Two Slashes

When people think back to all the time they spent playing video games as a kid, they think back to all the time they wasted trying to rescue the princess in Super Mario Bros. or how many times they defeated the Covenant in Halo.  There have to be a few games they considered crap and played only briefly, though, right?  Those games they thought sounded interesting, but were perhaps too good to be true, or picked up from a bargain bin in hopes of getting a cheap thrill, then sold right back to the used game store of their choice?  Why don’t they mention those?

In an effort to share that side of my life as a non-gamer with you, as well as these horrible excuses for entertainment, I’ve decided that I’m going to try and review old and lame games once in a while throughout the summer as a semi-regular feature.  (Of course, I have many to choose from thanks to my siblings, but I’d rather review games you had an interest in, so feel free to leave suggestions in the comments or my e-mail inbox.)

Seriously, doesn't this read as Speedball Tournament 2?

This week’s game is Speedball 2 Tournament, Speedball Tournament 2, or something of the sort, and it comes from November of 2007.  (Alright, so it’s hardly old, but I doubt you’d heard of it until just now.)  I really can’t figure the name out, because the logo clearly reads Speedball Tournament (to me at least), but Wikipedia, Steam, and most other sites seem to agree on the first version.  To avoid having to worry about that, I’m just going to refer to it as Speedball.

I wouldn’t have even known about the existence of this game if a friend of mine hadn’t found an online magazine giving away CD keys (and informed me that the game was on Steam, which means this game will be following me to the grave).  I can’t say it’s a bad thing, because I can’t argue with free stuff, but I’m sure they could have picked a better game to give away.  Obviously, this also means that I have never played the original.

If I had to sum this game up in as few words as possible, I would call it the older-teen equivalent to the Backyard series for little kids.  Essentially, it’s the same thing as a game of soccer, except made to be all futuristic, the characters carry the ball rather than kicking it up the field, and there’s definitely some language I wouldn’t expect to find in a kids game going on in here.  There are even little power-ups all over the field.  And, just to take the name into consideration (as well as the opening video and all of the violence), you could similarly compare the game to Unreal Tournament with a metal ball instead of Redeemers and a closed-in pit rather than Morpheus.

Speaking of fields, there are four (at least, four that are unlocked when you start the game, and I’m not expecting there to be any more) for you to play on.  They call come complete with a cute little animated crowd cheering you (or the other team, you don’t really know, do you?) on and booing and cheering as appropriate.  There’s not much to them, because, little things like the general shape of the outer stadium (which you won’t see) aside, there isn’t that much difference between the four of them.

The controls aren’t that hard to pick up, though you’re probably going to resort to what I did and just start clicking buttons and pounding on the spacebar in hopes of watching the little animated characters do something.  It won me a match or two, but it probably isn’t what the developers were intending for you to do.

The difficulty levels are definitely labeled appropriately.  Easy made it seem like the AI wasn’t even on half the time, but step it up to advanced and suddenly you won’t have to worry about who’s carrying the ball, because it most certainly won’t be you.  Unfortunately, it’s a little disheartening to watch the computer score so easily against you in so little time (or maybe I just play a poor defense), which is another reason to put it down rather quickly.

Given that I couldn’t even beat the computer AI, I didn’t want to bother spending the time checking out the multiplayer aspect of the game.  Given that the game’s rated so poorly on MetaCritic (and it’s not hard for me to see why), there probably aren’t that many people sticking around waiting for someone to play.  Of course, there’s some law that states that there’s that one devoted fan signed in and waiting for someone to play against, but he or she will have to keep on waiting, because that most certainly won’t be me.

If there’s one redeeming quality to the game, it’s the music.  It’s of a techno-rock variety, and it’s not that bad to listen to (or perhaps it’s just me). It reminds me more than a little of the older Need for Speed games (think Porsche Unleashed or older).  I may actually go through the effort of ripping it out at some point just to have something more to listen to while I’m doing homework or coding.  But we’ll see.

Would I play this game again?  Maybe.  But I’d probably rather play Half-Life 2, or at least something with a little more polish.  For the little time I’ve actually bothered to play this game, I’d probably give it somewhere around a 5 out of 10.  (Note to self:  Come up with witty grade chart for next review.)

If you’re interested in getting a copy of Speedball for yourself, you can pick a copy up on Steam for $20.

Wanted:  two hours of my life back.  Wasted them watching S.Darko, looking for someone with time machine or means to reclaim time.  Will compensate handsomely.  Please contact me if you can help.  If you can’t help, I’d like to take this moment to warn of potential spoiler alerts for both Darko movies.

It’s funny how something you had just a little hope for (just a little, mind you) can turn out to be so disappointing.

