Mr eel
A Whinge About Gears of War Having a Prick of a Final Boss
So I’ve just about finished Gears of War on casual. I’m at the final boss. He’s one tough motherbitch. That’s OK, you expect the final boss in a game to be a challenge, but this time I call bullshit.
There are two types of difficulty in games. One is where the player fails simply because they didn’t do things correctly. In a situation where the player can see how precisely they failed, they have an opportunity and the motivation to replay in order to get it right.
The other form of difficulty is where the game designers have just made enemies extremely hardy, able to met out massive damage and with lots of secondary enemies harassing the player. This is a brute, artificial and demoralising form of difficulty — “just throw heaps of enemies at the player”.
The big-boss in Gears of War falls into the latter category. Now game players have preferences. Some folk get off on these sort of challenges. Power to them, but I’m guessing they don’t represent most gamers. Keep in mind I’m playing the game on casual. For anyone who wants the challenge they can play the hardcore or insane modes. At that rate I’m a bit confused why Epic decided to make RAAM such a bastard in the casual mode.
After hours of good fun blasting away at Locust, I now feel frustrated and the beginnings of boredom. I’m no GoW superstar, but I’m not totally inept. I don’t feel like I’m even getting close with this boss.
So, maybe I might finish the game. It’s a great game and I want to finish it, but I actually want to be entertained, not frustrated. Mind you if I ever beat the bastard thing I’ll probably be ecstatic 
EDIT: I beat it. Felt a bit more like luck than anything else. The boss just sat there while I hammered it. My comments above are still valid I believe.
Job Advertising is Broken
Recruiting companies should really put the names of the company they are assisting with hiring. Because of the unfortunate habit they have of writing a shopping list — with every possible qualification they wish they could get in a hire — and other wise vague job descriptions, it can get hard to tell the job ads apart. This is exacerbated by having the same job posted on multiple job sites.
At least by knowing the companies, applicants can tell the jobs apart. More over, it gives them a chance to evaluate the company — word of mouth, or a bit of googling goes a long way — and decide if they really want to apply.
Personally I’m dubious about applying for a job when I don’t even know who wants to hire me.
YAC (Yet Another Console) - I Boughts an Xbox
I spent a bit of time over Christmas playing my brother’s Xbox 360. After playing and loving Super Mario Galaxy, I was satisfied with the Wii for awhile and didn’t have any plans to buy a new console. But ZOMG Gears of War is really brilliant. It’s not particularly original, the plot is rudimentary and the dialog has too too much gung-ho-yanks-are-so-tough for my taste, but damn… it’s plain good fun to play.
So I gave in to temptation and bought one for myself, with a copy of GoW. I really only have a couple of comments at this point.
Gears of War is totally a system seller. I’m loving it.
The Xbox power supply really is friggin huge.
The console is noisy as all get go. The fans go full-bore most of the time, but the disc-drive is particularly noisy. M’thinks it’s just a standard PC drive, which would explain the rattling noise it gives off. Not so nice.
Still, I’m happy. Merry Christmas for me. Let’s hope the bugger doesn’t melt on me!
DataMapper - Introductory Docs
I finally got off my bum and put together some documentation for DataMapper. These are mainly introductory docs. Not exhaustive by any measure, but should help folks get up to speed. You can check them out here.
Kickrush, Kickrush, Kickrush - I Love Metal
Spanning everything from slow, doom, sludge to high-speed thrash, Heavy Metal covers a lot of ground. If you like some heavy tunes, you’re guaranteed to find something you love. Even if you don’t there is still bound to be something that you can dig.
My non-scientific, incomplete list of favorites:
Mastodon
These guys often get tagged as progressive. I think that’s because they use… you know melodies and stuff. For a time metal was dominated by death, thrash and variants — loud and fast was the name of the game. Now minds seem to be opening up again. I absolutely love Mastodon. This is the thinking man’s metal. Good solid grooves, plenty of energy and some top guitar work. They also love a bit of conceptualising, which gives the music an interesting flavour — for example the album Leviathan is about Moby Dick. Highly recommended. These guys are fuckin’ awesome.
Chimaira
Yes the misspelling of the name is intentional, don’t look at me. Straight up fast and violent. This stuff is just plain capital-H Heavy. I recommend their self-titled album as a starting point. Previous to that release they had a slight nu-metal influence — that horrible metal/rap cross over rubbish — but Chimaira - Chimaira is almost a return to the roots of metal. If you dig Pantera and Slayer, check em out.
The Dillinger Escape Plan
Dear sweet Darwin, I can’t tell you how much I love this band, but I’m gonna try. Math-metal — they make heavy use of odd time signatures, mid-song signature changes and stop/start dynamics. They’re also flat out fuckin’ brutal. The LP Miss Machine gets heavy play from me. More energy and technical-chops than most. Thank you DEP for being totally awesome.
ISIS
Ahhh, sludgy. ISIS sit at the slower end of the metal spectrum. Most of ISIS’ music is built around a slow and steady build-up to a heavy wall of sound. It’s a dynamic they use repeatedly, but it never gets old. I recommend the album Panopticon in particular.
Other notables
Here is a few other albums that I’ve been thrashing lately:
- Year of No Light - Nord
- Behold… the Arctopus - Skullgrid
- The End - Transfer Trachea Reverberations from Point
- Neurosis - Through Silver in Blood
- Soilwork - Sworn to a Great Divide
A Mullion Ways to Do the One Thing
As much as I like Ruby, sometimes I see a feature that just makes me ask why. WHY? Specifically, when you have two features that do exactly the same thing, why implement both? The best argument for redundant features is that one is a short cut for a common argument. The best examples are the various literals.
# Hash
{:yay => 'spasm', :hoon => 'town'}
# Array
[1, 2, 3, 4]
%w(array of four words)
# Integers and floats
1
1.2
# Strings
"Yes, this is actually a literal"
# Regular Expressions
/(\w+)\/|./
# Ranges
1..100
And more… There are loads of ‘em! Literals are one of the nice things about Ruby. They are also sadly, one of the worst. Why? Because many of them are redundant. One that I came across more recently made me quirk my brows:
# Create a hash
{1 => 2, 3 => 4} #=> {1 => 2, 3 => 4}
{1,2,3,4} #=> {1 => 2, 3 => 4}
The first is the most common literal for creating hashes. It’s perfect, since you’re listing the pairs that go into your new hash and you can see how the keys are related to the values. The second one is just a shorter version. More to the point, it’s a more opaque version. Why is it even there?
Just one more example:
# Create an array
%w(array of words) #=> ['array', 'of', 'words']
%w'array of words' #=> ['array', 'of', 'words']
%w{array of words} #=> ['array', 'of', 'words']
If you haven’t seen this literal before, it just takes a string and treats each separate word as an entry in the array — it’s equivalent to doing "array of words".split(' '). This means you can’t have multi-word entries, but it’s a super useful shortcut. The first is the most commonly used. The other two do the same thing, but use different characters to delineate the string.
It’s a tiny thing to be sure, but I really don’t like having all these different shortcuts to do the same thing. It’s inelegant. Sadly, new versions of Ruby will have more literals.
# Yet another hash literal
{key: 'value', pairs: 'augogo'} #=> {:key => 'value', :pairs => 'augogo'}
More deprecations in Ruby I say! Pick one good thing and stick with it.
But… I still love you Ruby *hugs*.