Several months ago I wrote a short entry about the high-definition ‘war’ waged between the two competing standards, HD DVD and blu-ray. Now, one of the battlegrounds between both standards was the support each format had from major movie studios. Basically, enthusiasts were going with the standard which had the movies from the studios they each wanted.

Now, The Matrix was one set of movies in a small corner of such a battle, and for a while was published on HD DVD but not Blu-Ray. But 10 months since that post, it’s been finally released on the latter.

So, I plunked down a not too small sum of money on the blu-ray edition of The Ultimate Matrix Collection. The contents of this set of discs is roughly similar (I think) to the ten disc DVD set released a few years ago, and is stuffed to the brim with around 35 hours of content, with the main trilogy of movies themselves taking up about 7 hours.

Lots has been said about The Matrix movies of course. Many people agree that the sequels extended the story scape and depth substantially but to the point that the story also became convoluted. Who could really make sense of what KFC guy er The Architect was droning on about?

But now that I think back to the point when I first saw the movie (on disc as I missed the theatrical release in 1999), I can see why the movie was such a huge hit. No, I don’t for a moment believe we’re really right now living in a computerized virtual world created to pacify human beings who’re in reality each cocooned as some sort of biological battery. But that very premise of machines enslaving humans is interesting in itself, and makes for great story telling. If nothing else, it’s a nice change from machines only keen on exterminating humans like bugs e.g. The Terminator or the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series (up till a point).

That said, I never really understood the back story from the first Matrix movie alone. All Morpheus said, vaguely, is that at some point the humans waged a big war against the machines, with the former blocking out the sky in a desperate attempt to eliminate the machine’s source of power.

That back story was of course fleshed out in a couple of episodes from The Animatrix. And we watched that too the other night after completing the trilogy of movies. Ling remarked that two of the shorts (The Second Renaissance Parts I and II) that told this back story were so depressing.

Still… another set that’s on its way is the blu-ray Band of Brothers. I’ve got this on DVD already, but it remains the best TV limited series I’ve had the pleasure of watching (The Sopranos remained my favorite recurring TV series). So, it’s well-worth the expense for me. And hopefully Ling will be able to enjoy it too.

It’s coming to the end of the year again. Towards the end of each year, I’d sit back and reflect on some of the key events and decisions made in the past year or so. It’s a pretty interesting exercise as you’ll see the decisions that turned out right, and those that turned out all wrong; all with the benefit of a mite bit of hindsight at the end of the year now.

So, running off my head and in no particuar order:

Going to Phuket first in June then Bali later in September (WIN). Because right smack on the week we were in Bali in September, thousands of travelers in Singapore had to postpone their Phuket trip because the airport had shut down! Too funny for words. Bali posts tagged here, with Phuket ones here.

Having a baby (IN PROGRESS). Well, not saying too much away here, but the decision wasn’t an easy one. There were concerns about health and well-being for example. Funnily, we faced little of the ‘traditional’ sort of pressures. Oh, Ling’s mum asked about it now and then, but there was absolutely no (even polite) queries or pressure exerted on my side of the family. Nor did the announced incentives in August factor into our decisions. First announced here.

Going with a Nissan Latio (WIN). Well, on the upside, the car hasn’t broken down. Moreover, our Latio survived pretty much unscathed compared to the Honda Civic I bumped into nearly a year ago. On the down side, Ling’s been remarking that the car makes funny squeaky noises occasionally, and doesn’t give her the vibes that the Latio is better built than the old Civic we were driving. And we haven’t been getting the 14 km/litre fuel consumption milleage some drivers claimed. But a 12.5 to 12.8 km/litre isn’t too bad. First blogged here, then here.

Red and silver.

Publishing a book (WIN). This, funnily, was the hardest decision I’ve made this year. My work and research has been published in several places prior to this of course, but publishing in academia is quite different from producing a commercial publication. There’s all the legalese in the author’s contract with the publisher, all my liabilities since there’re now new issues of distribution, ownership and copyright. And to top if all off, it’s not as though my book is gonna be selling a million copies allowing me to enter early retirement. The summative royalties I expect are essentially, for lack of a better word, non-existent. First blogged here.

Deciding between a PS3 or an XBox 360 (WIN). No kidding! I had long chats with Matt about the virtues of one console over the other. Moreover, the decision wasn’t as simple as which had the games I was interested in or studying. The decision to go with one of them was made when the high definition standards war was raging, and investment in the PS3 wasn’t a sure decision. It could had turned into a white elephant! First blogged here then here.

