As anyone who follows my Twitter feed will know, I’ve recently been trying to install Ubuntu on my desktop.

On the whole it’s not that painful, the LiveCD lets you get a feel for the system, the installation is mostly painless even if you want to dual-boot etc, the interface is clean and easy to use, almost everything you’d ever want is already installed and almost anything else is available from the package manager. It’s great when it works. Really great.

The trouble is, often it doesn’t. For example the wireless card on this machine seems to have issues. Sometimes it won’t connect to a wireless network, sometimes it totally hangs the machine. The solution to this seems to be to dive in head-first into config files and the command-line, rip out the provided open source driver, and whack in a layer that will let me use a Windows driver.

My first attempt to do this just disabled wireless on the machine entirely, which wasn’t a forward step. I was honestly quite lucky to get it back to where I started from.

Software support can also sometimes be iffy. Stuff that should be simple like Adobe Air seemingly requires a trip through the terminal to convince to work. Another rather significant downside is that a lot of applications you’re used to using don’t have versions for Linux. You can use WINE to get Windows applications working, mostly, but it’s not an ideal state of affairs. And you can forget about playing games; support is even more dire than Mac gaming. That is unless you once again want to press WINE into service; frankly though it feels slightly iffy running Spotify, let alone TF2.

So my point here is three-fold:

1. Hardware support is patchy.
2. Proprietary software can be hard to get working / unavailable.
3. If something goes wrong, it requires a lot of scary stuff (command-line, etc.) to fix.

See, I’m sure that if I had a working machine and a few months I’d start to learn the Linux-fu necessary to deal with this, but it’s just a pain if something as essential as Wi-Fi doesn’t just work, or if you can’t play your favourite games.

They’ve got a long way to go with hardware support, and it’s going to be an uphill battle every step of the way. There’s a lot of hardware manufacturers who aren’t going to provide Linux drivers, and there’s a dogmatic craziness in the Linux world that THOU SHALT NOT distribute non-free drivers with your distribution, which means that nobody just provides Windows drivers, or makes it easy to get Windows drivers. It’s totally daft, and it’s not helped by nutjobs like Richard Stallman. I guess you can put me into the camp who doesn’t like the GPL. Give me the BSD license any day.

The software difficulties are as equally hard to overcome; you’d have to deal with the horrible Balkanisation of the Linux distros for one thing so that people would have something simple to compile binaries against. Idealism isn’t going to get people to give away the source code to everything.

However, there’s certainly a market for Ubuntu / Linux systems where you can be sure of the hardware configuration and fix all the problems in advance. This means that something like eeebuntu works really rather well, and is supported rather better than Asus managed to support the Eee themselves. It’s a pleasure to use, and makes me see myself using my Eee a lot more in the future.

Similarly, if all the software you could ever want, literally, is encompassed by the repositories of your chosen distro, then it’s also a very comfortable experience where you can be reasonably sure that everything will just work, which is literally the ideal consumer experience.

So, if you lie within some narrow definition of “consumer” then Ubuntu is going to be perfect for you. If you lie just a little to the edges, it’s going to suck. There’s really no middle ground between “idealised consumer” and “pretty hardcore techie”. I guess that’s why they’re going to carry on working with it. If they can expand that consumer window, this could be heading somewhere.

The next day was spent mostly trying to hurry and get my computing project ready to hand in, which kinda necessitated missing a few lectures, but never mind. Then, once that was all done, the Physics crew met up in the common room to exchange Secret Santa gifts. I think we were all pleasantly surprised at the quality of the presents we’d got each other. Emily in particular was very happy with her present, which was a book about 101 things an old-fashioned housewife could do.

Went home, and the house did Secret Santa, which was also great fun, although exactly what some of those gifts were eludes me slightly.

Then we had a few drinks, people came over, had a few more drinks, then headed down to the Union for the Christmas ball. In hindsight, going to the Union might not have been the best plan, but heck, it wasn’t too bad. Bloody freezing walking back, though.

The next day I got the train back home – only £3.30, which completely didn’t suck.

