Category Archives: Technology

Black Ops 2

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This post has been quite a while in the making, it is my thoughts on Call of Duty Black Ops 2. I’m a CoD veteran, I love this series. Let’s get in to it.

A little bit of history. My initial exposure to a Treyarch CoD game was World at War. Whilst I loved the campaign, I found the multiplayer hugely frustrating. There were numerous glitches and none of them ever seemed to get patched. It got to a point where I stopped playing the game and waited for the next Infinity Ward CoD, which was Modern Warfare 2. There are only so many times you can get stabbed by a man hiding inside a rock or shot from under the map before you rage quit the game for good. My opinion of Treyarch was low at this point. Fast forward past MW2 and on to the first Black Ops. Amazing game, by far my most favourite Call of Duty title. I loved the campaign; I feel like I am living through an experience in a Treyarch campaign, I feel like I am playing my way through an Infinity Ward campaign. Treyarch make the experience so much more immersive. I loved the multiplayer in Black Ops. The maps were almost all excellent*, I loved the variety of big and small, different scenery, elevation changes that weren’t just ladders and stairs. I loved the playlists; Team Tactical is where it’s at for me and my clan mates, a variety of objective based game modes with small teams. There was a good balance of weapons, with each class being balanced and usable and with there not really being anything to OP (over powered).

So, Black Ops 2.

I have broken this down into a short bit about campaign mode and then a break down of multiplayer. Whilst I think that the game is worth the £30 I paid for the campaign alone, the vast majority of my time is spent in multiplayer. Aside: Zombies is a signature of the Treyarch CoD games, but I won’t be including it in my breakdown because I literally never play it. I hate zombies. It is just not for me and I am incapable of giving a balanced analysis of it.

Campaign
With the exception of the strike force missions I am enjoying the campaign mode. The strike force missions represent a distraction from the main campaign in my opinion, they are awkward to control and not much fun. If I wanted that sort of strategy experience then I would play C&C or something similar. On a more positive note, being able to customise my load out for the campaign is great.

Multiplayer Overview
Treyarch have done some great things with the multiplayer mode. The new scoring system which rewards players who are actively engaging the objective is a brilliant thing. It encourages people to play the objective and that is what the game is all about in my opinion. That being said, I think that in game modes where the objective is to kill, kills should be worth more points, I’m thinking more of FFA (free for all) and TDM (team deathmatch) than KC (kill confirmed).

Maps
The maps are good, but there just isn’t enough variety. Not enough variety of size, not enough variety of landscape, not enough change in elevation (that isn’t stairs and ladders). Where is the snow and the jungle? Where are the hills, the lifts, the cable cars, the garage doors?

Score Streaks
Specialist and support kill streaks have not made it across from MW3, neither have death streaks. No more death streaks, awesome. I will not miss martyrdom, or that nonsense with the C4 for a single second. I am not bothered about the loss of the support kill streaks either, the changes that reward players playing the objective mean that you are not penalised with a lack of kill streak assistance for doing so. The specialist kill streak has been rendered moot by the new load out system, more on that later, but it is not missed either. Devastating kill streaks are harder to get, I have yet to see a single dog, although I have seen a fair few lodestars and warthogs.

Load Out System
The new points based load out system is excellent. It allows you to really tailor classes to different game modes. Full of win, not a single downside. I do wonder if the new load out system means fewer people are carrying rockets and so these things stay up in the air longer though?

Weapons
There is a nice variety of weapons with some in each class that are very much usable as a primary, heck even some of the secondaries make reasonable primaries. I don’t think there is anything that is too OP, Treyarch have been very good at buffing and nerfing weapons to maintain a balance. I think they have been a little hasty with the most recent nerf of the FAL though. For me, I know a weapon is OP when I see everyone using it, even players with low skill levels, at the moment that means the AN94 and the silenced PDW and not the FAL. Quick scoping is not as prevalent in BO2 as it was in MW3, but more so than in BO1. Rapid fire sniper rifles. Just no. Honestly, take these out of the game.

Game Modes
Hardpoint is a nice addition to the game, I find it more enjoyable than Headquarters. I would suggest that the average SPM is a lot lower in TDM than in objective based games, it encourages campy, spawn trapping behaviour. The occasional game of TDM can be fun, but only when mixed in with other objective based game modes, that way it doesn’t hammer your SPM, besides which you are more likely to be playing with #PTFO type players who won’t attempt to pitch a tent in a corner (not a euphemism).

