I need a name though. Recently I found how software testing often is like going to a doctor, so I wanted to go with The Clinic. But guess what, that and everything close is taken and probably copyrighted to death.

So I thought about witty wordplays, hmm, like Necessarily Evil or Defect Management. Anything that’s original and not copyrighted or at least utterly trivial. It just need some kind of relation to software testing, programming or company culture.

What do you think of my ideas – and more importantly, do you have any better ones?

Saving the galaxy is hard work. Ignorant, whiny people cry for my help wherever I go. Sometimes, you have to roll the hard six. On my last trip, I let the rachni queen live, and the krogan. I played games with a self-aware console.

No more games. The council had to die to make space for human advancement. I was dead and it wasn’t an experience I want to go through again. I wear my scars with pride for they show what we endured to accomplish survival. No man or alien is going to hold me back, let alone order me or my loyal, hardened crew around – illusive or not. Sometimes a boot to the head is all the universe can understand. So be it.

…

It lived for 26 episodes in total, that’s 11 more than Firefly. The trend is right, but Mr. Whedon, can you pick up the pace, pretty please? Want more.

“When you’re a fool in life and all hope is lost, friends will be friends”

Being a single is not the worst thing on earth.

It is actually possible to live a fulfilled life without ever owning an iPhone.

When you as much as brush my skin with a semi-sharp object like a fingernail, it looks as if I had barely survived a fight with a giant panda no more than five minutes later.

Controlling any 1st person shooter with a gamepad is unnatural.

Bringing a knife to a gunfight can still have its advantages, for example when they miss you and run out of bullets.

I like my hands more than I like my feet.

Mace Windu had it coming.

I usually don’t swear a lot. Okay, that’s not true in the sense of … oh fuck it, I’ve been an annoying office mate these days. Complaining about everything, but then I still think there’s been a lot to complain about! Deutsche Bahn (no need to explain…), unstable test systems at work, less-than-considerate colleagues, the Deutsche Post (no need to explain…), my bank, my eye doctor, and many others. Most of all though my own inaptitude to accept and forget about the countless small nuisances.

Usually I’m a rather relaxed type of guy, but the last couple days I’ve felt very much alive – and angry. It’s the perfect time to start a new project. Or to get up early. It’s scary, I gotta tone down my inner rage next week or else my colleagues will flee the office or start throwing things. Back to witty remarks.

Maybe I should start drinking smoking playing an MMO … I have no idea. It’s probably gonna be over when the temperatures are above Zero again. Superconductive brains, maybe, or something.

…

CrispyGamer will no longer publish comics. Go read Backwards Compatible as long as it’s still on there.

Bayonetta is everything I hate about Japanese action games. Yes, you may call me conservative, boring and European, but I like stories and characters that make sense, thank you very much. The graphics are technically up-to-date. However I can’t stand the style, or the  walking/running/fighting animations. And the music is unbearable.

Dante’s Inferno is a God Of War clone (and that coming from someone who has never played GOW) with some terribly obnoxious design problems. Timed scripts that you can’t know to be timed the first time you play are always an endless supply of agony, especially when the checkpoint of course lies before the last horde of imps you slew. I won the boss fight in the demo by holding Block 98% of the time. And it’s not even that pretty.

I think I’ll wait for the God Of War 3 trilogy ultimate HD prestige collection edition or whatever they’ll call it.

Oh the demo for Lost Planet 2 was dull at first, but the boss fight really was a giant boss fight – you could get swallowed – and keep fighting inside. Shame I didn’t understand the rest, is that a single player, skirmish, coop, or multiplayer only game?

***Spoiler alert***
Ok I can’t help but ask. If all human technology failed close to that holy glowy tree place, how come the avatar connection still worked?
***Spoilers alert***

In this day and age, it is altogether rare that a movies’ story and emotional resonance can match the level of the special effects. And Avatar is definitely one of those rare few.

When my party of four sword and magic-wielding weirdoes left whatsitsname-forest, there was no single living being left to find. All bears, spiders, bandits, wannabe orcs exterminated, the last herb harvested. And none of them will ever return.

