Many years ago, I had started a website dealing with trains in video games. Now I’ve finally updated it again, with reviews for Bioshock Infinite and Dishonored. I’ve also changed some other stuff.

Right now I’m wondering whether I’ll implement these changes here, too. In particular, I’m uncertain about the comments. Weeding out the spam used to take a long time, but that vanished when I started with my self-written spam filter. Sadly, that filter is way too strong. It has even killed comments by me at times. So I’m not all that certain about this yet.

It’s been a few weeks now since I played the newest Tomb Raider game, but somehow I forgot writing a review for it. Sorry about that. Here it is!

Reboot

We live in an age of reboots. Batman, Spiderman, James Bond, Star Trek… take your pick. The makers of Tomb Raider decided to get on board that train and made this an origin story. They also decided to call the game simply “Tomb Raider”, making it very annoying to talk about it. TR Reboot, New Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider 9, Tomb Raider (2013)… take your pick.

This game tells us the story of how Lara turned from a meek little girl into the adventurer we know today. This happens by way of stranding her on a pacific island together with a varied bunch of characters (including generic tech guy, generic father figure, generic damsel in distress, Zoe Washburn and Gilderoy Lockhart). She has to figure out an ancient mystery that won’t let her leave, while under attack from the strange island inhabitants. And if that doesn’t feel enough like LOST for you yet, don’t worry, there are also remnants of an old but abandoned research project.

If you read my previous coverage of the game, then you may have realized that I didn’t expect to like the game very much. And I’d say that all the things I criticized and feared are there. But despite all that, and to my great surprise, I ended up really enjoying it. So how does that work?

The Story

The story in itself is nothing special. Lara gets tortured, has to save a damsel in distress (twice), help her friends and get over things like killing a deer or a human being, both of which stop becoming problems for her frighteningly fast.

My first main problem with this was that the game had a story at all. Previous Tomb Raider games had stories, too, but they never seemed really well thought out. In half the games, she causes the apocalypse that she has to prevent in the end. Lara Croft also wasn’t actually a likable character. It’s fun to play as her, but the arrogant rich person wantonly destroying ancient ruins doesn’t exactly feel like someone I’d like to know.

This game managed to turn it around. This Lara feels (and for the first time looks) like a real person, and while I found it hard to take any of the ills that befall her seriously, it’s very rewarding when you see her succeed at something.

The rest of the story is a bit bland, though. Lara’s friends stay boring, and the most they contribute is get into trouble that Lara has to get them out of. It’s clear that Lara cares for them, but not really why. The villain is a very generic villain, with not a lot of redeeming or even interesting characteristics. The biggest issue of the story, though, is something else:

Blood and Gore

This is a game where Lara Croft gets hurt. A lot. She gets pierced by a metal pole right in the first five minutes, and over time manages to get an astounding array of burns, cuts and bruises. The frustrating part is that all of this happens only in cutscenes. In the parts where I’m in full control of Lara, she doesn’t suffer anything. As a result, all these injuries feel fake to me. An annoying side-effect of the injuries is that Lara huffs and puffs like a broken steam engine.

There is one part where, because of severe pain, Lara can’t move fast and any attempt to jump will fail. I love that part, but at the same time, I can’t help but feel that if I had been in control in the previous cutscene, she wouldn’t be in that position to begin with.

Besides that, there is lots of other blood and gore, apparently just there to make sure that the game gets an “18+” rating. It very quickly drops from frightening to silly, especially when Lara falls into a literal underground river of blood. And I though the hall full of severed heads and limbs was over the top. My personal interpretation is that most of this is just clay models and paint, put there by the enemies to spread fear. Otherwise, the maths just doesn’t add up.

Gameplay

But if I want to just watch a good story, I go to a cinema. I play Tomb Raider because I want to play a game, and my big fear was that this game wouldn’t let me. It seems that I was partially right.

There are many, many segments where there is exactly one path to proceed, or the game yanks control from you outright. There are also parts where the game pretends you’re in control, but really, you’re not. For example, when Lara climbs up a radio tower, you press forward to climb. If you press anything else, Lara stops. There’s no way to make her jump off, climb down, or anything else. That is just cheating. The scene is one of the most memorable in the entire game, but since I don’t have control, it doesn’t even begin to approach the fun I had e.g. jumping down the highest mountain in Skyrim.

That being said: The parts where I’m in control are excellent. There are millions of different paths through the environment, different approaches to try, collectibles to gather and so on. There are also nice puzzles, in the form of optional tombs (an odd choice. Will the next Star Trek have optional stars?), although they’re all too short for my liking.

