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Usually stuff I’ve written personally, stuff I think is pretty good.

A month with some Windows Phone 7, er… phones

I’m in the privileged position where I can buy whatever the fuck I like. No kids […] and no debt – just disposable income and a bloodlust for gadgets. Some people smoke, do drugs, drink booze, gamble, go out, whatever. I like buying electronics I have no use for, other than to say “I’ve used that”, and to be able to throw my opinion into nerdly discussions with some sort of authority. The pinnacle of this is my T-Hub – currently acting as a glorified clock in the living room.

via Anthony – An Apple loving nerd from Melbourne.

* give or take a few days

Pretty much this. It’s not that don’t like having money, but what use is money if I can’t do anything with it? This way, my “bloodlust for gadgets” — as Anthony so eloquently puts is — is satisfied and no one gets hurt in the process. Win-win, really.

I don’t know quite how it happened, but at some point during the last month I managed to acquire not one, but two Windows Phone 7 Phones; a HTC 7 Mozart and a Dell Venue Pro. I’ve already written about the hardware of those a little, so this will mostly be about Windows Phone 7 as a platform and how it compares to, say, the iPhone.

Small note before we get into things proper: in the above review of the hardware and intro to Windows Phone 7, I (incorrectly) say that even though the HTC 7 Mozart includes a notification LED, WP7 doesn’t seem to use it. That is just plain untrue — it just doesn’t flash for things like unread emails or messages. It’ll definitely flash for missed calls though, but whether the notification LED is a standard thing or something HTC has tacked on still remains to be seen.

The next small note before I start giving you opinions on stuff: I used the release of Windows Phone 7 called NoDo (7390), as well as the as-yet-unreleased (to the public, anyway) Mango (7712) for my evauluations. Besides Twitter integration, groups, and threaded messages across communication platforms, there is little else that I discovered in terms of differences between the two. There may be a few little changes between the developer beta 2 refresh of Mango and the final, carrier-released version, but your mileage may vary.

Final small note: if you haven’t read Lukas Mathis’ excellent Windows Phone 7 write-up, you should go read that. I echo a few of his points here, but he also looks at WP7 from a usability perspective (something I don’t do much of here).

Windows Phone 7 Phones

If you’re ready to get this show on the road, take a deep breath, and read on.

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Smartphone Lust

As someone who is interested in technology, there are few things that make me happier than a shiny new toy to play with. Unfortunately this also means my bank balance is relatively bare most of the time, but what money I save from not driving, smoking, drinking or, uh, courting means more money to be spent on new shiny, and that’s a-ok by me. Isn’t disposable income great?

For the moment, smartphones are where it’s at. Perhaps I just haven’t caught up to the rest of the world when it comes to tablets, or perhaps I think they’re not quite there yet – either way, my interest (for the moment) likes solely with the likes of those smartphone manufacturers like HTC, Motorola, Samsung, yes, even Apple and HP/Palm.

My personal interest in technology means that I have an iPhone 4 as my daily carry. In the past, I’ve experimented with a HTC Desire running Android 2.1.

This time around, I’m currently playing with the Windows Phone 7 platform, and not one, but two phones — the Dell Venue Pro and the HTC Mozart 7.

The Venue Pro is kinda weird. It’s my first 4-inch smartphone, and while the extra screen space is kinda nice, the phone itself is pretty heavy and quite bulky (especially compared to the chic Mozart). It’s also a portrait slider, which makes it even more unique. The AMOLED screen is nice and vibrant, as expected, but there’s one thing I can’t quite put my finger on that I don’t like about it. I think the display is too far inset from the glass, maybe. The glass that it uses is the famed Gorilla Glass, but it’s not the same as the same Gorilla Glass-touting Mozart. Not sure if it’s an issue with my phone or what, but I find it has moisture issues — like it’s more slippery than it’s supposed to be on the surface. The sleep/wake button is difficult to press, but overall, it’s a okay-ish phone. Average, I would say.

The Mozart 7 is a different story. It’s slim, light, and is everything I would expect from HTC. It’s a shame the notification LED isn’t used for any Windows Phone notifications (I’m not sure that’s actually a feature that WP7 offers), but it’s very, very nice. The phone itself is very responsive, the included HTC ringtones are even nice (Harp Glitch is my current ringtone of choice — WP7 doesn’t offer custom ringtones), and perhaps the only complaint I have is about the capacitive buttons — they’re a little too easy to hit. Apart from that, no complaints.

I’ve been using the Mozart as my daily carry for close to a month now, and I’ll have some thoughts on Windows Phone 7 up shortly (week, perhaps two, perhaps three if I’m lazy), as well as a nice comparison between the two phones.

For now, I’ll just say that Windows Phone 7 is very nice (contrary to what you might have read). There’s consistency everywhere, things are nice and simplified, and it’s overall very polished. The apps aren’t quite there yet, but that’s a story for another time.

