Why the games of tomorrow suck, and why we should stick to the classics

Let’s face it – the future sucks. Being so obese that you can’t lift your fat ass off your seat will be so commonly accepted. Robots will be left to do the dirty work, and that isn’t cool because, unlike the sweatshop workers of today, they don’t look sad and you can’t laugh at them. Robots are programmed to be happy while they do menial tasks, which sucks.

The future of gaming is even more bleak. Ever since Nintendo attempted to touch the more unfortunate side of the gaming society (aka old people), with their devices of doom called the Nintendo Wii, everyone, even non-gaming companies, have tried to follow suit to make digital life better for people over 40. Apple, for instance, created the iPhone and the iPad because they knew old people would go all sorts of crazy with keypad buttons, and that they would love a device that resembles their fantasies of the future during the 60’s.

Sony and Microsoft have tried to appeal to the much older community too, because apparently Nintendo has made a lot of money selling gaming consoles with remotes that were accidentally thrown into flat screen TVs, smashing them in the process, because they thought you have to throw the controller forwards when you’re playing Wii Bowling. They wanted to produce the same effect of making you look stupid while you’re playing (which has been the standard for the whole gaming era), sans the weird looking controllers we have been with since the beginning.

Enter the Kinect and the Move. Created by Microsoft and Sony respectively, these accessories will be available shortly to the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Both have been featured in the recent E3 2010, where nerds and gaming enthusiasts have gathered to watch the impending horror of the death of the gaming industry before their very eyes, in a fancy and exciting convention.

Both of these motion controllers, which feature state of the art sensors (I won’t go into any details here, go Google for it yourself) that somehow intelligently perceives your motion in front of it. This allows games like dancing to be more “dance-like” without the use of a heavy metal pad with four direction buttons on it. Boxing and fighting games wouldn’t need a badly designed glove-like accessory or a platform with infrared sensors that does the contrary to feel realistic. Driving is probably the worse – instead of using an already awkward-to-use steering wheel and pedals, you now just have to raise your hands in the air, grip and imaginary steering wheel, and you’re good to go. It’s like reliving what you were doing in your childhood again.

There’s also new ways of manipulating this new technology, like using it for simulation games like having a pet tiger in a jungle. With these new toys you can actually own a virtual pet tiger that you can feed, pet, and punch in the face by just letting your hands do the action in front of the motion sensors. Of course, all this does is just doom children when they realize that tigers don’t like being fed, pet, or punched in the face when they grow up as adults.

If there’s such thing as too much technology, it’s very apparent for the coming years of the gaming industry. This makes me want to throw away all my new games away and just start playing games that were made prior to 2008. Those were all better than most, if not all the new games we have now.

Why I absolutely hate Yahoo (and why I am still using it)

WARNING: Rant inbound. If you don’t like listening to a person bitch about what he hates, flee. Flee now.

These days, Yahoo is known as the international version of AOL. It’s clunky, cheesy, and the only Americans who seem to be using it at the moment are those who believe chain spam mail about a creepy girl appearing at your closet tonight or Bill Gates eating your hard drive if you don’t send an email to everyone in your contact list within eight minutes.

I absolutely hate Yahoo. Really I do. The search engine is just another crappy competitor of Google, and has failed miserably doing so. Bing is ten times better than Yahoo search, and we all know Google is ten times better than Bing. Yahoo search is clunky, full of ads, too purple, too family oriented, and too…friendly. It does not appeal to power users like me.

What I hate most about Yahoo is their mail service. Yahoo mail is one of the most crappiest mail services I have ever seen. It is like the greatest shitty e-mail service of all that you’ll think God himself crapped out Yahoo mail to remind people of retarded people sending chain mail to each other. The interface is just plain awful – very, very little space for people like me who use 4:3 screens, and there’s too much things going on screen – worthless ads about some untalented old “singer” named Kelly Clarkson, deals on car air filters, and other flash ads that were actually made in 2003 but Yahoo was too busy annoying the shit out of its users so they left it there on purpose. The interface is also very, very slow. The massive orgy of Javascript and Flash in the interface slows down any computer with a browser to a crawl. That’s why I switched to Mail Classic, in order to not have my computer molested with unnecessary JS.

But yet I’m still using Yahoo despite my opinions of it being the shittiest thing on the Internet since Geocities (funny thing to know, they own Geocities too). Why? Because of the same reason why I’m still on Facebook despite me hating it also – everybody’s  on it.

My professors use Yahoo Groups to upload lecture notes, worksheets, etc., so not having a Yahoo account to access this groups would be a bad idea. And it appears 98.3% of the Philippine population uses Yahoo as their Instant Messaging client, so I still maintain a YM account, though I don’t use Yahoo’s crappy IM messaging client, I use a much more stable and lighter Miranda IM.

Yahoo is also where I got my first email address. That email address is what I still use today, as I have since 2004. I signed up for Hotmail shortly after that, but I realized Hotmail is somehow shittier than Yahoo during that time, so I quit and let it rot under a million spam mails every month.