The game has a bit too much fighting, though. Especially during the raid on a temple, there are huge parts where it’s just one fight after the other, with no exploration or puzzle to break it up a bit. Fighting is now cover-based, and you have to aim yourself. I don’t really understand why they need that, but playing on easy, it didn’t bother me too much either.

What I don’t like much is that the game always tries to keep me busy. Collecting an egg somewhere is not a fun little thing, it’s part of an egg poacher challenge. If I hang around too long in one area, the game always tells me what buttons shows where I’m supposed to go next. For every action, I get experience points, which allow me to get skill and weapon upgrades that don’t really do much. It’s certainly a better skill system than Angel of Darkness, but that’s about it.

Multiplayer

The game has a multiplayer mode. I didn’t try it.

Final verdict

The game is oddly split. Parts of it try to tell a huge epic story, and those parts are well executed, but really more a movie than a game. And while they’re good, they’re not very good. On the other hand, large parts of the game are fun open world exploration, something that Tomb Raider should always have had. Those are excellent, and I hope the next game focuses on them more.

There is a lot of hype around JK Rowling’s newest book, “A Casual Vacancy”, her first for adult readers. I bought it, read it and finished it, and I thought I could give some of my opinions.

The book starts with the death of a councilor of a small town somewhere in England, causing what is technically known as a Casual Vacancy. This causes a major stir, since the town has had a long-running dispute over an unwanted housing project that some perceive as a stain on the beautiful town.

It follows the story of several people who all have their own ideas of how to fill the vacant seat, and their own plans that they want to further - whether it is political or simply to annoy others. It also follows some of their children and their friends, whose relationship to their parents is generally not easy.

I think it’s important to point out that this is not a murder mystery. The death is entirely natural. If anything, it’s like Desperate Housewives; a window into the very messed up lives of various people in what seems to be a nice little place.

As expected, the book is well written. At times, it is very funny, and the description of a black comedy certainly fits. The characters are spot-on; if you live in a small town (or a small suburb), there is a good chance that many of the people here will remind you of someone. The plot is not one big confrontation, but rather lots of small, related ones that culminate in one big problem. Much of it is fun and light, but by no means all of it - there is a lot of drug abuse, a parent who beats their children and worse. The contrast is enormous, but fits, because the characters also have a lot of contrast between them.

Social issues are a major point of the book. The book clearly makes a case that the people living in the housing projects are people too; not better or worse, but worthy of care. But claims that this book is a socialist manifesto are just stupid.

But is it…?

But of course, the main question for everyone is: Is it the next Harry Potter? And the answer is clearly no. This isn’t the next Harry Potter. It’s not trying to be the next Harry Potter. In fact, it’s trying very hard not to be Harry Potter.

In place of the hopeful outlook of Harry Potter and the clear black-and-white morality, here you have a lot of characters who are all defect in their own ways. You can establish a ranking if you have too much time, but there is no hero. Some people are more sympathetic than others, but they still have their negative effects on those around them. There is no fantasy in this book; while it’s fictional, it is describing reality¹. The language is at times trying so hard to be mature that it almost feels juvenile, with lots of sexual references thrown in places where you don’t really expect (or need) them. Where Harry Potter has one point of view character, this book has about a dozen. And where Harry Potter is a series, this book has a clear ending. Sequels aren’t impossible, but it doesn’t look as if they’re planned.

Conclusion

It’s a nice little book. I liked reading it, but I probably won’t read it twice. I can recommend it, but I don’t think it warrants all the hype that the media has been trying to make, or for that matter, the special JK Rowling price sticker.

I’m at Gamescom, and apparently the wait for SimCity is two hours. I’m going to use them to write down my thoughts on the Tomb Raider presentation I’ve seen here.

The thing is divided in two parts: First a 45-Minutes presentation, where a Crystal Dynamics employee plays the game for us, and then a section where we can okay the game ourselves. The part we could play was a subset of the things shown in the presentation.

I’ve already said it on Twitter: It’s a nice movie, but the playable parts in between seem a bit pointless. Of course, I’m exaggerating, but the cutscene density in the first part is beyond good and evil. The happen every few hundred meters. Whenever someone radios something in, or something interesting is visible, or Lara defeated a deer, every time there is a cutscene so we know what’s going on. This is less pronounced in a later part of the game that was also shown, but still, the game takes great pain to ensure that anything interesting happens exactly one way and is shown properly.

The most important thing should be the gameplay, but I have nothing to say here, because the demo was very uninteresting. It seems to play exactly like Underworld for the most part, including the clearly marked climb-here points. The bow is easier to use than one might be used to from e.g. Skyrim, which can be confusing - there we quite a few shots that I instinctively didn’t take, even tough they would have probably hit here.

