So, its official. I don't come around here, anymore. Mostly because the site IMO has gone down hill. Probably due to the loss of good talent, and replacing them with scrubs who can't be entertaining. Oh well. All good things right?

I usually read over at IGN, and as for the blog, I use myspace.com now, in tantum with livejournal, but thats only cuz I wrote a nify program that lets me upload to both blogs at the same time. But alas, the time for LJ has passed, and I'm just revert to one blog. So if you have a myspace account, or plan on getting one, and you actually read this. Then goto http://www.myspace.com/kylebilenki and add me to your friends list.

  -- Ciao

So I've started playing WOW. I've gotta say, I'm beyond impressed with the game. It feels so true to the cartoon-ish, fantasy world that Blizzard has set up. So I started with a Night Elf Druid which I named Dalarian, or Dal for short. I'm at level 15 right now, and I'm really enjoying myself. Probably because my friends and I have formed a guild so we're always messin around in Kalimdor, or Azeroth.

Here's a picture of him:



And in loveable bear form:

1 DBS201A INTRO.DATA.DSGN.SQL B+ 2 INT322A INTERNET II-WEB PRG B 3 NAT133YB ART AND TECHNOLOGY B 4 OOP344A PROG. II WITH C++ A+ 5 SYS366B REQ.GATH.USING MODEL B

*takes Winter 2005 Semester, puts in it a bag, and beats it to death* Hell yeah, take that school! I pwn j00.

Which OS are You?

Over the weekend by roommate and I decided to play a round of Command and Conquer: Zero Hour. Which is my favourite addition to the series based solely on the fantastic 3D game play, the story is another subject which I won’t get into.

I LOVE playing as the China Nuke General and sending a barrage of Nuclear Missiles at my opponent and obliterate him in a hell storm of nuclear fire. Or as China's Tank general and roll up into the AI's base with a fleet of Battle Master and Emperor Tanks loaded to bear a torrent of nuclear shells down upon all who unwisely stand in our way. There's nothing like looking at your radar and seeing this massive patch of red (or whatever your color happens to be) moving through the map. Like your base suddenly picked up and started moving towards your opponents. But above them all my all time favorite General has to be the Air Force General from the American Army. Nothing beats their mobility, and awesome striking power. Just like the Tank General, nothing beats seeing a huge cluster of King Raptors (F-22s with Point Laser Defenses and Flares) squads flying in formation with A-10s, Stealth Bombers, B2 Spirits, and B-52s en route to lay down some serious shock and awe upon the enemy base.

However, Generals is plagued with one SERIOUS problem. Their network code is absolute ass on a stick. While playing a LAN game, my roommate and I experienced so much lag it was unbelievable. I mean, lag in an internet is to be expected, and granted I would totally be ok if he and I were playing an Internet game and got lag. But we weren't. This was a two on four LAN game (The four was computer controlled AI). With 100 Mbps of bandwidth between the two of us, you think that it would be more than enough for Generals. I mean, Counter Strike Source, and Half Life 2 Death match need to send FAR more data just from the physics alone not to mention the complex AI decisions, and we've never lagged ever. We’ve run into the Memory bug in the Source Engine, but that is seldom.

At first, we tried diagnosing each other's computers. Admittedly I was behind in my PC maintenance, with school and work. So I went to work, defragging my PC. While this was happening Greg (my roommate) pulled apart the Linux Router he built to look for any possible problems, also doing some minor maintenance on it. Really, it didn't take him long to realize that the Router wasn't the problem, its Linux after all. So long as the computer is properly set up, the setup won't decay like a Windows Setup does. After defragging my computer, I scanned for viruses as well as look for any Spy ware that might be communicating over the network thus blocking things. (Greg did the same thing on his computer) I found my computer was loaded with spy ware, mostly cookies. But there was stuff found nevertheless. After purging ALL the spy ware, we looked at what was running on our respective computers. Greg noticed I still had Steam running, which could be sucking up network bandwidth on my end. So I closed it, along with all the other programs I had running in the background. (Things like System monitors, my g-mail checker, etc)

Now after ALL of this, would you think the game would run good for us? Hell no. We still got lots of lag, sometimes even more so than before all the maintenance was completed on our whole network of PCs. So Greg recalled reading on a forum that if the graphic eye candy was turned up too high it could slow down a network game. I said that doesn't sound right, because graphics are a job for the end computers and we both have exceptional computers. If he were using a laptop the case would be different, as a laptop's video card is really out of date. But we tried it nevertheless, but even that didn't work completely. Sure the lag was down to a playable level, but it was still lagging on a network game!!!!