The forest wasn’t very lively to begin with, despite the beautifully orchestrated ambient sounds. No D&D inspired squirrels. Its size seemed rather underwhelming too, and its tracks narrow, the boundaries of where my band of tragic figures could step rather artificial-feeling. And its texture … a little lo-fi.

The last thing I could do away with by installing a high-definition textures pack, which luckily did not have any impact on my frame rate. But that didn’t help with my hero’s long-breathed companions in arms. They just won’t stop talking. Like, ever. The game’s a nightmare for any honest borderline OCD personality. I have to check every dialog option. And every single crate, box, book, bookstand, … it hurts my brains if there is a strongbox which I cannot open due to my guy’s “insufficient skills”. It makes me swear. There could be great loot in there. And I can’t get to it. It doesn’t help either that the other rogue in my party consistently offers “Let me try, maybe I can help” every single time my adequately specced hero fails to open a lock. Because that character does not have any lock picking skills at all. I really wonder what my neighbors think when they hear me shout angrily “No, you can not, fuck head” every once in a while.

Right, that’s one accomplice to hate, but there are many. They are so witty, and thoughtful, and full of stories ohmegoshwillyoucometothepointalready – and there are the romance options. That should make them dear to your heart, flirting with them and all. If there wasn’t the “like-meter”. Your “friends” like or “dislike” you for your actions, however, they tend to react slightly erratic at times. Ok so they are just humans … elves … whatever, so that is bound to happen. But you influence them most by giving them gifts. So, just like in real life, you quick save, give them a gift, see if they like it enough, and if not, you reload, rinse, repeat. You gotta do it …. you want romance! Move the like-indicator from left to allllll right and bang! – you get a demure American-friendly sex scene. Still covered in blood from your last decapitation finishing move.

At least that’s what I hope I’ll get, ’cause apparently I’m not very popular amongst my friends. Maybe that’s because I kill them too often. In some random and insanely difficult encounter. Which you can only win by pausing time every half second to give new orders to the imbeciles, which basically turns the game into a very nice 3D slide show.

Now I’ve found a mod which lets me respec my hopelessly slow leveling insufficiently skilled lock cracker sociopath wannabe romancer. The fights are less painful now. But deciphering the stats bores me, the like-meter separates my real me from my henchmen companions, I never wanted to be a Grey Warden in the first place, and the pseudo-orcs can have all the Deep Mushrooms I have found in the biggest treasure chests (more than the mushroom kingdom and the smurfs together could ever dream up). Oh, and I hate DLC.

Jade Empire had me, Mass Effect had me. Dragon Age has something, maybe my OCD, but not my soul. Right. Now I have a dwarven kingdom to rescue, some heads to bash in, another gift to find for the bard, and Zevran to tell that No, he cannot try to open the fucking chest himself.

In other news I got mail from the public prosecutor’s office today. Not what you think – I always pay my speeding tickets. Or I would. If I drove a car. And too fast. I’m really trying, but so far I have never managed to get any of those photo boxes flash me on my bike. No, it was about the credit card fraud thing back in spring, where some money was stolen from my card through PayPal. Police actually managed to find somebody to indict (not that I heard about any prosecution going on, or I was asked any questions). But, there was a proceeding and it was dismissed now for lack of evidence. Can’t say I’m surprised. The money was covered by insurance, of course, like all credit card money with no signature.

After a looooong odyssey through many able and unable post worker’s hands, I finally got my yearly Christmas feel good package, complete with cake, cookies, and tons of chocolate. My “Oh just a little bit more” mom makes sure I won’t a) be w/o at least some Christmas spirit and b) ever reach my target weight. And I’m not too proud to say “Luv you, too, mom!”

That being said, I haven’t played anything at all in the last two weeks, problems with my eyes when sitting in front of a screen for too long.

That includes Modern Warfare 2. The over-the-top single player feels a tad bit ridiculous, but the multiplayer is fun. Well, since I cannot select the maps I want to play, the matchmaking constantly forces me to play against groups of people 40 ranks above me, and I fear for the worst come the – probably costly – map packs, I can’t see me playing this for very long.

