Star Wars The Force Unleashed II

I've bought this game yesterday after work, thinking I'd be settled for a few days just like I had with the first game in the series. Boy was I in for a surprise.....

As a small background information, I myself work in the IT sector as a Software Engineer/Software Specialist, so I have a good understanding of the amount of work that goes into a project such as this, but honestly; a project such as this should never come to the commercial market in the first place.

If you've played the first game in the series, "Star Wars The Force Unleashes", and actually finished it, then you're left behind at the end with a series of questions and uncertainties about the fate of StarKiller. The second games tries to fill in various gaps and give a twist to the story told so far. I will not spoil the story, but when looking at Star Wars standards, I must say that I find it rather impossible, especially when compared to the storyline as most people know it.

The game itself has some beautifull cutscenes and cinematics, although there's various glitches in it that make the game stupidly easy. For example, when you're on the higher ground, and there's a giant robot below you, just tumble it with some debris and lightning till the "X" button appears to start the finishing combo. No mather how far you're away, or how high you are, if it's on the screen, you press it and don't move you get instantly teleported to the enemy and the combo sequence begins. Game braking if you ask me....

The game itself is short. Way to short....I finished the entire storyline on normal in about 4 hours flat. That includes watching all the cinematics, dieing a few times to try stuff and defeating Lord Vader in the final battle. 4 Hours!

I don't know what the gaming industry is thinking these last years, but I can tell from all major game releases it's going downhill with games in general. Money is all they seem to care about these days. A decent RPG? Sorry, but the last decent RPG game I played is Final Fantasy 9 and that's nearly 10 years ago.

The game is definitly not worth the 65€ they charge for it. It's way too short, has too many glitches in it, has no challenge and doesn't make sense from Star Wars Point of view....

F.A.C.T.S 2010

This weekend I attended the F.A.C.T.S 2010 convention in Gent, Belgium.
This was my first time to such a large convention. I've been to Tsunacon before, but never to something as big as this. It was also the first time I did cosplay. Well not the first time, but it has been quiet some time since I've done it.

Without a real idea to follow, I kinda hooked in on the idea that some of my friends were doing, pokémon. Pictures can be found on my facebook profile, but for those that don't have access to it, it's the picture on top of the article. I'm on the left side.

It's been a long time since I got really involved with the pokémon branch, so for those who don't know it, it's a SandShrew pokémon. The costume is self-made and took several weeks to make. Just took an old plain T-shirt to get the form right. Then cut out yellow fabric and drew all the lines on it. The ears weren't perfect, and i'll probably spent some time on perfecting the costume; even add a tail; but the goal was achieved. Alot of people recognized us and we got alot of pictures.

F.A.C.T.S itself was awesome. The Cosplay event was fun to watch and some of the acts were pretty hilarious. There were some costumes that looked as if they were taken directly from the movies. Kudos to those people to get such things together. The shopping stands were loaded with merchandise, and my friends succeeded in loading the car till the roof with it...

There's load of movies on youtube about the convention and pictures as well if you google for it, so I'm not bothering to post links to it. All I can say, is that I'll definitly go again next year.

Political situation in Belgium

Every day you turn on the news here in Belgium, you hear nothing but the political struggle between Flanders and Wallonie. Endless discussion about who is responsible for what, who needs to get what money and which priorities should be addressed.

it has been several months past the latest elections and still we are without a decent gouvernement. Endless discussion start on various forums and newssites.
Today the person in charge for leading the discussion, the "preformateur" as we call it, made an appeal to the parties to sit together again.

Couple of days ago, Mrs Milquette asked the parties to take their responsebilities. She really has the nerve to demand such a thing after all the trouble she has caused over the past years. She's better known as "Madam Non" here in Belgium, because she never agrees on anything only strives for her own political agenda.
Most of people from Flanders are sick of this entire attitude. For years we have paid taxes to support Our southern part of the country. Yet they keep demanding more and more.

ARENT WE THE SAME COUNTRY?

What is wrong with these people, going at each other? They should be working together to get Belgium back on it's feet, but instead they argue over things that the population doesnt even care about.

If I was the prime minister of this country, my first order of business was to regulate everything around politics. Normal wages for Ministers and their people, not the insane amounts of money they current receive for basicly doing nothing.
The second step is to remove the 5 different gouvernements we have. Tiny country, 10 million inhabitants and 5 FRIGGING Gouvernements. Try explaining that to someone from abroad....

Gamescom 2010

Last weekend I took a close friend with me to Gamescom 2010 in Köln.

It was the first time for to join the gamescom, and from first impressions, I'm happy that I did it.

