Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, a great game!



Oh, I am weak. I'd already decided not to download the game from various reasons. First of all I didn't have the greatest computer to play it on, then the fact that it would totally consume me and take me away from work or any intelligent activity; third of all, I didn't have the space. Well, the hell with it, I've taken the hard drive from another computer, deleted all the movies, downloaded the game and played it at lowest graphics. Luckily (or unluckily) I've finished it in about 5 days. Here is my experience.

I had huge expectancies regarding this game. Made by Arkane Studios, the brilliant makers of Ultima Underworld (AND NO! I DON'T MEAN ULTIMA, BLEAH!) and Arx Fatalis [blog entry], both greatly intelligent games, but in a Might&Magic universe (I've loved the might and magic series, even from Might&Magic 1 - AND NO! I DON'T MEAN HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC, BLEAH!). Also I have seen the videos of gameplay and also noticed a multiplayer mode, something like Counter Strike, another sick obsession of mine. So Arx Fatalis + Might&Magic + Counter Strike = the greatest games of all times!

Wrong! Actually, the entire game is like Arx Fatalis II, a project that Arcane Studios have started but never finished. The Might&Magic name is completely misused, since the game is quest based, without open spaces or branched game play. The fighting is pretty cool, but on my NVidia FX5200 it showed white instead of water when swimming, a transparent checkers board on the screen when using magic items and a white rectangle when animations were played. Maybe that last one is from a glitch in the DVD image.

That doesn't mean it is a bad game. Au contraire! the 3D engine is great and the feeling and the story are almost identical to Arx Fatalis. The interactions with the environment and some of the innovations are extraordinary. However the complexity of the game greatly diminished, kind of like the decrease in complexity one sees from the 1-5 series of Might&Magic to the 3D version starting with 6. The quests are real no brainers and there aren't many creatures in the game. Somehow, the electric flying demon-octopus had made its way all the way from Ultima Underworld :) but other than that you only have: goblins, Orcs, soldiers, tough soldiers, necromancers, leeches, cyclops, pao-kai (corrupted dragons), undead zombies, undead cyclops and undead pao-kai, a huge spider and a lot of small and annoying other spiders and ghouls (which are the most scary and dangerous if you ask me) in 10 levels of fun.

I mean, where are the undead goblins? I've never seen them in any game!

Anyway, some innovations deserve a lot of credit:

The rope arrow (shoot an arrow and climb the rope) which would have been even better without the bug that made me fall through walls or get stuck there.

The fact that you can pretty much grab anything and throw it in your enemy.
The interaction with the environment (throw enemies off cliffs, into fires, into spikes, push coffins and statues and barrels on them, destroy wood supports or cut ropes to unleash hell on your enemies. This would have been great if you wouldn't have had to hit a ghoul several times with the coolest weapon you have to kill them, but you killed it instantly if you kicked it into spikes.

The way that the character evolves through your choices, making you an assassin, a wizard or a fighter depending on the usage of your points. Unfortunately you only win points when finishing quests, not when actually defeating enemies.

The head shot bonus.

The general dynamic of the game, which means smart monsters run when they are badly hurt, hide themselves behind obstacles if they can't reach you so you wouldn't just shoot them with a bow several times, etc.

Ok, spoilers follow! I will be telling the story of the game.

You are some magician's apprentice, before he sends you on a quest to carry a crystal to a friend, he implants you with a helper (a female voice) that gives you a lot of suggestions (too many if you ask me). She is also very sensual and making sexy remarks, so that means she has to be evil :-/ Anyway, you get to this city when the city is attacked by necromancers, they steal your crystal, you have to get the crystal back, find a skull, the necros take the skull, you have to get it back and the moral of the story is that... you are the son of the strongest demon of them all, imprisoned by the seventh dragon by using the very skull everyone has been after.

Now, you have options: purge yourself from the evil implantation in your head or not. Keep the good girl alive or not. Use the skull to imprison your father forever or to set him free. There are different endings for this, and the video below shows them all.

Very basic story, yes? A lot like the one in Arx Fatalis where you also were a pawn of ... everybody. And you also don't get any sex in this one. Plenty of violence though. The animations aren't very cool either. It seems as if Ubisoft bought the unfinished Arx Fatalis II and gave it a shine, then released it as fast as possible. Having morons like me playing the game without paying could also explain the lack of extra details.