Christmas is approaching at an alarming rate. Already bought the train ticket home, but still had trouble getting one of the cheaper tickets. The pricing policy of Deutsch Bahn is as annoying and illogical as always. Amazon wish lists get sent back and forth, self-made cookie rations are announced, holiday plans finalized. The worst of all? Christmas markets. If it wasn’t for the Glühwein, I’d never set a foot on one. And this year not even that is gonna help it much, it having 17 degrees outside, and mostly rain. Climate crises or not, it just feels wrong somehow.

In other news I am thinking about launching a new, separate web site. Not a private one, but one covering my profession: Software Testing. It can’t hurt having some profile on the intarwebs, and there’s really not that many sites out there, the testing community is a small one. The big sites all talk about the theoretical stuff which is nice and all, but simply just that: theoretical. Since my company is trying new stuff, I have a few things I could talk about. Obviously I have to consider very carefully what I can write about without compromising any internal stuff, so I’m not sure yet if I’ll really try this.

So, my sister is going to come visit in a couple hours. First Christmas market of the year. I’d say last, too, but you know the old Klingon saying: Never say it’s the last as long as there’s still blood wine in the keg and a human alive.

Bruges was very … historic. No, honestly, Bruges is great: Okay, so you have seen old churches, old houses and old places before – haha, we’d just come from Brussels. But you haven’t seen a town which is so consistently old – err, historically valuable – until you’ve seen Bruges. Every single stone on every single corner and in every single wall is so picturesque, it feels like, laden with culture and history – it’s pretty incredible. Many tourists (like us) for November, but never too many to make it unbearable.

It took us forever to find the hotel – hint of the day: Bring a map. Tiny one-way galore, and my GPS didn’t show any streets in the Old Town – the map just stopped at the outer city limits. Hotel was alright, the people were very nice and helpful. Gave us a map. Lifesavers. And gave us a coupon thing which would have granted us cheaper entrance fees. If we hadn’t immediately forgotten about it because we were so tired.

Alright, the weather sucked at first, it but got better in the end (compare below).

We actually managed to get along with English and some German – phew for me, no need trying to resurrect my long-dead French. Though I was surprised to see again how much I remembered when reading signs etc.

We took the obligatory boat trip and on the way I tried to find the sights from the movie (In Bruges, duh). Bruges at night is quite a sight, too. We ended up in an Irish pub where I spent my last bucks on single malt and we listened to live music and watched the surprisingly large local Irish community.

On the way back home we stopped in Gent. Also a very nice town, but unfortunately, undergoing extensive repairs right now. Hence the large density of construction sites all across town. We enjoyed ourselves nonetheless.

A fortress, right in the middle of the city – those guys really meant business back in the day.

In case you are wondering: We brought sweets. Belgian chocolate, y’know. Every third shop in Bruges was an exquisite chocolate shop…every second sold waffles. It’s kinda unfair, when you walk through town and it smells delicious everywhere. We also tried Belgian beer, and Belgian fries, of course – couple hundred variants yet to go, though.

What else, let’s see … history lesson: terrorism of the 70ies in Germany. Heavy Metal. Batman. My 15 yo. electric shaver broke (they knew how to build stuff back in the nineties…). Delicious scones. Quiet week.

So yeah I got me Windows 7 (I’m an early adopter by nature) and I used the oppurtunity to clean up my PC. Changed my hard drive setup, switched to a RAID 1 to allow my two old, slow disks some extra read speed. Of course write speed is still as slow, but you can’t have it all, can you. RAID 0? Naaah those things are too old. If one of them dies, I’ll just use the chance to reinstall freshly again.

Of course when I tried to install my new drive for storage and backups, I found out I couldn’t use it because the graphics card effectively blocked the free SATA ports. After 2 hours running to the store, getting one of those flat, 90-degree cables (10€, goes for 40 cents on Amazon! Fucking rip-off) I found out my RAID controller did not allow using RAID on one of the other SATA ports I was using. So I had to choose between my DVD drive and the new hard disk. Or buy another cable. Long story short, BIOS update solved the problem, after five hours of searching. My new-found love for consoles always gets a boost when something like that happens.