Of course I could have bought both, like Matt…

Ling having a go with Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

Investing in a new camera system (IN PROGRESS). And what a huge investment it turned into. I was determined to get it right this time by doing proper research, and proper accounting to what I was acquiring. So far, so good. Ok, so the photos are still a long way off to progressing from ‘crappy’ to ‘mediocre’, but I’m working on it! First blogged here.

Trying to fatten Matt up (LOST). As soon as Matt firmed up arrangements to visit and stay with us for a month in June this year, Ling and I drew up a strategy to make sure that this time, he’d leave Singapore weighing heavier than he arrived. And boy, did we try hard! We enlisted everyone’s help. Even my mum, and Doreen. Even our small group was involved. But Matt easily showed that he could beat us all without trying, and he left Singapore weighing less than when he arrived. So we failed miserably again.

He conquered durians even.

But as soon as he’s firmed up plans for a third visit, this time, it’s WAR. If we have to bury him with Banquet pratas or drown him with teh tariks this time, we will!! Ling’s tribute to The Champion here.

There you go. If I can think of any more significant milestones, I’ll append them here later.

Since I haven’t been blogging much, here’s an echo of a game review for the other blog I write for.:)

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

Naughty Dog as a game development studio has been around for more than two decades now since their founding in 1986. While they’re better known for their Jak & Daxter video game series, they scored a surprise and big hit with Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune on the PS3 a year ago.

In order to properly appreciate what the scene was like a year ago though, one has to realize that the PS3 didn’t have very many big titles at that point, especially when compared to the XBox 360 that had already been released one year earlier, during which a number of well-received and popular titles had already been published for it.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is console-based action-adventure at its best. It has all the blockbuster production values, likable characters, amazing visuals, and all the nods to established icons of the game story’s genre . The story concerns a Nathan Drake, a (fictional) descendent of famous English explorer and privateer Sir Francis Drake of the 16th Century. The modern Drake is a treasure hunter, and in Uncharted, takes off on an expedition to recover the mythical treasure of El Dorado. Along the way, he’ll be supported by a cast of memorable characters, friends and foes alike.

What’s special about Uncharted? The visuals for one. While fans of the Metal Gear Solid series will swear that Hideo Kojima’s last magnum opus, MGS IV (with an upcoming review by GET staff Mr. Ng soon) is the most visually stunning game available on the PS3, there’re other gamers who’ll point to the year older Uncharted as an equally if not more visually impressive effort that uses fewer overheads, er, MGS IV loading times *koff*.

Simply put, Uncharted is replete with numerous moments where you’ll stare with eyes afixed at the screen taking in the visuals. Seeing what the PS3 can produce on screen will give you that sense of vindication of having spent a small fortune on a gaming console. Among especially outstanding scenes include the German U-boat run aground on a riverbed, a massive monastery that is hundreds of years old and in ruins, and a submarine pen that is a page out of a similar scene in Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Animation was developed with the now ubiquitous mocaps, but still spendidly done nonetheless with eye, cheek movements and texture morphing on the faces.

The narrative in MGS IV is substantially stronger, with the story in Uncharted almost workmanlike. That said, the ingame story sequences in Uncharted are hugely enjoyable. They move along briskly compared to the occasionally indulgent story telling in MGS IV, with dialog that’ll make you chuckle and laugh on occasion, and carried through with a likable cast of characters. Nathan is assisted by a journalist, Elena, and a cigar-smoking companion, Victor, whose loyalties will seemingly shift in the course of the story. It’s probably a result of both the dialog script and also voice-acting that Uncharted is one game whose ingame scenes you’ll want to watch repeatedly, if only because they’re so well done and acted.

Heck. Even the characters resisting Nathan and his team’s efforts are likable. Of particular standout is the Indonesian (?) pirate Eddy Raja, voice-acted by James Sie. Sie’s comedic timing and with many of the game’s funniest lines, including a couple in what looks like Bahasa Indonesian, will have you laughing.

There’s a fair balance of platform-based and combat action in the game too. The platform based components and puzzles are pretty forgiving, so players looking for a bigger challenge would be better off with the Tomb Raider series. But they’re perfect for everyone else, including casual gamers.

The combat sequences in Uncharted don’t approach identical levels of realism or sophistication compared to some first-person shooters, but they’re still nonetheless enjoyable. Apart from four grenades, Nathan gets to carry just two guns at any one time; one side-arm and a rifle, and Nathan can only carry a limited amount of ammunition for both at a time too.

Fighting off pirates, rival treasure hunters and other critters isn’t simply an issue of charging head on too. Rather, your enemies will gun and duck for cover behind physical features of the terrain or buildings you’ll explore, and will in return typically flank or use grenades to flush you out.

