TechnocratTechnocrat’s Random Thoughts

I have been playing Mercenaries 2 for about 15 hours and according to the game I am 75% done.  So I figured I would drop in a review about it.

First the good, you can blow just about anything up.  It’s fun for awhile to just walk, run, drive, or fly around to different areas and towns and just blow things up.  Dropping ordnance like daisy cutters and artillery on buildings and people is great.

You can also use a number of different vehicles in the game.  Boats, planes, helicopters, cars, APC, etc.  It’s fun for awhile to steal them and try them out.  There are a bunch of guns also.  Though I found really all you need is the AK (or carbine) and the RPG.  You use the AK for far targets and the RPG for buildings and vehicles.  For everything else simply run in a zig zag patter so you don’t get shot as much and then use melee against them.  One hit of that brings them down.  Yeah that’s it.  I rarely shot anyone when not in a vehicle.

The game is entertaining for awhile.  Then it gets repetitive…quickly.

Which brings us to the bad.  First off is the graphics.  Boy are they sub par.  Feels like a game from 2 or 3 years ago.  Though not awful they aren’t great either.  But that’s not the worst part of the game.

That goes to the glitchy bugs and game play.  There are so many bugs and problems with this game it feels like they didn’t have a QA team at all.  Here is a good example, you have to take over a base in the middle of the jungle (get used to it because that’s going to happen a lot but I will come back to it.) by dropping smoke and having the friendly faction fly in a strike team to take over the main building.  All the while you have to kill all the enemies and blow up the other buildings to defend the strike team.  I guess because they are incompetent.

On my first try I took it over but died before I got the contract complete screen.  So I had to do it again.  Yet this time every building was now owned by a the faction I was helping.  But the ground guys were still the enemy faction.  So I just sat back and let them do the hard work until the mission was over.  This is one of MANY example of issues in the game.

I also got stuck, clipped, and glitched out a lot in this game.  More times than I should have.

The AI in this game is mildly retarded.  You can hide or trick them really easily.  It makes the game easy for the most part.  Add to that, that after the first few missions you can beat all the rest by simply bypassing the intended route, the game isn’t that hard at all.

What do I mean?  Well for example there is a mission where you are supposed to take a boat and do a beach landing and then run a gauntlet of enemies, tanks, and enemy structures.  By the way the worst is the structures.  After you play for awhile you will understand what I mean.

So instead of doing that I simply took a helicopter and crashed behind the main building.  The used C4 to blow through the wall and take over the build from behind.  I have done that on almost every mission like that. Or another good trick is when you need to blow a building up simply get close to it and there is usually a wall that blocks you from getting behind it.  Simply toss a smoke grenade for an air stike over the wall and then run.  You usually don’t even have to be close with the smoke.  The bomb will do all the work for you.

That’s why I am so close to being done at only 15 hours.  Add to that I have spent probably 5 or 6 hours messing around.

The game is also very repitive.  There are 4 mission types: take over a structure, blow a building up, kidnap someone, race a vehicles (which is pointless in this game).  Mostly you take over a structure.  At first it’s fun.  Then after a while you start to wonder why they couldn’t think up anything else.

So in the end, rent it if you want a few days of entertainment.  I do mean a few.  But I wouldn’t buy it!

I downloaded Google Chrome a couple of days a go and have been playing with it ever since.  I have to say for being a “beta” it’s VERY nice.

First the good, it’s very fast at rending web pages.  Faster than FireFox and no doubt faster than IE (what isn’t).

It also has a new version of Javascript which is by itself a reason to use it.  Every JS page or widget you use with it is ungodly faster than with any other browser.  I hope to see it in FireFox soon because that is something that should be shared with the masses.

It also gives you more usable space than almost all the other browsers.  So it makes viewing things easier.  The tabs are also more intuitive and can be grouped.  Which is nice.  Supposedly each tab and window is its own instance so it helps improve security.  There is a lot more in there security wise but you can find more on that some where else.  I am just giving you my quick impressions.

Now the bad, some of the ways it displays some things are kind of odd.  Like there is no status bar (this is supposed to change in the future).

There is also the license agreement which has the web world up in arms.  Basically giving Google to much license over you.  This is something that was supposedly a mistake on their part and will be fixed soon.

There have been some complaints about it displaying webpages incorrectly.  So far I haven’t seen that at all.

There are also no addons (yet).  Which is a huge feature in FireFox.

But given time I am sure that this browser has the possibility of being the one to beat and maybe even killing the IE giant.  Only time will tell.

I originally went from Word Press to b2Evolution because I didn’t like the interface and some of the features.  Now 2 and a 1/2 years later the reverse.  In my opinion b2Evolution is just to far behind the times with their themes, addons, support, etc.  It got to the point that I just couldn’t keep working with it anymore.

It’s fantastic if you want to have a site with multiple blogs and bloggers.  It’s very powerful in that regard but not so much for the single blogger.  So to that end I by hand moved over many of the pervious posts.  I did ditch about 1/3 of them as they were no longer needed.

So day 3 starts with still no email of a game being shipped. I did get two emails from them though.

First one saying that I have earned more points and I have a bigger discount now on game purchases. Fuck buying a game! If I wanted to buy games I wouldn’t be using your service assholes. Where the hell is my rental!

I get another email which is about to put me to the point of canceling. “Are you our biggest Super Fan?” Are you kidding me! Seriously!!  It’s about a contest they are having “Show us how insane your love for GameFly”. I should make a video flipping them off and telling them that instead of having stupid contents they should be working on improving their service. Like I dunno, their queue system! Or maybe their poor shipping.

I also realized that Monday is a holiday, so if they shipped one today, which is looking unlikely, I would get it by Wed. So a week and a half. I should stop complaining and just cancel my service. Maybe NetFlix will get the idea and start renting games.

