Bring It On

Just in case you're not aware of it, there's a great TV show called Battlestar Galactica. It's a remake recreation of the original show from the seventies, but much darker and more realistic. Despite the sci-fi setting, don't let that fool you - the show treats many timeless human issues like meaning of life, love, religion, betrayal...

I won't go into detailed analysis of why this show is so good but one thing is obvious: without the most excellent soundtrack that keeps getting better season after season the show wouldn't be half as good. The music is original with lots of unusual instruments and expresses emotion in a way previously unheard of for a TV series.

The last season's final episode was a shiny example of that: perfect synergy of picture and sound, great timing and excellent execution.

Now, just a couple of episodes later there's another genius example of the use of music and lyrics to enhance the viewing pleasure. In the episode 7 of the season 4 (warning: spoilers ahead! If you haven't watched the episode, don't read further) called Guess What's Coming to Dinner we all witness great vocal capabilities of the actor Alessandro Juliani (aka Felix Gaeta).

While recovering from the leg amputation Gaeta sings to reduce stress and cope with pain. The lyrics are original and so is the music, but the way the song is delivered will send chills down your spine. The song is appropriately named Gaeta's Lament and both the lyrics and music sheet are available.

Even better, a thorough analysis of how the song came to be and how it improves the narrative, especially at the end when the hybrid is awaken (awesome scene!) can be found at the Bear McCreary's blog. I highly recommend you to go through it. Considering how much thought and love when into making an episode like this no wonder it turned out as good as it did.

I have just received a promotional email from Amazon.fr with a great line

Disques durs externes Stockez sans modération

In English this reads “External hard drives Store without restraint”

We all keep so much junk thanks to the cheap and large hard drives…

I haven’t played a game on a PC since I bought the Xbox (the first one). It really is so much better just to put the DVD in, wait a few seconds, grab a controller and start playing. There are no network issues either thanks to the Xbox Live service.

Still, gaming on a PC has its advantages. The resolution you play is up to you (and is often higher than the resolution on a console, especially close to the end of life of the console) and mouse is a lot better pointing device for FPS than the controller. On the other hand, controller is a much better solution than the keyboard, at least for me.

Just the other day Half-Life 2: Episode 2 came out, AKA The Orange Box. I bought the original game and Episode 1 and played them both on the PC (one of the last few games I played on a PC before switching). I planned to play the Episode 2 on my Xbox 360 for the reasons listed above, but realized I don’t need the extras on the orange box (even though they look cool and are a good value), plus I payed for the previous games already. On a whim, I decided to buy just the Episode 2 and play it on a PC.

The Episode 2 so far is great. I say “so far” because I started playing from the beginning and even though I didn’t plan to, I played through the whole Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 in succession and only then started playing Episode 2. Unfortunately, a year after Vista’s release, several driver revisions and despite the fact that I own previous generation video hardware (NVidia 7600GS), I had and still have graphics glitches in the game.

That said, Valve truly is a great company. Half-Life 2, three years old game, gave me (again) so much fun compared to all the other titles that I’m surprised why the other game designers do not copy more of the concepts from this successful game.

What do these guys do that’s so great?

• Excellent music that starts playing at the appropriate moment (usually just prior to a significant battle), sound design is also top notch, weapons sound great and the voice acting is superb
• Great graphics that run very well (minus driver issues) on a variety of hardware; yes, they are not the top dog in the 3D effects department, but the game looks and plays great while the content is more important anyway
• You are never ever out of the game – there are no cinematics and the story unfolds while you play; this is probably the biggest advantage to the other games
• Sidekick characters are likeable: Barney, Alyx, Vortigaunts, even temporary ones like Father Grigori… they all behave like real people (or aliens); I chuckled several times during Episode 2, there are many times more jokes coming from the sidekicks this time
• Physics puzzles – no other game has physics integrated in the way that Half-Life 2 does

I could go on and on I guess. If you haven’t played Half-Life 2 yet and are even remotely interested in gaming, do yourself a favor and buy this game. Thanks to the Steam content delivery platform, you don’t need to order and keep CDs or DVDs. The games are always just a download away, and Orange box is a great value.

…you should definitely check out Hugo 20007 winner for the best novel. But you knew that already, if an author gets the Hugo Award his/her book is a must-read.

The reason I mention this particular book is that Vernor Vinge (the author) is “giving it away” – the full text is available online! It’s just a single web page with no styling and is very easy to read. Actually, I just found another use for my PSP – reading HTML books.

You might know Vernor from his earlier work (he is a multiple Hugo Award winner) of which True Names is the one that made him a name. It’s a book about cyberspace, before William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

When I bought my Xbox 360 I was surprised to find that it’s still labeled as “PAL” version. I tried playing some 360 games on a regular TV (my TV was capable of interpreting PAL, Secam and NTSC signal by the way) but they looked barely better than my old Xbox games. I kind of expected this as 360 was intended for an HD capable TV anyway.

