So most of us have heard of the recent war of the motion sensor controllers.  On the current market we have the perhaps outdated veteran: The Nintendo Wii, now entering the race are the new challengers from Sony (Playstation Move) and Microsoft (Xbox Natal).  While the focus has very much been on how these new motion sensor controllers/systems will overtake the wii and provide experiences that the wii cannot there’s one thing that has had very little attention:  What is Nintendo doing?

As one of my friends pointed out to me the other day, Nintendo has always been at the forefront of innovation; first to the market with the wii motion controls, first to the market with the handheld DS with touchscreen technology.  Now that its domination in the motion control market is being challenged I’m wondering what Nintendo intend to do.  Could it be that they are so confident in their market position that they’re doing nothing? (Considering also that traditionally nintendo consoles target a different audience than the playstation and xbox)  Or could it be that they are working on something new and biding their time, waiting for the opportune moment to announce it?

I for one hope that Nintendo has something up their sleeve; some innovative technology that will shock the gaming world in a blizzard-like fashion.

So I’ve finally upgraded to the latest version of wordpress because I figured it’s time for a change.  I’ll be working on a new theme for this blog as well within the next week.

Finally managed to activate Akisment, lets hope it keeps all that spam away from this blog.  I will also be upgrading to Wordpress 2.8.4 within the next couple of days…

I am at the moment in the states on my university exchange and I have also unfortunately dislocated my shoulder, making it neccessary to immobilize my right arm.  Just thought I’d explain the lack of activity.  While I’m here I’ll be doing little to no gaming.  Same goes for application reviews.  I will post up anything of interest but don’t expect too much.

Well well I’ve finally managed to finish Crono Trigger DS which came out a while ago and I can finally review it.

Graphics 5.5/10:

Even though Square-Enix decided to retain the original SNES graphics I still maintain that the sprites in this game are masterfully made, some of the best on the SNES and honestly better than quite a few modern DS games.  If this was a SNES review the I’d probably give the game a ten for graphics.  As it stands however this is a DS review and I feel that Square-Enix could have done a lot better,  I would have loved to see this timeless classic in fully rendered 3D that the DS is capable of.  I mean four years ago a third party group took it upon themselves to try and recreate this game in 3d for the PC, the project was known as Chrono Ressurection and had to discontinue for legal purposes… but it was beautiful,  the old website remains as a reminder of what could have been:

http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/

Why couldn’t Square-Enix do this? Disappointing to say the least.

Sound: 8/10

The music is simply breathtaking, Chrono Trigger’s soundtrack has been a favourite amongst gamers for years and will continue to do so,  I was thinking of giving a lower score but after thinking for a moment I realised that you can’t improve perfection, and thats what the CT soundtrack is.. perfection.  I’d give the original SNES game a 10/10 for sound but again, this is a DS review and I feel that they could have probably made some voiceovers or something.  Having said this its still an awesome soundtrack, countless tracks of melodic goodness.

Gameplay 10/10:

This game never fails to entertain, it has replay value that rivals any FPS or RTS and its an RPG!  The concept of new game + and multiple endings that was part of the original SNES version is a genius invention.  For those who don’t know new game + allows you to start a new game with the stats and items from a saved game file, so you basically start with your ending characters from the last finished game, the game features multiple endings (up to 13 I believe) which depend on when you beat the last boss, you can beat him right in the beginning with the first two characters thanks to new game +.  Back in the SNES days I managed to unlock about 8 different endings although admittingly this was on an emulator which had a fast foward function.  Other than this, the game features dual and triple techs that encourage the use of different character combinations, to this day I can’t decide which party combination I like best.

The battle system is typical ATB but unlike final fantasy games your characters aren’t all lined up on one side of the screen, this makes for a more battle-like feel in my opinion, even though its fundamentally the same system it feels different.

Story: 10/10

One of the best RPG stories I have ever played through, it keeps you intrigued and isn’t your typical good party vs evil party trying to take over the world.  Add in the time travel element and you ahve one dynamite of a story, I don’t think I need to say anymore, its just that good.

Extra Features: 3/10

I really felt these were just an excuse for releasing the game on a portable console.  Square-Enix released the DS version of Chrono Trigger with a couple of new features, 2 new dungeons, the arena of ages and a whole list of your typical bestiary, item encylopedia etc.  The new dungeons may sound interesting but they’re so repetetive and unrewarding that I felt like just finishing the game several times rather than just go through those sidequests.   The story would be quite interesting if the dungeons you have to traverse weren’t so annoying, every single map has a group of monsters you can’t avoid and so every time you go through the maps you have to fight.  This becomes extremely frustrating when you have to go back and forth up a mountain 10 times because a stupid reptite can’t fetch his own things.  

Now onto the Arena of Ages, its like pokemon but really nothing special, I didn’t even bother experimenting with it, it looked THAT boring.  Its basically a place where you can ‘raise’ your own monster and battle it with other creatures or players.  Yeah, I’m not going to say much else on that.

