Solved: Call of Duty: The Big Red One

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I’ve mentioned periodically how the PS2 is currently the best bargain in videogames. It’s nearing the end of its mass market commercial lifespan, and this, combined with the fact that it has sold the most consoles by far of its generation (by 1/05 it had already topped 100 million consoles sold) has led to an abundance of inexpensive used games. Today’s example is Call of Duty: The Big Red One, a World War II first person shooter. I got this game used for $12 shipped on ebay. It took me a couple of weeks to play through it. On a scale of 1-10 I’d give the game a 7. The graphics are solid for a PS2 release, though any PC fps fan would find them crude. The gameplay was a mix of mostly on foot infantry combat with occasional vehicle-based missions, ranging from tank and armored personal carrier to a fun and novel B17 Bomber mission where you’re tasked with moving between belly, tail and nose turrets to fend of waves of German fighters, then jumping into the bombadier’s position to bomb German industrial targets. You’re accompanied by squadmates through most of it and while they’re pretty stupid they are occasionally helpful and more importantly they rarely got in the way. The game features some really excellent set pieces as well – things like storming German 88 emplacement positions, holding fortifications until reinforcements come up, or rescuing downed airmen. The infantry set pieces are really the best part of the game, in fact.

One of the most interesting things about me having enjoyed and finished the game is that it led me to pick up a couple other PS2 FPS games – basically it convinced me that despite the relatively crude graphics and the fact that you have to use a joypad instead of a mouse and keyboard for controls, the console FPS can be fun. There’s also a wider variety of fps game types on the consoles than there are for PC.

To sum up – the game is well worth trying if you’re a wwII or fps fan, and you definitely can’t beat the price.

HBO picks up George RR Martin’s Fire and Ice series

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Wow. Couldn’t be more please or surprised. HBO has picked up the rights to George RR Martin’s Fire and Ice series of novels and is going to produce at least one tv series out of it. HBO has been producing excellent episodic television for over 10 years now, generally much better stuff than the broadcast networks, and the Fire and Ice series’ gritty, hard core take on an authurian-themed medieval kingdom is perfect for HBO. I’m really looking forward to this.

The details can be found in this Variety piece.

vmware intel mac version ‘fusion’ is out in public beta

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Got an intel mac? Get thee over to vmware’s site and grab a copy of the public beta of their ‘fusion’ product, which is basically the PC vmware engine ported over to macosx. I’ve been running Parallels and am completely happy with it, but I’m also really happy to see competition in this space on the mac, and given my last several years use of vmware on the pc, I’m also happy to see it running on the mac, which allows me to seamlessly move my environments from platform to platform as needed. If you’re not familiar with it, vmware, parallels and other virtual machines software allow you to run alternative operating systems inside your host operating system with very high levels of compatibility and at almost native speed. If you’ve had experience with products like virtual PC in the past which left a sour taste in your mouth, rest assured: this is not that. vmware and parallels are both great products and tremendously useful.

All that remains is for Apple to loosen up so you can run OSX as a guest OS in these virtual machines, something which is really needed and would again be tremendously useful. If Apple wants to compete in server rooms, they basically have to do this because vmware has taken over the world’s server rooms over the last couple of years.

Anyway, kudos to vmware on this, and here’s to healthy competition.

Google firefox browser synch

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This is getting a fair amount of mention, but in case you missed it, Google released a fantastic extension to firefox this week – google browser synch, which lets you synch your bookmarks, open windows, and even cookies, across multiple copies of firefox. Working in your browser at the office and want to resume working where you left off when you get home? You’re all set with this, which alone makes it super useful. The bookmark synching, history browsing and password synching are all just a fringe benefits. Definitely worth running if you’re like me and work at innumerable computers.

Spongo doesn’t live here anymore

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I’m just full of pet stories of late, it seems. This one is actually from my sister, who recently had a bleeding pet experience:

OMG. So I am sitting on the couch catching up on work when Spongo flies across the room and attacks Poot, unprovoked, as she sometimes does. Gidget runs over and attacks Spongo until she leaves Poot alone (Gidget is a good and loyal, if half-blind, friend). I rush over. There is blood everywhere, and I quickly realize that it is pulsing, warmly, out of Poot. Now what?

Brian and I try not to panic. We try to find the source of the blood on a white dog covered in blood. Poot’s getting splashed, we’re getting splashed, the floor is getting splashed. It’s a bloody mess. Brian starts looking for an emergency clinic. I am trying to figure out how we manage getting Poot to a clinic with a baby. I find the source of the blood – a gash on her ear, and thankfully not a vein in her neck, which is of course what I had been picturing. I stabilize her, and we start to talk about whether or not we need to bring her to the vet. We feel like things are ok. She shakes her head and the blood gushing starts again.

I call the vet and tell them we are on our way. We stabilize her again, head downstairs, she shakes her head and the gushing starts again. I wrap her in gauze like crazy, she gets excited, shakes her head… you guessed it: gushing. I managed to get her and Brian out the door by wrapping her head and ear in paper towels and gauze and taping the whole number to her neck.

