Monthly Archive: October 2011

Oct 28 2011

Delving into PS3 trophies

Categories:

Jon, PS3

by Jon Shute

October 28, 2011

You know how it is, you start digging into something and before you know it you have far more information than you could ever need. Well my digging into PS3 Trophies means that I think I understand them now and so I thought I would take a look at what they are for, what they are worth and how they compare. This is not the post to read if you think that achievements/trophies/etc are a waste of time.

For the uninitiated there are four levels of trophies on PS3: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. According to this they are weighted as follows:

  • Bronze: 15
  • Silver: 30
  • Gold: 90
  • Platinum: 180

Games can only have one Platinum, and it has to be for getting all of the rest of the trophies in the game, not including DLC.

So if we take a small game, one of the Sam&Max ones will do, we get a total of 1g (90) 3s (90) and 9b(135) for a total of 315. These small games are not allowed to have a Platinum trophy.

ICO, on the other hand as a medium sized game, has 1p, 9g, 4s and 2b for a total of (180+9*90+4*30+2*15) 690 points. A bit more digging and we have GT5(1p1g4s53b) at 1185 points and an awful long time to that platinum because they’ve been weighted with lots of small ones. Burnout Paradise has a massive 2255 points and Arkham Asylum has 1230. In fact if you dig for a while you find that ~1230 is the normal value for games if you don’t count DLC.

This is all well and good, but what do those levels mean? Well stealing a table from the original post I started with you get:

  • Level 1 – 0 pts
  • Level 2 – 200 pts
  • Level 3 – 600 pts
  • Level 4 – 1200 pts
  • Level 5 – 2400 pts
  • Level 6 – 4000 pts
  • Level 7 – 6000 pts
  • Level 8 – 8000 pts
  • Level 9 – 10000 pts
  • Level 10 – 12000 pts
  • Level 11 – 14000 pts
  • Level 12 – 16000 pts
  • Level 13 – 24000 pts
  • Level 14 – 32000 pts
  • Level 15 – 40000 pts
  • Level 16 – 48000 pts
  • Level 17 – 56000 pts
  • Level 18 – 64000 pts
  • Level 19 – 72000 pts
  • Level 20 – 80000 pts
  • It takes 8,000 points between levels after 20 also.

This tells us that Just playing burnout and completing it all will get you nearly to level 5.

Putting this on a graph we see the following scores for levels 1 through 20:

PS3Levels

Well that’s depressing to look at. At level 5 it slows down a bit, and at level 12 you hit a bit of a cliff where it then takes 8000 points to get a single level instead of the 2000 it was taking for the last few levels. I guess that explains why I think I’ve been noticing so many level 12s then!

So why is it designed like this? To start with it’s a very clear run up to level 5 and you will grab a few levels just finishing the single player side of the games you grabbed when you got the console. Things then slow down until you bog down towards the level 12 point, and that is where I think most normal players are going to hit before really slowing down.  In fact my first thought when seeing that is to just discard the levels completely, the time between milestones is too great.

The level system for PS3 seems pretty well thought out, it’s just not for average people. To start it gives people the sense of progress and at the end it gives a hardcore grind that makes your level really actually mean an achievement. Now I’ve seen the numbers the thought of bouncing off level 12 and maybe 13 for at least a year that makes it all a bit useless as no progress means it becomes meaningless unless you are a really heavy player.

A quick look at a leaderboard should be enough to scare you. Level 50? 275 platinum? That’s a lot of playing.

Since we know that a PS3 game will be around 1230 points we can take the standard 360 value, 1000, for the exact game in some cases and so some very quick and dirty maths to give a very misleading normalised total for the two. I’m not kidding there, this is at best a bad generalisation and at worse a total fabrication.

  1. Level 1 – 0 pts 0 gs
  2. Level 2 – 200 pts 163 gs
  3. Level 3 – 600 pts 488 gs
  4. Level 4 – 1,200 pts 976 gs
  5. Level 5 – 2,400 pts 1,952 gs
  6. Level 6 – 4,000 pts 3,252 gs
  7. Level 7 – 6,000 pts 1,878 gs
  8. Level 8 – 8,000 pts 6,504 gs
  9. Level 9 – 10,000 pts 8,130 gs
  10. Level 10 – 12,000 pts 9,756 gs
  11. Level 11 – 14,000 pts 11,382 gs
  12. Level 12 – 16,000 pts 13,008 gs
  13. Level 13 – 24,000 pts 19,512 gs
  14. Level 14 – 32,000 pts 26,016 gs
  15. Level 15 – 40,000 pts 32,520 gs
  16. Level 16 – 48,000 pts 39,024 gs
  17. Level 17 – 56,000 pts 45,528 gs
  18. Level 18 – 64,000 pts 52,032 gs
  19. Level 19 – 72,000 pts 58,536 gs
  20. Level 20 – 80,000 pts 65,040 gs
  21. Level 21 – 88,000 pts 71,544 gs
  22. Level 22 – 96,000 pts 78,048 gs
  23. Level 23 – 104,000 pts 84,552 gs

Looking at my gamerscore for 360 I would be level 21, which is higher than my first guess was. I think that might be a bit telling.

At this point it might be good to consider what achievement/trophies are for. Primarily they are a mechanism to make us play more games, with a secondary use of getting us to play individual titles longer than we might otherwise do so.

They make us play more games by letting us see where our friends are and hoping that we get all excited about rivalry. The Sony system doesn’t really make that as easy as the Microsoft one as it’s really not clear how far behind somebody you are until you get bored one weekend and do so much research that you blog about it just to make it seem worthwhile. On the other hand the Microsoft system can really make it clear that somebody is so far ahead of you that you will never catch them. Another problem that I also hit with my Gamerscore is that after I passed 60k or so it just started reminding me that I play way too many games. I would be less likely to consider Level 21 to be overkill than I am to think that 75,000gs is, but that comes at a cost of me not caring about the level because the progression is just too slow.

