Tag Archives: review

Nexus 4 vs Galaxy Nexus

My wife’s 3-year-old phone has been irritating her with its lack of app space, so I gave in and bought a Nexus 4, passing my Galaxy Nexus on to her. I thought I’d write up a quick review comparing the Nexus 4 and Galaxy Nexus, for the benefit of anyone not sure whether to upgrade.

From the front, it’s hard to tell the two phones apart. The Nexus 4 is 0.76mm wider and 1.6mm shorter, with the same basic rounded rectangle shape. Both phones have volume buttons on the left, power on the right. The Nexus 4 has the headphone socket on the top instead of the bottom.

Turn the phones face down, and they’re clearly different. The Galaxy Nexus has a rubberized gray back, whereas the Nexus 4 has a glass back with sparkly pixels underneath and “nexus” inset in silver. Presumably this is for when you’re playing the phone stack restaurant game.

The new Nexus is a fraction of a millimeter wider than the old one. However, it doesn’t taper the way the old one does, so it feels thicker. Curiously, it also feels noticeably heavier, even though the actual weight increase is only 4g. I think that the difference is psychological, and comes down to the build quality, which is the biggest physical difference between the two phones.

The Galaxy Nexus felt plastic. I personally don’t mind my phone feeling like plastic, but a lot of iPhone fans criticized the Nexus on that basis. The Nexus 4 has glass front and back, with a rubberized edge. It feels exceptionally solid. The glass has a rounded bevel on the edges, so the device gleams slightly in the light. (It’s the same effect Nintendo used on the DSi XL.)

When the screens are lit, the difference between the two devices is clearer. The Galaxy Nexus used a Super AMOLED screen, whereas the Nexus 4 is an IPS LCD. The LCD has better color accuracy and brightness, and doesn’t suffer from the papery texture of the AMOLED or its tendency to show color fringes at the edges at low brightness. On the other hand, the IPS doesn’t have the totally black blacks of AMOLED, which you’ll notice at night.

The Nexus 4 screen is slightly wider, 48 pixels more, about an extra 4mm. That tiny difference in aspect ratio is strangely noticeable, making the screen seem ‘fatter’.

The Nexus 4 supports GLONASS as well as GPS, for improved location services. Not much more to say about that.

Sound quality during calls is better on the Nexus 4, both sending and receiving. The Nexus 4 supports T-Mobile’s HD voice, and my colleagues tell me my voice is exceptionally clear.

The software, of course, is almost identical; both run Android 4.2.1. However, the Nexus 4 has a quad core CPU instead of dual core, and double the RAM, which means that everything runs just a little bit more smoothly. In particular, the Google Play store doesn’t lag at all, even when you’re installing and updating apps.

The built-in camera is also a big improvement. Resolution is 8MP rather than 5MP, and it’s an f/2.4 lens rather than f/2.8. It also has a back-illuminated sensor, which combined with the faster lens means that it’s far better at taking photos in low light situations. Finally, there’s an HDR mode built in, plus face detection.

There’s no dock connector. Instead, it can charge wirelessly using a Qi-enabled charging pad. On the whole, I found the Galaxy Nexus dock fiddly, and prefer the pad option, even though both are pretty ridiculously overpriced.

Battery life is about the same, though I don’t have any detailed figures yet.

So overall, a pretty solid upgrade in every respect. However, if I hadn’t needed to upgrade for other reasons, I’d probably have waited to see what the X-phone brings.

LA Noire review

It was just another treacherous night in the big city when I opened the “LA Noire” case. You doubtless saw the headlines—big name publisher picks up well reviewed game from independent studio. There was another story I was interested in, though. According to the police files, there had been accusations of appalling working conditions, and the whole shebang had been deep sixed a few months later in mysterious circumstances. That left me with a few loose ends to tie up.

I sat back and pondered the cocktail I had been handed. A fifth of hidden object puzzle, a generous dash of choose-your-own-adventure, a touch of cover-based shootout, and I could definitely detect a hint of sandbox. It added up to something, but what? There was only one way to find out. I slipped the disc into my PS3.

The graphics hit me first, a one-two combo punch of lush environments mixed with uncanny valley facial animation. The story moved like molasses on a winter’s morning. Yet it wasn’t long before I was hooked, as hooked as the morphine addicts who were turning up dead on the streets of the city of angels. I wandered the lovingly rendered streets from crime scene to crime scene, chasing down perps who were seedier than a parakeet’s breakfast.

It takes a strong stomach to be a detective. When there’s a serial killer beating and slashing his female victims, someone has to kneel over the desecrated corpse and turn it over for clues. I won’t even go into my time working the arson desk; suffice it to say I’ll never look at a rack of ribs the same way again.