Thinking of switching to Wordpress

When you ask a web designer, a professional blogger, or a tech geek about a good blogging platform, almost all the time, their answers would be Wordpress. And it’s true, most of it anyway. Wordpress allows great flexibility, its engine is open-source and can be loaded up into your server (some popular websites such as the Cheeseburger Network uses Wordpress technology), if you feel hosting on Wordpress.com is a little sleazy.

I’m thinking of making that switch. As a amateur graphic designer and tech enthusiast I would definitely enjoy the flexibility of Wordpress. However, there are some things in Blogger that I cannot live without, like integration into my Google account. I don’t use any of those “account and password” management softwares, for I don’t trust them at all with my data. So having multiple accounts for e-mail and blogging would be hard to manage. I wouldn’t want that.

Next, Blogger is easy to set up, and even though it does not allow you as much flexibility as Wordpress, you can still make your own Javascript widgets if you would prefer so. Also, Blogger still has a pretty good user database, despite Wordpress overshadowing it. It’s not like people don’t like Blogger; Blogger is in fact, one of the most preferred platform for people when it comes to personal blogs. It’s only when people plan to make professional blogs that they use Wordpress and/or the Wordpress engine.

There are also other blogging platforms available other than Wordpress and Blogger, like Tumblr and LiveJournal. However, I don’t prefer Tumblr and LiveJournal because I don’t want sad people posting unnecessary comments on my posts just because I expressed disgust for Twilight or a lesbian named Justin Bieber or something. I like to keep things civilized.

So there you go. Hopefully I won’t get an aneurysm trying to decide whether to import my blog to Wordpress or not. Google is doing a good job maintaining Blogger, and as long as they keep it up, I’m staying there.

Why getting a 1337-ass computer nowadays is unnecessary

Most geeks like yours truly possess at least two computers: One “main” computer is used for heavy work, such as powerful 3D gaming, video editing, etc. And then there’s probably a “secondary” computer, usually a notebook or a netbook (or an iPad if you’re an Apple fan), which is usually used in travel and generally browsing the Internet.

Nowadays, I don’t really need a powerful computer. They’re too overrated. I’m so very much buried in college work, and I don’t have much time playing modern video games. Maybe I could sneak in one or two hours of Garry’s Mod every Friday (where I usually don’t have classes), but that’s just about it. I rarely find fun in video games these days, unless that game is an open-ended sandbox.

My custom-built gaming desktop, which I named the “Warmonger” (from the countless CS, L4D and CoD4 games it was into), is slowly turning to deteriorating and the only thing that keeps its coolers from accumulating dust is the occasional “turning on the computer because not using it would deteriorate it even more” habit. Also, it’s getting old.

This proud piece of hardware once ran settings at max in almost all games (maybe not Crysis). It helped me win games because I just calmly do my business while the opposition is busy dodging projectiles at 8fps and complaining about how old their computers are. Sadly, it appears that the Warmonger is going through the same fate also. I ran “Aliens vs. Predator” on the Warmonger at DX10 mode (my Radeon HD4870 cannot support DX11), and it ran at 26-35fps on high settings (mild AA), but I get spikes often when I look at wide open scenery. It sucks.

Now I’m pretty content just playing GTA: San Andreas, Quake III Arena and Warcraft III on my laptop because they’re awesome games despite their graphics being shitty. I have tried importing Garry’s Mod on my laptop, however, it’s mediocre Intel GPU that’s good only for desktop and light 3D graphics could not handle vertex shaders, thus making the waters of HL2 invisible from the surface.

Who needs games anyway? They’re just good ways of slowing down your PC. I find more fun finding lols on Cheeseburger than watching marines die in AvP. It’s just too repetitive for my taste, sorta like working in an Asian sweatshop, except you watch people in heavy armor die after just being punched in the face by aliens.

The State of Sulatang Tapunan

Currently I’m knee deep in college. It appears that when they said in the first day that I’m going to get my feet wet, they didn’t mention anything about getting my feet wet on five feet of water. Immediately I was molested by confusing figures, raped by long lines of code and hunted by long lists of homework. It’s crazy, but in a good sort of way.

Endless hours of study appears to have steered me away from the endless hours of gaming it succeeded (thank God), but unfortunately it appears to be steering me away from important things of note, such as running (I can only run three times a week now) and writing.

So it appears I do not have as much spare time on my hands as I had during the Philippine summer. But it’s not over yet. Sure, I don’t have much spare time, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have any. Let’s just hope that that spare time I’m talking about will get spent into the better like writing, running, working out or pondering about the fate of humanity instead of crushing people under five-ton buses in Garry’s Mod (and savoring the glorious bloodbath that follows).

Quotes I like to ponder deeply about

I love quotes. I read at least five everyday. I have a Quote Reader in my desktop thanks to Rainmeter. I read through famous quotes by famous people, infamous quotes by infamous people, and sometimes not-really-famous quotes by not-really-famous people. Some quotes have the power to shape minds and civilizations, while others only send people clutching their ears because, well, it’s horrible.

Yet there are some quotes I come across that have some rather strange implications. These are quotes that have double meanings, or can imply something weird when you give examples based from it. Like for example:

You are what you eat.

