Final Fantasy XIII Review

So, Final Fantasy XIII came out last week.  I have been playing it and while I have not finished it yet (I have this thing called a life), I wanted to wait until I got at least 10-20 hours in before posting a review.

Here are my thoughts on the game:

Well, it is streamlined.  Very, very streamlined.  You basically have a frantic combat system that reminds of a stance system in an MMO and long corridors that you walk down between boss fights.

There are no towns as far as I can tell.  You get access to shops and crafting from save points.  Crafting is limited to pouring junk type items into your weapons and accessory items to give them experience and level them up.  You can disable old equipment to get high level junk.

The characters level up in basically the same way that we were doing it in Osiris originally where we had different constellations for each character and you had to put points into each constellation to power it up.  Some of the stats are shared (like HP) but most is abilities.  When you switch stance, you switch your constellation and you gain all of the abilities for that constellation.  Like I said stats stack (so, if you put points into HP across all constellations, you turn into a tank).

The stance switch is preset in a menu since you switch stances for your whole party.  You basically get to set up combinations you think are good ahead of time and you switch to the one you think is right in combat.  There is no limit on switches and switching accelerates your active time gauge (so you do it the entire time).

You only get to control the main character in the party, although you do eventually get to pick your party and who you control.  The AI is very good and picks attacks and abilities quickly and very effectively, so you don't have to mess about with each character's individual attacks.  You also get to do more attacks each turn, so the pace of combat is very fast.

The bosses rock as you have to really be quick with the stances and think about their moves and plan stuff out, but you do it in real time.  That sounds bad, but you get to retry if you lose and that basically puts you right before the fight so you can change party members/equipment or level up some more before trying again.  This is really well done and it doesn't feel like punishment for losing (really well implemented feature).

The story is your typical anime bullshit with racist undertones and "mystery" which is all very formulaic.  But it does feel pretty fresh and the setting is kind of neat.  The best part about it is the lack of technobabble or random MgGuffins as far as I can tell.  The characters don't wonder at every little fucking thing, because they live in that world and I like that.

Dialogue is well recorded, but poorly written.  And I swear, one of the girl characters sounds like she's fucking the whole time.  Plus, the one black guy sounds like a blaksploitation character.  I am waiting for him to call someone a jive turkey or a honky.

Music is good, but nothing stick like the classic stuff.  It is all high quality, but like I said not memorable.

Graphics are holy shit, just god fucking damn amazing.  I mean, just wow.  I have never, ever, ever seen anything like this before.  The CG stuff is barely discernable from the game and that's a compliment.  The game just looks sharp.  There's a few stretched textures here and there in dark corners, but the characters are amazing, the enemies are amazing and the sheer amount of particles and solid and animated effects are mind staggering.

Overall, it is a good game.  Does it have the replay value of a Chrono Trigger or FFVII or even FFX?  No, there's no minigames, no card battle, no blitzball, just combat and that's unfortunate.  I will give this game an 80% and most of it goes to production value and polish (if this was a car, it would a solid gold, chrome plated Mary Kay Pink Cadillac).  Yeah, its not practical and you can't exactly drive around in it, but it is definitely a thing to behold.

 

Gameplay: 75%

Graphics: 100%

Sound: 85%

Control: 95%

Story: 60%

Character Design: 65%

WoW Stats

I found this picture on a link on Digg.  Don’t know where it originally comes from but whoever they are, thank you for putting things into perpective.

Via: Online Schools

Those are some amazing stats.  I especially like how WoW has become a billion dollar a year business.

I know I have played it and enjoyed it and gotten bored and quit and then found reasons to come back and play some more, so it really is a compelling experience.

Acer Aspire Revo 1600 Review

I have been looking into getting one of these Nettop PCs for a while now.  The idea of having a super thin, super light terminal that I can hook up to my home network and my TV to view videos on and browse the web has always seemed like a basic thing to have in a home.

I found one of these Acer Aspire Revo 1600 units at TigerDirect.com for $170.  It was a refurb, but from my experience, these are actually higher quality since they are inspected more closely than the models that go out as new.  I have purchased a lot of refurbished things over the years and have come to the conclusion that the reason they were returned is due to lack of understanding of the product by the original buyer.

The first thing I noticed about this unit is how clogged it came with bloatware.  A dozen game demos, Office demos, MS Works, anti-virus, Google desktop, just tons of stuff.  So it ran slow and I mean very slow.  OK, so I went ahead and uninstalled all of that stuff since I know of lighter freeware alternatives and hey there’s a spry little box under all that clutter.

The model I have only has one GB of DDR2 which hamstrings it a bit, but it still putters around online pretty well.  Some video streaming sites don’t do so well, but basic web tasks are just fine.  From personal experience, it seems like it is slow because it is always paging to the hard drive.  So, it needs more memory.  Luckily, you can add up to 4 GB of memory and I do plan on doing so to give this little box a little more pep.