Medal of Honor (2010)

Sometimes, I play games. Mostly when I’m supposed to be doing something else, but I play games. For the past few years I’ve somehow managed to complete a single player game during the school/Uni study break period (swotvac). I think the first time this happened I was playing Fallout 3 GotY, but that’s for another time. What follows is my review of Medal of Honor (2010), which unfortunately didn’t get completed in the study period just gone by, but only just recently. There are a few spoilers, but I figure that if you haven’t played it by now you don’t likely care that much anyway. Enjoy!

When I first started playing Medal of Honor, it wasn’t very compelling. The main appeal of this particular triple-A shooter for me wasn’t that it was an alternative to the Call of Duty juggernaut, but that it featured guns. Like a druggie looking for his next hit, I was chasing the feeling of looking down the sights (preferably ACOG, but I’ll take whatever the developers choose to throw at me) and taking down some enemy combatant at range with a well-timed headshot. As cliche as that may sound, I was in it for the gunplay — how the guns “felt” within the context of the game, in different situations, and so on — and Medal of Honour (MoH) has that in spades.

In the beginning, it feels a little like you’re a nameless, faceless grunt fighting someone else’s war — because you are. It’s a little “go here, shoot those guys, rescue this dude”, and it feels like we’ve already been here before in every other big name, A-grade FPS — because we have. The enemies pop up at predictable locations, you advance through different scenarios with your squad in a predictable manner, and it’s all very predictable, even nice, but doesn’t make for very compelling gameplay (even the gunplay is average and just doesn’t feel good).

I don’t know whether it was because I had taken some mind-alterating substances that day or whether I was just in a different state of mind, but I recently re-visited the single player campaign, and, well, everything was different. The good different, not the bad kind. Somewhere between taking out snipers in a tower and lasing targets for laser-guided missile strikes or strafing runs I started to enjoy the game. I was no longer a nameless faceless soldier fighting someone else’s war, I was Rabbit, a Tier 1 Operator part of AFO Neptune, lasing targets with SOFLAM for Predator air strikes under the cover of darkness, or taking out the bad guys at 1000 meters with the Barrett. All I know is, at some point Medal of Honor started being compelling and sucked me right in.

The pacing of the game is fantastic. The action scenes are truly hectic at times, and yet there’s always parts where you never feel overwhelmed by enemies — unless that’s exactly what the developers intended, as they do in one particular scene. Like I said, the story starts out pretty slowly with you saving some guy and then just clearing out the same old enemies in the same old locations, but soon you’re on ATVs assaulting enemy compounds at night, or planting locator beacons on enemy transports, or blasting away at enemy RPG positions from the safety of the skies in an Apache. Some sections leave you truly exhausted, but you’re a SEAL; you just get back up and ask for more.

All that stuff is truly enjoyable, don’t get me wrong. It’s exciting, the gunplay at that point is incredible (oh selective fire, how I’ve missed you), and everything is as you would expect for a shooter of this calibre (pun not intended). It isn’t until about the last third or last quarter of the game that the whole story element comes into play and you start to feel that all this might actually be real. I won’t lie; I felt real relief after playing through one particular section where the position you’re holding for extraction is quickly becoming overrun by enemies who are almost constantly firing RPGs and all manner of rounds are whizzing past you, and just when you’re about to throw in the towel (your companion tech specialist even tells the brass to hold off the support troops he called in earlier), the calvary comes and saves the day. From the desperate calls over comms to having to put down guys left right and centre while running pretty low on ammo, that feels real.

And it only gets more real from that point on.

As a game, the model animations are as good as any. When you’re huddling with three other soldiers behind a wall talking about how you’re going to smoke the enemy position for an air strike, things seem real.

When you’re falling out of a friendly chopper, things seem real.

When you have to choose between bullets and broken bones, things seem real.

When you’re falling off a cliff (broken bones heal), things seem real.

While I have huge respect for people that serve I’ve never gotten into the whole military aspect of life that Americans seem to have. All that cliche gung-ho, trigger-happy, shoot now attitude just seemed too far fetched, a little too removed from reality to actually be. After playing Medal of Honor, I’m convinced that is only the tip of the iceberg. It’s games like this that demonstrate what war is like, how people like Rabbit live, and how they die.

Hoo-ah.

Medal of Honor is easily the best military FPS I have played in a while. While I do enjoy the sheer excitement and pure action of the Call of Duty series, there’s nothing quite like a good plot to keep the story going, and Medal of Honor delivers on all fronts. The multiplayer uses a different engine to the single player, but is still quite enjoyable (although perhaps not as much as Bad Company 2). Medal of Honor keeps it real while delivering everything a military shooter enthusaist would want, which means it’s a pretty damn good game indeed.

The Enthusiast Gamer

As part of the application process for Rock Paper Shotgun (which I didn’t end up applying for), you had to write a 500-word piece on a gaming topic. What follows is what I wrote, sort of a follow-up to The On-Again, Off-Again Gamer post I wrote about two weeks ago. Enjoy!