My suggestion is to get the charm spell as soon as possible, as it gives you the opportunity to make enemies fight each other while you watch. :) Of course, assassin is cool, too, but I hadn't had the time to test it yet.

Bottom line: Not the greatest game ever, but still one to show everybody else how a game should be conceived and how important innovation is.

The different endings of DMOMM:

There is no clear formula for calculating the concept of success because success can only be defined from factors like goal and duration. For example, a guy might be considered successful in getting a girl, but a failure if the relationship does not work and they split up in terrible anger or grief. In the long run, it was not a good idea to get the girl.

The same theory can be applied to any problem. For example outsourcing. In the short run, the company wins, because they reduce the costs of employment. They might even win in the long run, but the money go outside the country, diminishing by a little the success of all companies in the same region. In this case, the long run might prove that making a united front is better than scattering the resources between competing factions. Or maybe not.

The other day I was thinking of oil. A friend of mine sent me this link to a site that talks about the coming of an age in which oil is no more. It is coming soon and it basically means a dramatic (and probably violent) scaling down of world energy output. In the same time, a Romanian minister declared that he intends to push for investments in the gas sector, like finding new natural gas reserves.

And something blinked. If the oil and natural gas are scarcer and the price is likely to go up very quickly and dramatically, wouldn't that mean that keeping the oil in the ground would be a far better deal? Why extract it now, when the US and OPEC are still managing to keep the prices to a decent level (through a lot of indecent actions)? Wouldn't it be better, in the long run, to wait until the price skyrockets and everybody else is left without? In the short run, oil companies and ministries make a lot of money from it, but in the long run, they could make a lot more. Yet the people that are in charge now probably won't get anything. So they greedily suck it up and sell it.

Now, since I've defined the problem, I should think of a solution. And I think the only solution here is this: people that have charge over the oil in the ground should be able to sell the rights to the oil once it has been extracted. That means that I could sell some guy the right to the oil underground, even if I am not extracting it. Maybe even a nice clause that if the oil is not extracted in time, the guy could get his money back with a considerable interest as penalty. I believe it could work, since the price of the underground oil is likely to increase in time.

Thus the oil in the ground is transformed into money, independently of the extraction process. The extractor will get a percentage of the price of oil, then pass it to the owner or find some other arrangement to sell it and split the profits with the owner of the oil. I think it's a great idea to make money from oil without burning it. The only drawback is that someone could invent a better and cheaper and cleaner energy source. Bummer! :)

I've come upon this PDF file that explains what an euphemism is. I moved then to doublespeak, which is already a highly talked and blogged about term (679000 googles) because it is a form of euphemism used by politicians and press to change the emotional impact of information or even distort its sense. Stuff like "Collateral damage" to replace civilian death or "physical persuasion" used instead of torture.

Here are some useful links:
PDF file on euphemism
Doublespeak at Wikipedia
Also very interesting is the discussion on the article on doublespeak, which some call biased.
A funny rant about doublespeak and the US foreign policy when it comes to wars that are not wars

I had this idea to put a chat on the blog, kind of like the old school Bulletin Board System I had once. The fun I had back then, talking nonsense to so many people I didn't know... [rolling eyes].

Anyway, I took the advice of Blogger and used the chat from TagBoard. The other recommended chat was marked as bad by SiteAdvisor. The first thing I noticed is that it was a very simple site as well as a very simple chat: your basic iframe and some text inputs. The second thing I noticed is that most of the features were restricted to payed accounts.

Well, who needs them? Auto-refresh? I can make my own! Ban IP? What for? Filter messages? Why? But soon enough I got a spam message. So I went to the TagBoard interface and deleted it. Next day I got two. I deleted those as well. Then 4 appeared. Deleted. Then 8! I was kindda worried that they would progress geometrically. And maybe they did, but TagBoard has a limit of messages it keeps in memory.

I have no real evidence for this, but I can only think of one reason this spam would occur a few days after I enabled the account, and that is that the spam is perpetrated by TagBoard itself to force you into buying an account. Afterwards you would probably notice that the spam comes from a single IP, you would block it, and be happy. Also, I noticed that the iframe that they served me occasionally tried to open a popup. It fits into the general profile I've associated with them.

