One of the things that upgrading my computer brought with it was the capability to once again play games. Describing me as a casual gamer is very spot-on, with some weighting on the casual since it’s much rarer to find me gaming these days than before. There’s very few games who catch my interest, and I have a tendency to lose that interest quickly. Ask any of my friends who’s the first one to bail out of multiplayer-games and most of them will point at me.

None the less, I looked forward to being able to try a few of the current games. I have a very loose grasp of what’s current, but I knew that Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 were high up on the list. I also remembered that Bioshock had gotten good reviews and decided to try it as well.

Bioshock was in my opinion very impressive. UT3 is pretty much what could be expected. Crysis on the other hand is without a doubt the biggest disappointment in many years.

Sure, I’ll give praise where praise is due. Visually Crysis is spectacular. The graphics-engine is nothing short of amazing. It will require a quite powerful machine, but if you have one then it will deliver. If you want to impress your friends, Crysis will do nicely. Sound is also pretty good, but it can’t match the visual Wow-factor.

Everything else however, is in my opinion pathetically poor.

The story starts off good enough. In a not too distant future you as a member of an elite search & rescue operation gets sent to a tropical paradise to extract a few archeologists who’ve gotten run over by North Korean army. You discover after a while that something isn’t right, and the archeological dig turns out to be something else. In fact, it turns out to be some kind of alien machine-civilization thingamajig that runs amok and you alone stand between it and the rest of the earth.

The first part of the game is quite cool. Your suit has various neat functions, such as increasing your speed, making you less vulnerable to gunfire, making you stronger or even turning you invisible. Each function has advantages and drawbacks. For example, when in Strong-mode you’re incredibly slow, and in Speed-mode you’re vulnerable to gunfire. When you’re invisible you can’t fire your gun or your cloak will disappear. And so on, and so forth.

Utilizing these functions to outwit and outgun the Korean military is fun. Sneaking around the bushes using a sniper-rifle to pick off targets is fun.

But as soon as the alien crap starts everything that makes the game fun disappears, and instead it mutates into a beautiful but boring twitch-shooter. All the things that made the game impressive in the first part simply become irrelevant. The excellent AI that powers the Korean soldiers disappear, since the aliens will mindlessly attack until you kill them. Whichever mode your suit is in doesn’t matter, and the only thing that matters is how many bullets you can fire at whatever is attacking you. It becomes boring and repetitive, and whatever shred of story exists simply fades into the background.

A good single-player game needs a good story. Fabulous visuals are no compensation for a thin storyline, and Crysis is an excellent example of this. It starts off great, but it doesn’t take long for whatever sanity to completely disappear.

Adding insult to injury it’s ridiculously difficult. I played the game on “Normal” difficulty, and quickly found that I’d have to getting used to trying up to ten-fifteen times before managing something. Some parts of the game are so amazingly difficult that it boggles my mind. Sure, there’s probably tons of Counter-Strike junkies who will get a huge kick out of this, but I’m tired of games who punish my persistence by slapping me in the face all the time. Half-Life 2 was a good example of how difficulty should be set - it provided a challenge, not a chore. After a while Crysis became a chore, it became work. Just plough trough it and maybe it ends some time.

I’m disappointed. I really wanted to like this game. I liked Far Cry, even though it also descended into silliness and provided a half-assed ending. Crysis is even worse. Some things in the story just doesn’t make any sense. Why the hell did Prophet go off on his own, and how the heck did he manage to survive a NUCLEAR MISSILE? The cutscenes become boring after a while, since most of the plot is so amazingly dumb. The gung-ho admiral in charge of the aircraft carrier is a walking cliché. He does something that everyone including the player KNOWS is wrong, and after that the game gets turned into a search-for-the-key-then-defeat-the-end-boss nonsense. The ending itself isn’t an ending. It’s just a cut, while Crytek assembles the addon/sequel. You’re playing the game and then BAM, credits roll.

There’s tons of minor annoyances as well. Why do you get a gun that won’t function until later in the game? There’s no explanation, no nothing. It just doesn’t work until after a certain point, and even then it’s no fun. At this stage Crysis has all the thoughtfulness of an 80’s arcade-shooter. You have to find the “weak points” and finding them simply consists of either shooting wildly or dying. Considering the ludicrous difficulty, the latter is something you’ll do often. Enjoy that quick-load button, you’re gonna get really friendly with it.

No, the first part of the game was fun, and it was fun using the suit and admiring the visuals. After a certain point it just becomes a monotonous shoot-em-up that would make the original Doom seem like a masterfully crafted play.

