A Series of Tubes

Oh, the Irony…

November 11, 2008 – 1:20 am

Yes, I am writing a third post about LittleBigPlanet. Yes, I promise I’ll keep it short. No, it’s not good news. I just unlocked a mini-game level in the game (no, I’m not quite finished yet, but I’m almost there) called “Spline Rider”. When I saw the title, I died a little on the inside, but when I loaded it up and found myself on a toboggan riding down an environment constructed completely of straight lines, I got angry.

Of course, the level is fun. It’s tricky to get the sled to balance right so you don’t flip over. However, this level is an exact replica of the extremely popular flash game, Line Rider (so popular, in fact, that it has been bastardized into a soulless console game). The hypocrisy is unbelievable, that Sony and MediaMolecule will remove fan-made levels that infringe on copyrights, while there is an official level obviously meant to emulate another commercial game.

On the plus side, I checked the published levels again, and I realized that the Mirror’s Edge and Tetris levels have not been removed (yet), so please, go play them while you still can. I sincerely hope that the Tetris level is not removed, because it is pure genius, and really fun.

By Zib | Posted in Life in general, Rants, Video Games, ps3 | Comments (0)

On Second Thought…

November 10, 2008 – 12:24 am

So yesterday I posted about the latest addition to my list of all-time favorite games, LittleBigPlanet. After posting that post, I began to brainstorm the game’s possible flaws, and I came up with a few things.

First of all, in the level creator, the first time you try to use a new category of objects (materials, switches, eyes, vehicles, etc.), you are forced to watch a tutorial on how to use it. This would be tolerable if the tutorials were skippable, but they aren’t. At least, not all of them are. The tutorials are really unnecessary, and seem extremely out-of-place in such an intuitive and easy-to-understand game. Forcing users to complete tutorials before allowing them to proceed is one of the biggest problems in modern games, which usually include a ridiculously long tutorial level (usually unskippable, as well) at the beginning of the game, which you are forced to play through every time you play the game. For example, the first half-hour in Kingdom Hearts 2 (Twilight Town) is basically a glorified tutorial level, and the opening level of Knights of the Old Republc 2 was just as bad.

Secondly, and this is not a flaw as much as a trivial gripe, the clothes are not as customizable as I would like. Basically, colors. Some clothes allow you to modify their color, but there is only one color setting for your entire avatar, meaning every customizable article of clothing, and all menus, must be the same color. Certainly not a showstopper, but a complaint nonetheless.

Neither of these complaints were enough to merit posting about, in my opinion. However, then I read about MediaMolecule (the company that created LBP) and Sony “moderating” fan-made levels.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, I can understand the need for some level of censorship on their part, they obviously are going to have to delete anything obscene, and anything illegal. But the amount of level-deleting (and it is just that, permanent deletion of so-called “moderated” levels) that has been happening in the past few days is ridiculous. MediaMolecule is removing levels that could infringe on copyrights, so levels that reference other video games, music, people, movies, etc. are all being removed, irrevocably. This is really bad, a lot of my favorite levels (the Mirror’s Edge levels, as well as Tetris, Galaga, etc) are all being removed. They were really the best levels online, being so ingeniously re-created from the tools offered in the game. I must say, I’m very disappointed in MediaMolecule for being such cowards.

By Zib | Posted in Life in general, Rants, Video Games, ps3 | Comments (0)

LittleBigPlanet

November 8, 2008 – 8:18 pm

It’s pretty rare for me to really like a video game, or at least it’s rare for me to like it enough to actually want to play the game all the time. I usually only discover such an addictive game about once a year. The last time that it happened was with Rock Band back in the spring, Kingdom Hearts a few years that, and way back when, the Myst series.

However, last friday (Halloween), one of my friends lent me LittleBigPlanet for the week, and I’ve been been spending most of my free time since then playing the amazing thing (I actually gave my friend back his copy on thursday, and went out yesterday to purchase my own). The game is beautiful, creative, addictive, unique, intuitive, and above all else, fun. Of course, I’ve known about LittleBigPlanet for more than a year. The trailers and gameplay videos for it during the summer of 2007 were big factors in my purchasing of a Playstation 3 in the first place, so one could say I actually spend $500 to play this game (or, if you consider the fact that I bought my HDTV to go with the PS3 around the same time, one could actually say that I spent over $1000 to play it).

In LittleBigPlanet, you play as Sackboy (above), a character made out of cloth (hence his name), and run around LittleBigPlanet (a physical manifestation of all of the dreams and imaginative energies of the people of Earth), exploring and collecting items. Items include stickers (which can be stuck anywhere in the game, even on other characters), decorations (which are like 3-dimensional stickers, and can also be stuck on anything in the game), and costumes, among other things. The costumes are a very fun part of the game, because you can really customize your Sackboy a lot using them (see below).