From this I conclude that past a certain point your gamerscore or trophy level become meaningless, and it would be interesting to see if it’s at the same point in both systems or if one keeps players interested longer. My gut feeling would be that slower levels would burn it out fastest, but I just can’t tell.

The more useful use of trophies and achievements are for our benefit and neither Microsoft or Sony really go out of their way to make this easy. In fact Sony have gone out of their way to make this hard in the past. I maintain that the best use of them is to tell us what our friends have been playing so we can be reminded of games we may have on our shelves that we haven’t played in a while, or that we might wish to play online. Neither platform supports this without third party sites, but something like Raptr or one of the myriad of other web sites step into the gap. These sites are all hampered by Sony’s attitude to letting you get the information as you need to give them your PSN account details (BAD SECURITY, SONY!) whereas sites have been getting the Microsoft data for years over the web without needing that information, admittedly with many issues along the way. In fact the Sony logging in situation came about from their hacking scandal, so it could be argued that they have made their security weaker instead of improving it by requiring passwords. Maybe an Eve Online style API key system would be better for their needs if they wish to restrict casual browsing/scraping of usernames.

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Oct 25 2011

How To Murder Time – Senna

Categories:

How to Murder Time

by Jon Shute

October 25, 2011

This time we are looking at a documentary film called Senna. This is the story of the F1 career of Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna. Can this actually be a documentary about F1 that is interesting for non-fans to watch? Listen to find out.

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Oct 20 2011

Partitions…

Categories:

Tim

by Tim

October 20, 2011

Previously on How To Murder Time! “…Information security is one of those tiresome airy-fairy subjects until something goes wrong on your own patch…”

And now the conclusion! In rather predictable fashion I’ve now become a little bit RAGING PARANOID about online security and passwords as a result of it all, although it is somewhat reassuring to note that it wasn’t just me, and news sites seem to now be picking up on what turns out to be a fair sized rash of identical hacking stories to my own:

Eurogamer: XBL accounts hacked to buy FIFA packs

Ars Technica: As Xbox Live-FIFA 12 fraud continues, Microsoft’s response becomes maddening

Giant Bomb: Microsoft, EA Claim FIFA Isn’t Causing Rash of Xbox Live Hacks

Lots of mealey-mouthed damage limitation fluff from EA and MS there “We don’t comment on security”, “Don’t give out your passwords”, and so far, my own account is still suspended and under investigation (at my own request), and I’m still £60 out of pocket on the credit card.

My raging paranoia hasn’t been helped by receiving an unrelated email from Turbine, telling me that they think their forums were just hacked, and would I like to think about changing my password?

The nature of the medium throws doubt and uncertainty on the innocent and the victim. “Are you sure it isn’t your fault somehow?” they ask. Well, I was, but now I’m not so sure, hence my newfound paranoia, and associated Twitter ranting. It’s a vicious spiral of distrust which eventually ends up with me demanding to be paid my salary in gold nuggets, which I then stuff under my mattress, in my house that I never leave!

 

Get a grip, I hear you think, and indeed, that is the trick. Somewhere between just tweeting my bank details and hoping everyone only takes what they need, and becoming some shotgun-totting backwoods hermit who fears electricity and hates government, there must be a middle ground, combining caution and usability, suitable for continuing to usefully live in an increasingly online digital age.

I can’t do much about the original problem itself, squarely an EA/MS fault, but there were things I could have done differently and better. Here are some security tips I’m currently implementing which should help stop this kind of thing in future. Many of them were suggested by Askgar in previous comments! Feel free to add your own or dispute these – only YOU can stop me being robbed again!

 

Unique Usage Passwords

Use a different password for every online service. It may help to use a different account name as well. The reasoning here is straight forward. If, to pick a random example, EA are flipping idiots and just give out Xbox Live passwords to anyone who phones them up and asks nicely, then that’s bad. The Xbox Live account is in for a clearing out that its legitimate owner won’t forget in a hurry!

Much worse though, is when that Friend of Humanity goes on to successfully log into PSN, WoW and your bank with the same details. It makes sense to try the login on multiple similar services, because some people are lazy, or just have trouble keeping forty or more different usernames and passwords straight in their heads.

I did this a lot, but have now made them all unique. I’ve re-learnt how to write letters with a pen, and now I keep them in a physical book. Old-school! I’m in trouble if my flat is burnt down or robbed, but it’s more about making disaster less likely, than removing it altogether. They might take the PC, but probably won’t take the innocuous looking book under the pile of junk on that other shelf.

Particularly important with peripheral systems; forums, fan sites, etc. While Triple-A MMO Corp may have watertight security, do you really know or trust amateur owner-admin of Triple-A MMO Fansite dot com? I don’t. Using the same password for both makes the MMO’s security dependent on the integrity of the fansite owner. If you’re happy that everyone who ever asked you to create a password online is to be trusted, then you can probably ignore this one.

 

Strong Passwords

See XKCD comic here: http://xkcd.com/936/

Long beats complex, although in my recent paranoid password reset adventures, it’s dismaying to see that some online systems have password length limits of as little as eight characters. In these cases, use them all, and go with the punctuations and numbers, as suggested. EVE Online wins here with a staggering 64 character password limit. I approve!

Online systems could do more to improve this, but within reason. Runes of Magic wins the HtMT Ultimate Security Award here. On my recent attempt to retry the game, I went through all the forgot/reset password stuff to get back in after long absence, only to find it then wants a second password at character select, the resetting of which proved to be so bureaucratic and awkward that I gave up and will probably never play it again! I wish I’d written that down two years ago, and it does illustrate the dangers of security, which can become so secure even authorised users are kept out!

 

Remove Payment Methods

This one is what got me. If my XBL account didn’t have a permanent set of credit card details saved as part of itself, the Friend of Humanity would have just stolen 120 leftover MS points I wasn’t using anyway and then moved on, rather than gone on a 6120 point spree. I’d still be cross, but would not now be distrustful of all online payment as a whole. This is because online shops value One-Click Impulse Purchasing over security and this should not be encouraged.