Now I am sitting here wondering what blood to clean up first.

That cat is so out of here!

There’s also an update, 24 hours later:

…after an emergency visit to the vet last night, during which we were told that the two worst places to have an injury are the tail (uh yeah – had to have a piece of Poot’s tail surgically removed two years ago after she slit the tip and it wouldn’t heal) and the ear (of course!), Poot returned home with her entire head (less one loose ear) in a pink bandage (with a green heart – nice touch) and wearing an Elizabethan collar sized for a Saint Bernard.

As early as 8 AM, she had wiggled out of said bandage and splattered said collar with blood. After one more visit to the local vet this morning, Brian is now on his way to Poot’s regular vet in New Jersey (she sees a specialist for her heart) to prep for emergency surgery.

Anyone care to adopt Spongo the somewhat amazing?

There are monsters in my backyard

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Well….maybe there are. A brief scary story. I have about 30 acres of farmland behind my house. At various times I have seen fox and coyote traversing the property. Last night it was pitch black out, so when I took Soolin out for her 10PM constitutional I put my LED camping head lamp on so I could see. We got about 100 yards or so out into the farmland and she began doing her business. While she was, I was sort of aimlessly looking about when what do I see but two bright peepers, about 15 yards away and creeping up on us. As soon as I had them in the light, they stopped moving and just stared at me. They were roughly canine height.

I panicked, not out of fear, but out of concern that Soolin would rush over to attack. I discovered that nothing puts fear in a man like tackling a pooping dog though, and imagining the possible outcomes.

Anyway nothing much came of it beyond that – I got ahold of Soolin and dragged her back towards the house. The eyes never moved, they just followed us as we walked away. After I stashed Soolin in the house I went back to see if I could spot whatever it was, but I couldn’t see it.

Bloodmasters – imagine quake 1 played from a top-down perspective

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This week’s friday fun link: Imagine the original quake, played from a top-down perspective. If that appeals to you, go check out Bloodmasters, a freeware multiplayer action game. You’ll pick up the controls in 2 seconds, the graphics are decent, and there are a variety of gameplay modes to choose from. About the only downside is the limited number of servers. Check it out for your friday fun fix.

Velomobile: I want one

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My friend Nick turned me onto Velomobiles a while ago and now I’m mildly obsessed with them. If you’re unfamiliar with them, check out the velomobile wikipedia entry. They’re basically enclosed recumbent bicycles, and they’re often equipped with a small electric engine to help you climb hilly terrain. I could easily commute to work with one of these and would love to be able to – though I might need the assist on one hill, it would combine a great workout, the ability to get grocery shopping done, and an environmentally sound way to commute all in one package. There’s just one downside – the cost. You basically can’t touch one for under $10k. They’re also very hard to get in the US.

The concept seems brilliant though, especially if you buy into the peak oil/ever increasing fuel costs theory of where we are right now. I’m mulling over buying a recumbent, which can be had starting at around $2k, as a way to work my way up to a full velomobile. There’s a dealer in Greenfield, MA that carries stock on a lot of the main recumbent brands. As soon as it gets warm I’m going to take a few for a test drive, and possibly sell my kayak off and use the funds to buy a commuter bike.

One shelving system collapse later, I am pissed

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I have a fairly extensive collection of boardgames, many of them from the 1970’s and some, especially the ones published by Avalon Hill, are somewhat valuable (Titan, for example, regularly sells for over $100 on ebay and I’ve seen it go for over $200). It’s an impractical hobby in that boardgames take up quite a lot of space, and in fact until last weekend it had been over two years since I had seen most of them, because ever since I moved to Saratoga they had been sitting in boxes, first in the attic of a barn in Greenfield and then more recently in a spare room in my current house.

When I visited family over Thanksgiving holiday we went to Ikea and I bought dressers, which allowed me to disassemble the ramshackle milk crate and board shelving system I had been using for my clothes. I transferred this to the spare room, unpacked all the games, fawning over some of them as one might fawn over long absent treasures, then closed up the spare room. I’m not heating it this winter to save on the heating bill.

Yesterday I went into the spare room to retrieve one of the games and discovered the whole assemblage had collapsed for reasons unknown. Things could have been much much worse than they ended up being but still, games and parts of games were scattered everywhere. Most of the 1970’s era games, with their hundreds of cardboard chits, survived intact and boxes closed, but some of them vomited forth a stream of cardboard bits it will take me a month to sort. At first I thought to take a picture of the carnage but the whole thing was so depressing I couldn’t bring myself to do it – in fact, after gathering together the still closed games and stacking them together I fled the room and left the mess intact, to be dealt with another day.

The best thing I can say about it all is that most of the really valuable games seem to have survived, boxes uncrushed. The whole episode has tempted me to sell off the majority of the collection. It’s a bit of a burden to keep around and though I do get to drag out some of the games several times a year for play, the vast majority are neither valuable nor ones I would play. They are individually notable for their rule system, or the designer, or their heritage, or their theme, but in aggregate they’re a great bulk of relatively delicate historical gamestuff that would be better stored in a collector more inclined to make use of them than I am.