Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - cod4

Damn you Virgin Media

2010-04-02T10:18:00+01:00

I'm unreasonably happy this weekend. We had made the right choice to skip the first and last Maelstroms this year. We still have memories of waking up in snow last year. Instead we are looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend of chilling.

After a bit of tweaking we finally got my radio link working (weird routing through the CISCO). Suddenly we are able to stream iPlayer again something that has been next to impossible on Virgin's ADSL link. Luckily as I happen to write the NMS for the radio link so I can actually see what heavy strain iPlayer puts on the link. It turns out not very much, an actual video stream demands less than 2Mb/s while running. According to the router status the physical link is nearly 6Mbs so I can only assume this is due to downstream congestion and/or bandwidth shaping. Considering the amount I've shelled out to Virgin over the last few months I consider it a bit of a rip-off. I am supposedly a couple of rungs up on the allowed download limits which makes no real difference if I can't physically pull that amount through a squeezed data pipe.

Interestingly the data rate for CoD4:MW2 is only around 40Kb/s which includes the voice chat data. I could play OK on the ADSL link but the radio link does improve the ping times by around 40ms which is nice.

Blu-Ray and CoD4

2008-02-19T15:50:00+00:00

I see that Sony have "won" the battle for physical high definition media. Unfortunately since the last firmware update my Japanese PS3 has rather taken against playing Blu-ray discs. It does however play DivX files quite nicely (better than my ageing Cello DVD player). Given current trends I'm unlikely to be buying any Blu-Ray discs for a while. The problem of the firmware is probably fixable once I (finally) get Linux up and running on the spare partition but I suspect the pain of the DRM will get in the way. Up till that point I shall have to get my Hi-Def joy via other means.

Which leads me nicely onto the topic of Call of Duty 4. I have mentioned the game in the past so I thought it might be worth a quick review.

First of the main game is very short. It doesn't take more than a few days of play to get through the game. When you do reach the end however wait until after the credits to play the last aircraft hostage mission. Once you finish you open up the Multiplayer and Arcade mode. Arcade mode is fairly fun for quick dipping in play should you want to know if you have cleared a level the best possible way. I can highly recommend giving the AC-130 section several goes. It's quite a fun over the top level even if the infrared view is eerily close to the real video footage the real war PR departments churn out.

Multiplayer is however where a lot of attention has been payed. They haven't simply slapped a multi-player mode onto the existing engine and let people get on with deathmatches (which is pretty much what R:FoM did). Instead they have a full XP system and a series of un-lockable perks and weapon modifications. Once you gain the ability to create your own classes you will find yourself playing with particular weapons just to complete it's challenges. They also have added non-weapon based challenges (including things like downing a helicopter, or falling certain heights). There is also a wide range of game types from Free for All to Capture the Flag and other variants. My current favourite is Headquarters in which you take over an HQ and your re-spawns are stopped until the attackers over-run and destroy your base. All this variety means you are unlikely to get stuck in a rut being shot by camping teenagers in repetitive free-for-all games.

Having said that the muti-player does befit from the game engines attention to detail. Listen out for the direction sound of people running as they approach, creep around if you don't want to be heard. If you choose your camouflage carefully (and take the right perks) your ghillie suited sniper really does blend into the scenery. The variable protection offered by different types of scenery also comes into play, in fact one of the challenges is how many kills you can get through scenery. Last night I bagged someone who had retreated from the doorway but still stood the other side of a flimsy shed wall :-)

There are rumours that there will be some download-able content for CoD4 multi-player around spring. When it arrives Activision are almost certainly welcome to a few more of my hard earned pounds. CoD4 for the PS3 is a must have game for any fan of the FPS genre and I can highly recommend it!

Going Mobile

2008-01-08T14:33:00+00:00

I spent bits of yesterday getting final meter readings in and cancelling my Sky account. The rest of it was taken up with a fair amount of cursing at Call of Duty 4 as I struggled my way through act 3. Having the rest of the household point out the danger of hand grenades every time I bit the dust again didn't help that much. I'm really quite enjoying the game but it does get quite hard in places. I'm tempted to say it's one of the best FPS games I've played and I'll stick my neck out and say the experience is probably better than playing on the PC. After all not many PC's have the wide-screen display my PS3 does. Although a lot of PC gamers pour scorn on the controller vs the classic mouse and keyboard I think it's actually a better control method. The two sticks give quite fine control when you are maneuverings and of course all the buttons for grenades and weapon switched are in ergonomically helpful places.

I switched my mobile tariff a few days ago to one that included a decent amount of data. I subsidised this by dropping the number of free minutes as I wasn't quite using all 900 every month. As a result I've been playing with the mobile web.

First up is Opera Mini. It's a little Java app that runs on your phone and runs as a clipping browser. This means it takes normal non-phone optimised web-pages and attempts to render them in a vaguely sensible form. Generally it works very well although I personally preferred the older versions rendering of the BBC new site. The new version added a panning display instead of forcing the text to flow down one column which was a little simpler to read. The only website that has so far failed is the ever present Facebook and that could just be down to finger trouble.

I've also played with some of the Google services. Of all the services Google Calender and Google Maps (separate application) are the most mature. The calender functionality is basic but enough to check your appointments while on the go. Adding a simple events with a natural language (e.g. "Meeting at 1400 tomorrow") works well enough. Given the growing ubiquity of mobile data services I can see my days as a loyal Palm user coming to an end. I've been using the calender a lot over the last year and especially like the ability to have different ones with different collaboration profiles. It's extremely handy for Fliss and I to have one shared calender for all out activities (even though I suspect I rely more on electronic memory augmentation than Fliss does). If the integration with Evolution pans out it will pretty much solve all my calender requirements.

The Google Maps application warns you it is data-intensive but on modern 3G networks it still runs pretty quickly. They have taken care with the design of the UI, especially in the zoom control. You can very quickly get a map of the right scale for navigation in the limited space of a phone display. The only disappointment is the non-GPS "My Location" service isn't supported on my phone. The list of supported devices is a little vague.

There is not much to say about the mobile version of Google Reader except that it works reasonably well. However I suspect the reading of large numbers of RSS feeds is going to hard to optimise for a mobile phone sized screen.

Google Apps is also available in a limited mobile flavour. You can't edit documents but you can certainly view documents and spreadsheets (if you select desktop mode, the default spreadsheet view is one column at a time which isn't all that useful) with Opera Mini. I don't expect to be using it much but it certainly could be useful if you just want to check the last time you called a certain utility company while in the pub.

The last app I played with was MidpSSH which is a GPL'ed Java ssh client implementation. I doubt you will be wanting to do much with the hassle of text-typing to the command line but it may prove useful for an emergency server reboot or service restart. Having said that I haven't managed to log onto one of my boxes yet (I haven't tried very hard yet).