Mark's Blog

I watched The Hours this week, the only 2002 Best Picture nominee that I didn't see in the theatre. I didn't have super-high expectations but ended up really enjoying the movie. I usually like films with interlocking stories and those that play around with time, with different personalities or events that may or may not come together at some point. There were a number of interesting philosophical points in the movie. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, since it wasn't exactly action-packed, but if you like slower, more thoughtful movies you should give this one a shot. I gave it a 9 on IMDB.

I've been addicted to Civ 3 Conquests lately. I'm in a multiplayer game right now, against a friend and (right now) four computer civilizations. I have the lead in score and tech, but we are on different continents, and just like in real life, inter-continental wars are extremely costly, so the end is not in sight yet. I'm playing as the Romans, which is not one of my favorite civs to play, but it has worked out well. The Legionary was useful in the Ancient age and the Militaristic trait has helped to produce a couple of Military Leaders, which are always useful. I'm not a huge fan of the Commercial trait but I'm doing well in gold pieces in this game so I shouldn't be complaining. I usually play (and win, most of the time) on Regent level, and tried a game on Monarch recently, but got crushed quite quickly. I suppose I'll have to refine my strategies in order to make progress. I still have no idea how people can win on the Emperor and Deity levels.

The Super Bowl is tomorrow. I'm predicting a closer game than the bookmakers, but what do I know. Seven points seems to be an awful lot, given that the Patriots' offense isn't exactly tops in the league and Carolina has a very good defense. Plus, New England doesn't have home field advantage. I'll take the under of 38 points, and Carolina +7. I might as well do a final score prediction -- I'll go out on a limb and say Carolina 16, New England 13.

I've definitely been a delinquent blogger lately. I don't know why, I guess there's just not much to report.

I have been doing some editing on Chefmoz.org, a restaurant review site. I'm one of the volunteer editors for Ottawa. We maintain a list of restuarants and associated reviews. I used to log in fairly irregularly, like once every few months, but recently there has been a flurry of reviews, perhaps close to one a day, which is really nice to see. Some of the "reviews" are a bit too brief, but hopefully over time more people will use the site and contribute. According to Alexa, the site is around the 11,000th most popular site on the Internet, which is not bad.

I've been playing some Civ 3 Conquests recently. This is a good expansion pack, unlike "Play the World", which had precious little in the way of new features and extremely laggy multiplayer action. I've played through the three introductory scenarios and the first two real ones, "Mesopotamia" and "Rise of Rome". I usually play on Regent level and had ended up losing "Rise of Rome" the first time I tried it as the Romans, but winning the second time through as the Persians, who start out with significantly more land. It's definitely important to read through the rules for each scenario, since they are often changed from the base game. For instance, I was getting annoyed, while playing as the Persians, because I thought the best defender that was available was the spearman, who defends with strength 2. Then about 2/3 of the way through the game, I suddenly have the option to build Numidian Mercenaries, who have defense 3, which is obviously a significant improvement. In the regular game, the Numidian Mercenary is a Unique Unit, only available to the Carthaginians, however in this scenario the NM is available to anyone who has the Ivory resource (which I would have gotten a lot earlier if I had known that it would have been useful). Anyway, the scenarios are a great way to have a satisfying game in a night or so, unlike a regular game which can take a number of sessions on a larger map.

I've seen a few movies on DVD recently: Full Metal Jacket (endlessly quotable and reasonably entertaining but somewhat disjointed, I gave it an 8), The Recruit (slightly formulaic CIA thriller, I gave it a 7) and Out of Sight (overrated and somewhat implausible movie about a romance between a bank robber and FBI agent, I gave it a 7).

With the super-cold temperatures there hasn't been all that much to do, so I've been splitting my gaming time between three games: DX2, Civ 3 Conquests and MOHAA.

I liken Deus Ex: Invisible War to the movie Gangs of New York: very flawed, and easy to find problems with, but I just really liked it anyway. My Deus Ex: Invisible War Biomods Guide got indexed by google and is now getting some traffic, maybe 20 visits a day. I finished the game a couple of weeks ago and tried a couple of the endings. The last third of the game had a lot of tie-ins to the original game, which was neat. I didn't like the inventory management system, which was too simplistic and unrealistic. Also, the universal ammo system (one ammo type fits all weapons) was okay from a usability standpoint, except only nine clips could be carried (as if one could carry around, all at once, a flamethrower, sniper rifle, swords, SMG, shotgun, and a few other weapons, but no more than 9 small ammo clips).

