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Oddball Review: Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

By Chief Oddball on August 23rd, 2010 at 5:56 pm

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When I first heard about Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, the new Xbox Live Arcade title from Crystal Dynamics, I didn’t think it was going to be that good. Although my enjoyment of the Tomb Raider franchise is well documented — with one exception — this isn’t technically a Tomb Raider game. See, the words don’t even appear in the title and stuff.

More importantly, though, this game departs from the usual retail disc experience of Tomb Raider as well as the core gameplay foundation that its fans have become used to. Rather than a single-player adventure game that has you jumping, climbing and cavorting your way through exotic locations in search of some ancient artifact, Lara Croft: GoL is an isometic action game that focuses much more on combat. Because combat has traditionally been one of the weakest features of the Tomb Raider series, I was not hopeful.

I was also, as it turns out, wrong.

This is a really good game — in fact, I see it as the 2010 Summer of Arcade equivalent of last year’s Shadow Complex, which I also loved and discussed here. It is, in fact, the first time I’ve ever actually enjoyed the hell out of combat in a game starring Lara Croft. You’ll notice I didn’t say “in a Tomb Raider game”, because as I’ve noted, this technically isn’t one. (Hee…you see what Crystal Dynamics did there?)

Furthermore, GoL departs from the single-player roots that traditionally underpin the adventures of Ms. Croft. This is a game with an entire cooperative element fully baked in, where you and a friend each take a leading role — one playing Lara, and the other playing Totec, the Guardian of Light himself. Totec is an Aztec god who was awakened by some greedy bad guys when they attempted to steal the ancient Mirror of Smoke, in which the evil god Xolotl was imprisoned. Xolotl escaped and began to summon his horde of evil from the Negaverse abyss, and it’s Lara and Totec’s job to rein him in again.

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The Snitch

By Chief Oddball on August 23rd, 2010 at 2:39 pm

Filed under Journal, Rants ··· 2 Comments

During our walk to the post office today, we spotted a guy who can only be…The Snitch.™

Not to be confused with The Stig, The Snitch is believed responsible for the variety of violation letters that the HOA sends out to the community residents. He was riding a basket-equipped bicycle, carrying a thick stack of papers scribbled with myriad arcane notes in one hand and a can of beer in the other. He would stop at random points on the street, pull up in a driveway and appear to be adding further notes to his paperwork.

It’s possible that the HOA hires this guy — or he volunteers his time with them — to catch people with driveways that are too dirty, walls that are starting to show mold, etc. Although this thought may be worthy of an eye-roll, even worse is the idea that The Snitch does all of this at the behest of no one because he enjoys sounding the alarm over every perceived fault.

You are requested to lock your doors, shutter your windows and shield your women and children from the watchful eye of…The Snitch.

(On a side note, the “Who’s Online” feature of this blog is broken after yet another plugin upgrade, so I’ve written that functionality out of the site because I no longer have the patience for the continuous fuckery it requires. A eulogy for this fallen functionality will commence at half past never. Thank you.)

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From the Typewriters of Babes

By Chief Oddball on August 21st, 2010 at 5:26 pm

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I like to read before going to sleep, because the act of shifting my ever-active brain’s focus from real-life concerns to fantasy ones makes it easier to fall asleep in the first place. Sometimes I read Star Trek novels, sometimes other fiction from my favorite genres (sci-fi, fantasy, suspense, et al), and other times I read old stories that I myself wrote, going as far back as the late 1980s. It may seem self-indulgent, but everybody has their muse, and I tend to think of nostalgia as mine. Whenever I surround myself with things that helped stir my creativity in the past, or even the products of that creativity from years ago, it puts me in a “happy place” and often leads to better creative thinking here in the present.

Almost all of the stories I wrote between 1986 and 1992 were crafted on an IBM PC XT using PFS: First Choice, an old DOS-based word processor with about as corny as name as was possible. (But didn’t it seem like all productivity software had gimmicky names back in the mid-’80s?) As Microsoft has dropped native 16-bit code execution on modern 64-bit versions of Windows, like the one I’m running, First Choice no longer even runs. However, it runs just fine under DOSBox, the best x86 emulator around. Armed with this, I’ve been converting some of my old stories to Word format so that I can read them in this day and age.