Glitching and Boosting
I am very pleased to report that so far, I have not really been glitch killed by anyone, nor have I found anyone boosting in a game. I think the reporting system that came in in BO1 has helped to reduce this problem as has the genuine care that Treyarch seem to have for the community.

Hopefully, you can see from this post that I am very much enjoying BO2. It is a great game which represents a massive leap forward in the evolution of the series. I do not prescribe to the belief that Infinity Ward brings the innovation and Treyarch bring the polish, Treyarch have brought both things to this game.

Having covered some of the good and the bad, I must now cover the ugly.

Being dropped in to a game where you have a full team on one side and just one or two guys on the other side sucks. I cannot tell you the number of times I have spawned in to a game of domination or demolition where a loss is already guaranteed and the opposing team is just stacking kill streaks on top of each other. If more than x% of the original team quits the match then it should end. Do not spawn me in to a game where the odds are not just against me, but where the result is already firmly decided.

Why does Team Tac have a maximum party size of 1? This is insane. I originally thought (hoped) that this was a bug, but it seems to just be the way it is now. I used to play this mode exclusively with my friends, but now we end up playing domination most of the time. We could just manually select different game modes to get the variety, but we don’t like to try and find a new lobby once we have found one with good/nice players and to which we have a good connection. We leads me on to my final point.

The biggest issue I have with BO2 is something that seems to get worse and worse with every CoD title. Lag, or more accurately lag compensation. There is nothing more annoying than putting an entire clip in to someone and not getting a single hit marker, only for them to then turn around and drop you with a single shot. A quick watch of the kill cam seemingly revealing you standing static, never firing your weapon and instead waiting to be hit like a piñata. With BO2 there seems to be an additional problem if you are host. I think I get host quite a bit, I have a good connection and in this game being host seems to put you at even further disadvantage, although I cannot think of why this would be. The best gun to demonstrate the issue of lag comp with is the KSG. Single slug, pretty much a one shot kill. If you are a good shot and the lag Gods are with you, then you can beast with this weapon, but if the lag is against you then expect to get slaughtered. You can hit people in the centre of the body and not get a hit marker. Don’t believe me, go watch some of WoodysGamertag’s videos. Lag comp is real and it ruins the game. I really hope that in the next iteration of CoD it is turned way down. People with a bad/slow connection can always upgrade, but if your connection is good then there really isn’t much you can do.

* Nuketown was, is and always will be a pointless experience. If this map ever finds it’s way back in to general rotation on any CoD game then I am done with that game. There is only one tactic for playing on Nuketown: be the first to call in kill streaks, use them to spawn trap the other team. Whilst this is true to a certain extent on all maps, you at least have a chance to break the trap, but not on Nuketown.

ADN

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This post has been a while in the making. I had some initial thoughts about ADN and then I kind of wondered if I was rushing to judgement, so having given it some time and gone back to it, I think I’m in a better position to express my opinion.

For those of you who don’t know, ADN, or App.net (app-dot-net) is a social networking service. It is essentially very similar to twitter, but with two exceptions. Firstly, the character limit is 256, not exactly ground breaking, but it is nice to be able to express an entire thought in one post. Secondly, and more notably, it is a paid for service. The idea behind this seems to be that the users of the service are the customers and not the product being sold. So instead of finding ways to harvest data to sell, or shaping rules to push “paid for” posts in to users time lines, the creators and maintainers of the service would be focussed on making a service that people really want to use. This all resonated with me greatly. I do worry about how my data is being used, but I am also not naive enough to think that services like twitter aren’t ultimately looking for a revenue stream. I selfishly also hoped that if accounts cost money, it would help to dissuade spammers, griefers and ignorant sheeple. I say selfishly, because I subsequently wondered if the fee would provide sufficient barrier to entry to have prevented the spread of information during events like the arab spring. Would people be put off by the potential money trail that could be followed back to them. This is in contrast to Twitter, where anyone can sign up and tweet largely with complete anonymity (note the qualifier used).

