How To Spot A Psychopath

While I was hunting up entertaining links for my most recent letters column, I came across this forum thread.

Well, I call it a thread. It’s actually one post that led me to a fun page, followed by the most atomically disgusting comment spam it has been my misfortune to encounter in the whole of my sheltered little life.

Oh, I know that some people may be more horrified by filthy porno comment spam, or by hundreds of little one-link comments; it’s a matter of (dis)taste. There’s just something about the sheer one-paragraph, 300-link onslaught of these particular spammers that particularly tickles my own killing urge.

I mentioned TA Spring in a passing link in my Supreme Commander post, but it deserves more. It kind of looks the way you’d expect Total Annihilation 2 to have looked, if that had come out in about 2001.

(That’s the original TA intro music; TA had a proper orchestral score, played by a proper orchestra. And saved in a perfectly legible format, so it was easy to convert it to a 10kHz 8 bit mono WAV so it’d fit on a floppy, copy it onto someone else’s PC, and set it as their Win98 startup sound. Ah, good times, good times.)

There was, of course, no actual TA2 if you don’t count Kingdoms; Atari bought the rights to the TA brand and did nothing with it. Hence, Gas Powered Games straight-facedly claim Supreme Commander to be “all-new intellectual property“, despite the fact that it’s self-evidently a jazzed-up TA for the 21st century.

Spring lets you have a very flexible viewpoint - much more flexible, in fact, than SupCom. SupCom lets you zoom out to see the entire battlefield, but all you can do is zoom in and out and move your camera in the X and Y dimensions - you have no manual control over camera heading.

There’s a good reason for that, of course; lots of viewpoints that look cool are useless for controlling a game, not to mention quite confusing. SupCom’s puzzling enough for beginners without adding the possibility of moving your viewpoint inside a hill.

Spring’s developers are unconcerned with such things, so the Spring engine allows you to fly your camera anywhere you like, or even use a first-person view from a unit.

The old TA units don’t have nearly enough triangles in them to hold up well in close examination, of course. But Spring is all open-source-y and extensible, so prettier units, or other features, can be added to it at will.

Mmmmm.

TA was, of course, also highly extensible; people made lots of mods and tweaks and new units for it.

All of which can be seen in all their close-up magnificence in the Spring engine, too.

The old TA sounds are still perfectly decent, though.

I’m still going to be playing Supreme Commander, but there’s no point even trying to play SupCom on a five-year-old computer. As long as you’ve got a 3D card that people actually wanted to buy back then, though, Spring should be pretty darn happy.

And you can’t beat a price of “free“.

My productivity has just dropped to zero.

I cannot imagine what connection that might have with the copy of Supreme Commander the nice postman brought me.

I only dabbled with the widely-pirated beta version, so the retail version is pretty much new to me.

Except it isn’t, because everybody who tells you that Supreme Commander is Total Annihilation on steroids is exactly right. A TA player will feel very much at home.

It’s certainly taken me back to 1997, when I was playing Total Annihilation on my K6-200 (with crazy-fast Tseng ET6000 graphics card and useless-for-TA Monster 3D Voodoo Graphics accelerator) at 1024 by 768 and winding the game speed down as soon as battle proper commenced, to keep the frame rate out of slideshow territory.

Now here I am again, doing exactly the same thing ten years later on my 20-times-faster PC.

Admittedly, I am now playing with one monitor at 1600 by 1200 and the other one (which doesn’t seem to be as useful as you might think, but is so cool that I cannot countenance disabling it) at 1024 by 768.

And it’s all pretty and 3D accelerated.

And everything’s larger in scale, more like real military units in size-to-weapon-range terms. SupCom can also support bodaciously hyper-gigantic maps, though there’s not much point trying to play on one today unless you’ve got a PC that fell through a time warp from a thousand years in the future.

By and large, though, SupCom still feels awfully TA-ish.

All this same-old-same-old stuff does not mean that SupCom is not a fine game. It appears to be one, from what little I’ve seen so far, even if those timeless unit pathfinding problems are still there. And very noticeable to dorks like me who insist on making 200-unit armies on the early tutorial levels.

(Pathfinding problems are a big obstacle when you start playing with the nifty formation and coordinated attack features. I suppose the developers could have smoothed it over a bit by allowing re-formationing units to cheat and walk through each other, but I’m sure some munchkin would immediately figure out how to use that to make 40% of his units invulnerable at any given time.)

(Oh, and I can’t say I’m a huge fan of frickin’ SecuROM copy protection, either, but presumably that’ll be turned off a couple of patches down the track, as usual. And it only stopped the game from starting the first time I tried to run it. Fingers crossed.)