Several of the well known companies where present at the Gamescom. EA, Blizzard, THQ, Konami and Square-Enix to name a few. Ofcourse we had various indy companies present and some more known names out the F2P industry such as GPotato and Burda-IC.

The first goal on the Com was to walk around and get a good understanding of the size and layout of the Com. With 4 hall filled out we had our trajectory set out. First we did the Xbox stands to see what was new and play with the kinect. After that we tried the Playstation variant.

Several games made their official debut on the com. DragonAge 2, Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy XIV and Star Wars : The Old Republic to name a few. We watched the cinematics and trailers presented to us from the games and they simply looked astaunishing.

One thing that put us off, was the noise. The place was crowded and various stands such as RockCat and Razor where pumping up the music louder and louder across the halls to compete against each other. While my common sense agreed with the competition, my ears disagreed for the most part.

One thing that struck me odd was the crowd. The stereotypical view someone has from a gamer, is a real potatocouch, someone who dwells in the basement and doesn't stand sun light. Often having a few pounds overweight as well.

While there were definitly people present on the com that fit the description, the majority of people there were young adults in good shape and even more elderly people who still held laptops, PSP devices or gameboys. The term "gamer" affects a wider population then most people can imagine.

We followed various Q&A rounds of the large developers explaining why they implemented certain features or left them out. A great Q&A occured at the EA stand when they were discussing some of their new games comming out. There the audience really got involved with the discussion and they actually picked people out for good solid questions.

One thing that scared me was the hourly giveaways. Every hour people would swarm in masses to the large game stands in the hopes of getting their hands on some freebies. First they start with some T-shirts. People almost knocking eachother senseless for the T-Shirt, went totally beserk when they threw in free copies of the games.

We had a small let down when we tried to get our hands on the latest Aion beta disks for the next expansion/version. When we finally got close to the stand we noticed there were none left.

When the day came near an end, we had loads of keychains, posters, cards, stickers and other gadgets from the Com. We're definitly looking forward to the next one.

The Last Airbender

So, this weekend I went to the movies to watch "The Last Airbender".

I've seen the entire cartoon series on Nickelodeon, thanks to my little brother, so I had a certain expectation of the movie. While the movie was certainly not bad, I had the feeling that it did not live up to the expectation I had.

Several of the key characters have a lack of depth in the movie. You're suddenly thrown into the world of element bending, without proper context. The story is told at the start of the movie, but it's lacking. Some of the characters are pretty shallow in regards to their background and important in the story.

A big plus however are the special effects. The bending of the various elements was nice to watch, as were the duals between elemental masters. The only downside on this was the bending of the element earth. It appears as if the rendering of those effects took a dent during the making of the movie. All elements are smooth, yet when earth is used the effect seems to "slow down" as if the computer used for making the effect could not render it properly or display it properly.

Besides that I recommend the movie to anyone who is into this kind of stuff. The expectations aren't met, but all in all it's not a bad movie to watch.

p.s I watched the 3D version.

Creating a bootable USB Drive

These days, most computer systems come without a floppy drive build into them. In most cases you probably don't require the floppy drive anymore, but if you're like me; then chances are that you come across a situation where a system dies and you require a bootable floppy drive or similar means to access the command prompt and investigate Windows.

Fortunalty for us, most systems come installed with USB connectors and have the ability to support USB sticks. Only problem is that you cannot boot from a USB device if there is no boot sector on it.

I've been looking on the Internet for quiet some time to find an easy work around for this issue, and came across the following solution to make a USB stick bootable like a floppy drive.

- Download the following tool and install it : click me

- Download the Windows 98 boot disk files: click me

- Run the tool and format your USB stick into FAT32 using the files of the boot you downloaded.

- Now you can use your USB stick as a bootable device if your BIOS supports "boot from USB".

With this modified stick, you can add small tools to it in subfolders and run them from the commandprompt. Easy if you want to flash a BIOS or graphics card and need to do this outside Windows for example.

The supplied boot image comes with generic drivers, so you can even access your CDROM station if you have one connected.

Credits to http://www.victorchen.info/category/miscellaneous/

LINQ

or should I say Ruby on Rails.NET?

Today I started experimenting with LINQ in the .NET 3.5 framework, and my first impression was "this looks so much like Ruby on Rails". I'm not complaining about this, because it makes my life soo much easier now that I can apply the knowledge I have about the Ruby on Rails framework with it's hashmaps and active directory to the .NET model with LINQ.

To demonstrate with a small piece of code that I have:

I have a List that is filled with Cell objects. Because I wish to make sure that each cell can only be added once to the List, I need to verify the names of the Cells in the list prior to adding the cell. So I made a special indexed property that uses a bit of LINQ.

