E3 Begins

Hi all, and welcome to my entirely biased coverage of E3 2007. The following couple of posts will detail news and announcements from E3 that I deem worthy of my comment.

E3 kicks off at 1:30pm today (Wednesday) for us in Australia, and does so with Microsoft's press conference. We can expect gloating about sales, the reshowing of ridiculous peripherals, and possibly some more gloating, this time about exclusive games. Oh, and lots and lots of Halo 3.

To be honest, I hate Microsoft's gaming division. Xbox360 is a reasonable gaming platform and has lots of games, but their tactics are downright dirty. My big gripe for the day is that they've secured exclusivity for Beautiful Katamari - a game that was multiplatform, and that I was planning to buy as soon as it became available for my Playstation 3. It was coming to 360 anyway - but now it's NOT coming to PS3. Add to that the question of Metal Gear Solid 4 going multiplatform, and I'd suggest there's a heck of a lot of money being thrown around at the moment to try and ensure Sony doesn't get back on top of this generation of games consoles.

Along that line, I'd like also to throw my 2 cents into the "multiplatform is good for everyone!" argument, in case I haven't already. I see in particular a lot of Xbox 360 fans saying this when previous Playstation exclusive titles go multiplatform. However, I don't see them complaining when Microsoft pays $50 mil to secure exclusive GTA content. Or when they pay off Namco to drop Playstation 3 from Beautiful Katamari's platform line-up. Multiplatform is only good for owners of the currently dominant console. For those who own the currently less dominant console(s), multiplatform means there are less compelling reasons for others to buy the same console they did, which means a lower install base, and thus less incentive for developers to develop games for it. Multiplatform games, especially big name titles, mean a short-term gain for gamers who already have a lot of titles with a long-term loss for those who don't; for those who've invested in the non-dominant platform (read: me). The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

Anyway - stay tuned for updates if you're too bored to read games-related media for yourself. I'll give you the lowdown on all the gloating following the press conference this afternoon.

lolz

Click the piccy to see context, but generally - that's just tops. LoLz!

Mistake

Before I left home this morning, I thought to myself:

"Hmm, I'm feeling a little under the weather. Maybe I should bring some Panadol to work with me today."

And then, I didn't. Obviously I need an opera singer.



(You all know the whole story was just an excuse to post this video, right? Right?)

Random post

"In our real lives, there's also always the next level we're chasing after....But really, there are few blessings in life that are quite so great as to be able to spend one's days laboring creatively in the service of something that one genuinely loves. This is really the dream all game creators are living with all the time."
- Alex Rigopulos, Harmonix Music Systems

I believe this quote is from a keynote at GDC06. With E3 '07 coming up I thought it was worth posting. I've had it sitting on my desktop for a while. It just... sounds good. It's sort of the explanation of where I wish I was. And hey - yay for E3!

On a different note, I've just deleted a whole lot of long draft posts from my blogger account. Most of them were disections of topics I feel strongly about - science vs. God, family, politics, etc. Mostly they were motivated by something I'd read and felt compelled to respond. However, I deleted them because of the realisation that my posting them achieves nothing. I can have very little impact on anything that goes beyond my immediate circle of influence. So I give up. I think that's why I've stopped posting so much on here. Random life events aren't something people care about reading, and the rants I post have little affect on anything.

I'll probably post more family-related stuff once the new bubba arrives, but beyond that... I don't know.

BSOD-ing Fun.

Today is the second-last day that Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 will run on the two machines I have it installed on. At the end of tomorrow, it will expire and will only be able to boot for 2 hours at a time to enable data retrieval - something I must admit I am quite glad about. The two machines are my work PC, and my home PC. At home, I plan to install a copy of Vista RTM that I have handy, and try and purchase a license within the max 120 days you can evaluate it for. At work, I have an install of XP on a secondary partition, so my plan is to simply roll back to that. However, fate would not have it that way...

This morning, I decided to get stuck straight into rolling back my PC. The next time I'll be in the office is next Monday, and I really wanted to have this resolved prior to Vista switching into "2 hours at a time" mode. So I copied across all the relevant data I could find, cleared my desktop and got to that point where I decided that I no longer needed Vista. So I switched the boot manager to default to XP, and rebooted my machine. On launching into my old WinXP install, I discovered there was a small problem that could make the system unstable on startup. So, I did some quick clicking and found a system update I needed to resolve the issue. At this point, someone in my office asked me if I'd like a cup of coffee. This is relevant, and in a moment, you'll see why. I downloaded the update, and clicked to install. It did it's system checks and started to install, when suddenly...

*click*

The screen went blank, and the coffee which had been noisily bubbling in the background went quiet. I hurried over to our switch box, and saw that the circuit breaker had tripped. Oh bugger. I look back - there's coffee everywhere. The coffee machine had gone somewhat mental and bubbled over, tripping the circuit breaker in the process. I quickly switched the breaker back on, and hurried over to my machine. As it moved to the XP boot screen I breathed a sigh of relief - but unfortunately, too soon. The system rebooted. And then it did it again. And again. I finally woke up enough to realise something was wrong, and set Windows not to reboot on error. The next time, I was greeted by a glaring great BSOD with the message "BOOT_DISK_UNMOUNTABLE".

Oh...

Crap.

So I boot into the recovery console using a copy of XP I have lying around, but unfortunately it won't let me. I can only log on to the Vista install, and by default Vista uses a random Administrator password. Useful.So I start hunting around for NTFS-enabled boot disks so that I can do a disk repair. Can't find any, but stumble across Bart's PE. Having used Windows PE before, I know this is my saviour, so I download it and use a Win2003Srv virtual machine on my Mac to create the CD. Once I boot it up on my Windows box, I start a disc check and the errors it's fixing start to fill up the screen. About half an hour later, it finishes. I reboot... I hold my breath... and...

WOOOOHOOOO!!!! IT LIVES!!!! :D

Anyway, moral of the story is that Bart is my new hero. And could be yours too. I recommend anyone who has vague technical competence and uses Windows beyond WinME should have a PE disk lying around, and Bart's is free and easy to use. Having a functioning (while very, very limited) Windows install on a bootable CD is just awesome, and allows you to fix stuff you otherwise couldn't.

Anyway, rant done. Computer works. Back to work I guess.