Maybe that was the hook, the unflinching attempt at realism. Maybe we all want to be heroes, or maybe I was won over by the delight of there being something different in the world of console adventures. Whatever it was, I’m glad I was there. The story may be more of an interactive movie than is good for it, but entertainment is entertainment as long as your expectations aren’t out of whack.

Would I recommend that you follow in my footsteps? Well, if you’ve got patience and determination, and pay attention to detail, you could do worse. Sure, the path’s as linear as the proverbial straight and narrow, and if you wander off track the illusion of freedom in a living city falls apart faster than a shanty town being hit by a tornado. But hey, those are the breaks. Me, I think it’s worth it for the chance to take part in a car chase in a Tucker Torpedo and a shoot out around the Spruce Goose.

Movie review: Insomnia / Insomnia

I don’t often watch movies back-to-back with the American remakes. However, I failed to see Insomnia in its original Norwegian incarnation, and since the US version was directed by Christopher Nolan (who had previously directed the excellent Memento), I decided to watch both versions in one week.

Both are good movies. If you hate subtitles, feel free to watch the remake; it’s a perfectly good adaptation, taking into account Hollywood’s sensibilities–which I shall now proceed to discuss, with the aid of copious spoilers, so you have been warned. Continue reading →

Video game fight: inFAMOUS vs [Prototype]

Every now and again, two video games come out at about the same time that tackle pretty much the same subject matter. (Actually, this happens all the time in first person shooters, but by and large I don’t play those.) Such was the case with [Prototype] and inFAMOUS.

Both are M-rated games about becoming a superhero (or supervillain). Both have a protagonist whose origin is initially obscure and whose morality is questionable. Both have a conspiracy theory storyline. Both are third person action-adventure games. And yet, having played inFAMOUS and being more than half way through completing [Prototype], I’m impressed with how different the two games are.

The most noticeable difference is in the first five minutes. InFAMOUS takes a traditional approach, starting things off with a cutscene of a mysterious explosion and some voice-over, then having the protagonist wake up and begin a series of tutorial tasks to introduce the controls.

[Prototype] has no such reserve. Its opening cutscene has the ruined world already in place, relying on the narration to provide a little backstory. Some combat is shown in cutscene, before the player is thrown into the middle of an epic firefight with no real preparation. Panic, mash bGuttons, see what happens. Strange powers make a bloody mess of people and vehicles, as the game leads you through the major combat modes as quickly as possible. Just as you’re starting to think “Hang on, am I not going to find out how this stuff works?” you get another cutscene, and you’re jumped back 18 days of game time to before you had all the powers you were just using. The game then proceeds to tell its story by having you play a series of flashbacks, interspersed by cutscenes set in its present.

I think I can see what the developers of [Prototype] were trying to do. They wanted to see if they could grab players with an action sequence right at the start, give them a preview of what’s to come and a reason to play through the early stages of getting those awesome powers. It’s the same idea Gerry Anderson used at the start of TV shows like Thunderbirds and Space:1999. The problem is that when you’re expected to control the action in preview scenes, you’re less likely to sit back and enjoy them, and more likely to flail around in confusion and near-panic.

The differences continue once the main gameplay has started. In inFAMOUS, movement is based around grinding on electrical cables and metal rails, and jumping from roof to roof. (Developers Sucker Punch were responsible for the PS2 Sly Cooper games, and obviously decided to stick with what they knew.) Motion is largely realistic, if you accept the notion that your character is fueled by electricity rather than killed by it.

[Prototype], on the other hand, goes for ludicrous over-the-top cartoon motion, where the laws of physics aren’t even treated as suggestions. Everything seems unnaturally fast, including the movement of pedestrian bystanders. Eventually you get to scoot to the top of skyscrapers in a few seconds by simply repeatedly jumping upwards, with the vertical walls as purchase.

The differences in combat are also quite extreme. In inFAMOUS you slowly develop your super-powers; they are relatively small in number, and gradually power up. In [Prototype] you quickly get a bewildering array of different attacks, each with its own combination or sequence of buttons. I generally found myself sticking to one of three or so attacks that actually worked reliably and weren’t too fiddly to trigger. It just wasn’t worth remembering all the others.

I found inFAMOUS annoying on rare occasions, mostly when I had to dashacross the map in a short space of time. [Prototype] induced rage far more consistently. Enemy nests and larger enemies require that you pick up large objects like cars, target the enemy with L2, hold down circle to charge your throw, then release circle to actually complete the throw. There are a number of issues with the game that make this frustrating, however:

  • You have to be right on top of something and motionless in order to pick it up. There’s an attack power you eventually get which has the side effect of letting you lasso things while moving, or at some distance–but then you’re stuck with that relatively weak power for combat.
  • If an enemy attacks you while you’re charging your throw, you drop the object and have to start over.
  • The L2 trigger focuses on the closest visible enemy of any kind. In battles where there are huge mutants attacking you, but also random human troops, this is a major annoyance.
  • Monsters generally run straight for you, ignoring minor distractions like tanks.