Perhaps the litmus test on Uncharted’s appeal is to the untapped market segment of non-gamers. My wife for instance isn’t a computer gamer at all, but she got hooked on Uncharted’s platform scenes. She doesn’t possess much of the dexterity that PS3 gamers have when it comes to using the SIXAXIS controllers, but she enjoys having Nathan explore areas and solving puzzles on getting from one point to another.

The one down side though is the game’s comparatively short length. Experienced action game players will zip through Uncharted’s 22 chapters (levels) in less than 10 hours. But even if one doesn’t replay the game through the different difficulty levels and bonus treasures for those who’re game completists, the 10 hours will be a tremendously fun ride.

Highly recommended for those who have PS3s.

- Dr. Foo CY, 6 Oct 2008

Truth to tell, one of the ongoing discussions that gives me the laughs is the Apples vs PCs’war’.:)

Now, that in itself has a bit of a history, and like a few of my other stories here, there was a girl in it! I was an active participant of the online forums in NTU 16 years ago, and in my final year, there was a bit of a online fight between a Mac-fan and myself.

Here’s the thing; I’m neither a Mac or a Windows fan. My first computer in 1984 was an Apple, and I wrote my first game in BASIC 3 months later. For me, it’s always about the most appropriate tool for the job. And appropriate for me isn’t merely about functionality and looks, but encompasses a host of other factors including affordability, accessibility, support (especially), amount of published and user-generated literature in it, and quality of content.

In any case, there was this fellow who was in a different faculty heaping scorn on PC users. So I took up on him, and before long things got a little too hot. And only got worse when he got his girlfriend who was in the same faculty into the thread too. So there I was facing off this (very) rude fellow and his girlfriend in a Apple vs PC debate.

How did it end? Well, a certain Associate Professor who knew me in person—at that juncture in 1994 I was a semi-well-known debater—stepped in and broke up the fight, saying, as I recall it, it was regrettable that persons such as myself were arguing over something like this.

Now after things cooled off, one thing led to another, and the girl in this story and I became friends. No it didn’t get anywhere—how was it to—and it was a pretty sad story on how it ended: my heart got broken, and I wrote my most cherished song in memory of our friendship. And here’s the funniest part: whenever I see another Apples vs PC/Windows debate, this is the story I remember.:)

Anyway, just to make sure this entry’s still somewhat On Topic, Microsoft is coming up with its own stylistically clever advertisments to fend off years of Apple bashing on Windows. It’s cute, sort of.:)

In the old days in the mid to late 90s when we were still using portable CD players, I had a CD wallet alongside the player in my haversack. I was commuting from Yio Chu Kang station where home was to Raffles City station where I was working, and that was 2 hours of traveling and music-listening everyday. That combo weighed close to a kilogram I think.

These days things are all miniaturized. Ling first got me a Samsung MP3 player for my birthday 3 years ago. That was a great nifty little device. Fantastic sound, but awful, awful battery life. You exhausted the poor thing in about 4 hours, shorter than a flight from Singapore to Perth. It didn’t take long for me to change to a cheap Meizu Chinese player with surprisingly good sound but awful storage space of just 2 GB.

The Meizu M6 was my traveling companion for 18 months that I brought with me in all of our vacations overseas. Recently though I started searching online a fortnight ago to look for its replacement. I finally settled on a comparatively non-mass market Cowon D2. Yeah you haven’t heard of this player before eh. It’s a fan favorite. And it’s a wonder why when there are gems like these people still buy iPods which are over-priced, over-hyped, suffer awful battery life (lest their most recent models) and worse of all, mediocre audio quality.

Anyway the Cowon D2 has 16 GB built-in. For those of us who’re not an audiophile geek, 16 GB stores about 200 CDs of music. And if that’s not enough (my classics collection number around 700 albums now and at third of those are multi-CDs between 2 to 12 discs), there’s a SD memory card slot for one to fill up.

A site that I’ve just started subscribing to too is eMusic, which boasts of a huge online classical music catalog. The site doesn’t carry albums from the ‘premium’ classical music labels like Deutsche Grammophone or Decca, but there’s still an amazing collection of albums at a low asking price of around USD0.25 per music track. I’ve been browsing through the catalog at home for alternate recordings of some of my favorite compositions, e.g. Haydn’s twelve London and six Paris Symphonies, wind concerti by Mozart. There’s also several other interesting and almost unique recordings, e.g. English recordings of Mozart’s operas.

The eMusic service also has some really interesting subscription options. Specifically, they charge flat subscription fees for a fixed number of track purchases which resets every month. So, in theory, you could subscribe to a USD49.95 plan that allows you to pick up 200 tracks a month, and over time download every classical music CD you’ll want to listen to.