Of course it suits Microsoft for me to be able to give them money by just pressing ‘A’ four times. (I’ve heard stories of six year olds, and dogs, racking up huge bills because of this sort of nonsense.) However, it doesn’t suit me that someone pretending to be me can steal £60 from me by just pressing A four times, thanks to their own flawed security procedures.

It’s not just MS though, and it is telling that in Turbine’s account management pages, upgrading to a subscription or buying Turbine Points is a one-click operation, but to remove attached credit card details, (because, to pick an example at random, their forums have just been hacked), requires a string of grovelling emails, and probably will each time I want to buy stuff from them in future.

In a sensible world, we should be required to re-enter our details every time we want to actually buy a thing, after which, those details should be deleted. It’s more awkward for us, but serves to disconnect automatic links which can be easily abused, as I found out to my cost. As it is, I am not happy with online services having my credit card details any longer than is absolutley necessary to make a purchase or renew a subscription.

I guess the real point here is not distrust of the service provider so much, but prevention of hackers stealing from you by tricking the service provider into thinking they are you. I’m fairly sure Microsoft isn’t out to steal from me themselves, but some other bugger did trick them in to being an accomplice in a theft of my stuff anyway.

 

Game Cards and Paypal

On the subject of not just leaving your credit card details on a post-it note stuck to the shop till, why use one at all? Many online services have one-off points/time cards which provide an identical service, in a more secure manner. The underlying account isn’t any more secure, but at least it contains no onward money links. My paranoia recently sent me to GAME to test this out. I bought two £9 Station Cash cards (worth 3000 SC or two months of subscription for thier non-F2P games), which I then took home. Scratch off the back, enter the code and then spent the points on EQ2X Silver and one of those floating island player houses I was going on about a while back. Still have some points left, but it’ll only be those that get lost if my Station account gets hacked. Oh…did I mention the latest SOE account security panic, making for three security incidents relevant to my interests in as many weeks. These buggers are at it all the time, and everywhere!

Paypal is a useful alternative, requiring another password on a different system to be entered before cash is dispensed. This password is different to the purchasing applications one – see point one, above. I guess one day Paypal will be hacked, but I guess we’ll all have bigger problems than missing EQ2 points to worry about on that day.

Sadly, some systems offer neither points/time cards or Paypal options – Amazon being one example. Treat these with caution, and try not to leave the payment details on file unless actually in the process of paying. Remove them after the pruchase, if you can. With an increasing move to F2P design, it should become easier to find risk free ways to charge up the MMO MicroPoints that don’t expose the credit card.

 

Authenticators

My bank now makes me use one of these, a physical gizmo that tells me a number to type in when asked by the website. I do worry what happens when I put the authenticator on a 40C Non-Coloureds Spin Cycle, as I inevitably will one day, but anything that requires a physical object present to log in, can only help. CCV numbers on the back of credit cards work in a similar manner – you need the card in your hand to use it – and since the primary worry I have is people in remote places across the world pretending to be me online, this sort of thing does the job. WoW offer  these and I think SOE have one too. It’s annoying that we have to pay extra for them, but they are probably worth the cost for extra peace of mind. You only have to worry about burglary or assault now!

 

Secret Questions

Quick tip here; lie. The person at the other end of the Lost Password Helpdesk isn’t marking you for accuracy. All they care about is that the answer you give matches the answer you said you would give when you filled out the form two years ago. Treat it as another kind of password rather than a General Knowledge Quiz with “You” as the specialist subject. When asked for your mother’s maiden name, make one up. With surprisingly little effort, some Friend of Humanity can look up your mother’s maiden name, but unless they’re already inside the system they are trying to break in to, they won’t know exactly how you lied about it on the original form. As long as you can consistently remember the lie and repeat it back correctly later on, you’re fine.

More advanced setup forms of this type have a user-enterable questions instead, which helps a lot here. Make it fairly obscure, but memorable to you!

 

Many of these tips are designed to deliberately break linkages, to internally compartmentalise our online selves. It can be very easy to create an online gestalt which is made up of many interlinked systems; accounts, logins, forum personas, avatars and so on, all of which lie behind only one universally shared and  weak password. Get that from some weak link out on the periphery and the entire online you is laid bare, including the important stuff in the middle; the bank, the credit card, the employment records, the real you.

By resisting the pressure from these online services to create a unified one-button purchasing network around ourselves, and by resisting our own laziness, we can partition our online lives; insulate them from each other, so that if one element of it is compromised, the rest of them remain untouched. Pre-emptive damage limitation is fairly easy, but takes a moderate and sustained effort to keep it up.

All in all, I’ve learnt a lot in these last few weeks, so that’s something I suppose! I don’t even do MyFriends or BookFaces or SpaceVilles or the like, so have no security ideas for those, other than to not bother in the first place. Hopefully someone can comment on those!

 

With any luck, I’m preaching to the choir here and you all know all this stuff anyway, but if anyone reading this has learnt something, then that’s good too! If not, then I hope I’ve amused somewhat with tales of my own naivety! Regardless, good luck out there, remember that they are all out to get you, so don’t let the buggers get your monies!

Back to talking about things that aren’t online security soon!

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Oct 19 2011

How To Murder Time – Civilization

Categories:

How to Murder Time

by Jon Shute

October 19, 2011

This time we are looking at one of the more serious ways that we’ve both murdered time over the years: playing the first Civilization game.

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Oct 13 2011

Exaggerations…

Categories:

Tim

by Tim

October 13, 2011

It probably says something that the way we’ve chosen to celebrate the new Lord of the Rings Online expansion, Rise of Isengard, is to pretty much hang up the game en masse, with both the Monday and Friday static groups deciding to find new entertainments. It’d be unfair to blame this on anything Isengard has or hasn’t done; it’s probably great if you like that sort of thing. Spinks and Melmoth describe it as more of the same, a kind of Enedwrath Plus rather than anything distinctly new or different. More of the same is great if you liked what went before, but is less so if you were just about getting bored of it all beforehand anyway.