Pretty much as soon as I got back, got a lift from Beccy’s dad to head down to Shell’s place in Bromsgrove, and we had drinks and takeaway with friends, and that was all pretty good.

Did the usual home-stuff after that, hanging around the house, sleeping, reading, playing games, visiting family, etc.

Met up with friends once more (although a slightly different set of friends) in a pub, and that was pretty great too.

Finished Mirror’s Edge in a single day, and played a lot of the drums in Rock Band. Watched the Dark Knight on Blu-Ray. It’s so high-def it’s almost painful to watch. Awesome.

Christmas rolled round, presents got opened. Didn’t get anything spectacular, but it was all nice and good. My Nan came over for Christmas dinner, and we played Trivial Pursuit as a family. I won, because I’m awesome.

Few days later, I rang in the New Year playing Rock Band with my Mom and sister. My mother is honestly terrible on the drums, even on easy mode. It was fun, anyway.

Then on the 2nd of January, I got on a train back to London. Got a £17.50 first-class ticket back, so there was coffee and sandwiches available for free, which was nice. Being asked if you want tea or coffee before you can even sit down is pretty nice indeed.

House was freezing, so I borrowed Matt’s heater, otherwise I would have frozen to death, and I bought my own from Argos ASAP.

Then in theory spent time revising for the Computational Physics test, in practice I spent rather too much time playing Fallout 3.

Anyways, the test did eventually roll round, with more and more people coming back into the house as it came closer to term-time. I was as prepared as I could have been, but I think I made some pretty silly mistakes in the exam. Never mind.

Then for the rest of this week have been general introductory lectures. Other people are stressing about philosophy and politics essays, or lab reports, etc. etc. but I’ve mostly just kinda been chilling, watching TV, playing Left 4 Dead.

That’s pretty much everything, more or less. I mean, there’s a lot omitted, but you don’t need to know every detail, you anonymous internet people. Heck, this is already probably too much!

Anyways, hopefully I should be able to keep to posting more regular-like in the future. I’ve recently finished reading Y: The Last Man, so I might write something about that, and I’m planning to have a crack at The Communist Manifesto in the near future.

It’s about the size of a hardback book when closed, and doesn’t have a CD drive or a hard disk, but does have onboard flash memory to save stuff on, and wi-fi for getting on the Interweb. It runs Linux, because Windows is too expensive, but I’m cool with that, especially because I’ve been wanting to get my hands dirty (as it were) with Linux for a while now.

So the only difficulty I can see is that spending £189 would leave me uncomfortably close to being utterly broke. Which isn’t good, for very obvious reasons. Like my powerful need to continue being able to eat, but even so… I wants one.

Do you have an nVidia graphics card?

If so, you can get Portal: First Slice, composing:

• Portal: First Slice (being the first third of Portal, the Game of the Year)
• Half-Life 2: Deathmatch (being a game where you can kill people with ballistic toilets)
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (short tech demo fun)
• Peggle Extreme (addictive promotional puzzle game)

Seeing as how this bundle is free, it’s well worth getting!

Head over to the Steam website to get it.

So, I think I’ll try and write either every day or on a M/W/F schedule. See how it goes.

Anyways, in summary:

Buy the Orange Box, you fools! If you have a gaming bone in your body, or even if you don’t, go get it.

Quantum Mechanics is both hard and intellectually satisfying simultaneously.

God still doesn’t exist.

The TV spots for The Golden Compass make me angry: "Legend tells that the last Golden Compass – whoever can read it has the power to rule the universe… The quest for the compass begins". I’m… urgh. The book (which is actually called Northern Lights) is one of my absolute favourite books of all time, and it makes me angry to see it mutilated so. I hope that this trailer is only aimed at incredibly stupid obese Americans, able only deal with plots shallower than the pools of hideous drool collecting underneath their slack, lifeless mouths.

I want to see a documentary about Tony Blair on TV on Sunday, but I’m probably going to forget.

Going swimming by yourself is about 15 different kinds of dull.

I waste a frightening number of hours every single day.