The only saving grace for these features are the extremely typical ones such as the bestiary and item list. Even though they are typical they’re presented quite well in quite a bit of detail, you also have a musicbox, a theater for the in-game cutscenes and an ending log.  Nifty if you want to see which one’s you’ve unlocked.

Conclusion:

I’m a die-hard fan of CT, it was the first RPG I ever played and it set the bar pretty high.  It would have been beyond awesome to see the world of CT rendered in glorius 3D.  Sadly this isn’t the case and I had to settle for this re-port to the DS.  Fortunately I was actually planning to play CT again since I hadn’t for such a long time so it wasn’t as if I was playing it for the millionth time, it was nice and refreshing.  Overall I still enjoy the game even after its many years in the market its just such a perfect amalgamation of music, gameplay and graphics.  The end score being short of ten is simply because I was disappointed with this game being simply a re-port rather than a re-make.  One more thing worth mentioning is the change of script, its not a dramatic change but theres are some noticeable differences, some bad some good,  I hated the renaming of robo’s skill ’shock’ to ‘electrocute’  I just couldn’t get used to it, other than that the script changes don’t really effect my opinion of the port.

Overall: 7.3/10

 

Unfortunately I don’t have the time to download and isntall a DS emulator and provide screenshots so heres a glance at what could have been:

 

 

 

Well I’ve just re-designed this blog, given it a completel overhaul and I have to say I’m surprised I could turn out something this good.  Its probably one of my better designs.

Anyway, I’ve added a videos section and migrated my very small gallery from Gallery2 to nextGen Gallery because its so much easier to integrate into wordpress although its a bit harder to create an actual gallery page that displays everything.  Despite this I quite like it, its a lot neater than the Gallery2 in terms of install as well.

Tubepress is what I’ve used to integrate video into this blog, it’s quite a nifty little tool with a good level of cuztomisability.  As you can see it’s also widgetised so it can go in the sidebar.  Easy to install, easy to use.  A few simple steps and you’ve got quite a nice looking video feature for your blog.  I’d originally installed the all-in-one video pack but that proved to be too complicated for my purposes and didn’t provide the facilities to create the ‘gallery’ style page that I wanted (although I might have given up a little prematurely on it)

Designing this website has prompted me to use photoshop again and brings me back to the days of my digital space art and my 3d bryce renders.  A hint of things to come perhaps…

 

 So recently I’ve had to do some work on getting a NAS with a linux file-system to work with Mac OS X’s Time Machine.

To give some background on this, NAS stands for Network Storage Access and is basically a large hard drive (several) used as a network share, a cheap alternative to a server.  Time Machine is Mac OS X’s backup and recovery solution to back up a machine’s data to a specific destination.

In this case the user’s wish was to back up their emails/ user files that were stored locally on the client machine to the NAS.  Normally this would be a simple click of a button with Time Machine doing all the hard work of creating an image file and backing up to it.  However when it interacts with a linux file system it runs into some problems.

This is an initial fix that allows the user to back up to the NAS, further problems are however as yet unknown (at least by me).  

The way Time Machine works in a nutshell is that it creates an image file on whatever backup device you choose and then periodically (depending on the settings) rewrites this file to include any changes.

There are two problems here, first is that when Time Machine attempts to create the image file on the linux file-system based NAS, it fails.  The solution here is to manually create an image file using disk utility, that is a blank image.  The second is that Time Machine will not recognize the Linux file share as a valid backup drive.

 

Enable Unsupported Network Shares  

• To force Time Machine to recognize the linux-based file system as a valid network share you need to enter the following command into a terminal (type it in and press enter):

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Mount Desired Network Share

•  You need to mount the network share before you can use it for backups,
•  When in finder go to: Go -> Server and click on “browse”
• Locate your network share and open it, this should mount it on the desktop.
•  If it does not show up on the desktop you may need to go to finder -> preferences and tick “show all mounted network shares”

 

Finding the name of the backup image file to be created

There are two ways of doing this:

• Create it manually by knowing the standard, the name is in the following format: “<computerHostName>_<ComputerMacAddressWithoutColons>.sparsebundle”, so for example if on the network your computer is known as ‘zephor’ and its mac address is “00:A0:C9:14:C8:29″ your image name will be: “zephor_00A0C914C829.sparsebundle”.
•  Or let time machine fail once, and use the system log to find the name of the file it was trying to create,  I prefer this method as it ensures accuracy:

1.       Select the network share as a drive for time machine to use as backup.

2.       Initialise a backup by going to the toolbar and selecting “backup now”

3.       When the backup fails open up a terminal and type in:

4.       grep backup /var/log/system.log

5.       Find the line in the output that shows when Time Machine is attempting to create and remember this (copy)

 

Creating the Blank Image:  We first Create a blank image on the local machine using disk utility.