Having signed up for an account before the service was launched, I waited with anticipation to see if the funding target would be reached. Along the way I read a blog post that suggested that it would be rich, white nerds creating the service that *they* wanted to use. This struck me as bizarre for a few reasons. Why would people spend time developing a service that *they* didn’t want to use? Why would they spend time developing a service that *nobody* wanted to use, when their ultimate aim was to get people to pay to use it. I couldn’t see the issue, but I would.

The funding target was reached and hence ADN came in to being. I jumped in with both feet. There was initially no tapbots app for ADN and the contrast between Tweetbot and the ADN apps I was using was massive. I knew that with time the apps available for ADN would mature and grow. I hoped that ADN might take better care of the developers than twitter seemed to be and that this could mean that lots of development effort would be redirected by devs in to ADN app offerings.

The majority of the early adopters were all tech folk. A great many of them had ditched their twitter accounts and switched to ADN full time. Many of them seemed to already know each other (maybe from twitter) and it was insanely hard to get people talking outside of their tribal groups. I remembered how hard I found it to break in to twitter when I first joined. I was also now armed with my Aspergers diagnosis, I knew that I found socialising harder than most people. I’ve dipped in and out of ADN a few times since then, including a period recently where I spent a few days using ADN as my only social media outlet. It is still the same and so I don’t think ADN is going to be a long term home for me. At least, not unless all of my twitter friends switch over and I can’t see why they would? I think that the biggest impact ADN can have on my social media life is to keep twitter honest. That alone is worth the money I paid.

W:L > K:D

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Black Ops 2 looks like being the first Call of Duty game to acknowledge that W:L > K:D and I could not be more excited about it.

Why is this so important?

The points scoring system has been overhauled to better reward the players that #PTFO, i.e. to better reward the players who contribute to their team winning. I believe the idea is to encourage players to behave more like the pros, unselfishly working as a team, communicating and employing tactics. In addition, the levelling up system appears to have been changed to a true skill system, so match making should always pit players against other players of the same skill level, as judged by their W:L record. This is a big shift away from the current XP focused system where average players can grind away for years and reach top prestige, whilst awesome but occasional players make little in roads on the first prestige.

I am all about securing the win and that means #PTFO. I feel like Team Tac was introduced to allow players like me to play together, but unfortunately there are two other types of player who seem drawn to this game mode. Firstly, you have the self proclaimed Slayers, these are the guys who are only interested in K:D, they will gladly ignore the objective entirely and take great pride in amassing massive numbers of kills whilst their team mates carry them to victory. They kid themselves that their efforts are helping the team, but unless you are slaying like a really angry lady Godzilla with P.M.S who just stubbed her toe on a Tokyo sky scraper then you’re not helping. Cap a flag, defend a bomb site, pick up some tags. The second type of player is far worse, they are the Slayers inferior cousins, Slayer-lite. They provide the same percentage of your RDA of #PTFO but without any of the killing.

I was reminded of this video yesterday.

My clan mate and I were teamed with a single guy playing both sides of a split screen, who insisted in sniping despite not hitting a damn thing. I watched as he let guys run right by him to steal or cap flags. He was only interested in standing off at the edge and sniping to a kill streak, whilst his inactive alter ego not only blocked a genuine player from joining the game, but become easy pickings for the other team to rack up kill streaks.

Slayers are now an endangered species. They can evolve or become extinct.

RTFA

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A couple of things concerning digital video content caught my attention this week.

The first is the news that Mozilla have been forced into a position where they need to add in support for H.264, you can read more about this story here and here. I was surprised both by the controversy that this has created and by the number of people who think that Mozilla have some how caved in. They really had no choice. A large proportion of the video content available on the web is encoded in H.264. Users want/need to be able to view this content. Mozilla used to rely on Flash as a fallback for playing H.264 content, but Flash sucks. On mobile devices like smart phones and tablets, and even on devices like the MacBook Air, Flash is worse than sucky. If Mozilla are going to continue to stay relevant, if they are going to stick around to fight the good fight in the future, then they have to have a presence in the world of mobile. It really is that simple. They tried to persuade the world to adopt an open standard and they failed… on this occasion… but because of the decision they’ve taken they will still be around to fight this battle again in the future.

