Once again, the Myst community has to watch the game we love be shut down. Due to financial issues, Cyan Worlds announced today that the MO:RE project has been put on indefinite hold, until their financial problems (indirectly related to the national financial problems) are settled.
On a side note, they mention that the iPhone version of Myst is still in production.
I just submitted my first submission to Threadless, the crowd-sourced tee shirt company. People submit designs to the website, and then more people score each design, and after a week of voting the shirts that score high enough become actual tee shirts. It’s a pretty cool system, and the site has developed its own unique style, which is pretty cool. Check them out, and please vote 5 on my design (and check the box that says you would buy it as a tee, if you would be so kind).
I just submitted my first submission to Threadless, the crowd-sourced tee shirt company. People submit designs to the website, and then more people score each design, and after a week of voting the shirts that score high enough become actual tee shirts. It’s a pretty cool system, and the site has developed its own unique style, which is pretty cool. Check them out, and please vote 5 on my design (and check the box that says you would buy it as a tee, if you would be so kind).
About a month ago, I decided (most likely thanks to Jevasi, DanTheMystFan, and all the other great people I was talking to at Mysterium this year) to get back into the world of Writing (the process of creating a custom Age for Uru), after a year-long hiatus. I returned to find the community in good health, happily churning out very high-quality ages one after another. The tool used for Writing, pyPRP (which is actually just a plugin for Blender) had improved and advanced tenfold since I last used it, now supporting animated textures, custom cameras, and something called ‘AlcScript’, which allows for simple actions to be scripted, making it easier to Write dynamic ages (my only finished age, Galamay, has no interactivity whatsoever, because when I Wrote it years ago, you had to actually write code to do that stuff…). The Guild of Writers Wiki, with its big list of tutorials, was endlessly helpful as I re-learned the little I remembered, and quickly advanced to new levels of ability.
The only problem with this Age Writing is the fact that I use a Mac, and Uru is built for Windows. The classic problem. My first solution was Dropbox, an easy file-syncing program that automatically copies files to every computer you’ve registered, every time the files are modified. This worked well enough, but I still had to wait on my network to move the files, and then move them to the Uru directory on my PC once they were synced. It worked, but it was definitely flawed.
So I began to think about another option. What if I could run Uru on my Mac? That would solve my problems, because then I could Write and test on the same machine. But how would I do it? My first thought was Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion, which both run Windows on top of OS X, meaning that the game would definitely run exactly as it would on a PC. However, a virtual machine would only cause more problems, such as the time it takes to load a virtual machine, or the lag that would be produced by running 2 operating systems. I thought about the latter problem for about two seconds before the answer hit me:
Wine. A self-referencing acronym standing for Wine Is Not an Emulator, Wine allows users of non-Windows operating systems to run .exe files meant specifically for Windows. The great thing is that it does this without having to run the entire Windows OS, just the specific parts that it needs to make the program work. This means that there’s no added lag, and programs really do run as if they were native to your own OS (in my case, Mac OS X, but it is available for Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, and any platform you can build it on really, since it’s an open-source project).
The first thing I tried was DarWINE, a Wine project dedicated to getting Wine to work on OS X. Using the installer on the Uru Disk, I got through all of the initial installation before it gave me a strange error (Cannot find string ERROR_CANNOTLOAD), and crashed.
Next, I tried CrossOver Games, a commercial version of Wine dedicated to making Windows games work on Mac OS X and Linux. This behaved exactly as DarWINE did when I gave it the CD with the installer.
Frustrated, I thought more about my past experiences with Uru. I have found in the past that you don’t actually have to install Uru: all the installer does is unpack the data from the CDs to the hard drive. If you can get the files from another source (such as a past installation), you can simply run it without any other modifications. Perhaps the installer makes some registry changes, but they aren’t necessary for the game to run. Following this line of thought, I copied the files from my Uru install to my Mac, and tried opening UruExplorer.exe with CrossOver Games.
Presto! Flawless Uru, running directly on my Mac. Everything that worked on my PC works on my Mac, and given the fact that my PC doesn’t have speakers, the Mac can actually run Uru better than my PC!
Here’s how to do it:
You can also just find UruExplorer.exe in Finder and double-click it, Uru should launch just the same.
More pictures:
If you love Uru, but are tired of exploring by yourself, you should install Myst Online: Uru Live Again on your Mac and come play online!
Today, Google released their very own browser, called Google Chrome. It isn’t available yet for Mac and Linux, but I tried it out on my PC and it is smooth. Installing was painless and quick, and it imported my Firefox history in less than 3 seconds, which was very nice, since I usually rely on my history rather than bookmarks on my PC.
