Limping over the Line

I'll admit I'm not actually sure when I last posted something. All kinds of excuses are possible, Burr essentially the problem is my wife went back to work this week, making me a full time daddy again, and that's hard work. So last night, after I had got both the kids to bed, wiped up all the spills and smears and dirty dishes and tidied away all the toys, all I wanted to was play Lego Batman 2 for a bit and go to bed. And eat sugar puffs, but that's a different issue.

I have several things I want to write about. The ethics of sporting competitions such as Formula 1 taking place in countries with dodgy human rights records, the incredible power of Kickstarter, comparing recent campaigns on that site I have followed and contributed to, and how ridiculous atheists sound when they write off creationists are all ideas I have been mulling over.

Right now though, both my kids are asleep there is a great tennis march on the tele and I'm going to gave some sugar puffs and some rest.

Chest Scan Time

So this evening I went to hospital for an x-ray ray. The reason - I have had a persistent cough for at least two months now and this is an early symptom of lung or oesophageal cancer. Yep, when I said this blog would be full of all sorts of stuff, I meant it.

There has even been a public awareness campaign recently in the UK about it. In fact,I was sitting at some traffic lights, just thinking about how this stupid cough had dragged on for weeks and weeks when I saw one of the adverts.

I have had a check up with the GP, who thinks I am fine, but referred me for an x-ray any way, just to be sure.

I haven't coughed up any blood and there has been no rapid weight loss (if only there was!). I had a genuine cold/cough that led to me actually losing my voice to begin with as well. But - there's always a chance. I did smoke for many years and grew up in a smoking household too.

Its always better to know for sure. Chest cancers are often very treatable and survivable if caught early on. My mother was diagnosed with liver cancer about this time last year - that was untreatable and she was dead within weeks of the diagnosis. I don't know if she could have been helped by an earlier diagnosis but lung cancer certainly can be. As frightening as it is to make the appointments for the GP and the hospital, getting seen early is important.

The thing now is a two week wait for the results. These will be sent to my GP who will contact me if they see anything. If the scan is negative, i.e. nothing found, they don't contact you. So now I'm faced with waiting, with some small amount of anxiety, realistically until the end of month. If I haven't heard anything by August, I'll know I'm in the clear. Fingers crossed then...

Galaxy Note: One Month Later

I've had the Note for a few weeks now, so its time for a re-review. A lot of the points I will make here will probably come across as criticisms. This is not intended in any way to rubbish the phone though. Its just a natural consequence of having discovered more of its limitations through use and experiment.

In fact, the Galaxy Note is a really really good phone. I'll stand by all the points I made in my initial impressions review. It is a very convenient size, very powerful, and very user friendly. Possibly even more so since updating to Android 4.0 on Sunday night. But it is probably that power thing that is the real flaw in the machine.

The battery life on this thing is dangerously low. And, by 'dangerously', I mean if you take your phone out and about all day and use the net or listen to music as you go there is a pretty good chance of running out of juice. Yesterday, for example, I unplugged my phone from its charger at 10am and got in a train for London. I affluent a few hits walking round the ships, almost always listening to music. I may have looked at a dozen pages on the net at lunchtime along with checking in on Facebook. I got back home at around 5 at which point I got my first 'low battery' warning. By the time I plugged it back into a charger at about 9pm the battery was down to 1%.

According to the phone itself, around a third of my power usage that day was down to the internet access. Another third went on display. Knowing how I used my phone all day, these numbers seem 'questionable'. But, whatever the cause, its still a real shock to find my fully charged phone could barely make it through a day of usage.

Full days out like that, with no access to a power point, are a rarity for me. And I could probably buy a bigger, better battery. But I shouldn't have to, really. This phone guzzles power - watching video while recharging slows the process down so much, at one point I wondered if it was actually discharging the battery.

But, let's assume toy do have a full power pack.How much fun is the Note to use? Honestly, a lot.

Samsung's Swype is a lot easier to use than it was on the Tab, and it was already a really really user-friendly experience then. You only have to tap once on wrongly typed words to get a list of likely alternatives and adding new words to the dictionary is a one-tap thing too.

The screen still feels too small for a fun video experience for me. But as I mentioned in my first impressions, I am coming from having the Tab's massive screen. I suspect most people will find the Note's screen a great improvement on their old mobile's.

Coupled with Evernote, the Note is, appropriately enough, excellent for writing on. The use of the stylus gives a much more precise feel to using the onscreen keyboard to a point where I can write on the Note amost as fast as I can using pen and paper. Not as fast as I can type, granted, but still easily fast enough to make taking actual notes and even writing blog posts like this one very practical.

There are a couple of things the Tab could do that got left out of the Note's specs for unknown reasons.

For one thing, not every screen rotates to landscape. The home screens don't and its kind of annoying when you have your phone on a desk stand to watch videos but then switch out to check an email and have to turn your head sideways to figure out where and what your icons are. This Phablet really wants to be treated like a phone.

I had planned to record some video on my trip to London yesterday, then edit it together and post it here so I could talk more about how easy the bundled software is to use. Sadly, it rained so hard, all through the day, I literally had to buy an umbrella in order to not just get thoroughly soaked and miserable. Suffice to say though, based on previous experiments, it really is easy and the stylus helps an awful lot. There are ins and outs, tricks and shortcuts to learn, of course. But that is always the case and I look forward to working with it on better weathered days.