One part I really liked was in the wreck of an American bomber. Lara has barely made it inside, and now it’s about to fall down a cliff. What to do? Lara takes a parachute and jumps out, then glides a bit over the landscape. It’s cool, silly and entirely logical. This is similar to the last action you do in Portal 2, which has the same properties. But in Portal 2, you do it yourself, while in Tomb Rider, Lara makes the decision. That’s disappointing.

There are only bits and pieces of the story, glimpses into a thing whose interesting parts weren’t shown yet. Lara doesn’t like adventures, but then one happens to her, and it changes. This is a clear case where we have to wait for the full game, though.

Speaking about Lara: She sure is noisy. Whenever something new is on screen, she provides a running commentary, so that the voices in her head (I.e. me) know exactly what is going on. And if not that, then it’s sighs and “uffs” and vague expressions of pain. The game does not allow our own character interpretation: All of Lara’s thoughts are clearly announced by her. I’m not too fond of that, but a great story might justify it. Again: Wait and see.

But what really annoys me is how incompetent and whiny Lara is. Sure, she isn’t the hero yet, but a bit more courage and confidence wouldn’t hurt. As it is, I guess it’s supposed to be sympathetic, but she sure puts the pathetic in there. It does not help that she frequently uses the cutscenes to hurt herself by doing something stupid that a player would have prevented. Yes, it is an origin story and reboot, but neither Batman, James Bond nor Captain Kirk where cowards before they became heroes.

In conclusion: I’ve bought all Tomb Raider games and this has given me no reason to break with the tradition. But I’m not too excited about it.

Every once in a while, I’ve written small tools to solve problems I had. Those tools tend to work okay, but they’re too boring for a real release. For the longest time, that meant they sat on my hard drive and went moldy. That wasn’t too good, so now I’ve uploaded some of them on Github.

Currently, it’s three projects. All are for Mac OS X 10.7 (although two might work on 10.6, too). All are available for download in binary and source form. I haven’t picked a license yet, but I really don’t care too much, because none of these tools are that interesting. You will likely not see many big new features, unless they’re necessary to solve a problem of mine, but if you submit a technical issue, I’ll do my best to fix it if I have the time.

Stichwörter

This tool is german only because it was specifically written for three people, all of whom speak german as their first language. If there’s interest, though, I could easily do an english version, too. The goal is to create an index for a book. Yes, Latex might have nice tools for that, but for anything done with real layout programs, you need to create them by hand. This is no fun. This tool presents a simple user interface to take away some of the pain.

https://github.com/cochrane/Stichwoerter

Fanfiction Downloader

Sites like Fanfiction.net offer a lot of bad and a few good stories. I’d like to read the latter kind on my Kindle, but all tools that do that are either on Windows or inconvenient to use. So I wrote my own. The core is a basic screen scraper, which means that I will give absolutely no guarantee for its functionality right now and especially not in the future. That being said, if it were to fail, I’d be annoyed, too, so expect problems to be fixed fairly quickly.

https://github.com/cochrane/Fanfiction-Downloader

Tomb Raider 2 Settings

Since a few months ago, the best Tomb Raider game of all time, Tomb Raider 2 (from 1997), is available on the Mac App Store. That’s awesome, but sadly there is no way to tweak the resolution or set some of the very arcane settings this game admits without manually diddling with Plist files. To make this a bit easier, this tool offers a quick and simple UI for all important and many unimportant settings.

https://github.com/cochrane/TR2Settings

So Opera is planning to parse -webkit- prefixes in CSS, and everybody is crying out. From a practical point of view, though, it is a very good idea. Right now, CSS developers that want to take advantage of experimental properties have to write the same code up to four times with different prefixes (-webkit-, -moz-, -ms-, -o-). That is a horrible, horrible idea. It is made worse by the fact that CSS knows no variables or constant definitions, so you have to change all values in all four places, but that’s another issue.

From a more idealistic point of view, however, this is bad: The prefixed properties are supposed to be experimental only. By “blessing” the Webkit versions, Opera is encouraging bad coding practices, and if Opera isn’t 100% compatible with Webkit, then chaos will ensue.

There is an argument that people should simply not use properties that have vendor-specific prefixes in production. But that is unrealistic. The properties are there to be used. If not, browser developers would make it a lot harder to get access to them (for example by supporting them only in nightly builds).

OpenGL extensions

It is interesting to compare this to the situation with OpenGL, another technology where development is driven almost entirely by vendor-specific extensions. OpenGL is a graphics library specification. If vendors (those include mostly the graphics card manufacturers and Apple) wants to add functionality, they can create an extension. All the specifications have a vendor-specific tag in the names of the functions and constants they use, e.g. NV for Nvidia, AMD, ATI, APPLE or INTEL. If a vendor wants to implement something new, all they have to do is write a specification for the extension and then implement it, using their own names¹.

