November 5, 2007
xkcd, fullyramblomatic & Zero Punctuation
I found this little gem of a webcomic through the fullyramblomatic blog of Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, independent game designer, reviewer and creator of the now infamous Zero Punctuation game reviews
As a comic xkcd covers some pretty sophisticated ideas about everything from romance to hard core math and everything in between
Many of the strips really hit home (although, I'd probably go hunting to find a fulgurite before attempting to make one), especially ones like this about "Small Talk".
However, this comic is my absolute favorite:
P.S. Don't forget to visit the site and check the hover tags for each comic!
dreamslaughter and Burn This Book
It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of cool books and one of the coolest books that I've found in ages is "Burn This Book" by dreamslaughter. This completely bodacious collection of seditious quotes suitable for burning should be compulsory reading for any person that believes in freedom.
Get yours today!
P.S. If you're ordering from Canuckia (like yours truly), just drop the author a note to arrange shipping, as the Paypal order page lists the US of A as the only shipping destination.
Odd Ballz
My buddy Draxenn posted a comic recently based on another of my real life market adventures!
Actually, the conversation was more like "It's a dodechedron {pause as potential customer closely examines, then drops ball} That's a Platonic solid consisting of twelve faces, not a communicable disease!"
But apparently even my regular verbosity was too acute to be immortalized as a web comic! LOL
So now all I'm allowed to say at my able is "I make... Dodeca.. err... Stress Balls, yes, that's the ticket, Stress Balls!"
November 1, 2007
Hellgate London plus EA Download Manager = Hell on Earth!
Ok, so I'm a liar and couldn't help myself from trying out the full version of "Hellgate London", I mean, who cares about all the multi-player stuff, right? I just want to experience the single-player storyline.
But, guess what? More "fun" abounds with even trying to get the single player version of Hellgate London to run!
However, this time it's not even a technical problem with the game that's stopping me from playing, it's some kind of glitch with Electronic Arts' Download Manager (EA Download Manager).
Now, normally I would just wait until the next time I was in the city to buy a game, but I wanted to use some spare Paypal money I had laying around to purchase Hellgate London, so I decided to try EA's online store, just for the experience. I mean, downloadable content is the wave of the future, isn't it? Valve's Steam network seems to be crunching right along, so why not try the "next generation" of content delivery.
The purchase was super smooth, accomplished through my old buddies at Digital River, install code was received no problem, then came the download, which had to be accomplished through the EA Download Manager, a "quick" 20mb download and simple install later and I was ready to rock. Just enter my EA account information and there's my game, ready to be downloaded at the click of a button. The total size of the program was nearly 7 gigs, which came through in under 12 hours, "not bad", I though. A click to start the install, enter some information, create a Hellgate London account and "poof", we're ready for some hardcore demon slaying action!
I double-click the icon and have 4 choices, "Single Player", "Multiplay", "Visit Website" and "Exit". Now, at this point, I had closed the EA Download Manager, so I was sort of interested to note that it popped back up in my system try after trying to start the Single Player game. And then… Voila! Nothing but an error message:
"The game can not start. In order to launch this game, please login to the EA Download Manager to verify your ownership, then try again."
Aha! I think to myself, the download manager also acts as a copy protection scheme, which makes sense, since there's no DVD to verify ownership. Makes sense, except, what the hell do I do now? LOL!
As always, I jumped on Google, plugged in the error and started reading. Interestingly enough, it doesn't seem to be ~that~ common, just a few quick forum messages with replies like "Ya, nobody around here trusts EA's download manager, so we don't know how to help."
Great! So, on to tech support for Hellgate London and directly for EA, some quick searches and once again, Voila! Nothing… Neither Flagship's tech support, nor EA's tech support has any mention of this particular error, beyond connection issues, which I'm definitely not having, as the EA Download Manager logs into my EA account no problem.
I even went to the extent of firing up my trusty copy of Sysinternals TCPView, just to get an idea about what the EA Download Manager was up to. Apparently it makes a secure connection to link.ea.com, ok, again, makes sense, they have to double-check my account against my serial number, etc… A quick ping check later and I know that link.ea.com is working just fine, so what the hell is happening?
I have no idea! But, interestingly enough, the Multi-Player option works without a hitch, which means that the EA Download Manager doesn't check the multiplayer executable, in fact, checking the system folders, we see that there are a total of four executable versions of Hellgate London, with single and multi-player options for DirectX 9 (which I'm using, since I absolutely refuse to corrupt my system with Vista) and DirectX 10.
I guess it makes sense not to check the multi-player version, as you have to log-in to your account, which is linked to your serial number, to play. So basically, the EA Download Manager, acts like a log in check for the single player version.
Just for fun, I tried un-installing the EA Download Manager and then running both versions of the game. The multi-player executable still ran without a hitch, but the single player executable just died, without even producing an error message. I expected at least a note like "You must have the EA Download Manager installed to play this game", but nada! That's just shoddy programming in my ever so humble opinion!
So, what am I going to do? Well, at the moment I'm waiting to hear back from EA and Flagship's tech support, if the single player game doesn't run, then I feel that I'm entitled to a refund, so we'll see what happens, I'll keep you posted!
In the meantime, here's to hoping that some friendly sorts will find a way of creating either a faux version of EA's Download Manager or executables for Hellgate London that bypass the EA Download Manager check. Yes, you read it here, I'm actually hoping that a crack will allow me to play my legally purchased software, yeesh, what has the world come to!
April 2008