Besides the story mode (the main levels of the game, tied together into some sort of loose, disjointed story), there’s also the “MyMoon” area, where you can create your own levels. As you play through the official levels of LittleBigPlanet, you collect the objects from the official levels as items, allowing you to (in theory) re-create the official levels entirely, or build your own worlds. When you’ve created a level that you like, you can publish it, so other people can download and play in it themselves. You can also download and play levels that other people have made, some of which are really amazing.

Perhaps one of the best features of this already amazing game is the multiplayer gameplay. Up to 4 people can play at the same time, working cooperatively to finish the levels together. In my opinion, this is the best form of multiplayer gameplay (that is, 4 people in the same room working together, while the second best is online cooperative, then real-life competitive, and online competitive being the worst form of multiplayer), because it really feels like a group effort, and you’re playing with people you really know, and having fun together. LittleBigPlanet is a very social game, it’s actually impossible to complete it 100% on your own, there are a lot of two-player puzzles to get secret items and such.

LittleBigPlanet is definitely my favorite PS3 game thus far. I would strongly recommend it to anybody and everybody.

By Zib | Posted in Life in general, Releases, Video Games, ps3 | Comments (0)

A Winner is You! (’You’ being anyone who uses the internet)

November 3, 2008 – 8:35 pm

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama said last wednesday that if he is elected to the presidency, he will reinstate Net Neutrality for his first year in office. If you don’t know about Net Neutrality, it is a movement to keep the internet a level playing field for everyone, meaning that internet service providers (AOL, Comcast, RCN, etc) cannot block access to certain websites and give faster access to others. If this were the case, big corporations would pay ISPs to have faster access to their websites, and access to websites that cannot not pay up would be blocked.

This is obviously something that any normal person using the internet does not want. It goes against the first amendment to the Constitution, and would make it very difficult for websites like Zibland to continue to operate, due to inability to pay for good service like a website the size of CNN.com would be able to do. Senator Obama is apparently a very strong supporter of Net Neutrality, just another reason we should all be voting for him tomorrow.

By Zib | Posted in Internet, Life in general, News | Comments (0)

All versions of CrossOver are free for TODAY ONLY

October 28, 2008 – 7:29 pm

CrossOver, the amazing product for Mac and Linux that lets you run Windows applications (such as Uru) natively, is FREE for today only! Crossover is a great investment normally, but since it’s free for today you have no excuse not to get it if you have a Mac or a Linux machine.

By Zib | Posted in Computers | Comments (0)

Essential CoverSutra Mods

October 12, 2008 – 11:39 pm

I don’t know how many people use Coversutra (a companion to iTunes that allows you to search for songs from the menubar), but ever since buying a license a couple of months ago I cannot live without it. It has become as essential to me as Quicksilver, in a very short amount of time. So far, there are two things I don’t like about it:

1. It seems to have a few memory leaks, as it quickly eats up a few gigabytes of virtual memory.

2. By default, it is ugly as hell:

I decided that I had to fix it, so I went on a search for a better theme. I found this one, which is untitled but made by someone named Dustin on the MacThemes Forum. It makes the search bar much prettier (or at least, less likely to blind you):

In addition, the Left Side Mod is pretty handy as well, as it allows the text on the desktop to be left-justified, instead of centered:

By Zib | Posted in Computers, Internet, Life in general, Links | Comments (0)

MO:RE Put on Indefinite Hold

October 8, 2008 – 6:42 am

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.

By Zib | Posted in Life in general | Comments (0)

You Are Likely To Be Eaten

October 2, 2008 – 6:06 pm

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).

By Zib | Posted in Life in general, Links, Threadless | Comments (0)

Uru: Complete Chronicles on a Mac!

September 4, 2008 – 9:05 pm

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:

Install URU:Complete Chronicles on a PC
Install a nodisk patch (such as this one), so that you don’t have to insert the Uru disk to play
Install flymode and Uru Library Manager, and download/install any ages you’d like to have (I haven’t gotten ULM to run with Crossover yet, but it is possible to edit the library by hand once it’s installed)
Make sure all of that stuff works
Copy all the files in your Uru directory (C:/Program Files/Ubisoft/Cyan Worlds/Myst Uru: Complete Chronicles by default) to somewhere on your Mac
Get CrossOver Games if you don’t already have it. The link is a trial, the full version costs $39.95 unfortunately…
Create a WinXP bottle (”Manage Bottles” from the Configure menu)
Programs > Run Command…
Hit browse and locate UruExplorer.exe on your hard drive
Save the command, to make it easier to launch again later
Hit Run, and Uru will launch. You can ignore the error message that pops up, Uru will launch a moment after that.

More pictures:

By Zib | Posted in Computers, Life in general, Myst games/Cyan Worlds, Uru, Video Games | Comments (3)

Google Chrome Released

September 2, 2008 – 6:28 pm

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.

By Zib | Posted in Computers, Internet, Life in general, Releases | Comments (0)

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