So in practice, you run across the map to grab the nearest object, and end up facing away from whatever massive mutant you’re trying to kill. You spin around 180 degrees, and half the time discover that the mutant is right there and will leap over and smack you before you can ready a throw, causing you to drop whatever you picked up so you have to start your attack sequence again. On occasions when the mutant is far enough away that it can’t ruin your attack, you hit F2 and the cursor focuses on something entirely harmless that happens to be closer. It’s incredibly frustrating, particularly in the final “boss” battle–which has the added irritation of an arbitrary time limit.

Helicopter combat is frustrating too, because the right stick not only turns your helicopter, it also refocuses the L2 targeting on other objects. So if an enemy copter isn’t quite close enough to your sights for a missile to hit, you start turning, only to find that your missiles are suddenly targeting a different copter that they’re even less likely to hit.

So while inFAMOUS lacks vehicle combat and the range of weapons of [Prototype], it’s a far better game as a result of the added focus and polish. While I finished both games, I completed the last 25% or so of [Prototype] out of sheer bloodymindedness, rather than because I was actually enjoying it.

Both games got sequels. inFAMOUS 2 is already out; [Prototype 2] is due soon, but barring stellar reviews I think I’ll give it a miss.

iPad review

Work sent me an iPad to experiment with. Here is my review, from the perspective of a Mac user of 20+ years who firmly believes that tablet interfaces are the way of the future. (I even had a Newton.)

What’s bad about the iPad

1

Ye ghods, this thing is heavy. Sorry, but it really is uncomfortable to use for any extended period, unless you prop it up on something–a knee, a cushion, whatever.

2

The out-of-box experience is amazingly poor for an Apple product. Plug in a Mac and turn it on, and you get a friendly welcome screen that guides you through registration and setup, and everything is ready to go. Turn on an iPod, and it works instantly with some pre-installed sample songs. Turn on an iPad, and it basically tells you to fuck off until you go and find a computer running iTunes, plug it in via USB, log in to the iTunes store, and do some software activation. Software activation? On an Apple product? Oh dear.

3

I put some extra apps on this thing, so where are they? Oh, wait, I can slide the screen sideways now. I didn’t think I could, because when I first tried, it bounced and didn’t let me. Apparently it’s modal and depends on whether there are icons there. Someone didn’t get the memo that UI modality is bad.

4

How do I know if I’m typing capitals or lowercase? The keys are always marked with capital letters, and I can’t see if the shift is highlighted because it’s under my finger when I’m using it, obviously.

It seems Apple are slavishly reproducing the behavior of a physical keyboard, when there’s no need to do so. The F and J keys even have pictures of the ridges you can use to feel your hands are in the right position. Obviously these are totally useless on a virtual keyboard. A bizarre piece of design whimsy.

5

I can’t change the date and time format? Epic fail.

6

It’s plugged into my Mac, but it says it’s not charging. I need to use the special power brick to charge? No, it turns out that it will charge from a Mac–but only if the screen is off. And because there’s no power LED, that leaves it with no way to tell you it’s charging. No doubt Steve insisted that there be no LED to mar the featureless front.

7

Apps always appear on a separate screen and have to be dragged onto the main screen, even when there’s plenty of space on the main screen. Unnecessarily annoying.

8

Where is iTunes? There’s an icon labeled iTunes, but it gets me the iTunes store. There’s an icon labeled iPod, but that only plays things that are pre-synced to the iPad. How do I play all the music on my network iTunes share?

9

The screen isn’t as comfortable for reading books as a Kindle. I’m no paper fetishist; I spend 8 hours a day reading on LCDs. However, the iPad’s screen isn’t as good as my laptop’s, and that in turn is more distracting and fatiguing than the Kindle’s e-ink.

In addition, as noted above, the weight of the iPad is fatiguing. Given that I have a free choice via the Kindle app on iPad, I’ll carry on reading novels on the Kindle. For magazine PDFs, though, the iPad is a good choice.

10

The iPad would be pretty good for consulting video game FAQs while slumped on the couch… Except there doesn’t seem to be any way to search a page. Another basic functionality failure; even my phone’s browser has search.

Update: Turns out you can search on the page, but for some reason you do it by using the search box labeled Google. As well as searching with Google, this has the hidden function of searching the current page, if you pick the last entry in the resulting drop-down list. That’s some seriously obfuscated UI. Would it be so hard to find space for a “search on page” icon?

11

The iPad would be good for reading Facebook… Except when I follow a link and then go back to Facebook, it forces a page refresh and kicks me back to the top of the news feed again.