Bioshock on the other hand was awesome in my opinion. It does everything right that Crysis does wrong, and is equally spectacular in the visuals department since it uses the Unreal3-engine. It’s an entertaining plot, with intrigue and drama and a plot-twist. Add to this the heavy influences of roleplaying that Bioshock has.

So in summary this game is essentially Paris Hilton. It’s pretty to look at and fun to goof off with, but after the first few minutes the prettiness wears off and the conversation becomes stale and monotonous.

I remind myself every year that there is NOTHING that can be trusted on April 1st. Yet I often forget about this rule, and get all worked up over something. Afterwards I feel really stupid. Which I suppose is why I really dislike April 1st, since the “tradition” of April Fools has mutated into some kind of “make people feel really stupid”-tradition instead.

So yeah, I bought the thing about Cheese hook, line and sinker. Silly me.

Note to self: next year, don’t even turn on the freakin’ computer. Don’t answer the phone. Don’t read anything. Just sit in a corner and listen to music.

None the less, my opinions on software patents stand strong. I also don’t think it’s below Apple (or any corporation holding large amounts of patents) to try something just exactly like that.

It’s a well-known fact that I strongly oppose software-patents. In fact, patenting software is one of the most (ahem) patently absurd concepts I can imagine. Especially since pretty much everything in software is de-facto concepts that have been built on previous concepts building on previous concepts and so forth and so on.

Couple this with a patent system that has passed every checkpoint on the road to insanity and you’ll arrive at the system we have today. The major software companies no longer invent software, they try to patent every tom dick and harry piece of code and then sit on them like roosting hens and sue the bejeezus out of any poor schmuck who comes along.

Patents have been granted for completely absurd things, but software patents are in a league of their own. Today it’s virtually impossible for a small company to develop software without bogging themselves down in a legal quagmire trying to research what they’re allowed to do with software without violating some inane patent. Adding even such obvious things as a scrollbar to your application might violate some patent, and some troll-company comes along and sues your ass for infringement.

So, now that I’ve set the mood, let me proceed.

There’s an application on the Mac called Photobooth. It’s a fairly trivial little thing that essentially turns your Mac into one of those photobooths you can find in malls or supermarkets. You can add some minor effects and such. Basically it’s a completely harmless and mostly useless little software doo-dad that Apple includes in OS X.

Recently a new application called Cheese sailed up in the Gnome desktop. It mimics the concept of Photobooth and is just as harmless and mostly useless. It’s fun for about twenty seconds, and then you get bored.

I just visited the Cheese homepage and found out that some lawyer-shark acting on Apples behalf was forcing the creator of Cheese to abandon his project and remove all known instances of it, or they would sue him into oblivion.

This is posted on the Cheese frontpage:

all hell broke loose yesterday: i got a phone call yesterday by a nice lady, which presented herself as a former advocate of apple. she told me that the objective of her team was to find copyright and patent violations and therefore she called me:

obviously i did something wrong by starting such a project as cheese, which is a pure clone of photo booth. this would violate the us patent IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: computer software used for image editing, image acquisition, and image viewing, which was filed on february the 28th 2006 and as gnome is registered and known as an organization of the usa, this patent would be applicable.

i thought, that such patents would just apply, if there is some commercial interest behind it, but she knew it better: as i created cheese in the summer of code program, i “worked” for google, which makes everything a commercial project, even if now i “probably” do not get any money. in addition the full us patent law applies, as i a) worked for google in the usa for the summer of code program and b) cheese is now included in gnome, which is an organization registered in the usa.

she also told me, that of course there are similar applications like photo booth, but cheese acts as a clone and therefore an illegal copy because it works on intel based macs and therefore would be a competitor of photo booth. the fact, that cheese just runs on linux on the intel based macs was worthless by her.

so it looks pretty bad for me now.. i got a deadline of 5 work days to remove cheese code and binary versions from all places i have access to (probably svn.gnome.org, ftp.gnome.org, …).

i already contacted a lawyer, which thinks he can help me, but of course it is david against goliath…

so, if you know a way out of this, please contact me!

Is this the right way to go? HELL NO! This is just as bad as Creative getting all huffy over modified drivers that actually ADD functionality to their products. Why do companies insist on doing this? It serves nothing positive at all.

About an hour ago the clock turned over to a new day here in Sweden. That means that today is April 1st, aka April Fools Day.

Today I’m not going to turn on the television, nor read any news of any kind. I’m tired of every yahoo on the planet trying to post lame things to fool their readers. It stopped being funny when I was about twelve, and it’s become even less funny since most jokes these days are outrageously mean and insulting to most who fall for it.

Instead, I’m going to publish a screenshot of my Hardy Heron-system. I’m a Gnome-man, so that’s my preferred desktop. In case you want the wallpaper, it’s Toucan by Vladstudio. It’s awesome.