FFXII Impressions

It's finally here, in my hands. Went to Future Shop after work to get it, and didn't see any on the shelf (*gasp*). Maybe they were trying to scare me on Halloween. Good thing Keith warned me about this, so I asked a salesperson to get a copy from the store room. Don't let the price fool you, it was actually $10 cheaper (another good tip from Keith).

After booting up the game, an intro movie comes on, which consisted of scenes from the game paired with a musical score that sounded like a medley of all previous final fantasy games. Wasn't quite the intro I expected, it lacked a certain "oomph" to it. But my disappointment was soon forgotten once I started the game. The "real" intro made me feel like I was watching a movie, in fact, it had a Star Wars prequels feel to it (in a good way). And I've read reviews saying how good the dialog and voice acting was, it's really hard to believe until I actually hear it for myself. You can really tell they have made tremendous effort in this area to make the localized version of the game sound authentic. For the first time, I actually felt that the English dialog fitted a Japanese game. The European-like setting also helps in this respect.

Moving on to the new battle system, it will sure take some getting used to. It's a step towards (but not quite reaching) the battle system in Star Ocean 3, which I liked. Since you only have to choose an action once and the character will continue to perform that action, battles become largely an exercise of moving your character into range of the target, and selecting a new action on a new enemy once you defeat your current target (although I imagine the latter won't even be necessary once gambits come into play). It's still too early to tell whether I like this system or not.

I am now in the city of Rabanastre, and I have to say it totally blows away the tiny towns and villages in FFX. It's not fixed angle so you are free to look around and marvel at the grand scale of the city. However, this also brings me to one of my nitpicks of the game. When I want to look right, I instinctively push the analog stick to the right. This actually swings the camera to the right of your character, hence you see what's on the left instead. It's not so bad once you get the camera swinging, but I trip over this everytime I start to look around. It's opposite to most games out there. It seems reasonable to have a setting to reverse this, but unfortunately there's no such option.

Soukyuu の Fafner: Right of Left (OVA)

Last weekend I watched the Fafner OVA, called Right of Left. It is a prequel to the original series (review here). If you intend to watch the series at all, you should watch the OVA only after you have completed the original series, since there are plot elements here that you are not suppose to know about until later on in the series.

On the other hand, if you are not interested in watching the series, then I think that Right of Left has enough weight to be watched on its own (although having watched the series would certainly increase your enjoyment of the OVA). The key point is that Right of Left does not try to resolve the loose ends left in the series. Even more importantly it does not try to reveal any more information than what the fans of the show already knows, thus avoiding the pitfall of generating more questions than answers.

One thing that was done really well is that all the main characters in the series make a returning appearance... (hmm, I guess you don't really call it "returning" since this is a prequel). In other prequels, very often the scenes with the "returning" characters feels forcefully slotted in and makes you feel like life is just one coincident after another (as much as I love B5, I've to say its prequel "In the Beginning" comes to mind here). Right of Left felt very natural in the way it handled this.

The bottom line is, people who've watched the series will enjoy the revisit to the Fafner universe and seeing the main characters again, at the same time newbies can also enjoy it as a stand-alone story without being burdened with the background information on the series.

My rating: 8/10

Virus Troubles

Last night, I found a virus on my laptop. The strange thing is, I haven't used my laptop for a long time and so I have no idea how it possibly got infected. It's only one of those annoying viruses that keep opening pop-up windows and it doesn't corrupt any data, so normally, it shouldn't be that hard to clean up. But damn, it took me the whole night to get rid of it... (partly due to my own stupidity).

- the Norton on my laptop was outdated, I should have just updated it to a newer version right from the start, but for some bizarre reason I decided to go download some spyware doctor program instead.

- spyware doctor told me I had a virus (duh!), but the stupid trial version only scans and doesn't allow you to fix the problem (#$@&!&$!!). What's kind of trial program is that? What a completely useless piece of dog poo...

- ok fine, I uninstalled spyware doctor, uninstalled Norton and put on a new version. The scan came up with 3 infected dll files. 2 of them Norton was able to delete, but the 3rd one it left it alone (what da heck...) Well, no big deal, probably the dll is in memory so it can't be deleted.

- so I go in safe mode with command line, and tried to delete the malicious file manually. To my surprise and dismay, the file is locked even in safe mode.

- I need to use the recovery console, I figured. Stuck my winxp CD into the laptop and rebooted. Hey, how come it's not booting from the CD?? Fine, I need to change the boot sequence. Rebooted again, and held down the del button thinking that'll take me into the BIOS... no luck.

- *sigh*, spent another 10 - 15 minutes figuring out how to change the boot sequence on Toshiba laptops. It turns out it can be done in the control panel. grr...

- Finally booting into the recovery console now, and I am staring at the prompt for the administrator password. Uh oh, what is the password? My usual passwords don't work and I have to reboot after 3 unsuccessful tries... annoying.

- Logged back into Windows. I am trying to switch to the administrator account, and the winxp login screen doesn't usually show the administrator login icon (I forget under what conditions it shows it). In any case, I had to switch back to classical login so that I can type in administrator directly

- After fidgetting at the login screen for another 5 - 10 minutes, I finally figured out that I had NO administrator password set (I am kicking myself at this point). That's not a good thing, so I changed it to my usual password.

