The Clan of the Cave Bague

This is exactly what you don’t want. Trust me. I had a bank holiday stretching ahead of me when I turned it on. Now I have a DS with a flat battery which I can’t charge because my missus’ current EBA addiction means hers lives on the charger (I do have a spare, but really! Two charging at once? It’s unheard of”). I’m really glad I don’t work for the guys who wrote the DS version of Settlers, because having this puppy in the charts beside them would really rub salt in the wound. Essentially, Anno 1701 is Settlers, but better than Settlers by a country mile. For the following reasons:

• It doesn’t crash all the time
• It’s beautifully designed
• It has an extremely thorough tutorial
• It has PERFECT stylus control with everything from landscape to menus being smooth and responsive
• It’s a long-game, but remains fast paced (and pretty frantic) throughout
• It’s eaten my whole day
• It fits in your pocket
• It has that undefinable Civilization thing
• You don’t micromanage workers – you make buildings and set policy
• It’s ACEBEST

You with me? Essentially, it’s Imperialistic murder and colonisation thinly disguised as a real time strategy game, but it has PIRATES! And INDIANS! In the SAME GAME! I really should crack open the other DS Lite box and nick the charger.

In which many game sessions are combined into one and some surprising facts emerge about the clientel of GameStation.

Well, I’m finally making some progress in Zelda! I think my problem has been that I haven’t been playing it regularly so the first half of any play time I have is spent trying to work out what on earth I was doing the last time. So, I’m at the third and final (yeah, right) twilight area, to the north of Kakariko village, and I think I need to sort out a dried up lake to the east before I can progress any further. The control scheme has really become second nature now and feels very natural – Link is a bit of a ninja in this iteration.

I’ve suddenley become really rubbish at this and have made very little progress in the Silver grade levels. Again, it’s probably down to only playing for five minutes here and there. I should probably remove some of the DragonForce tracks from the soundtrack as well because it all gets a bit hyper after a while. Still, there’s a lot to be said for hurtling off jumps at two bazillion miles and hour with mental guitar shredding going on in the background. It’s a larf, innit?

This is woeful – I’ve been sat at the closing section (the invincible guy’s house) for ages now. It’s one of those “there’s no time” things. I’ll get back to it eventually, once I actually get five minutes to myself.

One of the nice things about it, though, is that it always seems to be very clear where you have to go next. Sure, it makes the adventure a bit linear, but it’s still aces.

Resident Evil 4 (or Resident Wiivil, as I call it) is indeed a thing of wonder. I’ve not too far into it yet – not even at the lake, but the control system is so immediate and awesome that taking my time and exploring every last bit of the environments is hugely more intertaining that the (excellent) orginal cube version. The bad guys seem to have been tweaked a little because they’re still tough even with the pin-point accuracy of the aiming system – this could all be in my mind, of course.

It’s probably not “Cool” to be playing this as (a) It’s a Harry Potter game, (b) it’s a movie tie-in and (c) it’s published by EA, but the fact remains – the wii remote controls work really really well. Without the controls, OotP would be of interest only to die hard potterheads (the exploration is great, I have to say) but the extra level of interactivity provided by the wii remote doubling as a wand really makes the difference. It’s never going to be the game of the year, but it’s still a lot of fun.

This is great, vacant and silly. I’ve only played it for around ten minutes (my daughter has played it for much longer) but it seems to be a lot of fun. Basically, you cook stuff – breaking eggs, chopping stuff up, stirring, etc, and all with one hand – it’s a wiimote only title. I’ll no doubt have more to say about it once I’ve actually played the thing.

One point of interest – my six year old picked it up within about 8 seconds. It took me considerably longer.

This is one I was looking forward to for ages but had actually forgotten about until just before release. One top tip though – if anyone out there is struggling with the frame rate, using the “force global lighting” option makes a massive difference. The game loses a lot of its appeal if there’s any slowdown at all. It depends whether you can happily accept a prettiness:playability compromise. It’s very clever, very pretty, but ultimately involves sitting in front of a PeeCee to play. If I’m going to be sat there anyway, I may as well play……

this! Despite owning it since launch day, I’ve barely played Half Life 2. I figured that as the home pc has enough clout to almost run Bioshock with a reasonable amount of detail, it should really fly with HL2. And it does everything turned up to 11, everything smooth and fast – it plays just lovely.

Lastly – here’s a turn up for the books – I was in GameStation yesterday and noticed on my way in the door that one half of the shop was completely empty and the other half was heaving. The half where the Wii and DS games are. The crowd was literally four people deep and everyone was taking games to the counter. All ages were represented – kids right through to people in their fifties. I overheard one woman – mid-forties, I’d say – telling another that she was going to buy Twilight Princess because she’d been playing Ocarina of Time on the virtual console and loved it. You can image the depth my jaw dropped to. It would appear that Nintendo’s “flash in the pan” is moving off in some surprising new ways – introducing new gamers to not only the shiny new one-trick-pony titles like Wii Sports, but to more traditional games as well. Who knew?

And that’s all for today, I guess. I think I’ve spent longer writing about these than I have playing them, which means it’s probably time to shut up.

People in newsgroups wonder why it takes me so long to complete a Zelda game. It’s very simple. I spend hours and hours mucking about with silly things. Last night, for example. I finally completed the Goron Caverns, and on returning to the village discovered that there’s a sniper-scope type attachment available for the bow. Obviously this created a NEED void. Except it cost 100 rupees and I only had three. Except three seconds after registering that it needed 100 rupees I convinced myself it was actually 200. So off I went on a quest to find 197 rupees. Lawnmower stylee.