To everyone and anyone who think that Google are going to sweep in and save the day with WebM, they aren’t. WebM is not an open standard, it is royalty free, which makes it one better than H.264, but it is not an open standard.

The second thing which peeked my interest was the furore that seems to have been created in the eztv forums by The Scene making the decision to switch from XviD in an AVI container to x264 mp4 files. I’m not even sure where to start on this one because there are just so many angles being played out. First off you have the folks who don’t care about the change other than the fact that it happened mid season. WTF? It wasn’t eztv who made the decision to change, it was the scene. Besides which, it wouldn’t matter when the change was made it would be mid season for something. But honestly, what difference does it make? If it really bothers you, convert the files. Then you have the people complaining that their old equipment can’t play the new format. Yep, we call that progress. Buy some new (and maybe future proof) equipment or convert the content into a format that your legacy gear can play and while you’re at it, throw out those VHS tapes. My personal favourite part of this is that there are people calling for eztv to distribute both the AVIs and the mp4s and not understanding why this is a terrible idea. eztv do not care about file size because they do not encode or upload, they distribute. They have stated in the forums that they will distribute which ever version of a show they get first, but have also explained that since mp4s are easier to encode and faster to upload (due to smaller file sizes), that at the moment they always seem to receive the mp4s first. If they distribute both versions then they have doubled their effort for absolutely no gain and have slowed down the distribution of shows in the process. My two cents, smaller files, better quality, #winning.

Play like a TWIT

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Playing as a clan makes FPS games so much more enjoyable. If you play CoD and you like Team Tactical then the chances are that at some point the TWIT clan has kicked your ass. ;)

As the name suggests, Team Tactical is all about playing tactically as a team, if you’re all running around like headless chickens, kill streaking, camping, playing split screen even though you’re just one person or doing jumpy spinny shit with a sniper rifle – just don’t be surprised when we chalk up a win. But hey, if you play us and win because your straight up better, we’ll gladly congratulate you… and then proceed to kick your ass in the next round. ;)

Things you need to know about us:

  • We practice quite a lot, by which I mean we play all the time.
  • We know each other really well – we have skill sets and load outs that complement each other.
  • We all have good quality headsets, Turtle Beaches – if you’re stomping around like an elephant then we will hear you.
  • We communicate constantly whilst we are playing, calling out tactics and enemy locations on the fly – we respond to situations super quick.
  • We don’t play cheap.

That last point is very important to us and really the motivation for this post. We don’t use n00btubes or heartbeat sensors unless we pick them up from fallen enemies, we don’t spawn trap, we don’t corner trap, we don’t glitch, we don’t boost and we don’t camp.

Guarding the flag, bombsite or bomb (think S&D) is not camping, that’s called Protecting The Fucking Objective. Ignoring the objective entirely and sitting in a corner racking up kills whilst the rest of your team valiantly tries to PTFO, that’s camping.

Killstreaking is for people who would camp, but have ADHD, running around the map racking up kills and ignoring the objectives. This is particularly evident in game modes like Kill Confirmed, seriously, the number of times I’ve died and seen people just walk away from a whole mess of tags is staggering.

Boosting and glitching are self explanatory. I was genuinely amazed this weekend that despite how easy if is to watch a game back and to report people and have them banned for 5000 days, we still managed to find ourselves in a game where two idiots boosted to an MOAB. Really guys, you didn’t think that having one of you at 25-0 and the other at 0-25 was going to give the game away!

So come on people, put down your RPGs and come play like men, you’ll probably still lose, but at least we’ll respect you. Unless you’re 12 and whine like a little bitch and threaten to “merk us”, in which case we’ll probably just laugh at you.

Don’t hate the iPlayer…

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At some point iPlayer disappeared from the XMB on my PS3, I think it happened during the firmware update that made the iPlayer a dedicated app, but I cannot be sure. Since then I have intermittently seen the TV/Video option in the XMB and assumed that the problem had rectified itself, but then the next time I started up it was gone again. Having scoured the internet, it seems lots of people are reporting the same problem. I have seen lots of suggested fixes, mainly based on signing in and out of PSN/Home/Qriocity, but none of these worked for me (I don’t even have Qriocity or Home installed!). I stumbled across a solution completely by accident when trying to do something else, I created an extra user on my PS3, completely stock settings, signed in as the new user, deleted the new user, switched back to my regular user and suddenly the TV/Video option was back. All of this was done on firmware version 3.73.