• Open Disk Utility
• Go to File -> New -> Blank disk image

Use the following values for the fields:

Volume Name: <name obtained from step 3.>

Volume Size: <Whatever maximum size you think your backup will reach>

Volume Format: Mac OS extended (journaled)

Encryption: (none)

Partitions: no partition map

Image Map: Sparse bundle disk image

Save this image file to somewhere on the local machine, somewhere you can access it. (I’d normally use the desktop) I saved as the same as the volume name for consistency.

Copying the Image onto the network share

• Your network share should already be mounted from step 2
•  Copy your newly created image file (from step 4) on the network share
•  NOTE: Make sure you copy the image FILE and not the mounted image folder (disk utility mounts the image automatically after creation), its a simple mistake but if you don’t realise it, it may take hours to troubleshoot.

 

Initialize backup

• Use the Time Machine Toolbar to initialize a backup by selecting “backup now”

Once the initial backup is complete (and this may take hours depending on how much data is being backed up) You should be able to use Time Machine as normal to do regular backups.  These steps need to be taken on each Mac machine that is to be backed up on the network share.

These steps were based on information provided by:

http://www.readynas.com/?p=253

http://www.flokru.org/2008/02/29/time-machine-backups-on-network-shares-in-leopard/

and applying it to the situation.  The NAS used was D-Link DNS 323

Well, after a few days of using Google Chrome I’ve finally decided to give a post about it.

After years of battle between Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer in regards to which would be the ultimate browser, google finally decided to enter the race.  Their answer to the browser wars was Chrome, released in beta phase a few days ago.

Since it’s still in beta I’ll refrain from judging too harshly.  I have to say its an impressive concept, it has quite a few neat features that I’d love to have in a browser such as tab browsing with individual processing.  The browser has yet to crash on me so I’ve yet to find out how effective this is but theoretically I think its genius.  It also appears to use up a third of the RAM that firefox did which makes it a win in my books.

Another feature that is of questionable purpose is the incognito mode, although it is a clever little feature, the official reason for its implementation is of a controversial nature (you know what I’m talking about).

In terms of interface design, its quite a nice look, with some smooth effects for opening new tabs.  It does however take some getting used to as it disposes of the conventional menu bars at the top of the window making the tabs the uppermost element of the interface.  The options for the browser are placed elsewhere next to the address bar and it took a while to work out what they meant.  Other than the transition time I’m enjoying the new interface quite a bit.

My only qualms with this browser is that it still needs some work in the standards departments.  Websites that have shown up perfectly on both IE and Firefox are turning up mis-aligned text, strangely placed menu elements and other funky and unintentional effects.  I have also been having problems with certain sites in the past few days although whether or not this is chrome’s fault or just my ISP i have yet to determine.

Overall the browser’s concept is an excellent one and in its current state it quite usable if you don’t mind switching back to firefox occassionally.  Again since its in beta that is a forgivable issue, for now I’d say give a go and see if you like it, if you do stick with it so that when it becomes as stable and solid as Firefox you won’t have to transition into it.

Here’s a download link, give it a shot:

Download Here

We’ve all seen how beautiful Mac OS X’s dock is, who can resist the nice smooth zoom effects and the auto-hiding ability of this little apple invention.  It defeats the windows taskbar hands-down.  This being the case it was only natural for windows users to start wanting the ability to use this invention on thier own machines.  Thus was born the third-party dock applications, two of which (out of the many) are Rocket Dock and Object Dock.

One would expect that Object Dock, being a software you have to pay for would have an array of features that sets it apart from its freeware counterparts.  Now, although it does exhibit quite a number of extra features that rocket dock does not have, admittingly these features are next to useless.  My personal experience is that I have been able to do everything I did with Object dock on my desktop computer with Rocket Dock on my laptop.  In terms of resource eating, both these applications will consume ram (as does any application) but whether it is noticeable or not is a different story.  With 2gb and 3gb of ram on my desktop and laptop respectively I noticed no difference in performance and speed and so the rate of resource consumption is at worst neglligible.

Overall, I’d use RocketDock simply because its FREE and it offers most of the features any average user would need (as average as a user who wants a dock can be).

RocketDock:

http://rocketdock.com/

ObjectDock:

http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/

I found out about this a while ago when it was barely announced, I guess it just skipped my mind with all the distractions I’ve had. So anyway here it is:

Crono Trigger has been announced for the nintendo DS. When I first heard this I was ecstatic at the chance to play such a timeless classic on new age technology and the at the possibility of significantly improved graphics and/or stylus game play. It seems however I was wrong, the game won’t be a completely redo with 3d graphics and new effects. Rather, it is a re-make of the game on ds with the same graphics, same gameplay (apparently a bonus dungeon somewhere).

Disappointing as it is, I’m still looking forward to playing the game on a portable console.

http://na.square-enix.com/ctds/