I got the Civilization 3 Conquests expansion pack, which has been a good buy. There are some scenarios, which allow you to play a particular segment of history, with different technologies and different rules than the regular game. The multiplayer seems to be a lot better than the very slow and buggy multiplayer capabilities in the previous expansion pack, Play the World.

As well, I've been continuing to play MOHAA multiplayer. I have the Breakthrough expansion pack and went through the singleplayer campaign in a couple of days. Good, but nothing revolutionary. Fortunately there are a lot of really good multiplayer maps, which almost seems to be the main value of the game. I'm not complaining though. I wish MOHAA had some sort of centralized ranking server, where you could learn approximately how good your opponents are (like America's Army). If I'm having a bad game, it's nice to know if it's because the other players are more skilled, or if it's just a bad night, or lag, or whatever other problem there might be.

Finally there was an article on Slashdot discussing the strong rumors about the next Grand Theft Auto game, supposedly GTA: San Andreas. Needless to say, this is the game I'm most eagerly anticipating right now. It's scheduled to come on the PS2 later this year, with a probably mid-2005 release for PC (probably sometime around the final, still-unnamed Star Wars movie)

I saw Cold Mountain a few days ago, the 2.5 hour Civil War epic. Right about half way through the movie I thought that it seemed similar to The English Patient, so I wasn't too surprised when I got home to discover that the director was the same for both movies. I really liked The English Patient, but this movie was not as strong. The plot wasn't quite as interesting and mysterious, and I didn't like the characters as much. Cold Mountain seemed to drag at times, and I doubted the strength of the bond between Inman (a weary Confederate soldier played by Jude Law) and Ada Monroe (the ever-elegant Nicole Kidman), who had apparently shared less than 100 words (and a lengthy embrace, to be sure). Renée Zellweger turned in a great performance as Ruby Thewes, a rough-and-ready outdoorswoman who moves in with Ada to help her with the farm. I wouldn't be surprised to see her get an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

I saw a couple of other movies on DVD recently: High Fidelity, which I liked, although I didn't think it was all that funny. I liked the story and the "Top 5" motif that John Cusack uses throughout the film. The only parts I was really laughing about were Jack Black's back-and-forth with customers and the other employees in the record store. I had a similar problem with Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank. The movie was fine, but I just wasn't laughing. I guess it's not my style of humor.

The other DVD I saw was The Contender, a drama from three years ago in which Joan Allen plays a vice-presidential nominee who is involved in a messy scandal and power struggle. Gary Oldman plays Allen's nemesis, a Republican congressman bent on destroying her character, with his usual great skill. There wasn't anything in this movie that we haven't seen before, but the plot was solid and it was a good look at the political machinations that go on in Washington. I did have an issue with the hare-brained scheme that comes to light at the end of the movie, which I won't reveal. it seemed totally implausible that anyone would try that.

Anyway, I gave all these three movies an 8, which for me represents an above average, but not great movie.

I have added a page to my site, Deus Ex: Invisible War Biomods Guide. Hopefully this proves useful to other players. By the sounds of things, the game is getting really bad reviews by people. I can certainly understand some of the complaints, and it's a tough legacy to live up to, but the game is still fun in its own right.

It's been ages since I took some planned time off work (somehow the week that were off after the great blackout of August didn't count, since one never knew when one was returning to work). I don't have any huge plans, just tidy up the house a bit and maybe get a couple of new pieces of furniture, and generally take it easy for what should be a pretty hectic few months at work coming up.

I added a couple of "cheat sheets" to my Rubik's Cube page (Solution #1, Solution #2). These are one-page reminders with the moves. I'm not sure why I didn't do this earlier, since they are proving to be reasonably popular. After having been up for about 12 hours, they have received around 60 page views together.

I've been playing quite a bit of Deus Ex: Invisible War. I'm definitely getting into the game more now that the graphics issues have been resolved. I'm trying to make a couple of FAQ documents about the game, but I'm still a long ways from any sort of completion. The game feels a bit "dumbed-down" from the original Deus Ex. Everything seems a bit simpler, probably because it was geared for console gamers as well as PC gamers. Also, the game has crashed on me a few times, sometimes requiring a reboot, and this is after I installed the 1.1 patch (which is critical to getting a good gaming experience with DX2). Still, I would recommend the game to others, as long as you have a reasonably powerful PC.