There are utility programs that can handle this, although most of them cost money. I’ve found a far simpler solution: First Choice has the ability to save a file in plaintext ASCII format, if you change the filename extension in the save dialog from DOC to ASC. The software itself gives you no idea that this is possible, so if you lost the manual, good luck figuring that out.

To make the documents pleasantly readable, some additional work is necessary. First Choice’s ASCII format, unfortunately, adds hard carriage returns every 80 columns, so with a decent text editor that can do a find and replace on the carriage return character — my favorite is UltraEdit — you can have that problem licked in short order. Then, just copy and paste into Microsoft Word (or your modern word processor of choice) and you’re all set. The only other issue involves styles (boldface, italics, etc.) that you may have applied to your document in First Choice, because the ASCII format drops them. To reapply, you’ll have to review your document within First Choice line-by-line until you see styled text, then apply the same styles in your modern word processor. This is made more irritating by virtue of the fact that First Choice, being a pure text mode application, wasn’t able to show these styles on the text itself, so you have to highlight a block, open the Style menu and see for yourself which style(s) are applied. Bit of a pain, so hopefully you didn’t use styles too much!

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Making Progress, Waiting For Resolution

By Chief Oddball on August 17th, 2010 at 8:45 pm

Filed under Journal, Randomness ··· 6 Comments

A lot of stuff has been happening lately. Progress being made. We think.

If this were Facebook, I’d have stopped right there and felt right at home with the millions of other vacuous posts that contain so little detail as to be utterly worthless to anyone but their author. However, this is a blog — indeed, a novel concept — where paragraphs are written, at least so long as the proprietor doesn’t forget to come around and actually write them, in which case the blog collects dust for days if not weeks. But never mind all that. I’m a bit tired right now, and my thinking has become…randomized, to paraphrase V23. Wow. You see? Random.

Up until this past weekend, we went three or four weeks without any showings of our house. I got in touch with our realtor to see if I could get an update, and the update was that there were three new properties whose prices were undercutting us. One was a short sale and the other two were foreclosures, so it wasn’t exactly direct competition, but they were the same model home as ours and when someone is bargain hunting, they tend to start at the bottom. Shortly after we had this conversation, coincidentally, we had two showings booked within hours of each other: one for Saturday and the other for Sunday. Finally, some new activity had arrived.

Apple and I had a fairly busy weekend, doing a lot of shopping and housecleaning and stuff. One of Apple’s Facebook friends reminded us that we should try baking cookies to fill the house with a pleasant aroma before our showings, so we heeded the advice and picked up some ready-to-bake chocolate chip cookies from Immaculate Baking Co. We baked half of them, and they were — in a word — scrumptious. Oh yeah, and the scent was pretty darn alluring too.

Then, we had another showing today…that was scheduled 90 minutes in advance. I got the call around noon, just as Apple was starting to prepare lunch, and the buyer’s agent was hoping to show the property at 1:30. So we had to stage the house, pack up all the food and jet over to my parents’ place pretty quickly, but it all worked out. I did some work on my new Sony Vaio F-series laptop and really is a fantastic machine for work, which is good because that’s why I bought the thing.

Unlike the last couple of showings we had (or didn’t have) a month or so ago, all three of the buyers actually showed up this time, if their agents’ business cards being left on our countertop is any indication. So we’ve had plenty of the home-showing process lately…but can we get some resolution soon? Like an offer, maybe? Just saying. Oh, well…the housing market in Texas continues to depreciate a bit, and interest rates are still declining, so while this isn’t exactly heartwarming news, the delay can only be helpful to us.

Florida has been doing its usual “pop-up thunderstorms” shtick a lot lately. For two days in a row now, I’ve gotten wet whilst walking up to the post office to get the mail. Yesterday Apple and I both went for our usual lunchtime walk, and the sky looked rotten dark so we took the big golf umbrella that I won in an office Christmas party trivia contest some years ago. (No joke.) We needed it, too, because a storm blew up on our way home and nearly blew us away. It took both of my hands to keep the umbrella from firing off across the lawn. The driving rain was so bad that we were both soaked by the time we got home, requiring our clothes to be hung up to dry overnight.