My sister spent a night here – made me get up real early, on a Saturday, grrr… but we had a lot of fun with the Brutal Legend, Dirt 2 and Little Big Planet demos. I really need a second controller. But hey, need some new ideas for Christmas presents now, there’s one.

Update: Wrote this with Windows Live Writer. Hm gotta say, not bad. If you could set up basic rules in Live Mail, I might actually switch from Thunderbird, too. Windows is finally becoming useful, and not only for games. In fact: the Games Explorer still sucks.

So says Keanu Reeves in The Day The Earth Stood Still, a solid yet totally uninspired and ultimately irrelevant movie with a flat start, a flat middle part and a flat ending.

Twin brother of Jumper? Hayden “I am your father” Christensen plays a teenage-looking teleporter hunted by the properly undefined “Paladins” headed by Samuel L. “Still hate him for killing me in that other movie” Jackson. I almost feel guilty saying it, but I actually enjoyed watching this for its pop-corn value. In the end the story’s so flat you could wrap it around Darth Vader’s helmet thrice, but at least it tries to be original. To bad that you have to do, or do not, since there is no ‘try’.

John “61 and still grinding people into mincemeat with my machine gun” Rambo is a hand-made classic action flick of which Stallone (director, actor, writer) himself says it was “possibly the last movie made that way” with real stunts, not so much green screen and no modern 3D crap the kids are into so much today. Simply Good vs. Evil, barely touched by a plot, naive, adult entertainment. Blood and gore yippie ki-yay. Too bad that in some scenes some advanced post-pro would have been good. Some things just looked weird so I ran a frame-by-frame and yessir, on Blu-ray you see everything. Puppets get ’sploded, you can see poor effects painted over, decals copied-in, fake blood, people vanishing from one frame to the next. Old school stuff. Somehow tho, it fits the movie.

Played the demo of Brütal Legend. Guys, can you pleeeease stop it now? There is no way I can pay for or find the time to play all these brilliant games. I’ll let you know when you can go on releasing the next. Thanks.

It even finds faces in paintings, in comics, on billboards in the background, on statues, when they are over or underexposed or blurred, or half-hidden behind another face or obstacle. Or in screen shots from games, non-human faces even (a Wookie from Star Wars Galaxies!). Multiple faces in one photo are no problem, it finds them all. After confirming some by comfortably selecting the right person from your address book (or adding a new one), it also becomes pretty good at identifying who it is in the picture, though still far from perfect.

But we still don’t have to be afraid of machines taking over Terminator-style any time soon. It also identified as faces: clouds, a book shelf, a blurry sign, a face of a building, garden furniture, a wall, a window, and a perfectly clear and well-lit lamp post.

It doesn’t look as if Jumpgate Evolution would be released, or even reach open beta status, any time soon. We FS have been waiting on it for years, and most of us would have been happy only to get the same old game with nicer graphics and a bigger community. Of course a modern, large-scale MMO that pays off financially for the developers needs a little more and apparently it’s turned out to be a little too much for Netdevil. I guess they cannot afford another failure like Auto Assault… They post news, visit shows like GamesCom and PAX, … but the momentum is waning. Though an MMO would totally ruin my schedule, I’d still like to see this fly, and succeed.

Oh any if they wait too long it’s gonna look old again – like last time. It’s pretty enough now and runs on smaller boxes but the hardware market never stops evolving.

Battlefield 2 is back. It’s the one old game everyone we got on board can play on their computers. We have yet to get more than 3 people together, but if we can get this started we could have some cool games. We even have your own server. Downloading the countless mods again took forever. And then finding out that most of them are dead was a disappointment, though not really a surprise. I think I’ll settle with AIX.

What else … I saw GI Joe and I wish I hadn’t … I wanna see District 9, like, real bad. Gotta talk a workmate into it tomorrow.

The latest iPod OS update 3.1.1 broke my earphone volume control and mic. Greaaaaaat.