Therefore, the chat is gone. I only had like two messages on it anyway. People seem more interested in commenting (yeah right).

I will just summarise the series I've seen or came in contact with after the sad loss of Stargate :'(.

First of all: Ugly Betty (the US version). My wife watches it. It sucks ass! It's just like a gayified, pointless conveyor belt of clichees, mostly stolen from other clichee series of "romantic comedies". The only bit of originality comes from the original Colombian Ugly Betty. The premise: ugly girl with huge heart in the world of fashion. All possible violence or tension has been stripped off, though.

Next: Doctor Who. After having seen the wonderful reinventing of Battlestar Galactica, I kind of hoped that Dr. Who would be just as great. I haven't seen the original series, but this one is plain silly. I still watch it, but it's like watching Charmed. Lots of ridiculous comedy with a sci-fi twist. The premise is that an alien, last of his race, is travelling through time and space to ... watch history unfolding. He takes along Billie Piper, who is terribly cute, but that's about all that is good in the show.

Numb3rs! Now here is a show that is obviously planned from a recipe, but I like it. The premise of the show is that a brilliant mathematician is helping his FBI brother solve cases. And I swear my previous post about superhero mathematicians was written before I even heard of this show. The show has high quality values, both in police/military strategy, budget and human relationships. The math, though, is really basic, but it just had to be, obviously. I think of it as a science popularisation police show.

If anyone knows of a good sci fi show or at least a decent mainstream one, please let me know. I am in withdrawal already, torn between the loss of my fantasy world and the complete boredom of my real one. I don't even have time to fantasize! Boo-hoo!

Monty Halls presents this two hour special about the Earth's structure. Again, it is not featured on IMdb.

The documentary follows the steps of Jules Verne and tries to analyse the same ideas with modern knowledge. In the process, explains how our planet is made, why it has an iron-nickel core, where does the magnetism come from, how deep humans have reached into the crust, etc. Interesting documentary, although a bit too "popular" for my taste. But it does explain a few things that I didn't know.

I would really like to see documentaries that are full of non repetitive data and that focus on information more than on special effects and deep voice presenters. But hey, in the same "session" somebody sent me a clip from a TV show where a guy was asked what orbits around the Earth, the Moon or the Sun. The guy asked the public and promptly said "the Sun". So, these docs are not completely useless. I just wish there was more.

You know, even about Bush people have said that he is in reality a very smart man and his obvious stupidity is an act. Could it be that Basescu is the same way? Oh, it seems I need a politics tag for this blog.

Well, Basescu is back in his presidential office, just like Ariel is back in school, and in his very first day as a not-ousted president the very day of the referendum that decides to oust him or not he does this incredible stupid thing. Basically he first goes shopping in a mall (like a normal citizen, mind you) and then he gets annoyed with this reporter woman that kept filming him with her cell phone. So he takes her cell phone. He has no idea how to turn off the phone, so it continues to record, including a conversation between Basescu and his wife in which he calls the reporter an aggressive stinking Gypsy. Then the recording is being analysed by the president's SPP corps (kind of like Secret Service) and the bit about the stinking Gypsy is removed. Little did they know that a recording like that can be restored; and it was and now all this is public domain.

There was great protest against the obvious racist remark, also about the way the president of a country treats a reporter and nobody does anything about it. How stupid can you be to do something like that, right?

But let me bring you this conspiracy theory: Basescu did this on purpose! After the elections he faced a publicity void, one that he either had to fill with keeping his promises (a rather difficult feat for most politicians) or one that had to be replaced with a new stunt. It is already obvious that a lot of the people that voted against his ousting this time are zealots, loyal to Basescu personally, so a little incident like this would not decrease his popularity, maybe it would just show (again) how human and average and of the people our president is. And also shift the attention from the presidential duties to a more common, easy to understand, irrelevant topic. Yet the last thing, the recording that was supposedly deleted then restored, was a stroke of genius. He now got really close to the racist electorate. And, funny enough, the Romanian Press Group decided to boycott the president in the media, thus removing any need of him to do anything. I mean, if you are not on TV or in the press, why do anything? Meanwhile, the press devoted to Basescu would write only the good stuff. And the reporter herself, after receiving an apology note (Basescu is good with notes) and some flowers, decided not to charge the president with anything.