After wandering all over hyrule field and, eventually, getting as far as the forest temple, I eventually collected a big pile of rupees and began to make my way back. Unfortunately, when I got to the WRONG side of the poisonous lake thingy that you need to wave your lantern at, I realised I’d ran out of oil, so had to go and nick some from the silly flappy bird that always attacks me (because I keep nicking oil from it, I expect).

To cut a long story short, I got back to the village and got the snipy thing (which is ACE) then discovered I could buy bombs. Except I need a bomb bag. And I don’t have enough rupees. So, tonight, I shall be off on another epic romp in search of coin.

Argh is all that I can say.  This is a brilliant game.  I am trying desperately to get through one of the missions and Im turning into a game addict cos I really really have to finish the level.  Rather than watching a Bruce Willis film heres me sitting with headphones doing practice levels and getting a higher rank while John lazes on the sofa watching a medley of whispering and gun shooting (Last Man Standing).  Yes, well.  

I have been Nintendo-ed.

Regards from the Woman Gamer o the hoose

OK, so we had a bit of a situation. We have a full rack of co-located production equipment, running a critical web application which can’t go down. The trouble is, the router and firewall belong to someone else and it’s getting turned off at the end of the week.

Not a problem, you cry, just get your own connectivity and firewall/router and hook em up. That’s fine. Until you get to the point where you have to change DNS to put it live.

So here’s the layout. Old production firewall is box A. Whole production system is a big virtual box B (with loads of machines in it). New production firewall, on a different external address, is box C.

Currently, traffic comes into box A, port forwards to box B, which has box A as its default route. All fine and dandy.  Trouble is, we want to change DNS so that traffic is routed to box C, which port forwards to box B, which….. sends its response out through its default route on box A, never to be seen again.

“You thick muppet,” you cry, “why not just change the default route on box B?” Well, remember that bit about no downtime? Just as connections to box C don’t work with the default route set as A, connections to A won’t work with the default route set to C – making things a little tricky during the DNS broadcast when the system effectively needs to answer to two addresses at once.

There is, naturally, a solution – a filthy FILTHY hack which makes the firewall look like the plate of noodles above. The core problem is this – traffic sent to an internal machine in box B leaves by the wrong route. Traffic on box C, however, leaves by the correct route. So, the plan is to make the traffic on box B “happen” on box C instead.

What?

Ok, here’s how it’s done. SSH TUNNELS! LOTS OF THEM! ONE FOR EACH SERVICE!

Look, if I forward port 80 to the internal machine, the traffic gets lost, right?

But the internal network is fine because it’s a flat class C – it’s only connections which require the default route which have issues. So, we do the port forward in two stages. First of all, we set up an SSH tunnel so that port 80 on the web server is forwarded to, say, port 12345 on the firewall’s internal interface. Then we follow up by forwarding port 80 on the firewall to port 12345 on the internal interface of the firewall, which transparently tunnels it to port 80 on the internal web server. Hooray!

Of course, this is a hack on a kludge of almost biblical proportions, but it only needs to be in place until the DNS has propagated, at which point we can change the default routes to point to box C, drop the tunnels and do the port forwarding properly.

So, as such, it’s not REALLY a filthy hack – it’s a piece of creative networking designed to avoid downtime while re-homing an entire system.

I want a job in academia so I can impose periods of arbitrary downtime and save having to turn my networking configs into chop suey.

Imagine my surprise to discover I’ve not come back to any kind of drama or bloodletting at all! The server-migration deadline I thought was on the 15th isn’t actually until the 18th, which is TONS of time, so hooray me!

The downside (there’s always one) is that I’m currently installing a Red Hat Enterprise box which is just WRONG. It’s a really nice machine as well – loads of CPU, loads of RAM and a nice chunky hardware RAID system, so it’s just nasty tainting it with The O/S Of Evil.

In other news, though, it’s lunchtime, so I’m going to go outside and sit under the trees for a wee while.

I really can’t describe the majesty and peacefulness of Glencoe. Pictures don’t seem to work either. But I’ve taken some pictures anyway. We only got to see a tiny part of the Glen this year, but we’ll be travelling a bit more extensively next year.

Here’s some pics.

Well, my mate Martin told me about this concept where you go and live somewhere else for a while and then come back, but without shipping all your belongings along with you. It’s called “Holiday”.

Well, that’s where we’re going tomorrow!

So, we’re packing up our tent and barbeque and heading off for the wilds of Glencoe. Being sensible people, though, we’ve checked the weather forecast in advance, and can confirm that it looks like this:

• Monday: Rain
• Tuesday: Rain
• Wednesday: Rain
• Thurday: Rain

So there we are – expect me to return later in the week with lots of pictures of rain. Fab!

The controls have really clicked now – feels very smooth and intuitive. It’s all helped by the locking system being pretty smart, especially in close combat. Ol’ link leaps about like a ninja, making me look much better at the game than I actually am.

Just done a little bit of the same dungeon – got up to the top floor, which involves making use of an awesome new addition to Link’s arsenal – the ability to magnetise bits of the ceiling and walls so the big stompy boots stick to them. The controls go a bit mental, though, because they’re still set to the way they’d be if you were the right way up, so everything is – well – backwards. Makes for interesting navigation, but it all works out in the end.

Woohoo! This game is just a work of genius from beginning to end. I solved the various little problem-ettes in the Boo house and headed back to toad town. Ok, so that sounds like it took about five minutes, right? Nah – with all the to-ing and fro-ing (not to mention a good fifteen minutes playing with the magic vase that turns you into Mario circa  Super Mario Bros 1) it took the better part of an hour, but who’s counting?

Next, I’m off to gusty gulch to beat up an invincible bloke, and one of the boos has come along with me to have a good laugh at his demise.