All in all then, my enthusiastic first impressions have not been tempered by time. The Note is a great little (big) phone with oodles of power and features. It does take a lot of power though, so its possibly not the first choice device for people travelling off the grid. But, for writers, bloggers, artists and video makers, it includes a lot of great features and abilities and should definitely be tried.

Diablo 3 is Ten Years Old

So I wrote briefly last night about why Diablo 3 sucks after a certain point. Here, I will elaborateon why Diablo feels more like a game from ten years ago than one that took ten years to make.

More eloquent bloggers then me have broken down the main areas in which the game is lacking. My biggest problem is that eventually the game simply becomes a sequence of corpse runs, slowly whittling down Elite mobs, before getting to some really hard boss fights.

Take the session I played this morning. I was in a group of three -my level 55 witch doctor,a wizard and a barbarian - slogging through the desert, looking for the constituent parts of Zoltan Kulle.

On our way to the first cave with the first part inside, we encountered three different Elites and their associated mobs of demons. We each died half a dozen times on each encounter. Each death required a corpse run back from the last checkpoint - a minimum of twenty seconds for each run. Eventually the last screaming beastie would be vaporised and we would collect our loot, get repaired if necessary, then move on. To the next sequence of deaths and reincarnations.

The fact is that death, for most of the game, is nothing more than an inconvenience, a waste of time and an inconsequential amount of gold. Maybe we died a lot because we sucked, didn't know the best way to beat the mobs or play or classes. But, even if that is true, it doesn't matter. Blizzard wants you to win - eventually -and, most importantly, keep playing.

Sometimes these little battles become farcical.

After a while the wizard got tired of the cycle of dying, running, and repairing, and left me and the barbarian in a cave with a spider mini-boss.  This thing and it's minions were vampiric and molten, meaning they dropped piles of magma on the ground and regenerated health. So we had to kite them a lot, to the point where they were all the way back at the entrance of the cave, waiting for us each time we reincarnated. And so they then had to be kitted all the way back into the cave so wet could at least get into it safely.

So, not only are these fights are not only boring, repetitive cycles, with no real incentive to learn or change ones's approach, they are often frustrating and nonsensical (don't even get me started on 'arcane sentries' - why on Sanctuary would spiders have the ability to summon magical laser orbs?).

The really weird thing is these mini-bosses are actually intended as the main draw to keep people playing the game. Blizzard has stated that 'this is our game', that loot will often be better from these random spawns than from the scripted Boss encounters because they don't want players such in a loop of just killing Diablo again and again in the hopes of getting good loot.

So Blizzard does note want players to come up with the best groups and strategies to defeat the toughest noses in the game. They just want us to endlessly grind through random spawn after random spawn, dying and whittling, dying and whittling, again and again - for what? To do the whole thing at a higher difficulty setting.

This whole set up reminds me of the endless loop World of Warcraft has become since its first expansion. Skills, both gaming and social, used to be necessary to get the best gear, are the most exciting content. Then these things were phased out in favour of grinding currency and random groups where noone speaks to each other. But at least WoW fights still require a rudimentary understanding of your class and the enemy, rather than a willingness to just keep running back into the encounter and do enough incremental damage to eventually kill something.

WoW, it seems, has reached its peak and shown us the limits of popularity for a game structured that way. Its as if the development team for Diablo 3 had not paid any attention to lessons WoW's subscribers are offering.

In todays gaming world you just cannot expect to put costumers on an endless treadmill of gaming and expect them to keep on grinding through the same content again and again in the hopes of getting that piece of loot that had slightly better stats or is slightly more interesting to look at. It is no longer a novel experience - Everquest, WoW, and so many other games have been experienced and played and written about. A lot. And there are so many other competing games and experiences on the market today that just didn't exist in the heyday of Diablo 2 and WoW. Blizzard, it seems, has failed to adapt.

Blizzard would not be the first giant of the business world to be sunk simply because of an inability to change with the times and adapt to new ones and it surely wouldn't be the last.

All of this is, of course, just my opinion of a game that had only been out for two weeks. There are still features, notably pvp arenas, to be added. Expansion packs with whole new levels of content are not inconceivable and might include bosses it its actually worth fighting. Even the current content could be tweaked onto a more worthwhile and meaningful experience.

But, for now, Diablo 3, a game ten years in the making, feels like one that has ignored gaming for the last decade. It is a relic of another era, where grinding for loot and online play was novel. Its structure, the cental mechanic of the game, repeated play for better gear, just leaves players feeling used and bored and wondering what else they could be doing with their time and money.

Two Weeks Later: Diablo 3

Well, I had written several hundred words on how Diablo 3 falls apart at higher difficulty levels and is basically a transparent 'hamster-wheel' of a game, designed as nothing less than another cash cow for Blizzard-Activision . But then my wife called me and that wiped all I had done from the Note's memory.

So let's just say Diablo 3 is polished but disappointing in the long run. And there is a small design flaw in either the Blogger app or the Galaxy Note...