So SupCom is not just TA warmed over. It’s a cool modern RTS that does stuff that nobody else’s RTS games can do. It’s just that a lot of the stuff that it does was already done by TA, because TA was so very far ahead of its time.

Command queuing, smart unit selection hotkeys (yes, control-Z to select all units the same as the ones currently selected still works, though it doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the manual; does anybody know how to set map bookmarks?), the ability to issue commands to factories to affect the units they produce… all TA stuff, and all beefed up in SupCom.

(The perfect example being telling a factory to send its ground units over the hills and far away, then setting one or more air transports to assist the factory, which will cause the transports to ferry the units to their destination automagically. I don’t think transports-assisting-other-transports works right yet, though.)

And SupCom, like TA, is still a RTS game for people who hate micromanagement. I don’t think micro is bad; I’m just not into it. So Blizzard-y games with lots of unit abilities that you have to play like a piano if you want to do even slightly well leave me cold.

(Yes, I’m aware that high-level TA degenerated into an evil clickfest, as people discovered that vast crowds of missile trucks were unanswerable early on, while giant flocks of stealth fighters, carefully managed, were just as invincible later.)

The Gamereplays Supreme Commander section looks like the best site to soak up info on the game at the moment. Almost all of the replays they have online are for beta versions and fail amusingly…

…on the retail release, but that’ll change.

I’m pleased to see, as I peruse the replays-I-can’t-play list, the irrepressible Gnugs mixing it up in SupCom. Now we old-timers need only see a gigantic Swedish Yankspankers sign rotating over the SupCom battlefield to feel perfectly at home.

(Although SY might, of course, be a little busy.)

The Yankspankers were the people responsible for the TA Demo Recorder, which allowed games to be recorded and played back via a sort of benign man-in-the-middle attack. SupCom has its own record/playback system built in, of course.

If you don’t have a sufficiently bitchin’ computer to play SupCom, I strongly recommend you pick up a copy of TA - and the Core Contingency and Battle Tactics expansions as well, even if the hovercraft were all useless. Going back to TA today is not like going back to the original Command and Conquer; the 256 colour graphics look distinctly dated, but TA’s gameplay is still great.

(Kingdoms was kind of interesting, and prettier, but the original is better.)

Because TA doesn’t use 3D acceleration at all (zillions of tiny polygons were un-acceleratable by 3D cards of TA’s era), it’s also an excellent game for computers with crappy 3D adapters, including boring business boxes and your Aunt Mabel’s dreadful Dell.

Any current CPU will push TA along at warp speed at as high a resolution as you can fit on your monitor, and it’s a young enough game that you can play online using nice normal TCP/IP, rather than having to do some bizarre tunnelling trick with IPX/SPX or something.

If your PC is large and veiny enough for SupCom, though - the minimum requirements are not completely laughable, but more of everything is a very good idea - forget its little brother.

Get in on the ground floor of the connoisseur’s RTS for the next ten years.

I just had occasion to look at my old piece here about a self-contained water cooling device that did not work very well, and checked to see whether an awful review of the device I linked to was still up.

It was not; the site is now a parked domain. Awwww.

More entertainingly, though, the company that sent me the gadget for review now has a teensy little problem with their home page, which redirects to the entirely reasonable http://yenindustries.com/index.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gif before Firefox pulls the plug on its foolishness. Internet Explorer keeps on diligently trying to load it for a while before giving up with a less informative message.

So I’m leaving death and derangement in my wake, as usual. Jolly good.

Why didn’t someone tell me earlier that there was a show called Tank Overhaul?

(I found out about it in one of Toolmonger’s TV updates.)

It’s pretty much what you’d expect - one of those blokes-fixing-stuff-up shows, except with armoured fighting vehicles instead of some poxy motorcycle.

There are four episodes, featuring a Comet, a Panther, a Sherman and a Hellcat. I don’t know whether there’ll be any more (there’s not a whole lot of info about the show on the Web; search for it and you’re likely to find torrent sites before you find anything about the production company…), but there’s quite a lot of tanky goodness in just these.

The series started out very well, with a collection of small-budget English blokes whose repair strategies involve a lot of sledgehammers, crowbars, wedges, and big baulks of wood. They love their jobs, and they make fun of millionaire tossers who hire other people to fix tanks for them at great expense.

Then along comes Episode 2, which is (a) quite heavily padded and (b) all about those millionaire tossers and the men who work for them.

(Curiously, it appears to be a rule on both sides of the Atlantic that no tank restoration workshop is complete without a black and white cat wandering around.)

But episode three has the English chaps again. Hurrah!

