Assassin’s Creed II

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2 years ago
by John Pennycook in ,

Assassin's Creed II

Anybody that saw my earlier post about how much I loved my Assassin’s Creed II collector’s edition shouldn’t be surprised to learn that all of my spare time of late has been poured into my Xbox 360.  And I must say — it was time well spent.

Just in case anyone has been living underneath a rock for the last year or so, Assassin’s Creed II is the much-awaited sequel to Assassin’s Creed (duh), and a game that promised to do away with the repetition that made the original so boring. Playing as Ezio Auditore da Firenze, another of Desmond Miles’ ancestors, the storyline this time takes us to renaissance Italy — a location considerably more colourful and interesting than the Middle East.

I won’t waste too much time re-hashing what has already been said in many other good reviews, but there are a few things that are worth saying…

Graphically, the game is very impressive.  Unfortunately, and this may just be the fault of my Xbox, there are several graphical glitches.  Textures going funny at the edges of the screen, mainly.

There are literally hundreds of things to collect, and lots of optional sidequests.  The best set, by far, is the “Assassination Contracts”.  Unlike the first game, there is an emphasis on being stealthy, and with two hidden blades, a pistol, poison and ways of distracting guards at your disposal, there are a number of different ways to approach everything.

For the achievement whores among you, it’s also very important to note that there are only 100 feathers to collect (in place of a million flags), and most of the achievements are storyline-related.  Indeed, I’ve gotten 1000 gamerscore within two weeks.

In short, I recommend it. Muchly.

Assassin’s Creed II: Box and First Impressions

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2 years ago
by John Pennycook in ,
So pretty...

So pretty...

Yesterday I was lucky enough to come home and find this beautiful Assassin’s Creed II “Black Edition” boxset, complete with an Ezio figurine.

It was so pretty I had to take a picture of it.

The little leather-bound book contains concept art and a few comments from developers, and the Bonus DVD has some wallpapers and stuff like that on it.   All in all, it’s awesome.

Anybody that hasn’t yet bought Assassin’s Creed II but is contemplating it should bite the bullet already. I’ll be putting up a full review when I finish it, but if the first few hours are anything to go by, then it’s well worth the money.

OpenCL from AMD

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2 years ago
by John Pennycook in ,

Having spent the last four weeks struggling to debug my OpenCL kernels (to the point that it was often easier to re-write them in CUDA and use nvcc’s -deviceemu flag) I finally took the plunge and installed AMD’s Stream SDK.

I was surprised to find it was actually much easier to install and configure than NVIDIA’s solution… except for its assumption that I had both an AMD CPU and ATI GPU. Hopefully anybody with similar problems will stumble across this blog post, and it will save them some time.

I should note that this guide will be completely useless unless you are using a Linux distribution.

  1. First, download the AMD Stream SDK here. (You will need to sign up.)
  2. Make sure to grab the OpenCL driver as well.
  3. Extract the SDK files from their .zip file, and follow the instructions contained in the “docs” folder.
  4. Extract the .run file from the OpenCL driver .zip file, and run it with the –extract option; this extracts the contents of the .run file to another directory (of your choosing).
  5. Copy the contents of /ati/arch/lib/x86 (or /at/arch/lib/x86_64) into the /lib/x86 (or /lib/x86_64) directory of your SDK install.

And you’re done! Why AMD chose to package some libraries necessary for libOpenCL.so to work with their GPU-specific drivers I don’t know, but they did!

If you’ve followed the steps here (and in AMD’s documentation) correctly, then all should work properly. Enjoy the ability to use printf in a kernel — I know I am.

Starting a PhD

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2 years ago
by John Pennycook in

As I may have alluded to in previous posts, I have recently started a PhD in the High Performance Systems group at the University of Warwick. When I say recent, I mean it; at the time of writing, I’m only four weeks in.

My life has taken a turn for the busy — though there’s no “strict rules” regarding how much time I should work, or when I should work, I’ve found myself working 9 till 5 (what a way to make a living!) and spending my weekends playing on the Xbox.

Despite this, you can expect my updates to become slightly more frequent… I’ve been told that, since I’m going into research, I should have more web presence; I can’t think of a better way than to dust off my unused domain names and get a proper site out there.

inFamous

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2 years ago
by John Pennycook in ,

It’s been a while since I’ve been bothered to review a game, but inFamous is too good to not write about.

First off, let me point out that this game is a PS3-exclusive. If you only read reviews pertaining to Xbox or Wii games, you should stop reading here.

inFamous tells the story of Cole McGrath, a messenger unwittingly tasked with delivering a bomb for an unknown customer. The bomb goes off, killing most of the city in the process, but Cole survives… with electric super powers.

Electric super powers sound a bit lame on paper; you can fire thunderbolts and… that’s about it, right? Wrong. Sucker Punch have pulled out all the stops to make sure that Cole feels very powerful. By the end of the game, you’ll be sporting the ability to hover, use a Jedi-like “force push”, grind along train tracks, and throw energy grenades. Each of these powers can be upgraded based on whether you’re good or evil, which makes playing the game twice a bit more interesting.

The good/bad karma system is pretty important in inFamous — as already mentioned, it governs the way that your powers evolve. It also affects how people see you, which missions become available and how the storyline eventually unfolds (though I was disappointed to find that the final cutscene is the same for both endings). Unfortunately, its implementation is annoying… Presented with a black and white moral choice (the screen’s colour actually fades), Cole spells things out for you: “Hm… I could kill him, or I could help him!” … Thanks for the insight, genius.