And then again today, I walked from my parents’ house to the post office at lunch time and was promptly rained upon again. I was out there by myself and had brought an umbrella, so it wasn’t as bad as yesterday, but I was still pretty damp by the time I got back. The summer storms here often blast you hard enough that an umbrella only keeps your upper half dry. I’ll never forget how many times my great uncle used to tell the story of how he once visited Florida after being recalled from the second World War, and how torrential the summer storms were even then. In the time it took him to run across the street, he was completely drenched. “My wallet was soaked all the way through in those few short seconds!” he would always say. Having lived here for over a decade now, I am only too well acquainted with that particular anecdote.

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A Whole Raft of Stuff

By Chief Oddball on August 7th, 2010 at 4:00 am

Filed under Journal, Randomness ··· 3 Comments

I start the weekends early. Six o’clock in the evening on Friday early. This weekend’s opening ceremonies were a particularly good time: I wrapped up things at work right on schedule, then I pulled the freshly-washed and Z6′ed GTO out of the garage so that Apple and I could head out for dinner. After several straight days of “pop-up thundershowers” at inopportune times, we were luckily spared any rain at all today, meaning the car actually stayed clean until we got home, a rare feat during Florida summers.

On our way to dinner we stopped off at the mall, where Apple picked up something cool for herself. Then it was on to our favorite Carrabba’s in East Naples, where we enjoyed another fantastic meal. Even better was the free large-sized platter of calamari that we received for filling out a survey after our last visit. We took home half of everything, as usual — meaning another full meal to be enjoyed later, for the price of one. At the end of our visit they gave us another survey, good for another free appetizer. You keep giving ‘em to me, and I’ll keep filling ‘em out.

The initial setup and exploration of my new Sony Vaio F-series laptop has continued off-and-on since the machine arrived on Thursday; I’ve actually managed to not completely abandon my job in favor of geeking around with it. In fact, I got quite a bit done these last two days. New computer not withstanding, Thursday and Friday were a lot better than the first half of the week, which was a frustrating hair-pull of an affair. Eventually, on Thursday morning I got so fed up with the perceived disorganization at work that I spent an hour typing up a huge email on the situation, all but begging for clarification on a handful of very specific points. It was with some satisfaction that my immediate supervisor revealed himself to be almost as confused as I was, but I still await real answers to several questions.

Back to the new laptop itself: I’ll have a full review here once I’ve actually worked with it enough to qualify myself. But so far, I think this thing is going to live up to my expectations of being the most ideal portable workstation possible. It’ll be great for working while traveling, its performance actually puts my desktop computer to shame and I’ve even figured out how to dial back all of the horsepower enough to make it serve as a subdued word processor for the evening hours. The latter required that I create a custom power management scheme that keeps the CPU constantly throttled to 5%.

Vaio F backlit keyboard at night

I can’t decide what I’m most impressed with: the keyboard or the solid-state drive. The former is, without a doubt, the best laptop keyboard I have ever laid hands on. I was typing on it this evening with all the speed of my regular desktop keyboard, and the backlight made it easy to see in the dark. The SSD, meanwhile, is the first of its kind that I’ve ever owned and the response times are astounding — and this isn’t even close to being the fastest model SSD on the market! You can boot the machine to ready-state in just a few seconds, it’s completely silent and it generates no heat. One of the weakest performance links of every laptop I’ve ever owned has been the hard drive, and it’s so nice to be rid of that.

This weekend I have quite a few projects in store. I’ve got some more setup to do on the laptop, primarily the installation of the Adobe software I use for work. I’m also going to switch myself into the seldom-used “handyman mode” and attempt to repair a toilet. I had to order the proprietary Mansfield replacement parts from some obscure vendor at the Brooklyn Navy Yard of all places, but the stuff got here yesterday and now I no longer have an excuse to sit by and listen to the toilet groan loudly every time you flush it. Also, I need to install the air filter I just had delivered for the GTO, clearcoat the touchup paint job I did on the wheel rim, then get the car up on ramps and check again on the status of the oil leak. There…might be a story behind that, depending on what I find down there. If I don’t say anything more on the subject, you’ll know that there isn’t.