I got the new Buffy Season 8 comic, it’s awesome, one of the best yet. I also picked up the "Tales of the Slayer" graphic novel, which is a collection of stories about slayers in the past, written by some of the people who wrote Buffy for TV. And it has more Fray, and Fray is just brilliant-fantastic.

I’m sure some other things’ll come to me later. There are so many things I want to tell people that I only think of while I’m by myself. It’s an annoying paradox is what it is.

Andy out.

So Halo 3 is already receding over the horizon – the Zero Punctuation review is up, and it’s spot-on accurate. The people throwing it perfect scores are indeed rather misguided.

This is a rather disturbing trend – two of the games which made my list of most anticipated games of the year were good, beautiful and well-crafted adventures, but lacking that crucial spark that sets the great apart from the merely good.

With any luck I can rely on Valve to buck this trend. As the tantalising countdown in Steam tells me, Episode Two and Portal will be released in about 7 and a half hours as I write this. By the time anyone actually reads it, it’ll probably be out. Their companion game, Team Fortress 2, is already out in beta and it’s The Shit.

It’s a finely-honed brilliant game, and on top of that it’s probably one of the best looking games of the year. It’s scary that the graphics shown in the “Meet the…” series of videos (which are very worth watching, incidentally) are actually representative of the in-game experience – the art style is simply breathtaking. It’s the perfect antidote to the “realism” dross that’s been infecting the genre for years. None of this annoying burst-fire-to-control-recoil nonsense, just the unashamed, glorious spin-up of the Heavy’s chaingun, his wondrous bullet-hose, the ever widening grin on his face as enemies are chewed up by the pain-stream. It’s good. Really good.

A reminder of why Valve is probably the best developer in the world – they understand a worrying wealth of things that most developers just don’t, like the importance of excellent writing and pacing, of using art to tell a story, or push an effect you’re going for. They excel in almost every area of game design, and they’ve got it down almost to a science rather than an art. You play something Valve’s done, and you know that almost every design decision they’ve taken is based on experimental evidence. It’s like that because they know that is the most fun.

Anyways, I’m kinda gutted that I have to be in lab tomorrow morning. I’m getting back here asap after lab finishes to play. The only question is which of the games to hit first, Portal or Episode Two.

PS. I’ve got a copy of each of HL2 and Ep1 to give away! So please ask if you want.

Except there is one. It’s swallowed my entire gaming history since moving out here, which means my entire set of Halo 3 achievements. I’m glad I didn’t get any I really had to work for, but it probably means I’m going to have to play the entire fucking thing all over again!

AAAAAARGH!

Fuck it, I’m gonna play TF2.

Still with me? Then I’ll begin.

So, what’s good, what’s bad. Often the same things. This is still Halo, so that includes everything from the two previous games. The Flood are still really, really dull to wade through, you can only carry two weapons at a time, and most of the story meat is delivered in cinematics.

Altogether I didn’t have much complaint about the gameplay, and it was really robust in a very Halo-y way. Everything’s been sharpened and refined a little, so the dual wielding interface is better, and there are a few new grenades types, and new “equipment” that has various effects, but for the most part that’s extraneous noise. I hardly ever actually picked a type of grenade for instance – for me grenades are for when you want an explosion to occur; the exact type of explosion is immaterial.

The main take-away from all of this is that if you liked Halo and Halo 2, you’ll probably like this.

On to story matters! I’m actually really disappointed. There’s a few gratuitous character deaths; clearly someone thought that being last in the series means it’s time to start killing people off. A main thrust of the story is that Cortana is in the clutches of the Gravemind and it’s all a bit sucky for her. This apparently translates to her transmitting a bunch of indecipherable nonsense to you that only makes sense if you’re clutching the Halo story bible. Seriously, her insane rantings require you to know some really peripheral stuff like Cortana being an AI made from the cloned brain of a-never-seen-in-the-game character, Dr Halsey, otherwise it just sounds like garbage.

