an iron fist grasp on communications and travel in the city. So, in order to get packages and messages, folks who would rather their business remain unknown to the city utilize couriers on foot, called “runners,” of which Faith is one. She’s employed by a runner named Mercury, who trained her after her parents were killed in some riots protesting the totalitarian regime. Celeste is a coworker of Faith who is a little shady. Faith’s sister is a cop who gets framed for the murder of a prominent businessman and rising politician—a candidate for a hotly contested mayoral race against incumbent Callaghan.

The game follows Faith as she rescues her sister, Kate. Another cop, Miller, is a friend and protector of Kate, but he pretends that he’s in on it in order to save Kate.

The game is absolutely beautiful. It’s honestly one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played on PC.

Mirror's Edge screenshot

I think the screenshot might be from the Xbox 360 version, but it looks even better on PC or PS3—I’ve played it on both.

The general gameplay dynamic is running, jumping, sliding, ducking, and falling. Frantically. Everywhere. It’s more of a first person running/falling game than a first person shooter. There are a few occasions where guns are available and arguably necessary. It’s possible to disarm baddies, but it’s difficult without the use of the “bullet time” feature of the game.

The controls were easy, but some of the moves necessary to climb to great heights (wall jumping, primarily) are difficult to pull off even after some practice. The soundtrack of the game is almost worth the cost alone. If I can find a way to extract the music from the game, I’ll be listening to it quite frequently. It’s upbeat yet relaxing ambient new age stuff, if you’re into that kind of music during coding or typing or something.

Unfortunately, the game was, well, short. Very short. Steam says that I played it for six hours. I know there was one area in which I spent nearly an hour trying to figure out how to walljump to where I needed to get to. That means that this game, if played by someone with quicker reactions and better timing, could likely be complete in 3-5 hours. That’s not worth the $50 it was when it came out. It was worth the ~$7 I paid for it. Hearing the soundtrack, I’d have paid $15-$20 for it.

My other complaint was that the story was very shallow. I think this is primarily because of its length, or lack thereof. I didn’t get attached to any of the characters, despite my compassion for their plight.

Celeste

I think that Mirror’s Edge would make a great movie, though. The action is sporadic enough and could likely be condensed to be a two hour film. I think that Devon Aoki could play Faith, with Malin Ackerman as Celeste, Eric Bana or Byung-hun Lee as Jacknife (depending on the which concept they follow), and Hugo Weaving, James Marsden, or Billy Bob Thornton as Miller. I’m undecided on the portrayal of Mercury or Ropeburn, but I think Vin Diesel could be the former and Michael Clarke Duncan as the latter. Yeah, I know Ropeburn’s white, but MCD would rock in the part, just like he did as Kingpin in Daredevil.

Movie dreams aside, I classify Mirror’s Edge as a decent game if you can get it under $20. It’s worth a play through, even if just for the beautiful graphics and soundtrack.

Update, 21 May 2010: I neglected to mention that a part of what spurred me to write this after playing the game was an Escapist article entitled Stumbling Through Mirrors’ Edge. It’s a great look into how the game is confusing overall, and how it could have been incredible. I agree with most of the sentiments, but still liked the game.

I’m a Tekken guy: am now and always have been. I never really got into other mainstream fighting games, such as Battle Arena Toshinden, Virtua Fighter, Dead or Alive, or Street Fighter. I did enjoy Mortal Kombat back in the day. I picked up Street Fighter IV at the behest of Shawn Wall and may even pick up Super Street Fighter IV when it comes out.

Kazuya Mishima

However, my true love is Tekken 2. Sure, the character stories are hilariously trite and the graphics of this PS1 game simply can’t compete with the visual feast that is Tekken 6.

Brigette and I bought the game from PSN shortly after I investigated and got a PS3 for Christmas. We’ve been playing for a few hours here and there, unlocking characters and enjoying playing a 15 year old game on a modern system.

Until last night, we hadn’t yet unlocked Kazuya, the villain of the game. Every site on the web says that one must beat the game undefeated (i.e., not using any continues) with a sub-boss character (e.g. Lee, Kuma, Wang, and the other unlockable characters). However, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Kazuya in Tekken 2

I tried for hours with Kuma, getting up to Stage 6 or 7 before being defeated. We were using single bout, 20 second rounds to do it—by "we", I mean Brigette and I switching off as our fingers got tired. We moved to Lee and got up to Stage 8, but couldn’t get past that fight. Eventually, I switched to Baek and really made some progress, getting to Kazyua on Stage 9 several times. During this, we switched to double bouts. This gave us an extra chance to learn from our mistakes and likely saved us time because we didn’t have to go back to Stage 1 every time we lost. Brigette took the controller at one point and switched back to Lee.

Finally, Brigette defeated Kazuya and moved on to the last fight against Devil. After a 19 second round, Devil offed her with his cheesy flyer laser beam eye attack. Frustrated, she almost reset the game. I kinda wanted to see Lee’s ending, so I urged her to fight Devil one more time. She defeated him handedly that round, a K.O. in ~10 seconds.

Disappointed, we continued trying to unlock Kazuya. About 20 minutes later, Brigette accidentally flipped too far in the character selection screen and realized that Kazuya was available!

It appears that one must only be undefeated through Kazuya in order to unlock him. After that, simply finish the game by defeating Devil. Apparently continuing on Devil doesn’t break the unlock.

If this works for you, please let me know. I can’t easily reproduce it myself.

The Video Game Voters Network is at it again, this time sending letters to the presidential candidates.

I changed the title to Responsibility Education, Not Unconstitutional Regulation to more closely match how I feel about the policy.

Video Game Voters Network: Write the Candidates

Check out the Congressional letter-writing campaign, too!