Could this have a hint of truth in it? Who knows but Basescu and his inner circle, but there is this joke circulating in Bucharest about two Basescu supporters. One of them says "Oh, it would have been great for this thing to happen before the referendum". "Are you crazy?", the other one replies, " people might not have voted for him!". "Nah. He still would have been president, but now 75% of the population would get rid of the stinking Gypsies".

The incident can be easily found on YouTube, but I am not going to give you the link, as it is irrelevant.

I just had to blog about this, Night of the Living Dead, the original movie from 1968 and the only one worth anything, is now in the public domain! You can watch it for free! Online! Where? On Siderite's blog!!

This is a documentary about Daniel Tammet, a guy that is a savant, but without the loss of social skills. He can make incredible complex calculations in his mind, has a fantastic memory, learned Icelandic in seven days then conversed in it on live TV.

The most incredible stuff is when he does math, though. He "sees" numbers as colored shapes and the operations he does in his brain are plastic, rather than numeric. He just sees some shapes that then reveal digits. As a guy in the film said "he does math without even knowing".

As a film it is not terribly elaborated, but you don't need it to be. It just shows the facts and lets you be amazed. I am getting annoyed with IMdb for not having a lot of the documentary films I am watching these days, so I had to blog about them. Bottom line, this doesn't really help anyone do anything, but it does display a normal looking person seeing the world in a completely different way than most of us and being capable of "superhuman" feats. These guys are the real superheroes, even if in comic books they would have probably been the bad guys. You know, no muscles, not really handsome, lots of brain.

The best part of it is that you can watch it all, right here, on my blog, thanks to google videoYouTube. Isn't the Internet fab?

I usually comment on films on the IMdb site, but there was no mention of this program episode there. Watching it was much like reading "I am a Mathematician", immersed in a fascinating, yet inaccessible world, the one of professional mathematicians.

I often wonder where do they get the money to sit years on end at their desk to prove a theorem, without telling anyone they intend to. Anyway, the story is about this guy, Andrew Wiles, who had the dream of solving Fermat's last unsolved puzzle and one that Fermat himself wrote he had a beautiful solution to. You see, Fermat wrote some conjectures, some ideas he had, and did not write the solutions, thus failing to turn them into theorems.

A lot of mathematicians struggled to prove them and they succeeded, all but one, a problem so simple to define and yet very difficult to solve: show that there are no natural non zero values that satisfy the following equation for any N larger than 2 : x^N+y^N=z^N.

It is amazing the math that this guy has to explore to solve it. Of course, I understand nothing of it, and the show doesn't try to make anyone understand the math, but the feeling and effort are truly remarkable. A must see for anyone needing motivation to better himself.

You want to watch the film, here it is:

Space Mowgli is a short novel that describes, much like Solaris, the first contact with an alien race. There is a twist, though, as the alien is a human kid, modified to survive on a planet by unknown beings with unimaginable power.

You can immediately separate Russian scifi from American scifi.
The Russian space exploration expeditions are mostly civilian, led by the smartest and more rational scientist around, acting as the brain of the expedition; the characters are unique and react unpredictably, led by their own feelings or beliefs; their biggest problems are bureaucratic or social and mostly internal in the group.
In contrast, American scifi usually deals with military expeditions led by a charismatic or at least authoritative figure, acting as the heart of the expedition; the characters usually act within a strict set of rules which, if they chose to bend, they do as a group rather than as individuals, their greatest issues being external or technical.
I personally prefer the Russian version.

This particular book explores the way humans understand their own humanity, rather than a true interaction with an alien race. The aliens are there, but they choose not to be characters in the story. Each human character has their own view of things and of how things should go on. Reading the book, one is forced to evaluate humanity together with the crew of the expedition and the ending becomes irrelevant. The inner exploration of the reader himself becomes the story.

Bottom line: nice and introverted. Easy to read and rather short. Lacking a conclusion because their is no need for one. The Strugatski brothers considered this story the closest to their hearts.

People know me as the guy who won't put AdSense on his blog. I didn't do this before, because I don't believe in getting money for something that I would have done for free and I dislike the idea of people annoyed by ads.