So my guess was that “PAL” or “NTSC” label on a game box (and 360 itself) only has meaning if you’re (again, not recommended) using an old analog TV as the output device. However, recently I read how the games are actually sold in regions, just like DVDs, thus NTSC games are not playable here in Europe.

Therefore when I was buying some games on eBay recently I made sure that the games are labeled “PAL”. But then I ran into a guy from Hong-Kong selling “region-free” games. Prices were excellent, even including an expensive shipping and the guy had an excellent rating. I took the risk and ordered two games.

10 days or so later I got the games and was expecting something like “region-free” on a game box. Unfortunately the label clearly read “NTSC”. I was torn between returning the games as they were (the packaging was flawless, both games were brand new including Microsoft’s authenticity seal) and opening the boxes and trying the games out. I opted for the latter – I had two games anyway, so if one works the other should too, if not, I can at least return one game unopened.

As I hoped, both games worked fine. So I can only presume that my original assumption was correct – the “PAL/NTSC” label only has meaning if you have an analog TV.

I vented before about the movie and gaming industries’ reliance on sequels. It’s a better bet than to risk millions with an unproven formula. Thus we get solid movies and games, but the great ones are few and far between. What’s worse it seems we never get an original product out of the studio that has a winner on their hands, just more-of-the-same.

Or at least we didn’t. In one of the boldest moves I’ve seen in a long time, Ubisoft decided to dramatically change the dynamics of their very successful franchise Splinter Cell. I am positive that yet another incremental improvement to the game would sell great. After all, it’s not like they didn’t improve the game since its inception. Four games total, three sequels, each slightly better than the previous one. Lots of money earned thus extremely high risk changing the formula. Yet, that’s exactly what Ubisoft did.

The new game dismisses the light/dark formula we’re all used to. It’s still about the stealth, but in a totally different way. Most chapters take place during the day, in the open with a lot of people around you. You don’t have any of the gadgets you’re used to and must improvise all the time. Fortunately since there’s little to no scripted events involved this means that even if you make a mistake (a guard notices you or an alarm goes off) you can still wing it and get out of the situation. The change is pretty drastic and if not executed well could alienate a huge fan base.

Personally, I have great fate in Ubisoft’s Montreal studio, they’ve never disappointed before. But I particularly commend them for having the courage to change the winning/proven formula.

…if you live in France and are predicting the movie(s) that will be shown on a TV a couple of months in advance.

To understand this, you need to realize one very strong trend: production studios are churning movie sequel after sequel. Let’s have a look at the pipeline for the coming couple of months:

• Spider-Man 3
• Die Hard 4 (Live Free or Die Hard)
• Pirates Of The Caribbean 3 (At World’s End)
• Fantastic Four 2 (Rise of the Silver Surfer)
• Ocean’s 11 3 (Ocean’s 13)
• Harry Potter 5 (and the Order of the Phoenix)
• Bourne’s Identity 3 (Bourne’s Supremacy)
• 28 Weeks Later (28 Days Later 2)
• …

It’s not hard to realize why: there’s almost no (financial) risk in shooting a sequel to a successful movie.

So, what does this have to do with French TV? Well, we all know how forgetful consumers can get. In order to refresh their memory on how awesome the Spider-Man is, just a few weeks before the next in the series (Spider-Man 3) hits the theaters, the good souls on TF1 (Télévision Française 1) are showing Spider-Man 1 today (ce soir, 20:50).

And if it’s not too expensive, we’ll most likely see Spider-Man 2 next week. Then Pirates of the Caribbean 1 in mid-May (the second one is probably too expensive to license as it’s a mere year since it’s been in the theaters). And then Die Hard 1 & 2 around middle June.

See? It’s easy. Find the premiere date, offset it by about a week or two and you can predict which movie will be shown on a French TV. Cool, huh?

If you haven’t seen the movie 300 you must have at least heard about it. It is violent, stylish and cool, full of special effects. It’s an adaption of Frank Miller’s comic, just like the most excellent Sin City.

Personally, I really liked the movie. At the very end, during one particularly sad scene, I noticed a familiar theme – at the time, I thought it was traditional Serbian folk song and even said so to my South African friend who I went to the cinema with.

Later on I realized that it wasn’t Serbian, but Macedonian song called “Zajdi, zajdi jasno sonce”. Macedonia is an ex-Yugoslavia republic that still cannot use the name Macedonia because of the name dispute with Greece. Having all this in mind, it is actually fitting that this song plays a role in a movie about ancient Greece.