Somewhere around a year and a half ago, I was introduced to Donnie Darko by a bunch of guys in my dorm.  We watched one or two movies (occasionally as many as five) every Friday night, with our choices usually being something at least one person in the group hadn’t seen before.  It worked out well, because the movies were all enjoyable, and we tended to lean towards the thought-warping titles (think The Matrix if you need a well-known example) more than the cheesy action flicks.  (Alright, maybe we had a Die Hard marathon in there at some point, but…well, yippie ki yay, I seem to be running off in tangents here.)

Is it me, or does the smaller "S" almost remove the idea that this is about Samantha rather than Donnie?

To quit beating around the bush, suffice it to say that I enjoyed Donnie Darko at least as much as any other movie I watched with that group.  It had a certain ring to it that, at some level, I hoped would be carried on, though I knew that ultimately any attempt to extend the story would ruin the mystique, just as the Wachowskis are blamed for doing with The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions.  And that’s where S.Darko, and the point of this post, come into play, as they do just the same thing.

I’ll try not to give too much away as far as this review goes, but suffice it to say that I found the film rather ridiculous right from the get-go.  The movie starts off with a Star Wars-esque block of text scrolling up the screen to give you the backstory for the film, though I felt that it really didn’t do much explaining:

Middlesex, Virginia. 1988.

Donnie Darko was killed when a jet engine fell from the sky and crushed him while he was sleeping.  The government never located the plane from which the engine fell, nor did they even admit the incident ever occurred.  But that was just the beginning of the tragedy…and the mystery.

Now, 7 years later, Donnie’s youngest sister, Samantha, seemingly alone and lost in the world, has run away from a home shattered by the death of her brother.  Drowning in sadness and unable to dream, she has drifted deeper and deeper into the darkness of her sleep.  And when darkness consumes the starlight, nightmares rule the night.

The first pair of sentences neatly sums up the first movie for those who never saw it.  Except for, you know, the whole government admission part.  (Weren’t those workers there removing the engine and investigating at the end of the movie? )  Ignoring that nasty, comma-filled sentence about Samantha running away, the rest of this blurb reads exactly like I would expect it to if I were watching a horror film.  (That’s funny, I don’t see ‘horror’ listed at IMDB.)  “And when darkness consumes the starlight, nightmares rule the night…”?  Seriously?

Of course, that’s just the first few seconds of the movie.  Things don’t get much better, as just about everything has some special effect to “enhance” it (extreme overuse of time-rewinds, anyone?), and they reuse a lot of the concepts from Donnie Darko so blatantly that it gets hard to tell whether any original content even went into this film.  There are also numerous plot holes, such as how Roberta Sparrow’s book comes to be in Samantha’s ownership as it was never given to Donnie in the first place (thinking through the timeline of the first movie).

This isn't the best pair of images to be using for a comparison, but they look similar to me (compensating for the age difference, of course). Yeah, Jim, I'm just as surprised as you are.

Some of the actor choices seem almost intentionally designed to get your memory drawn elsewhere.  One character bears (what I call) a strong resemblance to Jake Gyllenhaal, while another looks almost like a younger version of Jim Carrey in his role as Edward Nygma (“The Riddler”) from Batman Forever.  In one scene of the movie, I almost want to say there’s a slight resemblance to Javier Bardem in there, too.

At times, I also got a subtle preachy vibe, almost like the movie was trying to be an infomercial for God rather than a source of entertainment (HAHA!  HA! Ha…ha…eh…), which I found an amusing juxtaposition with the supposed supernatural components of the film.  I couldn’t identify exactly what the writers were trying to go for given what little development the characters involved went through, but it certainly could have used a little work.

In short, I was rather disappointed with the movie from all aspects.  It’s not the worst thing I’ve seen, but I would much rather watch something else.  If I had to place it on a scale somewhere, it would probably land between “I’d rather walk around in public wearing a bikini swimsuit” and “I’d rather listen to Ben Stein sing in the shower.”  (I love arbitrary scales, don’t you?)

Oh, and if you want a lesson in how NOT to design your user interface, you should check out the movie’s web site.  I particularly recommend trying to read the synopsis and cast lists they provide in their entirety without shooting yourself.

If you’re reading this, the topic of Windows 7 has probably already been worn so thin it’s liable to be used as the cling-wrap protecting your next party dish.  If it has, I apologize in advance.  If it hasn’t…well, I’ll put up money towards the first person who isn’t tired of a Microsoft-branded discussion by the end of this.  Oh, and the Geeky categorization?  It’s been earned at least three times over in this post, so avoid at all costs if you don’t want to be wearing a confused look for the next month.