My own new catchphrase applies to me too; if it isn’t fun, don’t play it, so its time to move on, like David Carradine off of Kung Fu. I’ve moved in two directions at once this time which is a neat trick. More on The Friday Thing another time, but the Monday Night Static Group, plus Friends, is on holiday in City of Heroes: Freedom, their recent F2P conversion relaunch, and to be honest, it really does feel like a holiday. I’d played before, of course, but had forgotten just how seriously they take the Serious Business of MMO Gaming, which is largely “not in the slightest”.

 

Solo gameplay in CoX is pretty lacklustre, as ever, but group nights in there are absolutely bonkers, and I love it. For a start almost every MMO problem I’ve railed about in the last few years is a solved problem in this game.

Their insanely flexible mentoring system makes Character Level an obsolete concept, especially in terms of that tedious Friends Wanting To Play Together Thing that many MMOs grudgingly pay lip service to. It really doesn’t matter what level any of us are. It doesn’t matter if any of us have missed a week, or even just don’t like the way the character is handling and want to reroll from scratch one unexpected week. We just group up and it sorts all that out for us. We then go out and beat stuff up.

 

The mind-boggling array of archetypes, powers and pools means that Group Composition is basically obsolete. I’m still not sure what our group actually consists of, and I find myself thinking of its members in terms of character concepts and costumes rather than archetypes. Bring the player not the class indeed! There are some Corruptors? One of us is a Scrapper? I’m not sure I know to be honest and that’s great. I guess some of us heal and buff? The never-ending flow of healing and self-rez Inspirations (potions) means we don’t really have to worry about that stuff anyway. “What class should I be?” asked one of newer members. “Anything you like” I replied. I always say that, but this time, meant it. So we all turn up on the first night with a bunch of superheroes with powers that just sounded interesting, and it still worked. Every group is a Concept Group in CoX! We then go out and beat stuff up.

 

The surprisingly configurable difficulty settings mean that Game Balance is obsolete. Through various NPCs, (Hero Corps Field Analyzers and Fortunata Fateweavers) we can set a number of options which can set mission difficulty from facerollingly easy through to brick wall impossible and anywhere in between. We’re still experimenting with the options here, but it’s refreshing for an MMO to let its players decide what kind of night out they want. I’m not adverse to challenge, but I do like to indulge in the occasional cakewalk too. We choose the type of experience based on the collective mood. If we use these NPCs correctly, it will always be just right. We then go out and beat stuff up.

 

If there is any problem left to conquer, it’s that of arbitrary maximum group size, which here is eight. There are nine of us most Mondays, but that isn’t an insurmountable problem; we just take turns sitting out on a per mission basis, and if I’m honest, I don’t much care what the missions actually are or whether I need a particular step on a specific arc. I’m just there for the mayhem of it all and will happily get no ‘tick’ for the job. The job itself is reward enough, which is rare in MMOs these days. They have some kind of raid type functionality, but I’m not sure if the missions themselves can handle that. I don’t care, we just go out and beat stuff up.

 

Moment to moment play in full-group CoX is mad and is one of those few games which will cause me to just start spontaneously giggling uncontrollably at the sheer preposterousness of it all. Eight supers all going nuts with overlapping pyrotechnics against waves and waves of hapless thugs, robots, aliens and zombies. And that’s just the ‘stock’ powers; the single target bolt, the big wind-up punch, the long-range AoE blast, etc. Pretty much every power set has at least one Comedy Superpower as well; mostly involving entertaining ragdoll physics which is just a joy to watch kick off. I’m a Peacebringer this time and mine is being able to turn into a flying energy squid thing which can spam ranged AoE Knockbacks. I can also make everyone else in the team fly, whether they want to or not! Plenty of others get them too though, hilarious punctuation in the ongoing prose that is our sustained massive technicolor rolling overkill. We feel powerful in a way few MMOs allow us to be, even at High Levels, and most of us only dinged Level 20 out of 50 this week.

 

I’m reminded again of the exaggerations of it all. The Tankers are indestructible aggro black-holes compared to Standard MMO Tanks. The Blasters and Corruptors are explosive hurricanes of elemental fury compared to Standard MMO Wizards and Hunters. Masterminds bring armies, not pets. Dominators control instances not individuals, and can subvert combat itself if they don’t feel like being hit today. Stalkers undetectably annihilate bosses and don’t bother stopping to pick pockets. Peacebringers turn out to be accomplished Druid types on steroids, shifting effortlessly to entirely different classes on the fly, litterally. Healing, Taunting, Group Auras and Stealth are available to everyone as optional add-on power sets. Supers do not need vehicles or mounts, they get to functionally be one at level four. Monsters come at you in the dozens, not the threes and fours of Standard MMOs. In the starting area no two players look alike and can look awesome from level one. Massive shoulderpads are soooo last season dah-links.  And if you get bored of the stock content, there are several thousand player-made missions you can try instead, or failing that, just go and make one of your own.

Pretty much everything is turned up to eleven and it is brilliant!

 

The nuts and bolts of the F2P implementation seem reasonable enough, running mostly on a system of points-based unlocks; one-off purchases to buy the usual array of goods and services, character slots, the newer power sets and costume parts and so on. They do the increasingly standard triple tier membership system, as seen in LOTRO, DDO, etc, etc offering the VIP pseudo-subscription along with premium and free memberships too.

The points are about $5 for 400, and character slots are about $6 each, which I think is a little steep. Theres a fair bit in there that I think is a bit steep, but value on individual items is very subjective, and that’s the good thing about it all – only buy what you think is fair! I do.

Regardless of all that, the game seems functionally playable without spending anything at all if nothing takes your fancy – entirely cheapseating new players still get two character slots and access to CoH, CoV, most of the core archetypes and power sets and almost all of the older content, which being an MMO of that age is fairly prodigous! Returning players will likely have more slots and can use those to unlock access to old characters.

