Digital Logic

Got an invite to the SC2 Beta yesterday from my good friends at Blizzard (i.e. I won the lottery….). Installed it, cranked up a 1v1 game and was instantly reminded of my childhood. While my buddies didn’t seem to appreciate the subtle differences or the fact that the game tries to remain true to it’s roots, I had a fun 30 minutes (although I’m still as bad at StarCraft as I was in the 90s). More to come as I have time to play it (that is, if I don’t get to into FFXIII).

It’s odd that I should have two articles of this type in such a short time span, but I was recently enraged. For those of you who don’t know, I live in Ontario in a small city called Waterloo. Since I’m a student, I’m not exactly a stranger to the world of fast food. Occasionally I grab my friends and head to the nearest McDonalds for a deliciously unhealthy batch of food.

Recently I was in Niagara Falls hitting the poker tables with a few of my buddies. After we had finished we decided to head over to the Wendy’s on Clifton Hill for a bite to eat.

“Alright!” I say, thinking of the delicious warm food that is about to hit my taste buds. Upon passing through the doors to this ritzy establishment we are greeted with a line at least 30 people long waiting to order. We begrudgingly enter the line to wait. First thing I notice is that while they have THREE tills, only one is operational for some reason. Now, it was only around 11PM on a Saturday, in a place that commonly is very busy. This is just poor management.

So after a good 20 minute chunk of time, we get to the till and place our orders. Among items ordered were a Baconator, two Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers, and a few drinks. After a few minutes, the cashiers comes out from the kitchen and tells us that “we’re out of bacon.” It should be clarified that they were not actually out of bacon, they just didn’t have any prepared (it also apparently takes 15 minutes to prepare bacon).

Remember that we had already paid for our meals at this point. The cashier offers to make us an equivalent meal instead. We agree, and wait another 5 minutes for the food to actually arrive. Sitting down at the table, we now realize that “equivalent meal” in Wendy’s-speak translates roughly to “sandwiches without bacon”. Have you ever tried a Baconator without bacon? Ask my friend Dave, he’ll tell you all about it.

So Wendy’s failed. I probably won’t be back to any Wendy’s for a while as their “fresh, never frozen” hamburgers generally taste like chewing on ground cardboard. There is a reason they feel the need to load their burgers with cheese sauce, overly expensive bacon and half a pound of mayonnaise, you know.

On to case number two: the McDonald’s restaurant at Columbia and King in Waterloo. I have only one word that can possibly describe this restaurant: failure.

It seems that, no matter what time of day or what day of the week, every time I head to this McDonalds they seem to be able to reach new heights in the field of disappointment. Because this particular McDonalds is so close to home and my friends seem to enjoy Big Macs a bit too much, I have countless stories of poor service to rhyme off. For this reason, please accept this bulleted list of horrible things about the restaurant.

• 4 registers, but only 1 is ever in use
• 10-15 minute waits in general to get your food ordered
• either cashiers or cooks are incompetent because they never seem to get my order right. Examples include: extra lettuce instead of extra pickles, and tomato every freaking time I tell them not to put it on. I even speak slowly to them in the hopes that one day they will understand.
• drink orders frequently screwed up
• managers serving employee orders and meals before customers (even though the customer ordered first)
• managers accusing customers of throwing trays (I’m 100% serious, this did happen)
• prices that are higher than the surrounding McDonalds, but yield the same amount of food.

I’m sure I could think of more, but frankly it’s not worth my time.

I don’t understand what happened to the concept of quality and customer satisfaction. I remember fast food places being considerably more reliable no more than a few years ago.

Step it up, guys.

It’s Friday morning and I took a break from my computer science homework only to stumble across the fact that some new pets have been added to the game that everybody seems to be playing (apart from me and anybody in my immediate circle of friends): World of Warcraft. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are tons of people who enjoy hunting down and collecting every single aesthetic bonus in the game, which is fine, I’m a bit of a perfectionist/completionist myself. There are even sites devoted exclusively to collecting pets in World of Warcraft.

The one problem I do have with these new pets, as you’ve probably already guessed from the title of this article, is that they are a shameless attempt at a cash grab by Blizzard. Oh, what’s that? I didn’t mention that you have to buy these pets? For real money? In fact, each one of these pets will set you back TEN DOLLARS. Ten dollars. For a small, insignificant, purely cosmetic upgrade for your World of Warcraft account…. Now, the rumor is that for each Pandaren sold, Blizzard will donate $5 to the Make-a-Wish foundation (until the end of 2009), which is good. However, why don’t they just price the pets at $5 and donate 100% of the profit to the  foundation. Better yet, why not just announce a promotion and say that a donation to Make-a-Wish will net you a promo code?

Since there are no up-to-date statistics about the subscribers (some people say Blizzard lost a few million subscriptions for the screwup in China), I can’t say exactly how much Blizzard aims to make from this deal, but I think 10 million dollars is a bit much for shrinking down some pre-existing models and putting them on the store.

Here is a list of better uses for $20:

• $20 donation to the Make-a-Wish foundation
• Treat yourself and two friends to a fast-food meal of your choosing
• Buy materials for lunches for a week
• Go out for lunch twice next week
• Take a date to the movies
• Go to the movies yourself and buy popcorn….
• Buy a decent bottle of wine
• Help pay for the WoW addiction clinic

Who doesn’t love TF2 taunt kills combined with Chris Cornell (especially on a slow Monday morning)?