Chrome’s address bar is called the OmniBox, and so far I like it way more than Firefox’s AwesomeBar. If you just type in words, without www. or .com, it will automatically do a google search (or whatever your default search engine is) for whatever you typed. In addition, if you type the URL of a search engine (www.youtube.com, www.yahoo.com, etc), and press Tab, you can then type the search term in the address bar. This is extremely nice, as Chrome doesn’t support the bookmark keywords that I rely on for searches in Firefox.
Another nice touch in the OmniBox is that if it auto-completes your URL, the part you typed is slightly darker than the parts it added (you can see this in the screenshot below).
Another cool feature is the ability to make standalone applications of web pages. This puts in item on your Desktop (and/or the Start Menu and the Quicklaunch bar), which will open a separate browser window for that site when you launch it. The window has no address bar or navigation buttons, it’s just the page and scrollbar. This is designed specifically for web-based applications, allowing you to have a separate application specifically for, say, a gmail account. It shows up on the task bar as the site’s title, with its favicon, as opposed to that of Chrome.
The ‘incognito’ windows are very cool as well, with a darker, more mysterious theme. While browsing in incognito windows, you won’t leave any trail (no history, no caching, no cookies, nothing), much like the Private Browsing mode in Safari. While I’m sure I can’t think of any reason someone would want to browse the internet like this, I bet many people will find this feature very enticing.
I don’t really like the fact that more and more Windows applications are ditching menubars in favor for drop-down buttons (see Windows Media Player 11 and Internet Explorer 7, among others). This is really disorienting, because there’s no longer a central place to access menus that’s constant across all programs. This gives the user a scavenger hunt every time they install a new application to try to deduce where the menus are, instead of being able to simply enjoy the application.
Apart from that one detail, I really like most of Chrome. It really is much, much faster than Firefox, and very pretty. The shade of blue Google used for the Titlebar happens to be my favorite color, which is very easy on the eyes. As soon as this browser comes out for Mac, I’ll seriously consider replacing Firefox.
Today I finally got around to upgrading my iPod Touch to the newest firmware (2.0.2), using the newest version of PwnageTool. PwnageTool allows you to build your own custom firmware, meaning you can specify packages to pre-install, options to set by default, and you can also change the splash screens (for when the device turns on, and when it needs to be plugged into iTunes). This feature has particularly interested me in the past, and while I was looking around on the internet for inspiration I stumbled upon the good old Happy Mac from the days before OS X:
This immediately struck me as a great choice, so I crafted a boot screen:
You can download it as a PNG, as well as a restore screen I crafted with the old bomb icon from classical Mac OS (below), by clicking here
I finally saw Tropic Thunder, Ben Stiller’s new comedy about the making of a Vietnam movie, and I found it hilarious. The star-studded cast (in addition to Stiller, there’s Robert Downey Jr, Jack Black, Nick Nolte, and an amazing cameo by Tom Cruise) is great, and managed to keep me laughing for almost the entirety of the movie. The movie begins with trailers for the products and movies of the fictional actors, setting the stage for their personalities on the set of Tropic Thunder. As the production of the movie slides further and further downhill, the veteran who wrote the book the action movie is based on (played by Nolte) suggests dropping the actors into a forest rigged with explosives and hidden cameras, to capture real fear and make the movie “the best war movie ever”.
It all deteriorates from there, as the director is almost immediately accidentally blown up, and the token Asian drug ring shows up, mistaking the actors for American soldiers (who in turn mistake them for actors, playing out parts in the script). All hell breaks loose as the actors slowly begin to understand that they are no longer filming a movie, but fighting for their lives and those of their friends and comrades.
This makes the movie sound very serious, which it isn’t at all. It’s completely silly, from the drug ring being run by a 12-year old who’s only ever seen one movie (Simple Jack, one of Stiller’s character’s movies, in which he portrays a lovable mentally disabled boy named Jack), to the impressive stream of obscenity issued by the producer of the movie (Cruise), to Downey Jr.’s character undergoing major surgery to turn himself into a black man, and subsequently falling completely into the role, convincing himself he really is the character he’s supposed to be portraying.
The movie is hilarious, but not for the faint of heart. There are many shots, particularly near the beginning, of people’s guts spilling out of them, and more than one person explodes in the course of the movie. A lot of the jokes could very easily offend people (and they have), but I don’t think that there are any jokes bad enough to merit skipping the movie entirely. Honestly, I would say the opposite: Tropic Thunder is a must-see, possibly one of the funniest movies of the year.