Notable exceptions that you’ll have to pay extra for include the new-ish Going Rogue 1-20 starter options, the newer powerwsets like Time Manipulation and Dual Pistols, the Incarnate post-L50 stuff, the new ‘One Must Die’ story arcs, and the usual array of costume sets that they’ve been charging extra for for ages anyway. Sente has lots more reliable observations and comentary on all that stuff here.

 

I’m gushing, clearly, but this exact sense of liberation hits me every time I return to CoX from any other more Standard MMO. That sense of ‘Why aren’t all MMOs like this one?’ It’s not prefect, certainly. Such flexibility comes at the price of distinctiveness. Warehouses and Sewers repeat often and despite there technically being over 300 ‘classes’, many of the powers within those are similar across different power sets, just with different particle effects. Also, soloing in CoX and full-group rampaging in CoX are very different games, and the soloing one isn’t the greatest. Best appreciated if you bring a big mob of friends with you. And also some people just don’t like Superheroes, meaning CoX is never going to be for them, which is fair enough.

I expect I will get bored of it in time, again, but then that’s probably just me and probably quite normal. But the whole thing presents an almost entirely carefree experience which possibly comes the closest to the kind of thing I think I may have been trying to find all along. Whatever else it is or isn’t, for me right now, it’s a breath of fresh air and just the tonic I need.

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Oct 12 2011

Tackling the PS3 unfinished game pile

Categories:

Jon

by Jon Shute

October 12, 2011

My crazy 40% rule, where I can’t buy any 360 games if I’m at less than 40% completion, actually seems to be paying off. I’ve not grabbed a couple of games and I’ve even gone back to Rage after it annoyed me enough to stop, and pushed past the bit that was causing a problem. Total success so far and I’m very happy with the results. I’ll have to raise that number a bit soon to push me to complete more of my backlog but that’s not an immediate problem.

So now my attention turns to the PS3 and my stack of shame for that. I don’t have anywhere near as many games on PS3 (purely due to the patching if you really want to know) but it’s still a respectable collection, especially when I’m collecting “free” games from PS+. Interesting confession: I’ve still not finished Uncharted 2, although I nearly 100%d the trophies in the first. Must play that last playthrough on Crushing difficulty to get those…

As with the 360 my first task is to identify how I can get a general gist of if I’ve completed games. For now I’ll use that 40% number, which is what I determined was the average number of achievements (not gamerscore) that completing a game’s plot (and having a general nose around the world) was giving me. As with the 360 I shall discount score and so Gold, Silver and Bronze trophies all become equal. Platinum throw things slightly as you get one of those for completing all other trophies (again, having that mean you had completed the single player plot once would have been far more useful than this 100% completion rubbish) but they are only one per game so I can probably ignore them and count them too.

The PS3 makes the whole thing a lot more complicated than on the 360. To look up my percentage for that I just go along to trueachievements.com and I can see that I have 40% (42% if I discount the DLC I don’t have, that’s a handy new feature they just added). I could also look at the numbers presented through the 360 UI itself, but I’m rarely next to my 360 when I want to check. The PS3 adds many levels of irritation to this. Firstly the trophies don’t sync with the servers automatically when you get them (manual process, will also automatically do them as part of the PS+ update check process now). They then present the data in a not quite useful way so I’m using a 3rd party site to pull the data and that gives me a nice list I can scrape with my own code. It turns out that I have 16.45% of the trophies, but since I have a lot of games I grabbed from PS+ just in case I’ll go with games I have at least one trophy for already. This gives me a slightly better number of 22.74%, which isn’t too bad. Getting that up to 40% before I buy any new games is a little unfeasible though (Uncharted 3!) so I need to hit the back catalogue a bit and accept that one or two games will be coming in that just can’t be missed.

The current two that are on the go are ICO (Only a few hours left to go of course. Short game, but Rage distracted me from finishing) and inFAMOUS 2. I liked the first game but thought the moral choice signposting was almost insulting my intelligence “Good acts make you good!” and the second game is a lot better at that. Instead I’ve decided to hate the AI that fires RPGs at point blank range as if they were shotguns in this one. Still, the rest of the game is good and the city is more than interesting enough to keep my sandbox itch scratched. After that it has to be Uncharted 2 of course in readiness for the third. Luckily the big game of the week is Forza 4 and that will end up being a nice background game instead of one I’ll obsess over so I should get a couple of hours at the weekend to work on that.

I make playing games sound like hard work, don’t I?

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Oct 12 2011

How To Murder Time – Doctor Who

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How to Murder Time

by Jon Shute

October 12, 2011

This week we are looking at the latest season of Doctor Who (major spoilers avoided). Is the darling of UK Scifi as good as people say? Is the break next year a good idea? Listen to almost find out.

Standard Podcast [ 44:44 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Oct 07 2011

Investigations…

Categories:

Tim

by Tim

October 7, 2011

So I was hacked. Information security is one of those tiresome airy-fairy subjects until something goes wrong on your own patch, and then suddenly it becomes an obsession to be shared with anyone who will listen!

TLDR; EA allow people steal to money from random XBOX LIVE users, using FIFA 12.

The long version where I show my working;

So I get home and get on with some unrelated stuff that doesn’t involve the PC or Xbox360. Later on, I check my email and find that Microsoft are grateful for my recent purchase of 1000, and then 5000 Microsoft points, for a total of about £60. Uh-oh, thinks I, and go into full-on paranoid detective mode.

Various checking about my various membership and account web pages at Xbox Live shows a surprising chain of events. Apparently, at about 6:45pm I used an Xbox in an entirely unknown location to buy myself 6000 Microsoft points, then log in to FIFA 12, a game I don’t own and over the course of about an hour, spend a total of 6140 points. A neat trick considering that at the time, I was watching telly and staring at my 360, which was off. On the plus side, I also managed to complete 4% of FIFA 12 and gain 2/45 achievements; “New Club In Town” (Create your FIFA 12 Ultimate Team club) and the ironically named “I’ll Have That One” (Open your first pack in FIFA 12 Ultimate Team).