Enthusiast gamers are a peculiar bunch. Shunned from society for owning and regularly using all the major game platforms, enthusiast gamers possess every console platform if only to play the largest variety of games possible.  Enthusiast gamers prefer PC; some say the keyboard and mouse combo feels more natural, others still channel Steve Jobs and say “it just works”.

Enthusiast gamers — not to be confused with euthanasiast gamers —  are currently an endangered species. Their highly coveted skills in all forms of video games are desired by many a casual gamer, but what separates an enthusiast gamer from the rest of their gaming brethren is the fact that they innately understand games. They understand how the graphics of any game are supposed to complement and add to the overall gameplay, and they understand how the game mechanics in good games make the game balanced for all players. Above all, enthusiast gamers enjoy games in a way that sets them apart from others who also game.

Enthusiast gamers can usually be found holed up in the corner of your nearest LAN gathering, or doing the odd job here and there; most enthusiast gamers are familiar with many technical aspects of computers, and that comes in handy when new games have to be purchased. New games don’t grow on trees, you know. Enthusiast gamers are usually aged between 17 an 28; old enough to play and really enjoy games, mature enough not to care about real world things like full time jobs or other meagre things. Indeed, the amount of time spent refining twitch reflexes in a first-person shooter or levelling their chaos blood mage in the latest massively multiplayer online role playing game means that enthusiast gamers really don’t have time for such things.

Enthusiast gamers are strongly opinionated. If prompted, they won’t hesitate to speak about games they’re currently playing, but be warned — some enthusiast gamers take such opportunities too far and launch into epic tirades on the state of the gaming industry today, occasionally slipping into “bitter old man” mode and lamenting how game development studios don’t cater to their niche; indeed, it is for this very reason that game developers see enthusiast gamers as the loyal manservant — they’ll happily buy whatever the game development studios are selling, but might post a ranty blog post about it later. However, most enthusiast gamers are kind, gentle folk, provided you don’t knife them in the back in Bad Company 2.

Enthusiast gamers don’t necessarily live and breathe games, but when they’re not playing games, they’re reading about games, and when they’re not reading about games, they’re thinking about how they would improve existing games, or even dreaming up new and exciting games. Enthusiast gamers read gaming literature from a variety of sources, and aren’t particularly swayed by any opinion — if a game receives bad reviews, enthusiast gamers usually play the game and decide for themselves rather than letting someone else tell them what any given game is like.

Gamerscore: somewhere in the vicinity of 55,000

What the hell is your problem, Benny?

Alternate title: Semester Break 2011 Wrap-up

What have I been up to all holidays?

Not much, really.

I’ve played games. In the holidays I spent quite a bit of time on Bad Company 2, finally getting to level 50 in the multiplayer stakes (I also uploaded a video of some mostly-scoped heli takedowns, if you haven’t already seen it). I had a go at some Fallout, and in the past few days there has been a bit of a Killing Floor revival, but nothing too intense (that’s probably a lie, I distinctly remember getting up at 9am to play a few rounds of Bad Company 2 before brunch). Somewhat disappointingly, I haven’t had any motivation to play Pokémon at all. That will change once the uni semester starts up once again, I’m sure.

At one stage I also thought about applying to Rock Paper Shotgun — they’re currently looking for new writers to join the fold, and I thought I had a chance at being a world-renowned writer someday. As it turns out, I haven’t quite managed to get that far — all I need to do is update my resume and submit it along with my already-written 500 word piece on gaming penned exclusively for RPS, but like I said, that hasn’t happened just yet. Applications are open until the 14th of July, but I doubt I’ll get around to it.

I installed a new operating system on my Mac! It’s not quite officially released yet either, but the gold master build was released to developers about a week ago. It’s nice so far; there are lots of little but appreicated changes here and there, and it’s a nice change.

As for purchases: I purchased an SSD to put in my Mac, moving my normal HDD to the optical bay and replacing it with the SSD. Easily the single most expensive computer part I’ve ever bought, but worth it. 30 second boot times can’t be wrong. Sure I can’t watch a DVD anymore, but it’s been so long since I’ve done so that I probably won’t be missing that feature all that much anyway.
I managed to purchase a new Nerf gun, a clear Vulcan. It completes my collection of all the “mainstream” Nerf weapons.
I also purchased a new NAS, a HP MicroServer N36L. The plan is to put the 2x2TB drives from my PC (which currently does network attached storage duties) into it, perhaps up the RAM a little, and add some more drives down the track. It hasn’t arrived yet.

So, what the hell is my problem? My Uni results weren’t fantastic. They were as I expected, but not fantastic. Sometimes it’s like I’m not enthusiastic about what I’m doing at Uni, sometimes it’s — oh, my YouTube video has finished uploading. Watch, comment.

Until next time…