Warning: long rant ahead. Summary: Terrible movie.
This movie was a huge disappointment, from the very beginning. I had been wondering, before seeing the film, how Lucasfilm would handle the opening, since the Star Wars movies usually start with the now emblematic text crawl, (which sets the stage for the action in the movie) at the top of which is the episode number and name. Since this movie is not technically an episode of the Star Wars saga, I had assumed that instead of saying Episode 2.5 – The Clone Wars, they would put simply The Clone Wars.
Turns out, I was wrong. Instead of the opening crawl of text, there is a montage of action sequences and a (somewhat cheesy, in my opinion) narration of the events. This scene could easily have been a text crawl, but in an effort to make the movie more kid-friendly the director instead opted to blatantly show the action instead of leaving it to the viewers’ imaginations. As a result, before I was 5 minutes into the movie, before any main characters had even been shown on-screen, I was already horrified at the thought that I had actually paid money to see this blasphemous excuse for a Star Wars movie.
And that was just the opening titles.
For the entire duration of the movie, I could not get used to the bizarre art style. I understand that it’s trying to look somewhat like the Clone Wars animated clips (see below, as compared to the movie above). The series of 5-minute animated shorts depicting the story of the Clone Wars was aired on Cartoon Network in 2003, and was awesome. The new movie of the same title attempted the same style, but in 3D. It certainly has the same look, but none of the same feel. The animated Clone Wars was like Samurai Jack, but in the Star Wars universe. No surprise, as they were both the work of Genndy Tartakovsky. The animation was fluid, the art style, while certainly very stylized, worked extremely well.
This was not true at all for the movie. Everything in the movie looked rigid and hard. You can see what I mean in the above screencaps, just look at Obi Wan’s hair. It doesn’t move at all, in fact it looks like it’s made out of wood. What you can’t see in that screencap is how the faces look like that too, with extremely limited movements, resulting in very un-expressive faces. All of the movement was stiff and ugly, and actually hard to watch. There is also very bizarre selective detail, for example most of the textures are flat colors, but for some reason Yoda has extensive bump-mapping on his skin. It looks extremely strange, because it no longer like he is a stylized character, but a realistic character with a very angular body, due to the detail on his skin. The Hutts aren’t slimy, just large and somehow both fluid and blocky.
The story revolves around the Hutts, specifically Jabba, his uncle Zero, and his son (who doesn’t seem to have a real name, but is nicknamed “Stinky” by the Jedi that were assigned to rescuing him). The basic plot is that Jabba’s son has been kidnapped, and he has asked the Jedi for assistance in retrieving the infant. The Jedi are reluctant, but at the persuasion of Chancellor Palpatine (another disappointing character, the voice actor doesn’t even sound like Ian McDiarmid), Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi are sent to help. Things get difficult when it is revealed that Count Dooku and the Separatists (who had been helping Jabba while the Jedi deliberated with Palpatine) are behind the kidnap, and are attempting to turn the Hutt Clan against the Jedi.
In the midst of all of this, Yoda assigns a padawan apprentice to Anakin, a youngling Togruta named Ahsoka Tano (see above). Let me just start by saying that I hate her more than I hated Jar Jar. She is obnoxiously immature, but Yoda OK’d her for Padawan training despite the fact that she is still a youngling at only 14 years old. She insists on being trained by Anakin, but she doesn’t really seem to learn anything from him, only really offering him criticism and competition. There are a few scenes when one of them points out something that she learned, but I got the feeling that Lucasfilm also noticed that she was a terrible student and tried to add in those scenes to fix the problem.
I was glad that there was very little of R2D2 (or “Artooey,” as Ahsoka nicknamed him) and C3-PO, because as awesome as they were in the original saga, in the prequels the only purpose they served was comic relief, and believe me, there was plenty of that without them. It seemed like the only purpose the battle droids served (other than fodder for the battle scenes) was comic relief. Misunderstanding each other, telling each other to shut up, the droids in this movie were more human than the human characters were.
The soundtrack was not composed by John Williams, and didn’t sound anything like that of the Star Wars saga. It was certainly groovy, but it didn’t have a Star Wars feel to it. Most of it wasn’t orchestral music at all, but much more generic action movie beats. In any other movie, it would have fit the action, but it just felt weird and out of place coupled with Star Wars.