- Back in recovery console, typed in my password, tada!! It didn't work... what the... When I set the password, there was a warning that my password was too long for older versions of Windows to handle. Could that be the problem?? Logged back into Windows as administrator again, changed the password to something simple. Reboot!

- Back in recovery console... again. Typed in the simple password and it STILL doesn't accept it. I am about to throw my laptop out the window.

- Googled around, and came across this page (it's a godsend). Turns out that winxp's recovery console, for whatever stupid reason will not recognize your password. The workaround is to disable the password prompt by setting the following registry value to 1:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Setup\RecoveryConsole\SecurityLevel

- Back in recovery console, true enough, the password prompt is gone. And finally, I was able to delete the infected dll file. All this trouble I went through just to delete this one file... *sigh*. I logged back into Windows and everything is fine once again. I am starting to wonder if formatting my laptop would have been less troublesome.

Upcoming products

Some cool pics of upcoming products, courtesy of Pam's Home Page.

Transformable Macross (yes, the SDF-1 itself). The way they did the metallic look is actually quite nice.



Pics of MG Strike Freedom, I am soooo getting this.

Battlestar Galactica Impressions

I've recently started watching the re-imaged Battlestar Galactica series (sorry bud, couldn't wait for ya). I started watching this series because I was told that this series is similar to Babylon 5, which is a sci-fi series that I liked. After watching the first season, I would say the similarities are only superficial.

That's not to say BSG is bad though. They are just different. There are sci-fi shows, and there are dramas in space; B5 is sci-fi, and BSG is the latter. What I liked from B5 is the interactions of the different alien races and the idea of the younger races (such as humans) getting caught in the epic battle between the ancient and mysterious Vorlons and Shadows.

In contrast, there are no aliens or epic battles in BSG. There are battle scenes with the Cylons but it is not the main focus of the series. At the core, BSG is a story about survival of the human race, and I've always been fascinated with these end-of-the-world type settings. It shows the extremes of human behaviour and makes the viewers think what they'll do in the same extreme circumstances.

I'm looking forward to watching season 2.

Interesting news... maybe

Just thought I'd share some interesting news I read recently, or at least I find them interesting, I'll let you decide for yourself.

Last Friday was the 13th, yup, black Friday. This is not just any Friday the 13th though, it's special because if you add up all the digits in 2006/10/13, the total equals 13. The last time this happend was over 400 years ago, you can read about it in this article. Does this mean double the bad luck?? My Friday was fairly uneventful =)

Recently, researchers from Russia and US successfully created Element 118, the heaviest element to date. This piece of news caught my attention because 118 happens to be my favourite number.

Do you have a friendster account? How often do you log on? This article tells the rise and fall of friendster.

[Review] Designing Web Services with the J2EE 1.4 Platform

This book is written by members of the Sun's Java BluePrints team, "from the Source", it says on the cover. Although the name says "Web Services", it actually covers other application integration concepts in the J2EE platform. I guess in order to understand the pros and cons of using web services one should understand what are the alternatives.

There are various code and xml sniplets throughout the book to help illustrate the concepts, as one would expect. I find in most cases the xml samples were more useful than the code samples; some just show you a stub which doesn't give you any extra info on top of what's already described by the text. Content-wise, I like how the concepts in the book are summarized into recommendations on the approach to use when designing an enterprise application. These recommendations are set apart from the text with bullet points so they are hard to miss, but it would be even more convenient if all these points were repeated in a list at the end of each chapter.

I only have one complain about this book, which is the chapters are very long and could have been broken up for an easier read.

My rating: 3.5/5

Ready for FFXII

Seeing how FFXII will be coming at the end of the month, I finally took the time to finish Final Fantasy X-2 which I had put aside for the longest time. FFX-2 was a nice re-visit of the world of Spira and the characters that we've come to love from FFX. But the game itself was not as solid as its predecessor; it's a bit goofy at times and I find the garment grid system somewhat cumbersome.

Still, it's nice to have closure for the FFX series, though the ending wasn't as satisfying as I hoped (the last battles were easier than expected and I only got the normal ending). Thank goodness there's youtube =)

MG ZGMF-X20A

We knew it was coming... I just didn't expect it to be so soon!! December is when the MG Strike Freedom Gundam will arrive in stores. Damn... I didn't factor this into my spending this year... boohoo... so much goodies are coming out by year end, YF-19, FFXII, PS3, and now this. I am going to be super poor T_T.

WTP 1.5.1

WTP 1.5.1 was released this past Friday, Sept 29, 2006 (although the web page didn't update until today). So what's special about this release? Well, it's the first WTP release where I had contributed some bug fixes to. I joined my current team literally the (first business) day after 1.5 was released; that itself is kind of interesting because there is a clear separation of what I did and did not work on. Secondly, Sept 29 is kind of special too since it marks my 3th year working at IBM. Coincidence perhaps?

The universe sure works in mysterious ways...