The purchases were confusing; 25 x “GOLD PACK  Game Consumable” for 60 points each, 25x “PREMIUM GOLD PACK Game Consumable” for 120 each and 25x “PREMIUM SILVER PACK Game Consumable” for 60 points a go. I wish it said somewhere what game those were for, but I did my Googling and found these interesting threads:

Giant Bomb: Live account hacked? FIFA 11 related

and

Xbox.com: Fraudulent Charge of Premium Gold Packs

Of particular interest is the Giant Bomb thread, which is talking about identical problems in FIFA 11, yes Eleven, which seem not to have been remedied for FIFA 12. Fascinating post by ‘eatkill’ further in which I’ll quote:

happened to me last week . $110 worth of xbox live points spent on “in-game consumables” in FIFA 2011. Contacted EA also since my password was changed also. The rep told me its a problem with the game, there is some way that someone can trick xbox and EA into gaining access to your accounts. I was told they have been trying to fix the problem for months, but it wont be a problem with FIFA 2012.  I’m still waiting a resolution.

I find it very concerning that someone can create a product I don’t use that puts my account at risk.

You and me both, pal. A bug or design flaw which allows random strangers to be robbed of real life money goes unfixed for a whole year.

 

So heres how I think it goes, The Great FIFA 12 Wayne Rooney Caper:

  • Friend of Humanity uses Mystery Method X (which I wouldn’t reproduce here even I knew what it is) to trick EA Support into somehow GIVING THEM ACCESS TO RANDOMLY CHOSEN XBL ACCOUNT WITH CREDIT CARD LINKAGE, in this case mine. (Anecdotal, from Giant Bomb thread)
  • FoH uses Gamer Tag Recovery system to make XBL think their Xbox is actually mine.
  • FoH uses my previously saved Credit Card details to buy 6000 points. (As per Billing Website log and emailed receipts)
  • FoH uses their own FIFA 12 disc to set up an “Ultimate Team”, which I gather is a cynical EA Magic-The-Gathering style virtual collectable card game shakedown exercise. (See Achievement 1)
  • FoH then uses 6140 points to go ape-mental in FIFA 12’s stupid MtG Style CCG booster shop. (Achievement 2, and Point Spend History website)
  • FoH opens packs, plucks out rare/powerful footballist wizard cards and footasaurus artefact cards and somehow transfers/trades them to another account. If he’s smart, that one isn’t a real one either and multiple stages will be involved. I severely doubt EA keep logs of this, but you never know.
  • FoH cackles off into the sunset to win lots of important pretend football matches online by cheating. He pauses only to render my XBL account inoperable on the way out – changed password, that sort of thing.
  • FoH possibly then sells on the cards for real money some how? Not sure how that side of it works what with me having NEVER PLAYED FIFA 12 and all. Probably facilitated by shady message boards and the like. Fencing has never been so easy!

Some amount of guess work up there, after all, I’ve never actually played FIFA 12, but it is backed up with reasonable internet corroboration. There is a definite Step 3 Profit here, a somewhat convoluted cyber smash-and-grab which by the sounds of it, goes on all the time. Not an especially glamorous caper, but a sound and repeatable one.

 

And this is just me, googling about. I imagine the nice Microsoft Support Lady that I immediately phoned, who should have the entire audit trail in front of her, is likely to find out a lot more. I talked to them and got the account frozen and promises of investigation and reimbursement, although it’s probably going to be a fortnight or so before its all back to normal. Annoying because the 360 has an irritating necessity to tag many of its save games to a profile I can’t now get at for the duration of the investigation. I am NOT restarting Final Fantasy XIII again – I may not live to see the end of a second play through!

The support lady reassured me that all they’d have seen was a bunch of x’s with four digits on the end from inside the Xbox UI, so its unlikely my “FIFA Fagin” will be able to use the card for outside general purchases, but now I still have to do the usual watchman’s round of online systems, checking all the other metaphorical padlocks are still unbroken. I’m just glad my online bank recently introduced physical authenticators.

To their credit, MS Support were professional, helpful and reassuring, so I’m not too worried about it all, but it does make me cross, and mostly with EA.

 

Summing up; FIFA 12 is a den of cheating scumbags, EA are cynical profiteering idiots, Microsoft are surprisingly helpful but should put some serious pressure on EA, and probably should think about introducing an authenticator for in-console point purchases.

And I probably should have known better than to leave my payment info linked as part of the profile. If I did anything wrong here, it was that. I might trust Microsoft, but do I trust everyone Microsoft trusts, and everyone they trust?

Much as it might suit Microsoft (Or Sony, or Nintendo, or Steam, or whoever), the console has NO need to constantly have access to payment details – these should be a one-off thing that must be entered each and every time I want to buy stuff.

None of this is possible without a one-click attitude to online shopping that we should all learn to do without. We don’t just leave our wallets behind on the counter in real life shops to make things easier next time we visit the shop – we shouldn’t do it online either.

 

The Information Age is a double edged sword. We become the centre of an increasingly fragmented, attenuated and ephemeral sphere of connections, passwords, accounts and security questions, all only as strong as our own memories and the competences of the system designers involved, and with the increasing complexity of it all, we lose more and more control over who we are and what we own.

At the same time, with more and more systems and logs and audits in place, time itself becomes a more controlled thing. If things happen that weren’t intended, time can indeed be rewritten. Backups, rollbacks, simple remote controls that make the last twenty four hours never have happened, as far as the credit card or account status system cares at least. Goods and values can be remotely evaporated and recreated anew, from nothing, at the press of a button.

If I’ve learnt anything from this experience, it’s that knowing the password is nowhere near as important as knowing the answer to the secret question. As long as you can still prove that you are you, everything else is editable.

