RPG Articles

So, my video card overheated, presumably, and rebooted my computer. After de-gunking it I started the machine up, at which point Windows wanted to run chkdsk. Null sweat, right? So, it corrects some indexes, and I proceed to login. I’m waiting. Waiting. Waiting some more.

An error pops up that it can’t load the user registry hives. Fuck? I hit ok on these, and it continues to load. The desktop is all clean, aside from icons from All Users, and nothing it right. It’s a blank profile, but the user name shows my login name.

I begin sweating over lost folders and email. Looking in Documents and Settings, I see my email, but it isn’t lining up with what Thunderbird is saying. An lo, there’s my Desktop stuff, in the Desktop folder, but not on my Desktop. WTF?

Poking around I notice that I’m working from Documents and Settings\TEMP. Rather than loading a default ntuser into my profile, it decided to make a temporary profile (that disappears upon logging out, I might add), that appears to be mine without explaining any of the crap it just did.

Copy the default ntuser files into my real profile, and I’m up and running. What the hell man? Why would your failure mode be to lie to me?

The same way I came in: Naked, screaming, and being cut out of something.

This is something I just worked through, and thought I’d share it to anyone that happens along. If you have a samba share that starts acting really weird, as in authentication loops or path not found messages, try looking for a line like this-

msdfs proxy = no

Seems valid, doesn’t it? Yet, having this line in there, which caused no problems for the last 2 years, screwed me. Commenting it out resolved everything.

Weird huh?

So, I just finished playing the first couple levels of a game called El Matador. I’d never heard of it, like ever, but saw the title and decided to try it.

You play some sort of DEA officer, starting in Miami and quickly moving on to Colombia. The game was listed as “stealth action”, but they must have a different definition of stealth than I do. Perhaps theirs is more along the lines of “shoot waves of people”. Anyway, it’s a 3rd person shooter.

It actually looks pretty good, and runs pretty well even on my aging system. The shadows are very granular without AA, so you should try to run it with that on.

The controls are pretty standard, but could have used a few extras. Namely, leaning and a freaking flashlight. I usually have a flashlight, and I’m not hunting armed retards in dark hallways.

The game features bullet time, implemented almost identically to Max Payne. It isn’t as useful as Max’s, but the gauge refills pretty quickly. You start off with a pistol of some kind and an AK. I found the choice of the AK odd for an American force, but what the hell do I know? The first room isn’t too hard, but there’s a lot of shooting and none of the hand holding typically found in any game these days. So, that’s good so far. Assault weapons, straight into action, and the ability to slow it down to line those shots up. Nice.

Then I started dying. A lot. So did my men, but they can only kill a guy if they’re all shooting at him for about a minute, so, ya’ know, that’s negligible. The guys shooting were plenty challenging, all on their own, but it was the grenades that almost made me not want to see the next stage. I can understand a group of hardcore criminals having between, say, 1 and 6 grenades, but an unrelenting barrage of them is unacceptable. And they’re cripplingly powerful, destroying legions of men. Until I get one, then they’re like K-Mart grenades or something. Maybe my cop hands are all sweaty and the moisture reduces their strength. I don’t know.

Eventually I make it through the death zone and end up under the building, which was a club of some kind. The dispatch lady is all freaked out, saying “We don’t have any floorplans for beneath the building!”, which was retarded since it isn’t like I had a map or guide of any kind up to this point. Oh, and the voices aren’t that bad, but the dialogue is best left to the imagination.

So, kill more dudes, get more ammo. There’s some kind of boss battle with a guy in a stairwell. Wasn’t all that hard and I got a machine gun out of the deal.

More dudes. Find some chick, leave the other cop with her. Fight another boss. This guy was King Hippo tubby, but running around like a meth-chicken, so I unloaded the machine gun on him.

So on. Find a dead DEA team at the bottom of what appears to be a well. I can only imagine that the script of the game punished them into self-awareness, and into the merciful arms of group suicide.

Last boss battle for the intro level. This guy is a skinny, sort of fruity albino man in a white suit, with a pretty ordinary looking pistol. Thus far it takes at least 4 uzis or better to take me down, not that such a situation is rare or anything. Still. He leans around the corner (that bastard is rubbing it in my eye!), and shoots. All of my armor evaporates. What the hell? Who made this gun? Satan? God himself? Is this man the chosen one gone wrong? Whatever the case I end up quickloading time after time. Finally the AK of Justice and all 5 of my sad grenades take him down.