Of course, Cortana’s absence would hit harder if not for the fact that her main role, being generally helpful and banterly with the Chief, is now undertaken by Miranda Keyes jabbering in your ear all the time, so you never really have a cause to miss Cortana anyway.

But never mind such trivial issues – the story itself feels like it’s made of Swiss cheese. There’s no explanation what-so-ever of how the Chief came to be falling from the sky at the start of the game having last been seen on Truth’s ship. The weirdass Ark portal on Earth is left entirely unexplained, with no hint of why it’s there. There’s barely a mention that the human race is on the verge of extinction, no hint of this being a desperate last stand. The “fight for Earth” feels entirely limp and pathetic.

Soldiers quip about it being taken out of your salary when you prang a Warthog, for instance. Maybe it was intended to be black humour, but it was delivered all wrong, and so you get a serious lack of any kind of gravitas. I’m not sure I could be so cheery if I was one of the last few remaining human beings. Apparently the entire defence of Earth is being undertaken by about 50 people, or at least that’s what it feels like; according to the game’s fiction the Covenant has been a threat for 30 years, and they’ve made no attempt to make it possible to fully mobilise the population of Earth?

Not to mention that the resolution of the plot MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. They wipe out the Flood by firing a replica of the Halo that was destroyed in the first game being built at the Ark. I can see why they did it; it gives the plot a nice, halo-esque even feeling of circularity, and they probably couldn’t think of anything better. Of course, this relies on the Gravemind, the Flood’s collective super-intelligence, being retarded enough to take every single member of the Flood to the Ark instead of consuming the Galaxy. Jesus fucking Christ.

Never mind that, a handful of unbelievably cryptic hints aside, there’s no explanation of why the Forerunners left the Flood alive, what the fuck they were doing with the Halos anyway, or hell, even what the fuck that weird planet at the centre of the Ark was. Apparently human beings are the “children of the Forerunners” and that’s apparently the reason the Covenant were trying to wipe us out, which apparently is being treated as Awesome New Information, but was actually something you could figure out fairly easily from the first game given that the information presented in this game was entirely fucking insubstantial. There’s absolutely no clarification on what “children of the Forerunners” actually means, and nobody ever thinks to ask.

No doubt some smug git at Bungie thinks that he’s terribly clever weaving this huge story and then putting only a tiny, random and nonsensical sliver into the games themselves. The rest, it would seem, is for a no doubt endless stream of spin-off media and tie-in novels. Then you watch the “Making of” video on the story and see this was indeed entirely a case of the smug-gitted-ness. They genuinely believe they’re telling a compelling story played out through the medium of cinematics and “viginettes” (translation: Half-Life-esque scripted sequences). I especially like the characterisation of the latter as a compelling innovation.

Game developers: pull your heads out of your collective arses and play the Half-Life games and then try and figure out what exactly you’re doing wrong. Seriously, it’s not fucking hard. Exposition is not a dirty word. Your story is allowed to be vague without being nonsensical. Characters are indeed allowed to ask 343 just exactly what the fuck is going on once in a while. Never mind sodding Cortana being inside the core of Halo and finding out precisely nothing.

Basically, it boils down to this – if you’re the kind of person who skips the cinematics anyway to blow more shit up, then everything’s fine. Otherwise you’re going to find the story lacking. Insipid boom-fest indeed.

Maybe my standards are just too high, but I feel like this year’s crop of highly-hyped games are just not as great as some people make them out to be. I’m just praying that the Orange Box games (Episode 2, TF2, Portal) don’t let me down. I have faith that Valve, I think still the only company who have the good sense to hire dedicated writers rather than relying on the amateurish literary pretensions of computer programmers, will actually deliver a story and experience with some actual meat.

In summary of what I can remember, I lazed about a worryingly large amount, did no work, earned no money, went out a few times, but otherwise wasted weeks of my precious youth. Urgh, sounds worse when I say it like that.

Anyways, I played through Bioshock, and some of my thoughts are vaguely congruent with this here video, which is just too funny for words to quite capture:

He is quite right. Bioshock is probably going to be one of the best games of the year, a few other ones not withstanding. This isn’t a reflection so much on the quality of Bioshock per se, and more on the fact that practically nothing good has come out for ages. Seriously, can you remember the last really awesome game that came out? I sure as hell can’t.