So it’s been music nirvana for me since I started subscribing. Bach wrote 250 cantatas, which if you were to buy off the shelf amounts to maybe one hundred CD albums. But I can now finally buy them in MP3 form… even if it’ll take me one year to finish getting them all haha! Not that I’ll ever want to though; I’m really interested only in a select few of his cantatas, thankfully.

Unfortunately, there really aren’t very many classical music listeners around me. In fact, of all the friends I’ve had over the years, there’s been perhaps just one friend I know who was also a classical music listener and shared my passion for it. None of say my small group friends over the years have, though two did have an appreciation for it.

And while Ling indulges whenever we’re driving and I put the classics into the car player, I think she’ll readily change to the radio whenever she can. As for family, my dad listens to the classics on the very rare occasion but he really enjoys only the Strauss’ family of waltzes. And my mum never quite understood why I amassed over the years that huge collection of classical music CDs at my old family home.

The one, possibly, spark of hope though is one of my nephews who’s taken to learning the violin. Yep, it looks like he could be the only person in the next generation who’ll learn a music instrument, and just possibly turn to the classics as his uncle did. :)

Notebooks have to achieve balance between weight, battery power, performance and form factor, and as satisfied as I am with the two notebooks I use, the want to carry around PDA-sized and truly portable and light notebooks is always somewhere at the back of my mind.

So, one of the technological developments I’ve been keeping an eye on has been the production of UMPCs, short for ultra mobile PCs. These notebooks utilize smaller screens of 9-10 inch or smaller, very small form factors (with semi-cramped keyboards), very low-powered processors, and typically without optical drives. Asus for instance produced the wildly popular EEE PC last year and sold a couple million units, and has followed it up with a newer model that retain the original’s diminutive size but increased the potency of the unit’s hardware. And best of all is the price; just $760.

I can imagine a couple of uses for it right off. For starters, it’s small enough to carry anywhere, and has the necessary connections for Wireless@SG. During vacation, one can use it to store and check on photos taken. E.g. even though the 3 inch 900 pixel screen on my D300 helps a lot in checking on pictures, an LCD screen - even a 9 inch one - will help loads more.

Notebook manufacturers besides Asus for certain have all realized the potential of low-cost, budget UMPCs, and are all coming up with their own models. MSI is just about to start selling theirs and HP has theirs out for a bit already. This is going to be really interesting to watch.:)

There were more than a few Singaporeans who scoffed when MDA announced the new game rating system in Singapore; after all, they’ve been getting their fix of ‘disallowed’ games in Singapore through a variety of means, including from our neighbors up North, and - if they knew where to find it - certain temporary shops in the heartland area.

Funnily, I was one of the Singaporeans who was actually happy with the new system, since it meant that games that weren’t previously available could now finally be bought here. And what better game to celebrate that with than gaming’s arguably most hyped, and definitely the most expensive, game ever - GTA IV?

This game has special meaning for me for two reasons: firstly, it was Matt who introduced me to this series what 6-7 years ago with GTA III. Secondly, a colleague at work was one of the designers on the game before moving to Singapore.

As for the game itself, it’s possibly the best example of single-player sandbox styled gaming, or in layman’s terms, a game that is open-ended and doesn’t require players to rigidly follow a well-defined path to game victory. It’s also lived up to its massive hype, with critical acclaim coming from all review sites. One source even notes that at 609,000 copies sold on day 1, GTA IV is now the fastest selling game title within a 24 hour period in the UK.

That said, the game is marked for adult players only and it means just that, and it isn’t just the language spoken by characters in the game. The themes of gangland wars, racism, drug wars, prostitution, crooked cops, and politics Americana provide quite a reflection and social commentary of the type of life that exists in some parts of the civilized world that until the GTA series had been largely seen only in non-interactive media. Sure, the game is unflinching in its representations of brutality, but its tie-in with story telling is intricate, and I’ve never felt in the 20+ hours I’ve played so far that some act of violence is there only for its sake.

Eh - since I have a colleague who was in the development team for it, I should get him to autograph my copy of the game.:)

Cameras and HD entertainment aren’t my only two obsessions as a geekboy. I used to have a thing for PDAs, handphones and notebooks. Fortunately, the tech compulsions don’t all occur at the same time (otherwise I’d be in perpetual deficit), but they usually occur as flavor of the month or year-quarter.