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Oct 06 2011

Preservations…

Categories:

Tim

by Tim

October 6, 2011

I have this thing about wasted food. It causes me anxiety bordering on the pathological to see good food being thrown away, so this time of year is especially hard on me. Whole trees, which have been spending the rest of the year patiently and painstakingly manufacturing edible spheres of useful carbohydrate, just start flinging them at the ground, mostly out of spite!

After grumbling along such lines in the presence of people who actually have apple trees, my bluff has been called and I’ve ended up with several unexpected carrier bags full of windfalls, and so this year I’ve been forced to actually do something about it all, rather than look like a hypocrite, nutterist or both.

Crumbles and pies are all very well, but there really are a lot of apples to deal with here, and I want to make them last, so I’ve gone with chutney and a Spiced Apple Chutney recipe shamelessly scrumped from the BBC Food Website.

 

It’s surprisingly easy! You’ll need:

  • 900g/2lb apples, cored and chopped.

Pretty much any apples seem to work here, which is the whole point. One average sized supermarket carrier bag of well-meant windfalls will produce about a kilo of useable apple bits, once you’ve peeled them and cut out the nasty bits. Peel, quarter, then cut out the core and top and tail. Takes a while and is the most fiddly bit. I recommend doing it on the sofa with a cooking show on the TV, so it feels like your participating!

You’ll also want:

  • 225g/8oz onions, chopped
  • 110g/4oz sultanas, raisins or chopped dates.
  • 15g/½oz ground coriander
  • 15g/½oz paprika
  • 15g/½oz mixed spice
  • 15g/½oz salt
  • 340g/12oz granulated sugar
  • 425ml/¾ pints malt vinegar

All commonly available stuff and not too expensive.

 

Step 1. Bung everything into a large pan on a high heat. I use a 28cm high-sided stir-fry pan and it all just about fits. An actual Preserving Pan for jam-making and such probably works well here, but isn’t necessary. Carefully stir so everything is all mixed in and bring to the boil.

 

Step 2. Turn down heat to simmer for about an hour. You’ll want to have a well ventilated kitchen for this; open the windows, extractor fan on. I didn’t and it turns out that if you boil vinegar for an hour in an open pan in an enclosed space, you are then unable to stop crying for the next four hours. The air gets a tad sting-ey! As you simmer down, the apples shrink and it all fits in the pan much better. Give it a good stir every ten minutes or so.

 

Step 3. While that lot is cooking down, prepare some jars. The above ingredients should make enough chutney to fill about four normal sized jam jars, if the jam is taken out first. Wash them out, scrape off the old labels if you can (particularly if they didn’t contain foodstuffs to begin with), and be sure to sterilise the jars and lids. Sterilizing the jars stops that nasty fuzzy mould munching away on your hard won produce during the months in the cupboard! I use Milton Sterilising Fluid, which you can find in the ‘Baby Needs’ section of most supermarkets, for baby bottles and such, but failing that, just bake the jars and lids in an oven at Gas3/170C for 10 minutes. For god sake, don’t then pick them up with bare hands. More ways to sterilise here, but don’t just skip it entirely, or after two months the pantry will resemble some of the more horrifying scenes from the end of Akira.

 

Step 4. When the mix is about the colour of brown sugar and a glossy consistency, turn off the heat. The picture above should be a fair guide since I stole it from the same page that I also stole the recipe from. Ideally, there should be no free-running liquid. Beware over-cooking as I did on my first go – it’ll turn almost completely black and gain a terrifying density that can damage local space-time. The difference between Apple Chuntey and Asphalt is about 35 minutes. It should still contain recognisable bits of apple!

 

Step 5. Carefully spoon the stuff into the jars. A dessert spoon will be easiest, as I discovered to my cost; the spoon needs to fit inside the jar otherwise you might as well just fling the pan roughly in the direction of the jars and hope for the best. If you do this while the mixture is still hot, do the lids up and then let them cool, the contracting air inside the jar will cause a drop in air pressure and make the big clickey button on the lid not click, which is neat and professional! Once sealed, leave the jars to cool before storing away in a dark cupboard for three months or so. With that much vinegar involved, the stuff shouldn’t need refrigeration, and indeed, this kind of embalming is what cavemen did before coldness was even invented! Some sort of label is a good idea at this stage, preventing disconcerting condiment-based russian roulette three months down the line.

 

Autumn apple chutney made about now should be matured nicely in time for Christmas, but even dolloping barely cooled leftover pan scrapings on some bread with some cheddar is very tasty, if a little rough. It makes for a very tangy and aromatic sour and savoury accompaniment to cheeses and you won’t want huge amounts of it in one go. It seems to be fine for vegetarians, but I’m not going to lie to you; if you have an apple intolerance, your head will probably go up like the Hindenburg, so watch out for that. I’ll have to let you all know what it tastes like when you’re supposed to eat it, but seems an excellent and rich alternative to standard sandwich pickle.

Best of all, I can rest easy knowing that several bags of wilfully discarded apples did not get landfilled! I’m doing my part!

 

(This post has nothing to do with Steve Jobs, by the way. I barely knew the man and genuinely do have a lot of apples to deal with just now.)

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Oct 04 2011

Machinations…

Categories:

Tim

by Tim

October 4, 2011

Additional Gaming Archaeology 101 bonus study notes here, to go with our recent lecture on System Shock, for extra course credit!

Review: System Shock 2, by Irrational Games/Looking Glass Studios (1999)

Forty-two years after the mayhem on Citadel Station, the Tri-Optimum starship Von Braun is embarking on a historic journey to test a new faster-than-light drive. Along with the UNN Rickenbacker, they travel to the distant Tau Ceti system and remarkably, discover a distress signal. An investigation of the source goes badly and introduces a hostile force to the two docked starships which rapidly takes control. As a UNN soldier, you are awoken from cryo-sleep directly into the ongoing crisis with only missing memories, a hefty wrench, and the radio voice of computer specialist Dr Janice Polito for guidance. It’s up to you to take the two ships back!