Let’s take this literally. The person who spoke this (I forgot who) says that whatever you eat is you. Now for example I eat chicken. Does that make me a chicken? I eat pork. Does that make me a pig? I eat fish, etc. and so on.

But who wants to be an animal? Every human wants to be just as what he is – human. If people follow that quote above and wants to be human, guess what would be the trend?

Cannibalism. Pure and simple.

Here’s another one I like:

X to Y, Y to X.

Assume X and Y are variables referring to something in particular. Usually this widely-recycled quote is used with “Live” as X and a profession, practice, ambition, sport, etc. as Y. Like, “Live to race, race to live”, or “Live to steal, steal to live”, etc. The possibilities are endless.

Changed the layout again

And so I have changed the blog layout yet again. Call me picky, but I think the last layout was quite getting bland and boring for me and most of my readers. Sure, it’s minimalistic, it doesn’t hurt your eyes because it’s not one of those “bright text on black background” templates, but it was getting boring.

So I switched the template to this nice little one I found on the net, named "Newspaper". Once again, my inability to have motivation to create my own XML templates are apparent, and led me to grab other people's templates from the web. Thankfully, these templates are free for my own personal use, so long as I credit them properly.

I have some problems with this theme apparently. Live Writer does not seem to read its XML properly, and now I have to resort to raw HTML editing, but it's ok, I never liked WYSIWYG editing anyways. However, when I switch to preview mode it appears that my paragraphs are not seperated into seperate paragraph, which leads to weird looking posts. I added approprite < p > tags, by the way.

Hopefully this blog will work well despite the difficulties. I tend to trade performance and reliability for aesthetics. If something goes wrong I'll just revert back to the old template, or go find a new one.

Why does technology evolve too fast?

Why does technology evolve too fast?

- Me

That question has haunted me so many times. It has appeared in many inconvenient places, in my solitude, in my dreams, while I’m working in front of my computer, even when I’m writing this blog post (obviously).

It’s been a year since I have built my desktop. In fact, it just had its birthday less than a month ago. But look at it now. It’s now old by a gamer’s standard. The once powerful Intel Core 2 Quad is now overshadowed by Intel Core i7 Processors, while my ATI Radeon HD4870 is now the new HD5870’s bitch. Also, there are a number of games now that I could not max the settings on without my game slowing down to the speed of a 40’s film.

Even my laptop feels its quick aging. The proud ultraportable Lenovo Thinkpad X60s is now a weeping pile of shame as my battery – well, died out. Hopefully it will get fixed, however.

There is one way to smile despite these however – by looking at other people.

Take a look at those computers in derelict computer shops scattered around the Philippines. The computers are equipped with nine year old Intel Celerons and Nvidia GeForce 4400s that they couldn’t even run Warcraft III. I think my laptop even does a better job.

In addition to that fact, despite my laptop’s portability being very crippled due to its dead battery, it still manages to go through some world standards. Its size is pretty small, the 11” notebook is near the netbook 10” size, but manages to pack an Intel Core Duo processor and 2GB of RAM, features most netbooks and entry-level laptops do not possess. It’s also much snappier and cleaner than other notebooks, because its proud owner has done a lot to keep it oiled and powerful.

So that’s it. Even though my equipment are quite a bit old, they still manage to kick some ass, if not all of them.

A laptop without batteries - disaster

And so it appears that after four years of proud service, my Lenovo Thinkpad X60s’ battery has suddenly died out permanently. It’s not died out as in it just ran out of stored charges, in fact, it can’t store juice anymore. My laptop suddenly turned from an angry skirmisher to an old man in a retirement home. It can’t move around from one room to another without bringing its life support anymore. It sucks.

I’m currently in the process of ordering a new battery from Lenovo, but I don’t think when it would be coming. It’s a good thing Lenovo is actually here in the Philippines, as it makes the job easier since I don’t have to order from China or Singapore or wherever the nearest country Lenovo is at is located. Hopefully before Friday I would be getting a new battery, or I’ll be clutching wires with my notebook forever.

Scratch: Get started programming, without the coding part

Ever wanted what programming is like, but don’t want to get confused in a huge myriad of code? A good choice to start for programming beginners are visual-based programming languages. There are a lot of them out there, but most of the time, they’re not free, and their capabilities are somehow limited.

Enter Scratch. Scratch is a small and lightweight visual programming application, written in C++ by the very awesome folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It’s visual, meaning you only have to use logic and creativity to create a simple application, and more importantly, it’s free.

In Scratch, you are presented with a single sprite. This sprite can be manipulated whenever a certain event took place, for example, if the user clicks that sprite, or after an elapsed time of 3 seconds, etc. Once a trigger has been specified, you can now issue commands that the sprite will perform once its triggers are met. You can command the particular sprite to change appearance, move to another position, interact with the user, etc.

The possibilities with Scratch are limitless, given the amount of creative freedom the program offers to aspiring programmers. And since it’s visual-based, it’s easy to understand and use even for those who have no grasp of skill when it comes to coding.