Oh yeah, and I would like to play some games too.

I’m ridiculously wired tonight. Guess I’ll hit the sack, though. Would hate to waste half of Saturday sleeping it off.

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Photos: GTO at Sunset

By Chief Oddball on August 1st, 2010 at 9:53 pm

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I haven’t taken any new photos of my GTO since 2006, embarrassingly enough. After the recent oil leak problem was addressed, I had a renewed interest in taking the car out for a spin. After an early-morning car wash on Saturday, I decided that some new low-light photos were in order. Saturday evening’s weather wasn’t cooperative, but tonight we had a pretty nice sunset underway, so I headed out.

Being Sunday — and the off-season, to boot — the parking lot of a local private school was empty and ripe for the photographing. I also finally had the opportunity to solve the big problem with most of my parking lot photoshoots: the damn white lines crisscrossing all through the frame. This time I parked in the middle of the access road where parents are supposed to let their students off in the morning. Conveniently, there was a flood lamp a short distance away that provided some fairly good diffuse fill light.

I’ve hand-picked a few photos from the shoot that came out especially well. Hit the “Continue Reading” link to see them, or find them all on my Flickr photostream.

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Laptop: The Next Generation

By Chief Oddball on July 29th, 2010 at 8:55 pm

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In my life, few purchases (besides an automobile) are more exciting than a new computer or some other piece of electronic gadgetry. So I was particularly geeked today when I finally pulled the trigger on my new mobile workstation — a laptop for business, in other words. My last laptop purchase was in 2006, and looking back, it seems that most of my machines are bought during the summer months, though not as a result of any conscious design. Perhaps it’s an internal biological clock that still remembers when I spent every summer playing the latest games, pushing my systems to their limits!

Sony Vaio F Series

As with everything these days, I tend to buy the best equipment that I can afford and make use for it for as long as possible, until it either just plain craps out or my needs significantly eclipse its capabilities. Today’s purchase was no exception, as I decided to choose a loaded-to-the-hilt Sony Vaio F Series, a 16.4″ Core i7 beastie that I optioned with enough equipment to stave off obsolescence for a good long while. What’s perhaps most significant about this purchase, for me, is that it’s the first laptop I’ve ever bought from someone other than Dell.

Excluding the first laptop I ever owned — a 486-powered Canon Innova Book — which was a gift, I’ve only purchased Dell Inspiron or Latitude systems for myself. The quality of these machines got progressively worse; the Inspiron 3200 was a solid (literally!) notebook, but the 8600 that came next was creaky, flaky and hot. Worst of all was the Latitude D620 I bought in 2006 for business use, which turned into a complete heap of slag in two years’ time. Its LCD backlight became dim and uneven, the lone monaural speaker blew out, the battery was reporting imminent end-of-life within six months, and the system gradually slowed to a molasses-laden crawl that even a full reformat and reinstall of Windows couldn’t cure. (This makes it all the more ridiculous to read my glowing impressions of the D620 on my first day of owning it…I shall endeavor to remember this and temper my review of the Vaio F accordingly!)

Although I have since heard that 2006 was perhaps a perigee for Dell and that the quality of their current line of notebooks is much better, I honestly just can’t stomach taking the chance. For the last few months I’ve been quietly looking at various notebook manufacturers, from Sony and HP to Lenovo and Asus, searching for the perfect configuration for my needs. I kind of expect my laptop to do it all: It needs to have a high-resolution screen for my design activities, sufficient RAM for heavy Photoshopping, dedicated graphics for gaming and video playback, a great keyboard for speed typing when I’m writing, and good thermal management so it doesn’t turn into a furnace beneath my wrists. Try finding all of that in a notebook, and at an affordable price — it’s not easy.