The function body of my property looks like this:

public Cell this[String name]

So, if I wish to select the cell that matches the given name from my internal List object I need to call the following line of code:

return m_cells.Single(c => c.Name == name);

The line above will return a Single Cell object that has the specifed name and resides in the List collection. If no Cell matches the given LINQ expression and InvalidOperationException is thrown.

But because a property works in 2 ways, I need to make sure I can assign a cell as well. The logic behind the following function might be a bit weird, but I wish to be able to select a cell based upon it's name and assign it a new value. However I do not wish to add the same cell twice to the collection. To facilitate this I wrote the following code:

// Use LINQ to count the cells in the CellCollection with the specified name.

// We will perform a count on it, because we need to check if the cell is present.

Int32 cell_count = (from c in m_cells where c.Name == name select c).Count();

// Check if the specified cell was found in the collection.

if (cell_count == 0)

{

// Count 0 means the cell was not present in the first place, so

// add it at the end.

m_cells.Add(value);

}

else

{

// The cell is present, so locate it that we can overwrite it.

Cell cell = (from c in m_cells where c.Name == name select c).Single();

// Change the cell with the new value.

cell = value;

}

The above code does exactly what it's supposed to do. Overwrite the cell if it's already in the collection or add it at the end if it's not present.

LINQ makes writing code a bit trickier to understand, but it shortens the total amount of lines you need to write by ALOT.

Visual Studio

Been a while since I wrote on my blog, need to do this on a more regular basis...

So, at work we've finally started the move towards Visual Studio. It will be a long process to do, since all our software is written in the Borland IDE. I'm normally not a fighter for a specific compiler environment, but I can say that I do not like the Borland environment at all.
Perhaps it's Delphi, perhaps it's Borland itself. But I can never get the IDE to do what I want it to do, and the debugger in Borland is lacking when comparing it to the Visual Studio one.

The biggest challenge now will be to create the same functionality in Visua Studio that we had with the Delphi components from Borland. Although we will not achieve the same "lazy-mode", I'm pretty sure we can fine-tune our own DLLs and use then inside the .NET framework to make new cutting-edge applications.

This new Visual Studio 2010 looks promising. The new look&feel makes it more enjoyable to work in it then the previous versions. Only downside for me at the moment is the lack of intellisense in the C++ environment. During the Beta2 it was not present, and this is severly lacking for some operations. I really hope Microsoft puts it back in at some point.

I've also made some changes to my Blog. No more Anonymous comments from now i'm afraid. Too much moderation work of spam and unwanted ads on the blog. So if you wish to comment, you'll have to make an account I'm afraid.

Money grubbing World

So,

I've gotten in some sort of mess at the moment.
I'm someone who makes decisions based upon his feelings. I always try to think things rationally through, but in the end after putting everything on a single line, I let the final call be made by my guts.

So in a rash moment I decided to resign my current position and apply elsewhere. This "elsewhere" was with Epsilon Minded, because the guy I spoke with gave me a good impression. When I announced that I would resign at BigBrother; we had a series of conversations and long chats and in the end decided that i'd stay.

BigBrother Security is a company that cares about it's employees. That listens and is open for input. This is something I learned out of this and it makes me feel good that I'm appreciated inside the company.
Epsilon Minded on the other hand doesn't seem to understand this. Although I have signed the contact, I asked for a termination with mutual consent. But this doesn't seem to be much of an option. Apparently there are people out there who don't care about the feelings of their employees or other person's and only care about $.

Don't take me wrong, i'm not as naive to think that we live in a pink world with rainbows. The truth is far from it. But I personally find it sad that we live in a world where a Company takes legal action against a small person instead of simply terminating the contract mutually and end up as friends for possible future partnerships.
No, they go after whatever money they can smell.

A sad example of how human society has evolved....if you can call it evolved. Just looking at television or the news demonstrates how sad we as human beeings are. Human civilisation's highest peak? Trust me, we are far from it. We are a sad species that preys upon each other.

Tsunacon 2010

Right,

so my friends asked several weeks ago if I'd join them to Tsunacon2010.
I've never been to a Con before regarding Manga&Anime, and I've heard stories about other Cons before, so I was a bit reluctant to go at first.

But I ordered the tickets and kinda forced myself to join the Con. And you know what? I didn't regret it one bit. I even managed to find a nice item to help me create a cos-play costume for one of my roleplay characters from the Moira Empire.
Been looking for fox ears quite some time, that actually looked nice and cute insteadof realistic. So I managed to buy a headpiece that covers the whole head and ears and has these 2 nice fox ears attached to it.

There's pictures taken of me wearing the foxhat, but haven't gotten my hands on it yet. As soon as I manage to get them I'll post them on my facebook page.