In any case, I thought it’d be fun to put together a list of notebooks I’ve used for the last 12 years now. The list goes like this:

This sort of table is illuminating because it shows several things:

• Notebook turnover is about 14 months. I think that has a lot to do with the fast depreciation of notebook value once warranty runs out.
• I’m about evenly split between ultraportables and full-featured notebooks. Actually, come to think of it, I oscillate between the two.

In general, I’ve had pretty good luck with notebooks with most having served me very well without failure. OK, there’s been two exceptions. The HP Omnibook 500 was a great machine with a very sexy chassis and color scheme, but the docking bay was just horrible with frequent failures to properly recognize the notebook when mounted. I think I had it sent to repair at Hewlett Packard three times within a year, after which I gave up and let it sit and gather dust at home. The Acer Travelmate had a quirky keyboard with a key that my fingernail kept getting stuck under. Moreover, it suffered three hardware failures, which fortunately were still properly covered under warranty. That said, I’ve had fond memories of the machine since I did a large amount of thesis writing on it.

Of the two current notebooks I’ve got, one is the always reliable IBM Thinkpad given by the school. The other personal one is a pretty recent acquisition: an NEC Versa E6310 which has a pretty OK graphics chipset to let me run game demonstrations for my lecture groups. Hopefully this one will last for a bit - or at least longer than the current average of 14 months.

No, this isn’t an entry about adopting babies! The phrase early adopter commonly refers to persons who’re enthusiasts buying into technologies that are newly emerging and before they become mainstream. Early adoption has its benefits; you get to play with the newest stuff, mingle with like-minded enthusiasts, and best of all, enjoy the online ‘wars’ when there’s another competing early technology.

The one I’m referring to is none other than the recently-ended high-def format war. What was that about? Well, in a nutshell, for the last 2 years, there’s been two competing formats for the distribution of pre-recorded high-definition entertainment: Blu-ray, and HD DVD. Hollywood studios were divided into both camps or choosing to be aligned to neither, and several changed sides in the 2 years too. There’s been many major ‘events’ and turning points throughout, but the absence of a clear winner was hurting mass consumer adoption of one standard. i.e. who’d like to spend thousands of dollars buying new media for one format only to see the other format eventually become standard?

What’s been especially fun though has been watching the war online. Gamers, movie-lovers and online advocacy groups have all taken sides and gotten involved. In fact, in order to stop the flaming and arguments from spilling into the forums where participants had no desire to bicker, several web sites even have Smackdown forums where folks went specifically to fight. I don’t enjoy bickering and I haven’t flamed since my Usenet days in 1993. But it’s nonetheless fun to watch from a spectator’s point of view. There’s wit, sarcasm, the usual cussing, scrutinization of press-releases and sales data, and Nostradamus-like predictions on who’d win (or lose).

All that said, the format war eventually reached its closure early this week when the HD DVD format capitulated with Toshiba, the forerunner leading the format, announced that in light of recent developments in the war, they’re stopping production of hardware for their format. All that’s good news for consumers, since mass adoption can now properly begin with the format that’s emerged the winner. The Smackdown forums are now slowly winding down in activity too since there isn’t much to smack the other fellow about now. But if you’d like to see what the fuss was about, here’s a good place to start. To get to the most fun stuff though you’d have to backtrack from around the Christmas week from last year.:)

One of those little nagging things about lecturing in a Gaming course is that I’ve always felt a little left out when my students rave about the newest console title. I mean, so many of them tote around PSPs to school it’s scary.

My parents got my two brothers and myself an Apple II computer in 1983, and while both my elder brother and myself got into computer games from that point, I was also altogether interested in the creation of games through writing programs.

From that point, I’ve chalked up about 24 years of computer gaming but very little on consoles, despite my good bud Matt’s best attempts to get me to at least take a look at consoles.

That said, the nagging feeling that I could be missing out got to me eventually, and a fortnight ago I started seriously looking deciding whether to get an XBox360, a PS3, or a Wii. All three have their advantages and appeal, but I decided on the PS3. I figured that if the console gaming didn’t appeal as much as PC gaming, at least we’d have a Blu-Ray high-definition player.

The Blu-Ray player didn’t disappoint. The first title we got - Ridley Scott’s director’s cut of his movie Kingdom of Heaven looked so splendid on high-def that Ling actually enjoyed the viewing much more than the two times we watched it on the big screen and on DVD later.

As for the collaborative gaming with wife-thingie itself, well, the picture here says it all. Ling’s never quite played games before; my few attempts to get her interested in PC gaming failed so badly I gave up. But now she’s gotten into Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and enjoying it that I cannot but help feel satisfied at this small achievement. Oh, she still gets me to go through the combat portions for her, but she’s handling all the platform and adventuring aspects of it.

Pigs can fly, indeed.:)