Dear Tim…

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I like the way Apple work. I like their vertically integrated approach and dedication to pushing the boundaries of technology. Life inside Steve’s walled garden is pretty epic, but that doesn’t mean to say there aren’t things I would change. After the release of Lion, the standing down of Uncle Steve and with iOS 5 imminent, now seems like a good time to list my annoyances and suggestions.

First off, let me say that customised notification sounds for texts/emails/etc on iOS is a super massive win, the same for unified notifications. If these weren’t features in iOS 5 then they would be near the very top of my list.

1. When you are sending a text message, right after you have hit send, the name of the recipient is replaced with “Sending…”. This lasts for all of two seconds, but feels like an eternity when you think you may have sent that text to the wrong person. The level of terror is heightened by the fact that there is no option to cancel the text.

2. Sure, I now have the option to merge folders, but Finder still feels awkward to use as none of the views feel quite right. I don’t like the way that files moves around the mouse pointer when you are dragging them either.

3. When I connect my iPhone to my MBP, it irks me that I have to launch iTunes in order to sync my contacts, calendar, photos, etc. Bring back iSync!

4. I would like to be able to combine my FaceTime account on my phone with the one on my Mac, so that both “ring” and I can answer either.

5. I know that you can get other browsers for iOS, but what’s the point if the first time I click on a link it immediately opens Safari? Allow me to choose the default browser the same way I would on my Mac.

6. An air like MBP. Lose the optical drive, add support for the external SuperDrive (maybe a new ThunderBolt version?). Replace the HDD with a phat SSD.

7. A pony. I’d quite like a pony.

TWIT for life

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I feel like I owe Jason Bradbury a massive thank you. I have just had the most amazing weekend and it really is all thanks to him.

I joined twitter in September 2008. I knew some other people who had joined and thought I should grab myself a decent username in case I decided to start using the service, but I really didn’t take it any further than that. Around this same time I started reading Jase’s blog on his newly relaunched website (coinciding with the release of his first novel) and at some point after that he started tweeting and added a link to his twitter feed from his website. I discovered the link to Jase’s twitter feed one Friday lunch time and remembering the account I had created for myself decided to log in and take a closer look. I was amazed to see that Jason was exchanging messages with normal people and confused by the strange #ff that accompanied so many of the messages that were flying back and forth. I quickly discovered that #ff was short for follow friday and that this meant that people were recommending other people to follow. I was quite taken a back by this, after all, my previous experiences with social media were fairly limited and the tools I had used had a nasty habit of sustaining relationships that I would happily have left behind, but here was a tool with the power to connect me to new and exciting people. I followed three people on that day, Jason Bradbury, Becky Kingston and Wayne Thompson, at the time the thing that stuck in my mind was that Jase followed me back, if I had only known what was to come!

Over the next few weeks I began to check twitter more and more regularly, following more and more people, although tending to read far more than I posted, I couldn’t believe that anybody who didn’t know me would be interested in reading my thoughts. I began to follow one of my favourite wrestlers, Chris Jericho, and was enjoying reading the tweets that Chris was retweeting, they were like Chuckisms, but Jericho themed. I tried to think of something funny to tweet in the hope that Chris might retweet it and then I nailed it “@IAmJericho Chris Jericho future endeavoured Vince McMahon”. If you don’t know much about wrestling then you will just have to trust me that I nailed it. Chris did retweet my message and I was ecstatic… and then a strange thing happened, other people started retweeting it… and following me. For several days after my original tweet I received RTs and new followers. This gave me a new confidence to start conversing with people rather than just consuming the tweets of others. One of the people that I began talking to was Wayne, he seemed to be kind of like me, we talked about PlayStation games and the Gadget Show (some things never change bro ;) and Wayne added me on PSN.

Tweeting along to the Gadget Show has become something of a ritual for me and I thoroughly recommend it, I’ve met so many cool people in this way including a badger from outer space!