In my daily life I come across hundreds of websites. Most of them are pretty good. Some of them are not. So, as a new “whenever I feel like it” kind of a section, I’m going to throw in some sites that could use fixes. First up, Ctrl+Alt+Delete Comics. Now I know a while back that this particular web comic was tossed aside (something about having too much emotion and too little humor), but I’ve kind of stuck with it. I’ve also noticed that the site could use a new design, or at least some effort to fix the old one. Let’s take a look.

Internet Explorer 8

Mozilla Firefox 3

Mozilla Firefox 3 with AdBlock Plus

Wait a second, what is that? Your header bar seems to have become misaligned, making it painfully obvious that it is in fact, three different sections. What I don’t understand is the fact that the rest of the header was moved up when the image was removed. Oh wait, now I see it. The designer of the CAD comics website seems to have used tables and spacer gifs for the header (and, in fact, most of the page). Now, while this might have been an acceptable way to create web layouts in the 1990’s, it has now been more than a decade since CSS was introduced. The page hasn’t changed much since November of 2005. It’s time for an update, and the new layout should display correctly regardless of what is on the page.

And that’s what really grinds my gears.

Found this article on Slashdot. As a fairly well seasoned WoW player (although I have since lost interest), this Dana Massey has hit the nail right on the head. The entire MMO genre is based around a singular idea. You log in, you kill stuff, you get more powerful. All games have basically the same UI elements, but fail to deviate from the norm.

Who said that MMOs require hot bars? Who proclaimed that it’s not a proper MMO unless you have quests? Blizzard took a formula that almost all MMOs had been using for years and distilled it down to addictive perfection. Love or hate WoW, it’s a polished, polished title. It’s no coincidence that on hardcore MMO sites, like this one, WoW is not the most hyped or trafficked game around. It’s not that it’s bad, but veteran MMO players don’t have the same love for it, simply because we’ve all seen some variation of it before. The WoW community has always been a bit apart from the larger MMO community. Based purely on the number of subscribers, WoW articles should statistically annihilate every other game on this site, but they don’t. A huge percentage of people who truly love WoW, I’ve always believed, do not know or particularly care about this whole world of MMOs out there. They’re WoW players and that’s it.

It’s true that this is a tried and tested formula, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. It’s attracted millions of people to a hobby that was once basically an underground. Blizzard’s commitment to quality is nothing less than astonishing and let’s face it: they’re in the business to make money. If your users are happy, that means more sales and subscriptions for you, and making players happy is something that Blizzard is very good at.

Part of the problem, as Dana states, is that re-visioning the genre is risky. Developers see a style that works and make their game conform to the standards. From a business perspective, it makes sense. The only problem is people who play MMOs aren’t going to leave their hard-earned characters and move over to a new title that has basically the same gameplay elements and only has slightly better visual elements. Because of the nature of MMO games, there’s no reason to transfer. It’s basically like playing any regular single player game 90% of the way through and then dropping it to pick up the next title, except in the case of MMOs, the game never ends.

For people who don’t mind doing the same thing over and over again, current MMOs are just fine. I’ve always been a person who enjoys not only variety, but a genuine challenge, and current generation MMO games don’t deliver that (I’m looking at you, Blizzard). If a game came out that even began to carve a new path into what massively multiplayer online games are, I would probably give it a fair chance. Until then, I’m going to enjoy the ever-changing Team Fortress 2.

Update: There’s a great GU Comics about the above article.

Update: Aww, nuts. You can find information on how to extract your own files from GCF archives here. Still Alive can be listened to and downloaded from my file repository here.

It has come to my attention that there are still a few links to the old version of this site. As I want to avoid the dreaded 404 error, I will be redirecting those links to this post. If you’re looking for the Portal Song (Still Alive), you can listen to it on YouTube. If you’re looking to extract information from GCF archives, I may cover this when Valve gets around to releasing HL2: EP3.

Sorry for the inconvienience. I lost some data during site migrations.

Just wanted to make a quick post outlining what I’m going to be working on this summer. I think I’m going to be brushing up on my PHP skills. I’d also like to learn a bit more about SVN and source control in general.

In addition, I’ve decided that I’d like to take my other web skills to the next level. I’ll be integrating URL rewriting and new CSS rules into my project. I’ll post more about the project once I’ve determined exactly what it’s going to be.

A recent Cracked article, entitled 5 Terrifying Bastarizations of the Wikipedia Model helped me stumble across Conservapedia today. I briefly glanced through it (most of it isn’t really worth reading), and needless to say, was not at all phased by the extreme bias present in the writing.

Now, I think the concept of collaborative efforts of a group of people towards a common cause is a good idea. It helps them get together and make their side of the story easier to understand for people on the outside. However, like in nature, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Similar to how I would compare the almost sacredness of Wikipedia to the database of hilarity that is Encyclopedia Dramatica (also, interestingly enough, mentioned in the above Cracked article), I will say that Liberapedia is the counterbalance to Conservapedia.

It provides a very lighthearted look at almost the same information, but from a rediculously left-wing outlook. I highly recommend checking out the article on Communism. Even if you’re somebody who can’t (or doesn’t want to) understand politics, at least you can laugh at half-decent satire.

Came across an interesting article today regarding an issue that I’ve experienced regarding the HDTV and video games. It’s fairly easy to understand for people who may not be totally tech savvy, and even provides some tips on how to improve those response times. From personal experience, I’ll say that the Sharp Aquos line of HDTVs has a fairly good set of tools for dealing with the delay. Even in the case of the Nintendo Wii, the games are much more playable than on other brands.

Anyways, on to the article.