It’s overly heavy on exposition, the AI isn’t that good, the ghost sequences make no kind of logical sense, the Vitachambers (think instant respawn) make whupping the hell out of everything too easy. It picks up towards the end though, where you start to get a bit more variety into your powers. I’m not full of hate – the art direction is stunning, and some of the individual set-pieces are breathtaking. The concept of the Little Sister / Big Daddy is wonderful, and something I would love to see more of in games.

Little Sisters are little girls who have been turned into monsters; they prowl Rapture extracting Adam (the resource needed to hop yourself up on genetic goodies like fireballs) from the bodies of dead enemies. This makes them somewhat of a target, as they carry lots and lots of Adam, so they’re protected by the huge Big Daddies. Anyways, as long as you don’t attack them, they are neutral to you, and you get lots of interesting behaviours, like the Little Sister pointing at you in fear if you get too close, that kind of thing.

In those details, it’s a good game, but the number of niggling complaints just stacks up. Each weapon has a stupid number of additional ammo types, and couple this with all your plasmid (basically magical powers) types it gets really hard to manage. The slavish devotion to the System Shock 2 archetype is justifiably mocked, it’s harmed what this game could have been.

Anyways, Bioshock is a game that’s worth getting, assuming that its monstrous system requirements don’t melt your PC into a foul smelling pool of ruined electronics.

In other news… (as promised)

• Went for a trip up to Liverpool way to see Niro for his B’day BBQ and met up with the Uni people. It was awesometastic, and therefore deserves its own entry. All in good time, my pretties.
• And next week I’m going on holiday to Majorca with Uni people. Again, probably going to rock.
• The Orange Box has been released for purchase on Steam. It’s about £25, and comes with Half-Life 2, Episode One, Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. It’s scarily good value, and all the games in it look brilliant. I’ve already cracked and bought it. Shame I’m on holiday next week when the TF2 beta starts. Anyways, anyone want a spare copy of HL2 and Ep1 on the 9th of October? They’re up for grabs.

Now, I shall retire to my bed to contemplate deeper mysteries, and let Sleep overtake my weary eyes. Until we meet again.

What I actually want to write about is how the next few months is looking really awesome for games.

1. Bioshock. It hits our noble shores on August 24th, and it’s looking eyeball-meltingly good. PC Gamer gave it 95%, which makes it the best game released since Half-Life 2 rocked our collective socks. It looks gorgeous, the gameplay sounds amazing, and the story is apparently so good, you absolutely must not let anyone spoil you on pain of death. I absolutely can’t wait.
2. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Strogg vs. Human in gigantic futuristic vehicular warfare. I’m absolutely gutted I’ve missed a slot on the open beta. Apparently the full game will arrive come September.
3. The Orange Box. Valve’s cluster-bomb of game-wonder, due for October 12th. HL2: Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. Each one of these is worthy of intense anticipation individually. The fact that they’re dropping on the same day as part of the same package is breathtaking. The mind-bending Euclid-defying puzzleness of Portal, the beautifully insane stylisation of TF2′s multiplayer mayhem, and the continuation of the epic HL2 story. It’s going to be good. It’s Valve.
4. Crysis. Have you seen how beautiful this game is? Destructible trees. You can blow up trees. On a tropical island.
5. Left 4 Dead. Another game from the Valve stable, as it were. Zombie co-op mayhem with persistent stats. This is the game LAN parties were made for. All 4 (human team) players in a single room, yelling at each other, freaking out at an unexpected ambush, rescuing downed comrades. Working together and staying alive.

In other news, iD have released practically every game they’ve ever made on Steam. It’s pretty bonkers. Valve are also releasing the Steam Community beta next week. By the use of some judicious hackery, some people have gotten an early sneak peak. Looks like interesting stuff, adding non-Steam games to your list, using Steam Community features in all games – nuts. Could put a dent into Xfire, this lot.