 

 

One day I was playing MW2 when Wayne invited me to join his party. I did and we had a few good games, I wasn’t as good as he was (some things never change bro ;), but I had fun. A few weeks later I was online again and Wayne invited me to join his party again, I did and was slightly surprised by the two other people also in the party, veedubhev and supermarioex. Wayne introduced us and explained to the others that I didn’t have a mic. We had some great games and exchanged some banter (I tended to be on the receiving end due to the lack of a mic) and this became such a regular occurrence that they invited me to join their TWIT clan and pushed me both to get a mic and to follow the rest of the clan. The rest is history, if it wasn’t for the fact that we all live so far apart, we would be inseparable, but modern technology means that we are all only a tweet/text/email away and can normally be found shoulder to shoulder, slaughtering the competition on CoD Black Ops.

This weekend was the first weekend that we were all in the same place at the same time. It was awesome. I spent the weekend with SMX, Wayne and his lovely fiance, we went to Gadget Show Live 2011 at the NEC on Friday (where we met up with a bunch of our other twitter friends) and traveled down to meet up with Hev and her beautiful daughter on the Saturday. So you see, it is all thanks to Jason and The Gadget Show that I met my three best friends and that is why I owe him a massive thank you. Thank you Jase, see you at the NEC in 2012!

Shameless plug: Jason Bradbury’s third novel is available now from all good book retailers. ;)

Browse like a ninja

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If the only metric you use to make your choice of internet browser is performance then you are a fool. The security of your personal data must surely be at least as important as how quickly you can render a page? I should explain that this post has been coming for a while, articles about Evercookies and Firesheep were worrying, but it was a piece on internet security on The Gadget Show [that completely failed to mention browser choice] that was the ultimate catalyst.

Firefox is my browser of choice because it is the safest, thanks largely to the security and privacy on offer from some of the myriad of awesome third party add ons. I have previously explained why NoScript and AdBlock Plus are must haves for me, but I have recently come across two more add ons that have quickly found a place in my personal hall of fame.

BetterPrivacy provides an easy way to manage super cookies (LSO Flash Objects, DOM Storage Objects – cookies that never expire). You set it up, in my case this meant telling it to delete everything when Firefox is closed, and then you forget about it.

Ghostery allows you to see exactly who is tracking you using web bugs, beacons, hidden pixels etc and then control which ones you allow. In fact, it offers you a profile on the source of each tracker to help you make your decision.

Go on, check them out and start browsing like a ninja!

If you are interested in browser security then you may be interested in this article about changes in Firefox 4.0 to prevent abuse of the CSS :visited selector.

Thanks to James Hugman for pointing out Ghostery to me!

With great power there must also come great responsibility

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In the same week that the story of Jessi Slaughter came to light, this post appeared on Engadget.

Free speech is a right that everyone should be entitled to, but when you say something, it’s all on you if it offends/upsets people. If you say something that a lot of people find offensive/upsetting then you can expect a lot of people to tell you about it and you have to except that they might do that in a way that you find offensive and upsetting.

So you are responsible for what you say, but what if someone provides you with a stage? With maybe the exception of reporting on something upsetting/offensive as a news item, the stage provider is effectively endorsing the content of your message. It is a reflection on them. Websites such as YouTube have a right to uphold their standards by refusing to post, or by removing videos containing content that they find objectionable. This is not censorship. You have the right to free speech, not to have people agree with you. The important point here is that the judgment call on what is acceptable lies with the stage provider, even if they use popular opinion to make their decision on where the threshold of acceptability lies.

In the case of Jessi Slaughter who is a minor (yes, I know that’s not her real name), her parents take on the responsibility for not protecting her from the full horror of the internet and the responsibility for not policing what she was saying*, she did instigate the entire episode after all.

In exactly the same way, Apple and Google have the right to refuse to allow apps containing content that they find objectionable in their respective app stores (the rejection of apps for the purpose of gaining/maintaining market control is an issue for another post). You want Nazi wallpaper on your smart phone, go do it, but don’t expect Apple/Google to help you.

I wrote this post because freedom of the internet is one of those subjects that people like to convince themselves is full of grey areas, when really it isn’t. The internet is as self policing as the spoken word, it’s just that people don’t like having to make the decision on what is black and what is white because they are making clear where their own threshold of acceptability is and other people might disagree.

*Despite what one of the talking heads on GMA said, rap music is not responsible for Jessi Slaughter’s actions.