12

The sound output is terrible. Because the designers insisted that the front be completely featureless, the speaker is on one edge. If you find it and cup your hand to bounce the sound, you can hear that it could actually sound quite good, if the designers had compromised and allowed the hardware guys to make the speakers face your ears.

13

There’s no way to change web page font size, or the font choice. You can zoom in, but that zooms the entire page so content drops off the sides. If zooming the column you want to read to the tablet’s width doesn’t make the text big enough, you’re out of luck.

14

Proprietary connecting cable. Come on, Apple, you said you would adopt micro-USB like everyone else.

15

At the risk of sounding Daring Fireball, where are the killer apps? Even things which you’d think would be really cool on the iPad, like Google Earth, often turn out to be cut-down versions.

16

PDF reading is OK, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to select and copy text. So it’s not very useful for reviewing business documents.

17

In general, iOS apps are hard to learn. They tend to rely on unlabeled graphical icons for buttons, and because it’s a touch interface, there’s no equivalent of a help tooltip to tell you what they do. For example, the Mail application has an icon which looks like a cardboard box with a label on the front, like the ones I keep files in, with an arrow pointing into it. As far as I can tell, this actually deletes the current message. Why?

While this is a general problem, it seems to be worse on iOS than on Android, because of Android’s greater use of menus with actual text on them. To use HCI terminology, menus are discoverable, whereas touch icons aren’t.

Of course, it wouldn’t be that hard to implement some kind of tooltip for iOSs mysterious user icons, that would be triggered by touching and holding your finger on them. You could then slide your finger away if you decided not to activate the icon.

18

Undo is gone. It’s a feature so critical that Apple’s Mac OS X frameworks practically try to railroad you into supporting it–yet iOS seems to lack it entirely. Combine this with the lack of discoverability, and you get frustration.

19

It’s really hard to type on the on-screen keyboard if you have long fingernails, because they don’t conduct enough to be detected by the screen. I’m surprised I haven’t heard more women complaining about this. Maybe they all wear metal nail polish or something?

What’s good about the iPad

1

If you plug in headphones, the sound output is OK quality.

2

Battery life is good, for a color screen.

3

Video playback is smooth.

4

A touchscreen keyboard works quite well when the screen is this big.

5

It is undoubtedly pointing the way, as far as touch user interfaces go, even if there are some parts of its UI that are inexplicably bad.

Conclusion

So, what is this $500 device good for?

It’s not very good for browsing the web, even ignoring the lack of Flash support. It’s no good for Facebook.  It requires that web UIs be (re)designed for it, as clicking small text links is an exercise in frustration. Basically, it needs a better browser before it can replace a laptop for general web browsing.

It’s OK for reading e-books, but not as good as a proper e-book reader.

It’s OK for reading PDFs, but only so long as you don’t need to quote from them.

It’s good for watching video, as long as the video is in MPEG-4 format, which means you’ll have to rip it yourself, buy it from Apple, or find it on YouTube.

It can run apps, but I’ve yet to see any that are particularly worthwhile. Most of them seem to be repackaged web content or games.

If you need to read lots of PDFs, or want something nicer than a laptop for reading long web articles in bed, it’s a good choice. It’ll also let you experiment with e-books, but if you’re a serious reader you’ll probably want something else in the long run.

It does a bunch of other things too, but none of them very well, and it’s really expensive for what it does do well. It’s fun to play with, but if I’d spent my own money on it, I’d have severe buyer’s remorse.

Movie review: “The Room”

I’ve seen a lot of terrible movies, from “Night of the Lepus” and “Battlefield Earth” to “Xanadu” and “Plan 9 From Outer Space”. “The Room” beats them all. Believe the hype, this could be the next Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Let me start by listing the things that are right about this movie: The sets are competently lit.

Everything else is wrong, even the most basic elements of movie making. Scenes are intercut with what you might mistake for establishing shots, for no apparent reason. Actual establishing shots start to tilt part way through panning. Even the end credits have mysterious blacked-out areas that scroll at the wrong speed. And through the whole thing lurches the auteur responsible, Tommy Wiseau–writer, director, producer, and for want of a better term, actor.

He’s a man for whom English is clearly a second language. His characters often speak in apparently random collections of clichés, or hammer home plot points through verbatim repetition. People in “The Room” lurch from laughter to sorrow and back like they all have rapid cycling bipolar disorder, until you start to feel faintly hysterical yourself from trying to keep track of what the mood of the scene is supposed to be. Above all, the lead characters exhibit an autistic level of emotional understanding, behaving towards each other in ways that make no sense at all. It’s a world where chickens tweet, pillows have sharp edges, and men casually ask friends “So, how’s your sex life?” The reactions of the characters in the final climactic scene make me wonder if the writer has even met any human beings. It’s almost as though the script was written by an alien, or generated by a piece of software.