These Crysis freeze issues which I’ve been having are apparently related to something which I know exists but I’ve never actually seen a program do it. Crysis, when played on the highest possible settings, will attempt to surpass the 2 GB virtual address space limit of 32-bit operating systems, such as Windows XP.

Only the 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista can run Crysis at its high settings, apparently.

I discovered this last night after reading a few forum posts about folks trying to get the game to run on Windows 2000 and then using Process Explorer to actually watch Crysis hit the 2 GB limit and subsequently crash. It’s really quite amazing watching Crysis hit 500,000 page faults within five minutes of starting it.

So, in short, if you’re using 32-bit Windows and Crysis is repeatedly crashing, try lowering the settings. It’s not that your hardware can’t handle it—your operating system, by design, can’t.

While it took less than five minutes for me to download the ~140 MB patch, it took almost an hour to actually get it to work.

If you are trying to patch and get a long, truncated error message with a ridiculously large number and something about a file missing with instructions to find the file in a cab on the CD or network, trying reverting the video file names in C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis\Game\Localized\Video to their original names.

This solved the problem for me.

If Hillary wins, I’m moving.

Here’s why.

I cannot ethically or morally stay in a place where art and freedom of expression are regulated. I know that American companies generate a large percentage of game content, but I will not give my tax dollars to a government that violates the first right it has explicitly granted to its citizens.

GET THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF OUR LIVES.

Bioshock is the reason I’ve not written in a while. Orange Box isn’t helping, either.

Bioshock is one of the more rivoting (misspelling intentional, har har har) games I’ve played lately. I enjoy single player games with a good story line and atmosphere, and Bioshock hits both.

What else have I been up to?

I finished my first quarter as an adjunct instructor at ITT Tech. It doesn’t look like I’m going to have a class this quarter because of scheduling conflicts, but, AFAIK, I’m on the substitute list.

I have one night left of an Advanced Visual Basic class at RMU. Enough said.

Pittco announced Iron Storm 8, the LAN party group’s ninth event. Sean is heading up the planning for the event and doing a very, very good job. Cat herding is an art.

CES is a little more than a month away. I’ll be covering it for ThinkComputers. I’m in the process of reviewing a new cooler for ThinkComputers, too. It dropped my GPU temperatures by more than 12° C!

I’m going to a rapid application development party this weekend, at which we’re going to attempt to add a payment system to Autonomous LAN Party, a LAN party management system. Unfortunately, the newer versions of ALP at Q Licensed, a license which is incompatible with the GPL. Under the Q License, changes to the software can only be distributed as patches. Users are free to redistributed the source of the software, but their changes must be separate from the source. If this license shenanigans turns out to be that much of a problem, we’re just going to write our own LAN party management software and GPL it.

I’ve been getting back into gaming the past few nights. I finally put a usable PSU into Rahab, my new gaming PC, and have been enjoying my shiny, new 8800 GTX. The game of choice has been Battlefield 2142, my favorite first-person shooter.

A few hours ago, I finally earned a promotion in the game. I don’t recall my rank now, but I have more than 8,300 points. Upon earning promotions in BF2142, the player is rewarded with unlockable weapons and utilities. Excitedly, I attempted to choose perhaps my favorite utility item to get when my squad gets field upgrades (temporary unlocks for excellent squad maneuvers): motion mine bait grenades. These handy things can be chucked at a pile of motion mines and will detonate the mines safely. They can also be thrown at enemy vehicles, attracting the mines to said vehicles and allowing the explosion to take with it more than just the mines

However, I couldn’t choose them. I needed to purchase Battlefield 2142: Northern Strike, an expansion for the game. “Alright,” I said to myself, “I guess it’s time to do that.” I’d originally held off because it was $20 and I didn’t want to spend $20 on an upgrade for which I had no use.

Credit card in hand, I went to EA’s Online Store and found the Northern Strike package. It’s downloadable only—no physical package available. I’d used EA Downloader to get Battlefield 2′s dual expansion packs, so I am OK with downloading Northern Strike.

However, when I added it to my cart, another item was added.

It says Extended Download Service, and there’s a small link beside it that offers this explanation:

Think of this as your digital safety net for those unexpected occurrences – like your hard drive frying or a virus infection. EDS means that with the purchase of your digital product, we’ll keep a copy of your file for two full years, so you don’t have to. This is in addition to the complimentary coverage we provide for 6 months with any digital purchase from the EA STORE. You’ll gain peace of mind knowing that we have your program stored and ready for you to download again at your convenience. A little extra protection on your order to keep your products safe? Why not!

I can pay an additional $6 to be able to download it more than six months after I purchased it? Ludicrous.

Digital content downloads are supposed to be forever available, EA. Ask Valve. Steam, while imperfect itself, at least comes with a feature to backup installed games so one doesn’t have to download them again.

In the interests of preserving my EA downloads, I dug around EA Downloader a bit and found where it caches the installers: C:\ProgramData\Electronic Arts\EADM\cache\{a number here}. By going there, one can get the installer and back it up to optical media or another hard drive.

Or, I could just wait until Battlefield 2142 Deluxe Edition comes out and sell my copy of BF2142. I don’t want to wait until January, though.

A few weeks ago, I chided the gaming industry for releasing so many games nearly simultaneously. I believe that studios/distributors/producers should stagger releases so that gamers don’t have to choose between games and so that gamers can have a few weeks/months to recharge their wallets.

I found out today that Gears of War is due to be release for PC on November 6, further complicating my purchasing decision.

In other news, Orange Box sales have been magnificent, apparently. It’s #2 on Amazon’s video games section, with the Wii at #1. I’m actually contemplating purchasing it because I haven’t played HL2 Episode One yet, so I’d only have to gift HL2. $10, anyone?