The release candidate for the next version of the must-have-if-you-work-in-an-office-setting operating system has been put out and the critiques are already coming in.  (In short, they can be summed up as saying that Windows 7 is the better-looking younger brother to Windows Vista, though they’re both of about equal intelligence, but that’s beside the point.)

The group of people I’ve been most concerned with hearing from regarding the operating system upgrade is security researchers.  Given that this is a field I take  a reasonable amount of interest in, I’m actually rather alarmed that the only topic I seem to be watching pop up is the same “issue” that’s plagued Windows for over a decade.  And yes, those quotation marks are intentional and completely reasonable.

Once upon a time, there was DOS and Windows 3.1.  You were limited to 11-character filenames in the “8-dot-3″ format, where the first 8 characters were a user-specified name for the file and the last three were an extension denoting the type of file it was.  Then came Windows 95, and lo and behold the world was amazed that you could have these amazing 255-character filenames (which were really just an overlay to the old 8-dot-3 system) and give your files reasonably descriptive names!  And you could use punctuation (granted that the punctuation you wanted wasn’t a question mark, backslash, forward slash, pipe, or any of another two or three characters) too, which made things even better!  Sure, the file extensions were still there (and are to this day, as is the legacy 8-dot-3 filename), but nobody complained for they could name their files “My Letter To My Boss About Me Quitting Next Week.doc” and all was right with the world.

Of course, nobody complained until this file extension voodoo was abused.  You see, Windows defaults to a setting where you don’t have to see those ugly file extensions because they take up screen space and confuse newbies.  And, in my book, it’s a reasonable expectation that most people don’t want to see them.  (For the record, I turn this functionality off, but that’s a whole different topic.)

With the advent of the Internet, people (even the newbies) have been blindly trained to start recognizing certain file extensions for what they are anyway, even if they aren’t technically inclined to do so.  For example, even if you aren’t a geek, I’m sure you know what a .jpg, .gif, .doc, or .zip at the end of a filename denotes.  It’s useful knowledge, even for someone who prefers things that Just Work™.

Expanding this same notion to the contents of a user’s local files, that user is just as unafraid and accepting of seeing .jpg as they are online to the point where they don’t even think twice.  After all, what’s the worst thing that could come out of an image?  Porn?  An old photograph of Aunt Millie?

If you answered in the affirmative to either of those two suggestions, most people would urge you to jump off of the nearest highway overpass, though I’ll accept either of those as correct answers.  This giant group of security researchers, some of whom work for the same companies that ultimately provide the software your favorite pimply-faced Geek Squad employee will be installing on your next PC, have nothing better to do with their time than to complain about a well-intentioned feature.

I cannot count (on one hand, at least) the number of articles I have seen recently (like this one) that cry “Wolf!” over a trivial morsel like hiding file extensions only to have a piece of malware call itself “AuntMillie.jpg.exe.”  And here’s where my post title comes into play.  Is it Microsoft’s fault for adding what amounts to a (in my opinion) useful feature?  Is it the Symantec and McAfee developers (to name the recognizable duo, though just about any security suite provider should be included here) who kindly will alert you that you installed Cain (and then promptly remove it) but refuse to sound an alarm or do anything about legitimate malware (I’ve had this issue)?  Is it the end user for not disabling the feature and being vigilant and knowing what they’re doing?

I suppose we’ve become too dependent on file extensions for me to suggest that Microsoft ditch the idea, join the Unix crowd, and start using the contents of the file to figure out what it is rather than its name.  For example, web servers will use the file extension to determine what type of file you’re requesting and whether anything needs to be done (like executing it) before it gets passed along to the end user.  Granted, file extension hackery can be fun (who knew), but it would be a small price to pay (and the files would still be accessible by other applications, so it really doesn’t even ruin the fun).

However, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to demand why these same security gurus are not busy including a feature of their own to warn of questionably-named files.  I can think of few legitimate reasons for someone to have two or more extensions appended to their filename, so warning of files that end in “.txt.exe” on creation or execution probably isn’t a bad idea.

And to think that I've done more work in thirty seconds with the Visual Studio form designer than the security gurus have in over a decade. (For the technical: Yes, I realize that user conventions would switch the position of these buttons. However, you don't want anyone going to the "Yes" button out of habit, do you?)

If I wasn’t starting my final exams tomorrow, I’d probably write a proof-of-concept that accomplished this simply because I don’t know of anything similar that already exists.  (On the other hand, it is something for me to work on rather than study… )

For a group of security-focused people, their intentions are in approximately the right place.  However, they seem to be forgetting that there’s more to computing (and life) than three or four extra characters on a screen and the bright intentions of a few developers in Redmond.

(Cripes, and to think I would be writing over one thousand words in defense of Microsoft…  I really must be off my rocker.)