It seriously pisses me off when a company with the resources of EA makes such a lousy game from such a great franchise. I never encountered this problem with the first Generals, which was largely developed by Westwood Studios (R.I.P) or any of the previous games. Even on 56k modem, or earlier the games never once displayed so many problems communicating with each other as Zero Hour has.

I only hope Red Alert 3 is better than Zero Hour, or EA will find itself on the "Never to buy from again list" along with Square-Enix.

Yes sir, I went out for coffee with Dire Raven!!!!

LAMLAMLAMLAMLAMLMALMALMLAMA I r teh l337357, p1mp3s7, haXXXor of Gam35p07! b0w d0wn 70 m3!!!!!

Ok, now that that's outta my system. It was a pretty cool afternoon, we hit up a starbucks for some much needed hot beverage as Toronto its pretty cold today (-20C). Anyways, it was good times indeed. I enjoyed hanging out with her! :) Its nice to know that the first time meeting someone from the forums didn't turn out bad. :P

Anyways, I'm out now. CS is a callin' my name.

This year's haul was good. I goto some great presents!!! :D

• a Green Lantern Hoodie
• a Trogdor T-shirt
• ROTK Extended Edition
  
• Star Wars 4-5-6 Box Set (Wide Screen!)
• Socks and Underwear (they're like a must for Xmas)
• some comics
• a couple other shirts
• a pair of jeans
• Thing and Aragorn action figure

With this week passing we saw arguably the biggest release in videogame history. I'm of course talking about Halo 2, now its no small understatement to say the game totally rocks and is the best thing going for the Xbox since its predessesor. But I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to talk about how mainstream this release was. Previously the last time I heard such buzz generated outside of the gaming world was when Sony dropped the Playstation 2 back in 2001. I mean, there were huge release parties all across America and Canada. Gamers lined up for hours just to get thier copy. Heck, Halo 2 even scored the front page of the Toronto Star and the National Post here in Canada. Even on the Daily Show's Election night special Halo gets a cameo in a hilarious skit. Since when has videogames became so cool?? Have they become the new hollywood?? Or is Master Chief merely today's Mario (with Gordon Freeman as the slightly superior Sonic :P).

Also, while I'm writing this about Halo 2, I wanted to add something about Greg's review. I thought it was great, although the negatives he mentioned were pretty small when you actually play the game. Alot of Greg's reviews tend to exhibit this, its nothing really new. He didn't reveal anything to major about the game's plot other than there's a cliffhanger ending. Oh no! A game company planning a sequel?? Who would've thunk it! Also, alot of fanboys have been throwing a fit over the 9.4 rating. Hey look, 9.4 is damn good in my books. Certainly if you look at the individual scores (GFX, FX, Gameplay, etc) you can see that the game pretty much gets a 10. So in closing, fanboys STFU and go play with your Master Chief doll, I mean, action figure.

Argh, I'm quickly becoming incredibly jaded towards Windows XP professional. For some reason after installing the Prince of Persia 2 demo, I get these BSOD. Yeah that's right, BSOD. For those who aren't computer litterate that stands for Blue Screen(s) of Death. They are the lovely, and normally unhelpful messages that tell you module two-zero-zero-one-alpha-fox(2001AF) has caused a fault in memory location zero-zero-zero-zero-six-fox-fox (00006FF). Which of course, unless you know the absolute addresses for all your computer's applications that means nothing to you. So I'm left with the annoying task of searching out said problem without even a small starting point. *sigh* So it looks like tomorrow will be more fun with re-installing Windows XP. And doing some diagnostics on the computer to ensure there's no physical defects afoot. Temperature-wise the computer is chilling at a mean temp of 35 degrees C (~95 degrees F), so I think the cooling is ok. I may buy a multimeter to test out the PSU to ensure proper voltage is being distributed although I doubt it is that. But might as well check over the computer while I'm fussing with windows. The UPS I bought for the computer has turned out to be a really blessing, I've had about 5 incidents (excluding the purpose one I did to test it out) since buying it. Most where Electrical Noise, and there was one case of Over Voltage. Thank god my UPS was there to stop it from possibly harming my computer!

