Spontaneous Monotony

To anyone at Glasgow Uni (I think this still goes out on the GUFF aggregator, barring any redirection fuckups on my part), the ‘CSCE’ (see, they can’t just call it software, it has to have gasp an acronym) has been updated again. Aside from an upgrade to Office 2003 (blah) and the removal of EndNote (again, blah, using that damn thing took longer than adding the footnotes myself), there is only one real substantive change to the software on offer. It’s a significant one though – OpenOffice.org.

Now, a part of me is hoping that OOo will eventually become the standard on CSCE, or at least that the uni will stop purchasing endless M$ Office upgrades (at thousands of pounds a time) and put the money towards something else (like balancing the uni’s finances, or student welfare, or some other more-worthy-than-Bill Gates’-bank-balance cause). There is one ‘leetle probleme’ though – they seem to have failed spectacularly at actually setting it up. Any attempt to run any of the OOo apps (remember, when you run any of them it’s the same actual PROGRAM – soffice.exe – which runs, it just uses a different mode) results in an error box:

The application cannot be started. An internal error occured.

Which is of course about as informative as your average Windoze BSOD. Clearly it is some fault with the way the uni computing service has set it up – like many people I use OOo at home and know it to be very reliable, and the uni uses a rather strange (and slow) Novell Netware (*shudder*) system to distribute the CSCE applications. Clearly, unless the network transmission was interfered with by laser-wielding gerbils, some setting or another needs changed.

When (if?) it is eventually fixed, though, it will be brilliant. I will be able to work on documents from home without either:

• Converting the file to a non-standard format, or
• Using ‘Portable’ OOo on a U3 flash drive (no chance)

All that’s needed now (apart from the aforementioned fixing of their OOo setup) is for the CSCE to include Firefox. It does work with the uni’s proxy servers (I had it running from my network storage space last year) and is a damn sight faster than IE 6 (believe me, the uni internet access is now so slow that every speed benefit counts). It is at least a start – and a recognition from the uni computing service that open source software does not have horns, nor will it eat your children.

EDIT: It turns out that the problems with actually running OOo were due to the main network filespace server being down.

Many of you (especially those of you who play PC games) will know that Star Wars tie-in games are generally, well, a bit crap (Force Commander was a disgrace to the RTS genre). That can’t be said for the Lego Star Wars games, and the new one is better simply because it is based on the original trilogy rather than the new toy adverts films. The vehicle levels are good fun, though impossible to get a decent score on, some of the bosses cheat, but on the whole it is a good game with very few obvious bugs. Even better is that the PS2 and PC versions can be had for about £17.99, which is not bad at all.

We must never forget that since September 11th, 2001 almost 3,000 innocent people were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. But we must also never forget that since that day, over 70,000 equally innocent people have been killed by America’s so-called ‘War on Terror’.

America claims to be fighting for freedom against ‘Islamic fascists’ and yet it detains people in secret and not-so-secret torture camps. America claims to be fighting to protect the innocent and yet when 1,000 innocents are slaughtered in Lebanon, America speeds up a shipment of smart bombs to the perpetrators. America claims to be fighting to bring democracy to the people of the Middle East, and yet when the people of Palestine choose a government which America disagrees with, America refuses to even talk with it.

The September 11th 2001 attacks were a dreadful crime, but what America has used it as an excuse for since is far worse.

Take Two, who purchased Firaxis Games and the rights to the Civilization series a while ago, have announced that there will be a boxset of every game in the series (except the Activision-published Call to Power and the Civ IV Warlords addon) along with an extras DVD (with footage, trailers from the games and a ‘making of Civ IV’ feature). It will also include a 250-card tabletop version of the game, as well as a 96-page book about the series. According to Gamespot the US retail price will be $69.99, which is not at all bad considering what you’re getting.

There is no word yet on a UK retail price, or even whether it will get a UK release, but if it does then it’ll probably be around the £40 mark (remember, this is ripoff Britain, and the prices are always higher than the Sterling equivalent of the US price).

See also

• Gamespot – 2K boxing Civilizations I-IV

The new Battlefield 2 patch (v 1.4) is out, and it includes two notable new features:

The most publicised is the new map – Road to Jalalabad. So far most people view it as something of a cross between Strike at Karkand and Mashtuur City, sans helicopter and bridges. The only two slight flaws are that it has too much armour – a US team that captures the first control point will have access to three tanks, more than most maps have in total – and that in the infantry-only mode (see below) the US mainbase is far too vulnerable to spawnraping. I haven’t come across the latter yet, as I haven’t played RTJ on infantry-only yet, but from some of the forum posts I’ve read it seems like a pretty serious flaw for servers that don’t bother enforcing their no-spawn-raping rule (seriously folks, if you do not have an admin on the server at ALL times then DO NOT turn kickvoting off!).

Perhaps the more significant though is the new ‘infantry-only’ mode. This had been much requested, and in fact some servers had previously been enforcing ‘infantry only’ rules through kicks in violation of the Ranked Server TOS. I have to say, although I was unsure about it at first, now that I’ve played a couple of infantry-only games I’ll probably be spending most of my time in them. Sure, I enjoy driving a tank as much as anyone, but it’s no fun if you’re the people getting blasted without much effort.

The problem with vehicles in Battlefield 2 is not so much their power, but the lack of balance. A tank can take out multiple people with a single shot, whereas it will take up to 4 anti-tank rockets to kill a tank. I’m not calling for down-to-the-last-rivet realism in an unquestionably arcade-type game like BF2, but surely making tanks so overpowered (just watch news stories about Iraq and you’ll realise how many well-placed rockets a real tank can survive. generally none.). The same can be said about helicopters and aircraft – even if hit by two AA missiles (assuming BF2’s still-buggy heatseekers actually get within half a mile of their target) a helicopter will probably still be able to take out the person carrying them. It is here that the lack of a BFV-style portable AA missile is most keenly felt. Giving one to, say, the anti-tank class as an optional swap instead of the anti-tank rocket, would solve the overpowering of helicopters at a stroke.

The infantry mode, then, eliminates tanks, helicopters, planes, everything that players of Battlefield 2 complain is ‘overpowered’ (remember, the ‘n00b tube’ got balanced a patch or two ago) – including commander artillery. There is no other way to describe it than ‘it rocks’. Seriously. Previously only the people in the vehicles (or a medic in a large, but crap, squad) could hope to get a halfway decent score. In my first game of infantry-only I had a score of 48 and was in the bottom half of my team! Aside from the lack of tankwhoring, the most obvious difference is that a lot more grenades are being used. Not to excess though, plenty of other weapons (especially the flashbang and support ammopacks) have gained in relevance in the new gametype.

Having said that, it isn’t all good. Many of the old bugs have either not been fixed (like the ‘crashing to desktop’ bug which seems to have been a new ‘feature’ since Patch 1.3) or been made even more bizarre – the teamcolour bug has been ‘fixed’, but now kills of people who are actually on the other team (and appear as such, correctly) will sometimes register as teamkills! How DiCE managed this I don’t know, but having patches that increase the number of bugs is a novel approach to software maintenance, and seems to be unique to this company – they are even touting what in any other game would be considered a bug (the inability to move after standing up) as a feature! If this was intended to stop ‘dolphin diving’ then it has been a fuckup of spectacular proportions – I have been dolphindived more in the past two days than I have in all the time I’ve played Battlefield 2 since it came out. Releasing a game in an unfinished state is contempt for your customers, failing to fix at least a sizeable majority of the flaws after six (!) patches is simply pathetic.