If Wiseau as a writer is bad, Wiseau the actor is even worse, making the rest of the porn-movie-grade acting look good by comparison. He has the facial expressiveness of a stroke victim, and walks as though he was taught to do it by chimpanzees. His robotic flatness of affect is bizarre, given that he’s apparently able to show emotions in the director’s interview. The sex scenes are the stuff of nightmares–well, I say ‘scenes’ plural, but the second time his Johnny character air-humps his girlfriend, we’re treated to the exact same shots as the first time (though mercifully cut short).

Wiseau allegedly spent $6m on “The Room”. This is no low-budget production; rather than just shooting on top of a convenient building, he apparently shot the rooftop scenes in a studio using green screen, and then dropped in footage of San Francisco by computer. Of course, since he didn’t use motion control cameras, the background doesn’t always end up moving properly relative to the characters. The studio set is then re-used later on to represent a different location–one whose physical existence is inexplicable given the supposed exterior of the apartment where most of the action takes place.

In short, “The Room” is amazingly bad. It’s almost hard to believe it’s not deliberately bad, some sort of dadaist prank. If you enjoy watching bad movies, you really need to see this one.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS3)

Naughty Dog have quite a history on the PlayStation family of consoles. They started out as developers of the first three Crash Bandicoot 3D platform games on the original PlayStation, as well as a Crash-themed cart racer.

With the introduction of the PS2, Naughty Dog showed that their developers could implement the best game engines in the business. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy was built using a variant of Lisp, and featured dynamic multithreaded loading of game data and textures. This made it almost unique among PS2 games in having no loading screens–the entire world appeared seamless. By the time of Jak 3, the engine supported progressive scan and widescreen. It had multithreaded rendering as well, which kept the frame rate consistent at the expense of some tearing.

Unfortunately, the best technology doesn’t always mean the best games. Naughty Dog’s technology found its way into Insomniac’s Ratchet and Clank games and Sucker Punch’s Sly Cooper games, and I’d rate both series as generally superior to Jak and Daxter. In particular, Jak II was a low point for Naughty Dog: they tried to take the series in a more gritty and urban direction, and it didn’t really work. The infinitely respawning enemies were annoying and broke my suspended disbelief. Worse, someone on the design team decided that it would be fun to make players avoid randomly generated traffic while trying to travel around completing missions within tight arbitrary time limits. Sorry, but traffic jams are not a fun gameplay mechanic.

Naughty Dog’s first PS3 game was Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. They stuck to their 3D platformer roots, expanding out in the direction of third person shooters, and the result was another technical tour de force. Once again, the game engine used background threads to suck in data on the fly and provide the illusion of a seamless world with no loading screens; and for the first time, a Naughty Dog game featured realistic human characters.

Uncharted was like a Hollywood action adventure. It featured a lot of running around, ducking and diving for cover, grabbing guns and shooting on the move. The combat was interspersed with climbing and jumping, and some light puzzles. The game was well reviewed, though many felt it was somewhat short. It was also disappointingly linear, and only really supported a single play style–leap in, grab the guns conveniently scattered around, and run around causing mayhem.

And so to the inevitable sequel. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves keeps what was good about the first game, fixes what was wrong, and outdoes every other similar game in numerous areas. It fully deserves all the awards and rave reviews it has been receiving.

Like the first Uncharted, Uncharted 2 has no load screens; but this time, some of the environments are huge in scope, occasionally jaw-droppingly so. The draw distance is so large you’re never aware that it isn’t infinite, and only twice did I see any sign of popup or texture loading. (And one of those occasions was during multiplayer when switching cameras, so I’d argue that it doesn’t count.) Even though the plot is basically linear, the game feels open because of the excellent design; the only time I felt boxed in was when I had a traversal puzzle I couldn’t solve.

The graphics are amazing. There are no photographic textures; everything was drawn by artists, but in photorealistic style. Dynamic lighting is used so that game objects can cast shadows. Plants are apparently modeled using a physics engine which allows them to be blown about by ambient weather or passing helicopters.

By offloading most of the graphics pipeline onto the Cell processor SPEs, Naughty Dog freed up the graphics chip to handle dynamic depth of field, generally focused around either key action events (during cut scenes) or whatever your reticule is aimed at (during combat). Depth of field helps to focus your attention on what’s important, getting around the problem of visual clutter that plagues games like Killzone 2. (For an alternate approach, see Team Fortress 2 (part of The Orange Box), where the entire art style is focused on reducing visual clutter.)