The only thing I actually enjoyed about the movie were the battle scenes, which were impressive. There’s one part where an pair of AT-TEs scale a totally vertical wall, which was completely awesome. The lightsabers glowed, the energy bolts flew (though not quite as fast as they did in the other movies), and the droids glowed red-hot as they were carved by the lightsabers. It was adrenaline-packed, but there was too much of that and not enough of the other things that make a movie into a Star Wars movie.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars was definitely a movie intended for children, not hardcore fans of The Saga. Every aspect of the movie that I didn’t like probably makes it more and more attractive to kids. Gone are the beautiful cinematic panning shots, the glorious Williams soundtrack, the politics, the subtleties of the battle between the Light and Dark Sides of the Force. Instead it’s quick action, cutesy nicknames (“snips” and “sky guy”, as well as artooey and stinky), and too many whiny teenagers. Anakin’s struggle with the Dark Side is barely touched upon, just a few comments about him not wanting to talk about his past, and some scowls when Ahsoka asked too much.
Save yourself some money, don’t bother with this movie. Pirate it, or just skip it entirely. It really was that terrible.
I noticed that a portion of my traffic today and yesterday has been coming from surfbits.com and macreviewcast.com, which happen to be the same site. The site is the homepage for the Mac Reviewcast, a weekly podcast that reviews new software for the Mac OS. Anyway, in episode #170 (iTunes link), my app Date Difference is mentioned. The review is very nice, and does a very good job summarizing the app. The review runs for about a minute, starting at 16:19 into the podcast.
This is (as far as I know) the first time anyone has reviewed Date Difference, and it certainly makes me feel special.
Well that was disappointing! What did we get out of the Electronic Entertainment Expo this year, boys and girls? Let’s see. Microsoft unveiled their best-kept-secret-ever, the clearance of 20gb 360s to make way for 60gb 360s, as well as the motion-sensitive…microphone controller?
I mean, we’ve been hearing rumors about a motion-sensitive 360 controller (to compete with Sony’s SIXAXIS and more importantly, Nintendo’s Wiimote) for months now, and I have to say, I’m disappointed. A karaoke microphone? That’s…um…that’s great, Microsoft. Thanks a bunch. Other than that, there was the Dashboard redesign, and the news that Final Fantasy XIII is being made for the 360 as well as the PS3. Whoop-dee-doo.
What did Sony have for us? Let’s see. Well, there was that neat little presentation of their fiscal year using LittleBigPlanet, that was cool I guess…Not really news, but hey, it’s LittleBigPlanet. I’m not complaining. There was the launch of the video store, about freakin’ time, Sony…And now you can use one login for the PSN across all your machines, as opposed to one account for each. Again, this should not be something that’s happening more than a year after the PS3’s launch. All in all, no news from Sony.
Well how about Nintendo? Oh yes, Nintendo gave us a game, a toy, and two peripherals. Hooray, big news day from Nintendo, right? You might think that. The game? Animal Crossing City Folk, which is basically Animal Crossing Wild World (the DS iteration of the series), except with a city area (accessible by everybody), and a few graphics updates to bring it in line with the Gamecube version of the series. In other words, it’s basically a port of the older game. In other words, it barely counts as its own game.
Next up, Nintendo’s Wii Music. This is the “toy” I mentioned earlier. I call it a toy because it isn’t a game, even Miyamoto has said that it is not a game. It is a non-game, with no plot, no back-story, no characters, no objective. I call that a toy, not a game. Also, the thing isn’t news, because it has been demoed in some form at every E3 since the announcement of the Wii. The “news” is the ability to use the Wii Fit, Nintendo’s balance board in addition to the Wiimote to basically just make music. Think of it like Rock Band, but without real songs or objectives.
Finally, the two peripherals. First off is Wii Speak, a multi-directional microphone that sits on top of the Wii Sensor Bar and allows for audio chatting in online games. This, not unlike the PSN’s video store, should not be something new after more than a year on the market with online services. The second peripheral, the MotionPlus, is just as ridiculous. It is a little knob that plugs into the bottom of the Wiimote, and according to Nintendo, improves the motion-detecting of the Wiimote to make on-screen movements match more closely to the actual movement of the player’s hand or arm. Now I don’t know about you, but it seems to me like this peripheral does…what Nintendo originally promised the Wiimote would be able to do. That seems more than a little lame to me, but hey- it comes with a free game: similarly to the Wii coming with Wii Sports, and the Wiimote coming with Wii Play, the MotionPlus ships with Wii Sports Resort.
So yeah, disappointing compared to previous E3s, but it seems like every year the convention is getting more and more pitiful and less appealing. Oh well, we still have Leipzig and PAX to look forward to!