Then you go to Bogota for some reason, and inevitably end up shooting a lot of people. The dialogue here is awful, but the action has been less annoying.

Pros-

Cheap. You can grab this thing for like $6 off Amazon. No, I’m not linking to it, find it yourself.

Entertainingly fast paced, very arcade style gameplay.

Cons-

Very arcade style. You die constantly.

Can’t lean, so you have to do special dances with the mouse to see exactly how many dudes will be killing you.

When you reload a save, your weapons always default to burst fire. Seeing as burst fire makes you a millionty percent less accurate, this is not something I desire.

Anyway, if you’re bored and come across this title, try it out. If you crave hearing lines that make the latest Die Hard sound like, well, a somewhat better movie, then feel free to order it. I think there’s a demo out there somewhere too.

I’ve read a fair amount of Koontz books, and the response I have is damned near binary. We have the morose quasi-religious books, and the hectic adventure novels. The Husband isn’t really any different, in that it completely fails to engage and is morose. There’s some half-hearted spirituality, but it’s almost as muddled and ignorable as that sort of thing is in real life.

What’s it about? Well, some dude, Mitch, he runs a small landscaping business, receives a call from some people saying that they’ve kidnapped his wife, and he has 60 hours, I think it was, to come up with 2 million dollars. Sounds like an adventure, doesn’t it? Tragically no, it’s just boring crap. You’re made to assume that Mitch is likeable and a good sort, but there really isn’t anything in the story to help convince you of that. It’d be like me introducing my roommate to people by saying “He’s very likeable!”, then refusing to let you talk to him.

Anyway. We plod along, waiting for the action to pick up or the characters to get more interesting. There’s some half-assed ode or jab or something at Running With Scissors in there, in the form of Mitch’s parents. The idea wasn’t bad, but the execution was way hard to swallow and they come off as little more than a paragraph that could be boiled down to “Hey, I read that book. Those people were crazy.”.

Then we get to the bad guys. Replace “likeable” in my roommate example with “evil” and you’ll get the idea.

I’d suggest reading it only if someone gives it to you and you’re too broke to make a trip to the bookstore seem like a good idea. It’s better than a poke in the eye, but a lot worse than doing anything fun, interesting, or terrifying.  Maybe you should play mumbly peg instead.

I was amazed. It didn’t suck. Not only that, but I really enjoyed it. Sure, there was some stuff that I feel could have been done better, and things I wanted to see that weren’t there, but it was relatively small points. Nits. Seriously though, the story was clearcut and solid, the characters were silly but enjoyable, and the animation was the same amazing stuff I saw in The Host.

Totally unexpected though. I mean, Michael Bay has been behind some good stuff, but also complete trash. There were several writers involved, none of whom have a record indicating a sure shot of quality. Yet here we are.

Go see it and save fanboy bitching for someone who’s retarded enough to care about canonical continuity in a series that existed solely to sell toys.

Also, if you’re going to sneak a camcorder into the theater, maybe at least try to hide it, and consider getting gear made after 1993.

Well, I expected it to be bad. Like stupid bad. However, while it was not as enjoyable as the previous films, it was a lot of fun. If you ignore two things-

The main bad guy is a total douche, and is apparently retarded. He’s like a special-ed villain.

Everything shown or mentioned about computers is, largely, the same trash that Hollywood always spits out.

Still, the action sequences were good, the banter ran from better than average to funny, and they employed that little French monkey-man from District B-13.

I know that the sidebar fonts look tiny in IE, I just don’t really care. Switch to a good browser.

Yes, I’ve heard people commenting that IE7 is awesome. Or Safari 3.

IE7 is garbage. Some folks seem to feel that it renders faster than Firefox, but I’m of the ilk that those people have failed to disable the useless ipv6 stuff in Firefox and/or have a number of html processing extensions. Also, the UI for IE7 manages to be even more retarded than anything MS has ever created before, managing to even trump all the trash in Vista and WMP. You also get to retain all the awesome features of using a browser that ties heavily into core OS stuff, like brutal destabilization.

Safari is pretty speedy, but it’s also boring, and has a the standard retard look and feel that you get from a lot of Apple stuff. No Apple, I think it’s swell that none of your stuff is in any way theme capable.

I finally got this looking more or less enough like the main site that it doesn’t offend my senses.

Now I guess it’s time to link to the main page. Hopefully I come up with some stuff to say.