The rendering pipeline uses HDR. The game simulates dark adaptation of the human eye–when you walk from a light area into a dark one, it takes a while before your vision adjusts. Fire and water are modeled well, and there is judicious use of motion blur and bloom. The end result of all these technical details is particularly impressive during a sequence that takes place on a moving train–I won’t say any more, in order to avoid spoilers.

The set pieces in Uncharted 2 are integrated into the plot much more cohesively than in the previous game. This is possible because the game engine uses Havok physics for both characters and destructible cover. You can literally aim and fire at enemies while sliding down the sloping floor of a building that’s collapsing into rubble, ducking behind tables for cover and grabbing pieces of wall to slow your fall. While Nathan Drake has many combat moves, the controls are kept simple enough that there’s no frustrating button-sequence-mashing.

While there are a few cut scenes (rendered with the same engine, of course), most of the combat sequences that would be handled as cut scenes in something like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots are instead scripted battles you control. The end result is like a good Indiana Jones movie–except you’re controlling the protagonist. I didn’t want to stop playing.

Another welcome improvement is that the game allows for multiple strategies. You can run in with guns blazing and hope you can dodge, like the first game; but you can also hang back and be cautious and try to pick enemies off from a distance, or sneak up to them and dispatch them quietly as Solid Snake might. I frequently started out by trying to be stealthy, then switched to diving for cover and shooting once I slipped up. Often things would escalate smoothly into one of the aforementioned set pieces, gradually ramping up the adrenaline rush.

Voice acting is uniformly excellent. Naughty Dog record the voice tracks from the actors while they are taking part in the motion capture process, so the speech fits the action in a way it often doesn’t in other games. The story is less of a cliché than the first game, too, which helped to draw me in.

Overall, I’d say that this is the best action game I’ve ever seen. I hereby forgive Naughty Dog for the controller-throwing frustration of Jak II. Uncharted 2 is a game that ought to sell more than a few PS3s.

Of course, no game is perfect. There were three things that bothered me. The first was the Elena character; she was far too much of a Lara Croft caricature, complete with tiny waist, big breasts and tight clothing. Perhaps it was intended as satire, but it felt like pandering.

The second issue is the believability of Drake’s death-defying antics. In the first game, he actually felt like an everyman, but in the sequel it gets a bit unbelievable at times. I can overlook the magical regeneration of bullet wounds as a necessary game mechanic, but there were at least a couple of moments where he took a scripted fall that would leave any human with a shattered ribcage.

The third issue was specific to Chapter 20 of the story. [Minor spoiler, skip to next paragraph to avoid.] At one point I was trapped in an alleyway by the tank, and from the only places where I could get cover, I couldn’t see the alleyway that I was supposed to run to in order to continue the story. I ended up spending a lot of time looking for ways to climb around or over, getting frustrated. I suspect that adjusting the angle of the alleyways slightly would have avoided the problem.

iLife 09: iPhoto

I have a confession to make: until this year, I didn’t have all my photos in a properly cataloged database. I’d tried various programs, but none of them quite satisfied me.

iView MediaPro seemed to have bugs in its ITPC handling. I e-mailed their support address reporting the problems, and got no reply at all. Then they were bought by Microsoft, so that was that.

QPict works well as a browser for large numbers of random files, but I don’t find it a very helpful tool for organizing them. This seems to have been reflected in the changes in the new version, which looks more like a Finder replacement for photos.

I got Adobe Bridge for free with Photoshop Elements, but I gather it’s pretty much the full deal as bundled with Photoshop CS3. It looks like it’s very powerful, with some kind of metadata templating system. However, it has a horrible interface for browsing large numbers of photos, and a horrible interface for entering metadata.

iPhoto was pretty ropey too. In particular, it insisted on moving all your photos into a set of folders named 2004/01/01, 2004/01/02, and so on. It also had no support for any of the industry standard metadata formats, such as ITPC and XMP. It’s as if iTunes had been built with no ID3 tag support and made to store all your music in folders according to how many minutes and seconds long each song is.

However, with iTunes 08, Apple finally delivered something usable; and with iTunes 09, I’m actually feeling enthusiastic about the program. I’ve now got everything in iPhoto, and I’m happy with it.

The new face recognition is far from perfect, but it’s good enough to be a time saver. It can also be a source of entertainment–I laughed when it got confused by some shadows, picked out a horse’s ass, and asked whose face it was.

The geotagging isn’t too useful as yet, but it’s a nice feature to have supported. I’ve discovered that if you’re using the dialog to manually assign geotags, it will use any existing metadata to help narrow down the options it presents to you. This means that if you start off by tagging a bunch of photos with an approximate location (e.g. London), and give the event a sensible title (e.g. England Trip 2001), searches for specific locations will apparently start from London, England and work outwards.

Browsing the tagged photos is less impressive. For now, there’s just a zoomable Google map with push pins on it. However, I’m sure people will start coming up with cool add-on visualizations.