However, it crossed my mind the other day that I could get some money and give it to charity. More than that, I could even use it in the charitable that I choose! Like teaching kids to use computer (or at least their brain).

So, I am asking you, dear readers, would you accept ads on my blog if you knew the money from your clicks go to a good cause? Please feel free to add a comment or use the chat to discuss it. Thank you!

BBC News released an article today, regarding the referendum in Romania about the decision to oust or not to oust the president, Traian Basescu. The picture in the article was very representative and it is the same in this post. That's why I feel robbed! I go vote and I see that this kind of people stole the vote from under me.

But I went to vote anyway. It is my first time (political deflowering?), and I knew it was for nothing just as well as I knew it the times I didn't go to vote, the idea being that even if I will be (again) in the minority that no one cares about, Basescu will look at the numbers and see me there! He will see that some of the people don't really like what he does and how he does it. Maybe this will stop him from going all Elvis on us.

Anyway, to people who are not employed in the budgetary system, this ousting of the president thing was like a good opportunity to watch something interesting on TV for a change. Nothing changed when he got suspended by the Parliament and nothing really changes today. Maybe that will make people see soon enough that we don't need a hero, just a good system.

However, I still fell pissed off because I always get ignored in the votes because of the "people" in the picture. Geez! Use head, don't bang!

For those of you who didn't hear about it until now, Pandora is a free online music service that tries to detect characteristics of songs and allows you to make your own "radio stations" that play the songs or artists you like and/or songs that are similar to those you like. You have a nice and simple voting system that allows you to say if you like the currently playing song or not.

But lately, some new legislation in the US, making licencing for the Internet a few times more expensive and adding more restrictions for access outside US made them restrict the site. Now you can't listen to music on Pandora unless you are American.

However, there is no way they can be restricted from showing the relations between songs, so you can search the songs for yourself. Here is a excerpt of an email I received from Pandora about allowing access to their song clustering system:

email from Pandora

You can essentially use our Backstage service (http://pandora.com/backstage) as a recommendation tool. If you search for an artist and click on their image, then you will see a list of Similar Artists. If you select an album, then you will see a list of Similar Albums. If you select a song from that album, you'll be presented with Similar Songs, along with 'Features of this Song'.

This is essentially the same information that the tuner was using to find new music for you. The big difference with Backstage is that you won't have any audio.

I have been reading this very nice blog (in Romanian) called BookBlog, where people talk about and review books. They had a nice initiative of getting people together to swap books. I've decided to go and see how it is.

The result? Man, I'm old! And if so much opinionated and energetic youth, as were the people that came to the meeting, did somehow manage to infest me with their vitality, someone inevitably bumped a chair into me then excused themselves using the polite form of addressing your elders.

The meeting took place at Carturesti, a nice book shop/tea shop in Bucharest, one that has a very nice atmosphere, but lousy service. You see, the whole thing was organised with the approval of the people at Carturesti, but when we got there, no one knew we were coming and were very apprehensive about us moving tables around. Then they've decided to bring a big mug of fruit infusion (improperly called tea) to all of us, as it was too much the trouble of making individual tea pots for each request. I was bent on drinking mate tea and I hate boiled fruits, so it did upset me a lot.

But back to the meeting. The layout (a big makeshift table) did not encourage group discussion, but rather a group of small discussions. I've talked a little with the nice girl next to me, until a lot of her friends came and make it awkward. They all seemed to know each other, more or less, making me feel like an outsider. And I was outside everything you can imagine: size, age group, book interests.

Yes, the books everyone brought were mainly taken from the second hand book shops, not that mine was different, but I could find no single book that caught my eye. Eventually I bought a Strugatski book and left them my beloved "Fisherman's Hope". I do hope someone that knows how to appreciate it fished it home. Or I could have gotten A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, by David M. Friedman, which was a huge success, although I doubt anyone took it home.

Eventually I got bored, talked a little to the organizer, a very nice guy from BookBlog. He has what it takes to make it in life... that particular energy that is found in both successful businessmen and sales people. Then I left.

At least I had the opportunity to read some more on the way back and at the Pizza Hut place, for now I return to my designated purpose for today, viewing as many movies as possible before the wife comes back. Muhahahahhaa!