Actually, all of the episodes have a non-trivial amount of somewhat repetitive padding, including the old Cheap-Ass War Documentary Maker’s Favourite - shots of the place where a battle happened, with sound effects that give the impression that the fighting’s still going on, if only the stupid cameraman would turn around. The producers are trying a bit harder than that, though; they also have sequences with pretty decent CGI tanks superimposed on the scene. I’d still rather the show spent all of its time with the actual restorers, though.

The first three eps don’t actually feature the end of the job, on account of how… the job doesn’t end.

If your “restoration” only involves making the outside of a reasonably complete tank look presentable for static display in a museum, then you can get it done in a week. But these are proper restoration projects, with the aim of making a working and highly authentic vehicle. And, on top of that, they’re not starting (in the first three episodes) with something that’s been perfectly preserved in a bog. No; they get tanks that’ve either been sitting in a river for sixty years, or used for target practice for thirty.

You get to see a lot of progress, and other tanks trundling around and, upon occasion, deleting one spatial dimension from a smaller vehicle. But they kind of gloss over the fact that the actual project tanks in the first three episodes aren’t even rolling chassis by the end of the show.

The last episode’s got Americans again, but it’s not as badly padded as the second, and goes all heartwarming at the end. Which is permissible, since you also get an M18 Hellcat tearing around like an 18-ton sports car.

This is almost enough to get me to forgive the voice-over guy for, earlier in the series, talking about how terrifying the German tank force was in 1941, over stock footage of ranks of Tiger IIs that didn’t exist before 1944. And, more seriously, for using the term “military-industrial complex” as if it’s a compliment, which it isn’t.

Tank Overhaul is still excellent viewing, though.

Now - how can we get Tim and Rex involved?

(I’ve reviewed quite a lot of toy tanks over the years, by the way. Plus one centipede.)

Joel Johnson, former glorious leader of Gizmodo, wrote an excellent column for them about the idiots who buy, and the idiots who write about, gadgets.

I didn’t think I’d mention it here. But then a particularly egregious example of an unengaged-brain review slapped into my inbox.

ThinkComputers, you see, are very impressed with Brando Brando’s 55-In-1 card reader. They gave it ten out of ten!

And why wouldn’t they! It can handle fifty-five kinds of Flash memory card, after all!

The only teeny little cockroach in the banana split, here, is that there aren’t 55 kinds of Flash memory card. Not even if you count old formats that almost nobody uses any more, and which this reader can’t read, like PCMCIA and SmartMedia.

It’s normal for card reader marketers to inflate product specs by pretending that it’s remarkable that they don’t just support CompactFlash cards from 1999, but also cards from 2006. Wow! That’s two kinds of card, right there!

Yes, newer cards normally use some updated version of whatever the protocol is. But they’re also backwards compatible with the old cards. They’re the same darn thing as far as a reader is concerned. Motherboard manufacturers don’t say you can use eleven kinds of hard drive just because the board supports every iteration of Parallel ATA, two flavours of SATA, and ATAPI. They tell you it’s got PATA ports and SATA ports. Done.

Brando, however, have taken the number-inflation cheat to the extreme, dude. They’ve just listed every single name for every single revision of every single card format you can plug into their reader. They don’t even mind putting down different names for the exact same thing, so they can count it twice. This is stupid, but it’s even stupider to copy and paste that big indigestible list of formats into your review without at least pointing out how many real formats it’s talking about.

So let’s do that, shall we?

CF I
CF II
CF I WA
CF I ELITE PRO
CF PRO
CF PRO II
CF Ultra II
HS CF
CF Extreme
CF Extreme III
CF Extreme IV
IBM MD
Hitachi MD
MAGICSTOR

OK, that’s all one kind of card. From a modern reader’s point of view, there are only Type I and Type II CF cards; it doesn’t matter whether they’re one of those nifty-but-obsolete tiny hard drives or not (the last three on the list are moving-parts drives). And the only difference between I and II is that Type II cards are taller. Same pinout, same socket, not even worth calling them two cards.

So that’s one out of 55, so far. Promising!

MS
MS MG
MS PRO
MS PRO EXTREME
MS PRO MG
MS DUO
MS DUO MG
MS PRO DUO
MS PRO DUO ULTRA
MS PRO DUO MG
MS PRO ULTRA II
MS ROM
MS MEMORY SELECT FUNCTION
MS DUO HS
MS PRO EXTREME III
MS PRO HS
MS PRO DUO MG HS
M2

I’ll be generous and grant that the three different sizes of Memory Stick qualify as three kinds of card.

XD
XD H Type
XD M TYPE

OK, xD counts as another format. We’re up to five in total now. Only 50 to go!