But there’s an ugly side to all this: Tyler Bates, the composer of the soundtrack for the movie claims that the song in the movie is his own work, even after being confronted directly by a Macedonian portal, details on the Wikipedia.

Unless you’re tone deaf, at least in my mind there’s no question about it – he is lying. This is clearly a copyright violation because he used the song without any kind of attribution. Apparently, this is not the only controversial theme by this author, see the full story on Wikipedia (authors’ name is linked to an article about him).

I really don’t get it – did Tyler really thought he is going to get away with this? That nobody will recognize the songs in question? Today’s world is quite unlike yesterday’s world – everybody’s connected through this thing we call the Internet, and it’s really easy to report a copyright violation of this kind.

I guess you’ve noticed how (especially original) the music for the movies never gets the respect proportionally to its effect. All you hear about is the director, the actors and sometimes special effects, but there’s not much about the composer or the previously written songs that have been used for the movie (or the episode for the TV series). This is a shame because sometimes without the music the scenes wouldn’t be even the half as effective as they are with the music.

One of the greatest examples of masterful synergy between the picture and the sound has been a scene in the most excellent 28 Days Later. Almost at the very end, the situation in the soldier’s house intensifies and the theme, almost 5 minutes long, almost perfectly follows the events on the screen. The theme is called “In The House – In A Heartbeat”, written by John Murphy who wrote most of the music for this film. If you’ve seen the movie you’ll know what I am talking about, and if not, go see it (or, get it on a DVD or over the VOD), it is brilliant.

Well, I am happy to report that another scene, this time from the season 3 finale of the Battlestar Galactica has now taken the crown and is the best picture/sound combo of all time. It’s the last 5 minutes or so of the last episode of the season 3. The original take on Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower” is absolutely mesmerizing and the events it follows are spectacular.

I find “Battlestar Galactica” the finest TV series showing at the moment, so if you have to choose and watch only one series I’d pick this one.

Finally, to partially justify the subtitle of this blog – on computing, women and beer – I’d like to point you to Maxim’s site (which is SFW) where you’ll find a great pictorial of the Tricia Helfer, also known as the Number Six Cylon. You might have noticed her, she’s a beautiful skinny blond that seduced Baltar

She doesn’t just look great but she can act too. She appeared recently in another TV series called Supernatural, in an episode Roadkill.

I realized quite late in the game (pun intended) how cool the console gaming is vs gaming on the PC. For years, ever since the early Doom days I’ve been gaming on a PC. But then the graphics cards’ prices increased so much that I could usually buy the whole console for the price of a mid-class 3D card.

I got my Xbox at the very end of 2004. It was holiday season, Halo 2 just got out with rave reviews around the ‘net… My wife and I were walking around Carrefour (very roughly speaking an European equivalent of Wal-Mart) shopping groceries and discussing Christmas/New Year presents. It was actually her that suggested that I buy myself an Xbox. On a whim, something I rarely do when electronics are in question, I just put one in the trolley.

Couple of months later I was pleasantly surprised how good the decision was and have never looked back – I’m a “console guy” now.

Jumping in so late has its advantages – there were plenty of games to choose from and most were cheap (launched months ago). The platform was already mature so new games coming out would often use the hardware to its maximum.

When Xbox 360 launched, I did not rush to buy one. I still had almost dozen games to play on my “old” Xbox and I knew that buying a revision 1 hardware was never good idea anyway, so I waited. I also saw the games running on a HDTV LCD and decided to only go with the next-gen console with the next-gen TV.

Finally the starts aligned – in the next couple of weeks, I am getting a new LCD TV, a new PC (with a relatively low end graphics card, just enough to run Vista ) and a shiny new Xbox 360 (ordered it yesterday).

I got a great deal. Xbox 360 Premium with the best game so far “Gears of War” is only 434€. Since the console is officially 399€ that means I get the game for only 35€ (retail price usually around 60€!). On top of this, I get 50€ coupon from Microsoft (trivially easy to cash in) and a 40€ voucher from Amazon. The Amazon voucher sucks for general public because you only have 30 days to use it, you must buy over 80€ worth of goods from Amazon to cash it in, but I’m buying a new monitor on Amazon anyway so for me it’s a non-issue. Microsoft’s coupon is a lot better deal – you don’t have to buy anything extra, you have several months to cash it in and they will put the money on your account directly.

So let’s see – with 90€ discount, I get my console for 309€! On top of that, I save 25€ on the best game for the Xbox 360 until now.

I’d say it’s hard to pass this up, especially in the light of the new 1 year warranty for the console (US only for now, but should trickle down to Europe soon hopefully).

I’ll post a couple of pictures when I get the new TV. Unless I change my mind at the last moment, I’m going for 32” Samsung LCD TV LE32R73BD.