It's not every day that something happens that you had been waiting for, for more than five years, but tonight I saw The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. It's really awesome. Suffice it to say, I have already cast my "10" on IMDB

Unlike a number of other eagerly-anticipated sequels which I won't mention, this one totally lived up to the first two. It was simply the third part of an amazing whole. Seemingly every detail was in place and although the movie is extremely long (the longest movie I've ever seen, I believe), I wanted more. There are the now-usual light-hearted remarks from Gimli, the incredible battle scenes, and a formidable array of strange beasts.

The movie focusses on different material than the book. The first 2/3 of the movie basically follows Book 5 of the trilogy, interspersed with the end of Book 4 and the start of Book 6. The last third deals with the climax of the story, and then skips past most of Book 6. As an example, the encounter with the grotesque Shelob, which occurs in the last two chapters of The Two Towers book, probably takes place 2/3 of the way through the ROTK movie.

The decision to not include seven minutes of Saruman was widely criticized by fans of the series, and after seeing the movie I'm in agreement. It would have been more logical to at least show Saruman's fate onscreen, especially when his prominence in the first movie in particular was probably greater than his prominence in the first book. And, given that the movie is 3:28, what's another 7 minutes? The ending itself, which a number of people have disliked, was drawn out in a lengthy sequence of snippets, with a number of false endings, which did feel a little choppy to me, especially since a few years were passing between some of the sequences.

In what seems to be an off year for Hollywood movies, I think ROTK has to be the favorite for Best Picture, and probably Peter Jackson for Best Director. Given that the other movies did not get major recognition, you would have to think that they are due. The three movies together are a landmark of movie making and one has to wonder when something so grand in vision and successful will next be pulled off. My bet is we'll be waiting a long time.

I got the MOHAA: Breakthrough expansion pack Thursday night and jumped right in, playing most of the multiplayer levels. It apparently includes the same multiplayer maps as the Spearhead expansion pack. With MOHAA I never really got into the single-player campaigns (other than completing the basic Allied Assault missions on Easy level, which was indeed easy). Playing online is much more humbling and challenging. My favorite levels so far are probably Palermo, a destroyed village with a million different angles and obstructions, and Castello, a mansion that has somehow become a battleground.

I downloaded the 2.40 patch for Breakthrough, which came with a couple of new maps. One was Stückguter, a level that takes place entirely in the hold of a ship. This is definitely a level that tests your reflexes. I was having more success with the shotgun than the machine gun on this map. The other was Bizerte Fortress, a rather unremarkable Mediterranean city.

The multiplayer setup in Breakthrough is a lot nicer than plain MOHAA, allowing you to filter out servers with high pings or different parameters than those you want. There is also a Call Vote feature which allows you to change maps, boot players or change game parameters with the consensus of the other players.

Thanks to a couple of tips I found on the Internet, I managed to configure DX2 to run nicely on my machine.

• Use "MouseLagThreshold=0" in the System\\default.ini file. This is initially 75 (milliseconds?)
• More importantly, if you have an NVIDIA card, in the NVIDIA Media Center that appears in your taskbar, set the Performance & Quality Settings, Antialiasing Settings to Off (by default it is on)
• As always, change the video settings to the lowest possible (640 x 480), low lighting, shadow and character detail

It's now running very nicely, although still in 640 x 480, but with medium detail settings. It also seems okay, just on the border of being playable, in 800 x 600 with low detail. It looks really nice on 1024 x 768 with high detail, but I'm probably getting about 5 fps. Is there any way to display the number of frames per second in DX2? Leave a comment if you know.

I have a couple of gripes with the game, such as the multi-purpose ammunition (all guns use the same ammo clips) and it seems a little more simplistic than the original one, but at least now I feel that I'm going to get the full experience of the game, rather than some laggy garbage.

Saw Elf on Saturday, which had been highly recommended to me by a number of people. It was surprisingly funny for a G-rated movie. There was one particularly hilarious part where Will Ferrell, dressed in his usual Elf costume, gets his picture taken in the same style as the classic Sasquatch pose. I think about 10% of the audience got the reference, but in any case it just cracked me up since it was so out of context. I rated this movie an 8. The movie had a lot of funny moments and director Jon Favreau didn't have to resort to the usual bathroom humor (although this is not to say I never find that funny).

Irrelevantly, I wondered whether I had seen a movie with a shorter title, but soon realized I had seen Go, Pi, X2, 54 and the optimally-short, assuming there is no untitled movie, O.

I played a number of rounds of MOHAA tonight, my current favorite first-person shooter, and reached a certain milestone of skill by getting accused of cheating for the first time. Despite the protestations of my poor-spelling all-capitals-writing accuser, his repeated allegations were erroneous.