 

While the first game is a thing apart and for all the reasons I went on about in the podcast, something special, System Shock 2 is very much a mixed bag. It plays in a manner similar to the first game with you, the Bruce Willis type, trying to deal with a series of increasingly powerful threats through a variety of fetch and carry type objectives, fighting off the roaming forces of adversity along the way; mutants, robots, etc, and the basics of it all work well. The engine is a huge improvement on the first game, with the sprite-based monsters now completely replaced by 3d models and the whole thing looking (for it’s time) slick and detailed. The gunplay is more fluid than SS1’s admittedly sluggish pistols and assault rifles and the introduction of Psi Powers (Magic) does increase the variety available to the player.

 

What lets the experience down, for me, is the introduction of some very arbitrary RPG Elements to the whole outing, which are an odd choice. The introduction of a stats window, experience points for completing objectives (Cyber Modules) and point-spending to specialise in an almost Talent-Tree style set of skills seems jarring and unnecessary, given that the first game got by well enough without any of these features. They hark back to the game’s ancestry in Ultima Underworld, where little character sheets and choosing to be a fighter, thief or wizard made a lot more thematic sense. System Shock 2 even offers these three paths as career choices during the disguised character selection process at the start; dressed up in future parlance ‘Marines’, ‘Navy’ and ‘O.S.A.’ This then sets up an irritating system of gated content prevalent throughout the game; you must have X points in Y to use this gun, or open that box.

Worse still, a pre-emptively savvy foreknowledge of just which points to spend where is if not essential, then extremely advisable, to be able to deal with the various challenges the game throws at you, and cross-training is a must. Trying it purely with Weapon, Tech or Psi skills alone is a recipe for disaster. A purely weapon specialist will end up with broken guns all the time, a pure Tech won’t be able use any guns in the first place and a pure Psi will run out of Psi Hypos (Mana potions) very quickly using them as ammo for the gun-like psi attacks. To get through you need quite a bit of everything. Balance is shaky at best, which can be viewed as a part of the challenge, but also means that in reality, much of the stat system is built on red herrings and dead end incorrect choices, and if you need it all anyway, why bother with choices and scarcity at all?

Successors would go on to use these RPG Elements too, Deus Ex, Bioshock, et al, now-familiar systems which force us to choose, spend points and specialise, rather than excel at everything and anything simply because we are alone in a world where it’s fine for us to be The Hero. These days only Bethesda seem to just shrug and let us be awesome at everything (Morrowind, Oblivion) which ironically enough, was one of the things that made System Shock such an enjoyable romp – precisely this freedom to do it all and be awesome.

 

Beyond the stats, ammo scarcity is a problem. It adds to the pressure of a game which is very much about the sci-fi survival horror. Guns degrade and break at an alarming rate, bullets are rare and respawns are frequent and sudden. It isn’t really a game about clearing levels, more just getting to the objectives alive. Also a shame, gone are the Cyberspace interludes, now replaced with dull connect-the-dots stat-regulated PDA puzzles, which literally amount to tossing a coin three times in a row, and are more about amassing the right kind of weighting stats than doing anything for ourselves, as in the wiring puzzles from the first game. This too would show up in the Multitools and Lockpicks of Deus Ex, and is something of a loss, a movement to the generic stat based, and away from innate player skills.

 

New to the sequel is research, which I do like. Various enemies drop unidentified organs which can be researched, another stat-regulated task, but also needing various chemicals which become something of a rewarding scavenger hunt around the store rooms of the two ships. Finishing the shopping list gives damage bonuses against that enemy type or unlocks the use of new weapons and equipment. Again, this is seen in Bioshock with the research camera gameplay, which I also quite liked.

 

Despite all the mechanics bitching, System Shock 2 is an outstanding example of what Looking Glass always did best, creating a thrilling and engrossing action movie which we star in and direct at the same time. The story telling is a definite advance on the predecessor and makes for a satisfying overall experience, making you want to deal with all the adversity, both in-game and the game itself, fight through it all and see what happens next. Shodan returns, which is not much of a spoiler given the massive Shodan face on the box art, but the twists and turns, reversals and revelations are still fresh and sharp to me even today, after countless replays. The supporting cast of obsessive doomed diarists are in full characteristic flow, with audio logs and emails carrying the bulk of the narrative in a surprisingly effective manner that is still emulated today. Delacroix’s dogged resistance, Korenchkin’s visionary smugness and Diego’s bitter determination all bring the adventure to life, and Polito is just plain brilliant.

 

While the technical direction may have lost some of its edge compared with the first game, and now facing up against the likes of Half Life (1998), in terms of engaging story-telling, that nebulous ‘intelligent first person shooter’ terminology, Looking Glass surpassed themselves in the sequel to create a memorable romp which still deserves the title of ‘classic’ today.

 

Looking Glass would go on to release only three more games before going bankrupt in 2000; Flight Unlimited III, Destruction Derby 64 (N64) and Thief II: The Metal Age, which seems almost criminal. However, they live on in spirit, in a host of modern classics almost all of which contain gameplay and features first honed in these two games. We all owe a lot of entertainment hours to System Shock and System Shock 2, even if we’ve never played either of them.

 

As for getting hold of it and playing along at home, the game is still owned by EA and is not Abandonware, whatever that even means. It is not currently in production so second-hand purchases of the original box run is about the only way to find it today. Best bet is probably Ebay, who seem to have some new for $269 and used for $25. Perhaps if we’re lucky, it’ll turn up in the future on some download service like Good Old Games or Steam, but don’t hold your breath as the legal side of it all is enough of a nightmare that even the mighty corporation that is 2K Games had to go and make “Bioshock” instead of the “System Shock 3″ it so clearly really is.

Having got hold of it, it will likely need extensive patching to work on modern OS – Through The Looking Glass has lots of help for that here, patches and workarounds and the like.

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