Another nice feature of iPhoto is the built-in Flickr and Facebook support. Both systems work like add-on photo libraries; you can edit a Flickr-published photo album, and the changes automatically sync up in the background. Also, any faces tagged in iPhoto result in the appropriate person being tagged in Facebook.

Internally, the iPhoto Library now organizes your files by event. As in previous versions, the original files are kept untouched, and any changes you make result in new files. All of this is invisible to you, and you don’t need to care, but it does mean that you never lose quality by applying repeated edits to a JPEG, and you can revert to the original file at any point. The program manages to stay pretty snappy, even while juggling thousands of files.

iPhoto now supports the raw CR2 files from my Canon SLR, as well as JPEGs. It also has an option to reveal the original file in the Finder, or to fire up an external program (such as Photoshop or Canon Digital Photo Professional) to edit the raw file.

So overall, I now recommend iPhoto, even for fairly advanced photography enthusiasts. It won’t be enough for a pro studio photographer, but if your camera isn’t your career, it’s probably most of what you need.

BlackBerry Curve review

In mid November, our contract with AT&T (formerly Cingular) expired. We switched to T-Mobile and got BlackBerry Curve phones.

I was a BlackBerry skeptic for a long time. I didn’t think I wanted a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. This changed when we looked at the phones available. It turned out that the Curve was only marginally wider than the average phone, perhaps a centimeter or so. It’s otherwise comparable to mid-range phones in size. It ends up being pretty much as portable as our Sony Ericsson Z520a phones.

The BlackBerry UI is best described as “retro”. The icons look like 1990s Windows, the text fonts look like 1980s Atari ST, and the general method of navigation most resembles Palm OS. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Starting with the good, the UI is clearly designed from first principles to work well on a handheld device. The central trackball handles scrolling, pointing and clicking. It sits easily and naturally under the thumb. You can do pretty much everything with one hand, including browsing the web and checking e-mail.

This is in marked contrast to the iPhone, which pretty much requires two-handed operation. Windows Mobile devices suffer from having a desktop UI squeezed into a handheld form factor, and also require two hands, and often a stylus. Symbian is designed for phones, but the UIQ interface for smartphones uses a stylus. Overall, then, the BlackBerry works better than other phones I’ve tried when you’re standing in an airport with a coffee in one hand.

On the downside, it’s hard to find the icon you want in a hurry, because of their visual clutter. Perhaps a replacement UI theme would help; I’m a little tempted to grab the theme designer and start working on one, but it’s Windows only. The fonts were initially problematic too; nowhere near as nice as Apple’s, and they took some getting used to.

But when it comes time to reply to an e-mail, niggling issues with fonts were forgotten as I got to grips with the keyboard. Yes, it requires both hands, or more accurately both thumbs. It’s not as fast as a full size keyboard, but it’s faster than Palm Graffiti or Windows Mobile pen input, and much faster and less frustratingly error-prone than I found the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard to be. Unless Steve relents and allows a Son of Newton to use the Newton’s non-cursive text recognition, I can’t see it being bettered.

Textual messaging is where the BlackBerry really shines. It’s quite possible to thumb out fairly lengthy e-mail responses, or even update your web site. As far as IM, there’s support for Google Talk and AIM built in, as well as Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and ICQ if you know anyone who still uses only those. There are third party clients for non-Google Jabber and other protocols, and in addition, there’s BlackBerry’s own BlackBerry Messenger, previously called PIN messaging.

If you have a friend who also has a BlackBerry, PIN messaging is definitely the way to go. The manual doesn’t cover its benefits, so I’ll digress a little here. Unlike other IM systems, PIN messaging is tied to the BlackBerry device by a unique ID. You connect with another person initially by sending them an invite via their BlackBerry-specific e-mail address, or any other address they access via BlackBerry e-mail. When they reply, their device records the device ID you sent, and sends you theirs.

The primary benefit of PIN messaging is that it’s push-based. The recipient doesn’t need to be logged in. If their phone is switched off, the message will be queued until they log on.

The second benefit of PIN messaging is that it’s reliable. Unlike SMS, messages don’t get randomly dropped. In addition, you get delivery confirmation automatically for every message: when you hit enter, the line you typed appears in the transcript with a small icon next to it indicating that the message is going out over the network. When your device receives positive confirmation that the recipient’s device has displayed the line you sent, the icon changes.

If that’s not enough, there’s a third benefit over IM or SMS: there’s a separate “ping” option. So you can set up your regular notification to be something discreet, and know that your spouse can ping you to set off something more noticeable if necessary.

Other than that, PIN messaging has the usual file transfer, allows you to send voice memos, and looks and behaves like regular IM. For us, it has completely replaced SMS, not least because it doesn’t cost 15¢ a message.