SD
SD PRO
SD ELITE PRO
SD ULTRA
SD ULTRA II
SD EXTREME
SD EXTEREME (sic) III
SD HS 150X
SDHC 2.0
MINI SD
T-Flash
Micro SD

Three sizes of SD, counting as three more formats. Total: Eight.

MMC
MMC 4.0
HS MMC
RS MMC
RS MMC 4.0
HS RS A15MMC
MMC MOBILE
MMC PLUS 200X

Oh, no - they’re finishing weakly!

MultiMediaCard is just SD with no Digital Rights Management functions, so, at base, it only barely counts as a different card - though it is of course normal for card reader manufacturers to say that it does.

OK, I suppose it’s fair enough to make clear to normal users that the reader can handle both SD and MMC. Let’s raise the total to nine.

I’ll once again be generous, and say that the Reduced Size (RS) version counts as another card type, even though (a) it’s an orphan format and (b) it’s got the exact same contacts on the front as standard MMC, so you stick it into the exact same slot on the reader.

So we’re up to ten.

Once you winnow out the rest of the redundancies and separate entries for different revisions of the same thing, you’re left with… nothing more. No old SmartMedia, no unpopular MMCmicro.

An unschooled consumer might assume that a 55-in-1 reader would have to be compatible with everything under the sun, but this is not correct. That’s because this, to be generous, is a ten-in-one reader.

Which is pretty good going, seeing as it’s only got five physical holes for you to put cards in.

Brando’s product page links to some even lamer reviews, like this one and this one (”ever-changing memory paradigms”, eh?). (This one’s OK, though.)

Brando’s store wants $US28 plus $US3 shipping for the “55 in 1″ reader.

USB Geek, about whom I’m feeling guilty because they sent me some widgets to review about a million years ago and I haven’t done it yet, have a slightly less flagrantly mispromoted reader for $US15, delivered.

If you can find something the Brando reader reads that the USB Geek one doesn’t, and you care, then go on and pay twice as much for the 29736-In-1 Brando product.

Otherwise, though, please don’t encourage them.

Mickey isn’t actually very interested in cockatoos, on account of how large and alarming they are. When he startles them and they blast off to the safety of a nearby tree, he often seems as surprised as them.

That doesn’t mean they don’t feel the need to keep a careful eye on him, though.

(Previously. All bird posts.)

For once, I decided to politely ask someone who hotlinked one of my images to please not do that, via a comment on their blog.

They elected to deal with the problem by deleting the comment, and have continued to leech their little bit of bandwidth out of my server for weeks now.

Hence, this (screenshot).

(OK, they’re Dutch, but I’m guessing that someone there speaks just a little English, on account of how their blog name is in English, and all.)

I’m sure they’d love to see a lot more comments, all over their site. Bonus points for any of you who comment in Dutch, a language in which most words sound rude anyway.

This Daily WTF post amused me much more than is reasonable.

Amazon will presumably fix this listing in the near future, so I downloaded the page source for posterity. If you for some reason want to view its full 3,677,481 byte magnificence - I recommend you use a text editor, not a browser - you can find a Zipped version of it here.

Doom - The Roguelike sounds like a strong contender for Nerdiest Thing In The Entire History Of The World. And, OK, it is.

There are, however, two strong points in its favour.

1: It works. It’s not what you’d call a deep game, and it has no lofty goals, but it’s more complex than you might at first think. And it really does function quite well.

Thought has gone into how to translate the FPS experience into a turn-based ASCII game, and DoomRL has kept the spirit of Doom without making bad decisions like trying to translate famous levels into 80x24 screens. There are new weapons and old ones, and skills to beef up your character when he goes up levels, and things like shotgun reloading work in sensible ways.

There’s even an ADOM-style tactics setting, to simulate dodging around to avoid fire or standing there pouring your own bullets into enemies. (When you pick up a Berserk Pack, you are of course stuck on Aggressive tactics until it wears off.)

2: It’s got sound.

Roguelikes, traditionally, are silent as the grave, but DTR has standard DOOM sounds. And they don’t seem out of place at all.

I didn’t realise how deeply those grunts and snuffles and yells and scratching noises had burrowed into my consciousness until I started hearing them again. After I came to, hunched in a dark corner of the kitchen holding a carving knife and snarling, I was really impressed.

You don’t have to have the sound on to play; if you’re goofing off at work it’s obviously inadvisable, and it’s not even possible if you’re running DoomRL on some ancient system or other, according to roguelike tradition. But the sound really does help. It lets you know what monsters are out there, and even uses stereo panning to tell you where they are.

There’s a Wiki for DoomRL as well, by the way. Oh, and the same author has produced the going-full-circle DiabloRL, and a seven day roguelike (previously) called Berserk!.

I wonder what he’ll turn into a roguelike next.

Myst? Civilization? Metroid?