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Whistlin’ Dixie

By Chief Oddball on July 28th, 2010 at 8:34 pm

Filed under Journal, Reviews ··· 2 Comments

Dixie Buick GMC in Fort Myers

Over the past decade that I’ve spent in southwest Florida, I’ve seen my share of ups and downs. One of the definite downs of my residence here has been the service offered by the local area’s Pontiac dealerships. From that fateful day in 2001 when Naples’ big-name Pontiac dealership of note first got its claws into my Trans Am, I’ve been on a roller coaster ride of poor workmanship, damaged parts, rude service writers and flat-out brainless employees of every conceivable position. Imagine my surprise, then, at finding a Pontiac dealer nearby that doesn’t flat-out suck donkey nipple.

That dealership is Dixie Buick Pontiac GMC in south Fort Myers, part of that area’s “big row” of car dealerships lined up as far as the eye can see. Formerly known as Galeana Pontiac, a dedicated PMD shop, the dealership was bought out by Dixie Buick GMC when GM was doing their big consolidation of those three brands under one roof. I took my GTO there for some routine work in 2008 — tire rotation, alignment, and brake fluid replacement — which was performed competently as far as I could tell, though for some reason the techs felt the need to put an inordinate number of miles on the car while it was in their care. Back then, I drove away with a few nagging concerns in the back of my mind, but no evidence to support them other than the trip odometer. The car’s ride had improved, there was nothing damaged and the cost for the work was reasonable.

Fast-forward to last month when I changed the oil in the GTO and discovered, to my heart-stopping horror, a thin film of oil coating the bottom exterior of the oil pan. Although GM cars have been derided endlessly over the years for leaking oil like a sieve, none of the ones I owned have ever leaked so much as one drop. (From the engine, anyway — my Trans Am did leak a few drops from the differential at one time.) I went immediately to the online encyclopedia of all things goat, LS1GTO.com, and discovered that leaking oil pan gaskets were a relatively common issue on the LS2. In my case, it did indeed seem to be coming from the oil pan gasket. I found one bolt on the pan slightly looser than the others, snugged it up, cleaned up the oil and hoped for the best.

Checking back a couple of weeks later, I found the sheen of oil had returned. Welp, that was it. I had six months of my extended 5-year / 50,000 mile GM Major Guard warranty left, and it looked like it was about to get its first use whether I liked it or not. The leak was so insignificant that there wasn’t even any oil on the garage floor after two weeks, but I wasn’t going to chance it.

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Retro Gaming Anniversary: Star Wars: KOTOR

By Chief Oddball on July 15th, 2010 at 11:10 pm

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Damn it feels good to be a Jedi gangsta

Seven years ago today — July 15th, 2003 — Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was released for the original Xbox console. Now, I normally don’t go around spouting off release dates of games; I happened to run across this one a couple days ago only because I am once again playing this game. Since I have been so completely addicted to it in recent days, I thought it might be an appropriate subject for one of those elusive Oddball Update “Retro Gaming” posts. And so here we are.

Star Wars: KOTOR (as it shall henceforth be called, since I don’t want to type out that whole name again) has the honor of being the first game I ever reviewed here at Oddball Update. It was, in fact, the subject of my second post ever on this blog. Reading that old post from 2003 is somewhat disorienting today, as it talks about the old Xbox console and its hamfisted controller, and makes comparisons to other games of the era that I have long since forgotten. But the overall bent of the review still holds true: KOTOR is an amazing game, even today in 2010, and now — as then — it’s an absolute pleasure to play.

Today’s post won’t really be a review of the game (hence the absence of the word “review” from the already-overlong post title). It’s more a chance for me to discuss the technical fine points of going to back to such old software on a modern computer. This is a process which is typically fraught with compatibility nightmares, driver hacks and other stuff-and-nonsense that makes you wonder why you even bothered in the first place. However, thanks to Valve Software’s inestimably helpful Steam digital delivery platform, playing KOTOR on your PC is now as easy as plopping down $9.99, downloading 4GB of data and firing it right up — natively — on your Windows 7 box. Yep — KOTOR is on Steam.

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Well, That Didn’t Quite Work Out

By Chief Oddball on July 14th, 2010 at 11:51 am ··· 2 Comments

Today’s prospective home buyers showed up 45 minutes early (while we were still here), flustered us thoroughly and then decided they hated the place, turned around and walked out within literally thirty seconds. Nice.


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