One interesting feature of the BlackBerry is that as well as individual icons for each messaging system, there’s also a unified inbox that shows IM, SMS and e-mail in one place. This makes sense, as they all have pretty much the same UI on the Curve; the protocol is almost an irrelevant detail. I believe that if you attempt to send pictures via SMS, the phone automatically uses MMS, but I haven’t tried it.

Web browsing is a mixed bag. The built in BlackBerry browser has two modes, mobile mode and “desktop” mode. Although there are references to WAP, the browser copes with both, the mode just determines how the page is formatted for display. In mobile mode it works like a typical phone browser, in desktop mode it tries to deal with things like tables, CSS and JavaScript. Overall it makes for a pretty good browsing experience, as phones go. (If you haven’t tried browsing from a phone, the main issue isn’t usually layout–it’s latency. Each page request takes a ridiculously long time to send, compared to a desktop system. I assume this is something to do with the mobile network.)

An alternative is Opera Mini, which takes the “thumbnail of page with moveable active area” approach to web browsing. It works surprisingly well with sites that the built-in browser can’t cope with, like zagat.com. (Yeah, good move, make a web site of restaurant reviews that doesn’t work with a phone browser.)

Maps are another strong point. There’s a map application supplied, but I downloaded Google Maps for BlackBerry, which is free and offers pseudo-GPS location by correlating your active cell to its geographical location. Accuracy can be as little as 50m or so in cities, up to 1km in the countryside. The Google Mail application also works well once downloaded.

The BlackBerry OS appears to be Java based, and is pretty solid. It’s more reliable than a Palm; I’ve only managed to crash it once, which is comparable to Linux on the N800 in solidity. Initial bootup (after inserting a battery) is horrendously slow, but once running it seems to use a soft power off which doesn’t require a full boot. The UI is generally responsive at all times, unlike some Sony Ericsson phones. You can put the phone into standby mode by holding down the power switch. In standby the screen and keyboard deactivate, but you can still receive messages and calls. The same hold-down-button action brings the phone out of standby instantly.

The one bug I’ve found so far is in the BlackBerry web browser. After a while the cache gets full and slows browsing down tremendously. The workaround is to empty the cache once a week.

The phone shows a lot of attention to the details of how a mobile device should best operate. For example, an ambient light sensor behind the notification LED turns the screen brightness down in dark areas, and automatically turns on the keyboard backlight. The LED itself has behavior customizable through the notification options; each event (phone call, IM, SMS) can have any or all of a user-chosen sound, vibration, and LED flashes. You can even set different messaging systems to have different notification; for example, I have IM just flash the LED a few times, unless it’s a PIN message from the spouse.

Mac sync is a bit of a sore point. There’s a package called PocketMac that BlackBerry purchased and now give away for free. It worked for me, more or less, but had some annoying bugs. (For example, syncing with a subset of address book records didn’t work, and editing records on the BlackBerry resulted in duplicates.) The solution is simple enough: Mark/Space have a Missing Sync for BlackBerry, which makes everything work, and even syncs user pictures so you can see the face of the person calling you if you’ve given them a picture in OS X.

Overall, it’s the best mobile phone I’ve used. Whether it’s good for you will of course depend on your use cases. If you’re someone who likes to talk to people or use voicemail rather than IM or e-mail, or if you have little patience for customizing software, the iPhone is probably a better bet. It certainly look prettier. But if you prefer text to voice and prefer functionality to prettiness, the Curve beats the iPhone hands down. This may change once they stop crippling the iPhone and open it up to third party applications; we’ll see. For now, I’d pick the Curve again, even if the iPhone wasn’t tied to AT&T.

Update: Oh yeah, the Curve is also a quad band phone. That’s de rigeur, so I didn’t even think it was worth mentioning.

“Equilibrium”

An experiment in cloning goes awry: director Kurt Wimmer attempts to clone The Matrix and inject it with Brave New World DNA, and ends up with a truly ghastly piece of derivative sci-fi that takes a noble premise and turns it into exploitative cartoon violence. What plot twists exist are telegraphed so far off you’d need to be heavily sedated to miss them.

Like the uneven but popular movie it slavishly copies, it can’t decide whether it wants to be intelligent and philosophical, or to just revel in pointless unrealistic violence; and whereas the original at least had a plot device to explain the unreality, the cheap knock-off has no such excuse. Netflix thought I’d rate it 4/5, but adequate acting and special effects can’t drag it above a 2.

I find myself wondering whether Roger Ebert actually watched it before giving it 3 out of 4 stars, especially as he mentions a memorable scene of the protagonist listening to jazz. In the scene in question, the music played is Beethoven, the guy even mispronounces “Ludvig Van Beet-hoven” before putting the record on.