Another drawback is that it does not have integrated WiFi.  Well, that’s not a drawback to me since more integrated WiFi solutions in these little boxes has terrible range.  So, I find that it is better to just find a good performing dongle and use that.  I don’t have to worry about massive range since I live in a medium sized apartment, so I went for the Tenda WiFi 802.11N adapter.  It was $15 at MicroCenter and it was very easy to install.

I tried this box in the farthest corned of my apartment and it was still getting full bars, download speeds were also very good and definitely on par with other WiFi solutions I have found.  So, the lack of WiFi out of the box is not really a drawback.

The ION graphics do pretty well.  I installed World of Warcraft and with the settings set way down (as I knew I would have to set them for onboard graphics).  It ran at 25-30 fps.  Not great,  but not terrible considering the computer is so low on RAM.

The CPU kind of sucks, but it does its job well enough and for a $200 PC it is amazing.  It is Hyper-Threaded and handles multi-tasking far better than I expected.  The only thing that this machine doesn’t do well is Flash.  But then again, I’ve seen Quad-Core i7s where a bit of poorly written Flash code causes full loads on the CPU, so I won’t call that a big setback.

In terms of connectivity, this little guy is amazing.  It has 6 USB ports.  One of them is capped with a little rubber stopper, but it does work. It has a media-card reader on the front as well as audio inputs for a headset and an e-Sata port for external hard drive.  It also has VGA and HDMI on the back.  The HDMI is the main draw of this box as it will power a 1080p set making your thousand inch TV able to browse the web.  Yeah, that is as cool as it sounds.

The keyboard and mouse it comes with are pretty lackluster but they do function and do so well enough.  The keyboard has that chicklet layout that Apple pioneered with its laptops and the feel of the keys is actually quite good.  This is a compact keyboard, so you do not get a num-pad.  This is slightly better than a netbook keyboard.  Functional, but not much more.  It looks nice though with a nice finish on the face of the casing.

The mouse is crap.  It is too light and squeaks when you click it.  The scroll wheel is also too big for the mouse, but again it is functional and usable, but not great by any stretch of the imagination.

Overall, the unit is nice and small, and once you de-clutter it, it does a great job as an internet terminal.  Just don’t expect it to replace you full-tower box unless your full-tower box is from 2000 or earlier.

Star Trek Online: A Brief Beta Impression

I pre-ordered Star Trek Online as it is one MMO that I have been awaiting for a long time.  The open beta has started a few days ago and aside from some technical issue which I’ve seen in just about every beta I have ever played (server downtime, a random crash here and there, some goofy animations that are clearly not quite done yet), the game is great.

The ground combat is nothing to write home about, but the feeling of being with an away team (red-shirts and all) is pretty cool.  You get to zap bad guys with phasers and pulse rifles, go hand to hand and coordinate fire with other team members.  Overall, a pretty decent experience based on the source material’s rather blase ground combat.

The space combat is where the game really shines.  You have to consider your shield, the placement of your weapon arrays, reload time and  the shielding of the enemy vessel.  I have found that the best way to beat someone is to pound on one section of their shields and then hit them with a torpedo.

The combat looks like Trek, sounds like Trek and feels like Trek.  Overall, a really good job there.

The interface is a little confusing, but you do get used to it pretty quick and it is just a beta, so I cannot really complain.

You can also customize your ship’s look and color scheme, which is pretty neat, although not really that important in my opinion as I personally want my ship to look like a Federation vessel.

The uniform customization is pretty neat as you get a big variety of styles and colors to pick from.  So, if you want to walk around in formal wear all the time, you can.

I am really hyped for the release of this game, when we will hopefully have a lot more servers up so the server issues that have kept me from playing the game more get resolved.

The Vicious Cycle of Complexity

I recently started a new job, which I truly enjoy. However, in my short time here I have stumbled upon one absolute truth. Business begets complexity, which begets support business, which begets complexity ad infinitum.

If you do not believe me, try to think of how enerprise class software works. There is usually a database, and a data layer, and a busines layer, and a platform layer and at some point the application layer. Now, I don't know about you, but with all those layers, that sounds like a good cake to me. So good in fact that eating too much might overwhelm you.

And so too is the case with enterprise software, if you use too much you end up with to much complexity and end up getting overwhelmed.  But why does this happen? One word: customers.

Customers want a variety of things, things outside of the original design, things that simply require hacks to work. And sometimes the new features are deemed worthy to be introduced into the core source code, along with the hacks. After all, we'll sometimes have the time to fix any issues.

But in reality the problems never get fixed, they just get worked around until they become too big to ignore. The workarounds become a regular part of life and complexity ensues with exceptions to the rules and weird incantations that must be performed to get the system to work.

This is a problem and enterprise developers need to monitor their environments carefully to prevent things like what I described from comin to pass.