Despite how annoying this becomes, the rest of the game is a joy to play; there’s enough variation in the sidequests that they don’t feel repetitive, and the main quests are all very different and interesting. The powers are dished out with great timing, too, so you’re never running around feeling under or over-powered.

Summing up, then:
The Good: Great gameplay, great story, great… well, pretty much everything.
The Bad: Black/white moral choices — no neutral option.
The Ugly: Some of the graphics are jaggy, and I fell through the floor more than a couple of times.

I’d actually say that this game is good enough to buy a PS3 for. And if you’ve already got a PS3, the least you should do is download the demo; this is easily one of the most fun games I’ve played in years.

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

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2 years ago
by John Pennycook in

As with some of my other entries, this one was brought about by some ridiculous news reported by the BBC.

Yet again, the pirates of the web are being blamed for the “death” of the music and film industries. The solution? Cracking down on teenagers pirating in their bedrooms.

Yup, that’s right. According to this article, the corporations are aware that they’ll be unlikely to crack down on “real” pirates that are capable of encrypting their internet traffic; attacking people who download the odd film or album is obviously a much better way of doing things!

What somebody needs to do is make it clear to the older generation that “piracy” is nothing new. When I was growing up (and before I had internet access) it was commonplace to record things off of the TV to VHS or to record things off of the radio to cassette. Despite actually being illegal, I can’t remember ever seeing a court case about somebody lending some VHS tapes to their friends, or making a mix tape for their beau.

Piracy doesn’t even harm the big corporations, so why do they care? Take a film like Wolverine, for example. Even though it was leaked online and millions of people apparently downloaded it, it still “clawed” £107m at the box office.

This entry isn’t particularly well structured, but I’m supposed to be revising; just having a bit of a rant.

BBC Encourages Hard Drive Destruction – Why!?

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3 years ago
by John Pennycook in

This blog post is concerned with this BBC news article.

When I woke up this morning and checked my RSS feeds, I was shocked and quite frankly appalled to find that the BBC (following a “study” by Which? magazine) was encouraging people to take a hammer to their hard drives in order to keep their data secure.

Apparently, the “only way” to ensure a fraudster cannot get hold of your personal information when you sell a computer is to completely destroy your storage media.

Given that the economy is currently shot to hell and we’re supposed to be worrying about the environment, surely stopping electronic goods from being put to good use and causing extra waste in the process is nothing short of ridiculous?

Bad move, BBC.

Since the time of writing my e-mail to the BBC, the article has now been slightly rectified (it now contains a video guide that at least mentions filling a drive with zeros as an alternative) — but it still claims destruction is safer.

I used to think their articles were well-researched and useful, but this has taught me to take anything they say with a handful of salt. I suggest anybody reading this blog does the same.

Heavenly Sword

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3 years ago
by John Pennycook in ,

Today, I’m proud to bring you another review far too late to have any effect on your decision in buying a game.

Heavenly Sword. Not the best name for a game, I’ll give you that.

The story wouldn’t win any awards either; the heroine, Nariko, is not accepted by her clan and seeks to prove herself to her father, the sword she is forced to wield is slowly killing her, and the twists and turns at the end of the game are clearly signposted.

But it doesn’t matter, because unlike a lot of other games on the market, Heavenly Sword is actually fun to play.

The combos flow together fluidly (and look awesome), the controls are responsive and the graphics (with the exception of hair) really show off what the PS3 is capable of. As for gameplay, think God of War with a woman — quick time events and all.

My only real criticism is the difficulty; it’s not always too easy, it’s not always frustrating, but it always manages to hit one of the two extremes. The quick time events seem to be more about failing until you know what button’s up next, and chaining together enough attacks to unlock new combos often seems impossible.

Heavenly Sword certainly isn’t the best game on the market, “Hell Mode” and the desire to unlock new episodes of the animated series should keep you playing longer than the 6 hours your first playthrough will demand. It’s short, but it’s fun, and at £15.99 it might be worth a go.

GPG Nightmare

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3 years ago
by John Pennycook in

Well, it’s pretty embarrassing; I forgot my GPG passphrase. Luckily I had the forethought to generate a revocation certificate when I created the private key, but it doesn’t make me feel any less foolish.

It took me a few days to pluck up the courage to publish my revocation certificate, which is ridiculous — I was worried that people would see two revocations in two years and assume I was an idiot. My housemates have already assured me I have nothing to worry about, since my idiocy is well-known…

Felt I should blog about it since I haven’t been keeping my promise (to whom exactly I’m not sure) of an increased blogging frequency.

New key ID is BD9CC8A3; if anybody who had previously signed my ID would like to meet up, exchange photo ID and the usual malarkey then please let me know!

Tim Minchin!

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3 years ago
by John Pennycook in

As I may have mentioned in my last blog post (I forget), I went to see Tim Minchin with my girlfriend and the rest of my house on Sunday. He was AWESOME. Certainly awesome enough to deserve capital letters, anyway.

Not to mention, he signed my canvas bag:

If you’ve never heard of him before, I recommend you check him out on YouTube. He’s been hailed by both me and the Times as “the new Bill Bailey” — when somebody has such great reviews from such refutable sources you know he’s good.

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