Hopefully my computer will be fixed this time, and ready to run normally for HL2. I bought this new rig for it and Doom 3, and the eventual modding that will come from the HL2 SDK (Software Development Kit). I've already been thinking about entering some tweeks to the physics and AI systems. I want to add in body part hit location. So if you hit someone in thier bicep, thier reaction will happen accordingly. A simple example of this is if you hit someone in the head, thier head will snap back, and they will fall backwards. (the latter I believe already happens in HL2, but I haven't seen alot of it in CS:Source) To the AI I want to add the reaction to a location wound, for example if you rip someone's bicep up with your gun and that bicep happen to be arm that was absorbing the recoil from thier gun, then will switch hands and thus thier accuracy will decrease. (the severity will depend on which gun they use) Another example will be if, you shoot someoen in thier leg, they will either fall to thier knees, and attempt to squrim away.

That's all for now, I'm going to go play some Counter Strike Source now.

You know, games such as Wolfenstein and Doom were around for several years before the Columbine shootings. And sure there were probably some fringe groups who were utterly disgusted by such videogames. I can accept and respect such a view, those games were indeed very violent, and realistic for thier time. However, one thing that puzzles me is that when I first loaded up Wolfenstein 3D after my father had given it to me as a surprise attempt to sell me on the fact that a 80286 was superior to a Nintendo Entertainment System. I never once felt like this game would represent reality at all. Here I was age 10, playing an ultra violent game where I was pumping round after round from my pistol into Nazi soliders, SS troops, and hideous creations of thiers. It was only a few years later that I was playing the original DOOM on my brand new 80486, the game FAR surpassed Wolf3D in terms of realism and violence level. But again, I never lost touch with reality. I knew that a gun would seriously harm, if not kill another person without the need to fill thier body with lead. I knew that if I were to punch someone I would hurt them. So why the sudden rash of videogame related violence?

There are a couple factors I blame on this.

1. Unparralleled Realism - Its finally happened where graphics are becoming so life like the claim of most parental groups can be validated, to a degree. Even DOOM 3 and HL2 lack the abillity to replicate the world in prefect detail. There's still lots of details that go missing. Game characters don't sweat, the don't breath, light does not reflect off of thier skin correctly in all instances. However, a small child could easily misinterpert this into being a representation of reality. Which leads me to my next point...
   
2. Bad Parenting - That's right. Generally speaking, parents involvement in thier child's life has gone down. A lot of parents use videogames has a babysitter. Leaving thier child alone with the game in hopes that a wholesome message of peace and love will be beamed into his or her mind while they pummel a helpless person with a baseball bat. Going back to my childhood experiences my father was never too far away when I was playing these violent games, always kept a close tab on my behaviour to ensure I didn't fly off the handle, and made sure at a young age that I knew these were all "make believe" and couldn't happen in real life. Unfortunetly another negative trend has developed when Nintendo or Sony babysit a child
   
3. Loner-ism - My own word for the problem which is in some cases turning deadly. Some of these kids who are raised on videogames develop no social skills and become so dependant on videogames that they simply can not function in the real world. So they revert to this loner state where they stay indoors, stareing at thier TV/Monitor, never interacting with anyone but fictional characters in a video reality. Not only does this mean that thier perception of reality becomes warp by the constant infusion of videogame's "hyper reality" elements, but its only incredible unhealthy. Some poor souls in South Korea and the United States have already paid for thier unwise choices with thier lives, after playing Everquest for 24+ hours without any tangible breaks. Finally to tie all of these points together..
   
4. Politicalization - Ever since Columbine, this problem has been politcalized five ways till sunday. For awhile it was almost "hip" to sue videogame makers for turning thier child into a murderer, druggie, or some form of deliquent. So again, why all of a sudden? Even since one of the Columbine shooters said "Wow, this shotgun will be just like the one in DOOM." People have been quick to blame companies like ID. But if you think about it, the comments have a certain sense of logic. True, if the shooter really thought that firing a 12 gauge shotgun in real life would be the same as pressing the control key on a keyboard. Then he already has had his reality distorted by a videogame's "hyper reality" elements. DOOM doesn't account for the pain that a shotgun's recoil could cause if held inproperly, DOOM hardly accounts for any recoil, the game doesn't allow for the shotgun to get jammed if loaded imporperly, or from heat due to rapid firing. The game hardly represents how a real shotgun would function. Heck, you don't even have to reload it. The character simply cocks the gun, and your ready to go.