Again you stuck gamefly.com!

Gamefily.com still sucks.

So I mailed Conan back on Monday. I got an email Wed saying they received it. But here I am Thursday afternoon with no email saying anything has shipped.

So lets look at my queue:
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames – Coming Soon
Too Human – Low
Battlefield: Bad Company – Low
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – High
Saints Row – Low
Ninja Gaiden 2 – High
Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Conspiracy – Medium
Hitman: Blood Money – Low
Perfect Dark Zero – Medium
Condemned: Criminal Origins – High
Crackdown – Low
SoulCalibur IV – Low
Skate – High
Fight Night: Round 3 – Medium

Look at how many of them are low! Almost 50% of them. I don’t think I have a crazy queue either. It’s not like its stacked with that many new releases. How long has Saints Row, Crackdown, and Hitman been out? Long enough I would think.

So which game do you think they will ship me? I am going to go with….Condemned: Criminal Origins. Why? Because it has the lowest game rating. But they should be sending me Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. So lets see

Either way at minimum it will take a week for me to get a new game in my hands.

After writing my last blog post about gamefly.com (http://www.techn0crat.com/index.php/2008/07/25/gamefly-review) I was sort of thinking maybe I was too hard on it. So I decided to try it again, make some notes, and be a little more scientific objective about it this time. The results were the same, gamefly still sucks in the same areas that I complained about before.

I turned the my previous game into the local USPS at 8:00am on Monday and setup my game queue with no currently availables at all. Then noted my queue.

So I get an email on Wednesday letting me know Conan was shipping. Again it took two days to get to LA. What are they paying for 3rd class mailing? Seems odd to me that it takes that long but anyways.

Now for my biggest bitch the queue. Conan was a one game that had a high availability level but it was the 3rd game down my list with that level. Plus it was in position 11 of my queue. What the fuck is the point of having a queue when the system ignores it!? I can not really understand stand it skipping low and medium levels I guess. But to skip two other highs!! Why!! This makes no sense and seems stupid as hell. I mean seriously what is the logic behind that? My best guess is they ship you the game they have the most of, which in this case was probably Conan because well the game sucks. But if that’s the case why have positions.

So off rant, I get the game Friday. Again with two days? I guess I am spoiled with Netflix. Really two days isn’t bad I guess.

Then I get an email on Friday saying they have received my previous game. Really!? Where did it go from Wed till then? Maybe it went with all the other games in my queue into some bizarre world where number positions have no purpose and customer service gets get treated like a $5 whore.

GameFly.com get your shit together please! >:XX

A couple of people have pointed out to me that someone has been running their mouth on a clan theme forum site again about me and 2.1.0. I am not going to say their name because really there is no point in talking about them anymore. I could sit here write another big long post proving how wrong and miss informed this person is, how stupid their claims are, post the IMs they used to send to me asking basic PHP questions to point out their amateur skill level, and crush him again. But what’’s the point really?

It’’s like fighting a retard. Sure you will always win, but in the end whats the point you just won against a retard and he is still retarded.

I have better things to do.

I recently made a post on Raven’s site about new CMS from Francisco Burzi ( FB ) called Smeego.
You can read the post here: http://ravenphpscripts.com/postxf15828-0-0.html Follow up at http://ravenphpscripts.com/postp121846.html#121846

For those that don’t know FB killed created PHPNuke. He recently sold it to some people who seem to be doing just as badly with it as he did, but anyways. FB closed the Smeego project after only a few months because of “In these months I received, as usual, lots of critics, attacks, bad comments, etc… it was on this way for about 7 years, and I must say that finally I’m tired of all this. I’ll not tolerate insults and destructive criticism anymore”

Really seriously what did you expect FB? Lets review. You ignored your community. Closed yourself off from anyone that would support you. Didn’t support your product. Improperly used the GPL license. Didn’t patch or repair your code. Left serious security flaws in version after version. Stole from other developers. Never really improved important current features but keep adding unneeded stuff. Let the project become stale. I could keep going but that’s the gist of it.

So after all that you expected a new project, which sounds like an STD you would get from a hooker, which appears to have the same issues all over again, would be well received by a community that for the most part hates you? People would cheer and dance? Give me a break.

He should get some credit for starting the project and bring it to the a certain level. But then should be blamed for killing it and making it the laughing stalk of the CMS and open source community.

What I really feel bad for is those people that drank the Smeego koolaid. They started sites based around the project and hung on him like a king. People like the person that runs axew3.com. You have to feel bad for these people when he took the project offline, or even starting to follow him in the first place with the way he handled Nuke. I guess they have learned a valuable life lesson.

I have spent the last few hours trying to figure out why Google hate me so much. Nuke-evolution.com has fallen from the top search result for nuke-evolution to the 4th page back. Behind sites that aren”t even active any more. What the fuck! We have thousands of link backs. Every fucking site setup with NE has a link back. How the hell are we so low!

phpBB-evolution.com has fallen to the second page of results behind the SVN and other stuff. Why the hell is this happening? I know it’’s new and I could see us behind sites like phpbb.com but seriously!?

I used as many tools as I could find online to analyze the sites. Not one of them pointed out any serious issue. We are still tops on all the other search engines including MSN and Yahoo! So what’’s the deal!? My only guess is that the link advertising at the bottom of the page is the cause. Because only in the last month or two has the NE site fallen like that and that was around the time that I put those links on. So that’’s my only guess. If they hadn”t paid for a year I would pull them off and see what happens.

So I guess word to the wise don”t do what I did. >:XX>:XX

I have decided to move the phpBB-Evolution blog from here to a more manageable site. Some people were bitching about all the cursing and funny disgusting things I was posting here while trying to find information on the project.|-|

So now development and info on the project can be found at http://blog.phpbb-evolution.com