The interesting part is that OpenGL also has two special prefixes: EXT for extensions shared by several vendors, and ARB for extensions that have been approved by the Architecture Review Board and thus become official. ARB extensions often become a core feature in the next OpenGL version. A good example for that is the rectangle texture extension. It was created by Nvidia as GL_NV_texture_rectangle. Because it was useful, other vendors implemented it as well, and thus it was moved to GL_EXT_texture_rectangle. Finally, it arrived as GL_ARB_texture_rectangle. As of OpenGL 2.1, it is part of the core OpenGL specification.² All of this is fully downwards compatible, because while the names have changed, the specification hasn’t, and it is trivial for one implementation to support all historical and new names.

Different vendors can implement different extensions that do the same thing, but are incompatible. The final ARB specification can be different again. As an example, for synchronization, you can choose between GL_APPLE_fence, GL_NV_fence or the standardized, but very different, GL_ARB_sync.

Note that the move to EXT and ARB does not have to happen: Any vendor can implement anyone else’s extension, based on the official specification. It is just very common to move it to EXT.

In CSS

How can this be adapted to CSS? First of all, there should be a shared experimental prefix. I support -ext-, because of the OpenGL background, but others prefer -beta-, which may be a bit more obvious. The second important part is that anyone who has an extension has to write a specification for it, so that other browsers can implement it as well, if they choose to. The specification for -beta- can then state that it is identical to one or more previous vendor-specific extensions.

The end result is very similar to the Alpha-Beta system proposed, but keeps the vendor-specific syntax for experimentation, and offers a way to specifically say that a beta version is compatible with a browser-specific one.

What do you think?

Es ist beschlossen: Dass neue Semesterticket für die RWTH Aachen kostet 104,80€ im Semester, der Vertrag hat eine Laufzeit von drei Jahren (mit fixem Preis) und als Neuerung kann man jetzt zusätzlich Freunde oder Familie am Wochenende und am Abend mitnehmen. Ich hatte unter Twitter live über die Sitzung des Studierendendparlaments berichtet, auf der dies beschlossen wurde. Nun ist etwas Zeit vergangen, und ich möchte das ganze noch mal kurz zusammenfassen und bewerten.

Die Konditionen

Zuerst die wichtigsten Daten: Das Ticket gibt es ab Sommersemester 2012. Der Geltungsbereich ist wie gewohnt: Alles in NRW, und die Buslinien der ASEAG (bzw. im Auftrag der ASEAG) nach Vaals und Kelmis, sowie all die ganzen Zusatzgebiete für das NRW-Tickets. Der Grundpreis beträgt 102,42€ und ist für die gesamte Laufzeit des Vertrags fix. Dazu kommen im ersten Jahr (also Sommersemester 2012 und Wintersemester 2012/13) noch 2,38€ für die Personenmitnahme, für einen gesamten Preis von 104,80€.

Personenmitnahme

Unter dem sperrigen Punkt versteckt sich, dass man jemand anderen ohne Aufpreis mitnehmen kann. Dies gilt Werktags ab 19:00 und an Samstagen, Sonntagen und Feiertagen, aber nur im AVV-Bereich (ob hier die internationalen Buslinien dazu gehören weiß ich nicht. Ich habe einen E-mail an den AStA geschickt, aber dass der noch nicht geantwortet hat verwundert sicher nicht).

Dies ist in der Laufzeit begrenzt bis einschließlich Wintersemester 12/13. Im Sommersemester wird eine Studie über die Nutzung dieser Mitnahme angefertigt; danach kann sich das Studienparlament neu entscheiden (tut es dies nicht, dann endet die Vereinbarung automatisch). Von den Kosten für die Studie trägt die Studierendenschaft ein Drittel, aber gedeckelt auf 3500€.

Unabhängig davon können bis zu drei Kinder von sechs bis zwölf Jahren kostenlos mitgenommen werden, für die ganze Laufzeit des Tickets (Kinder unter sechs fahren eh kostenlos im AVV). Eine kuriose Bedingung die wohl von der FH gefordert wurde, aber für umsonst werde ich mich nicht darüber beklagen.

Die Verhandlung

Im Nachhinein kann man nur sagen: Der AVV hat gewonnen. Das neue Ticket ist tatsächlich sogar etwas teurer als das Angebot, dass im Dezember 2011 einstimmig vom Studierendenparlament abgelehnt wurde (hat dafür aber eben auch die Personenmitnahme). Die lange Begründung für die Ablehnung, die die Allgemeine Fachschaftsliste (AlFa) veröffentlichte und die sogar noch mal ausgedruckt an alle Gäste verteilt wurde, ist letztlich ungehört geblieben. Dass der AVV jetzt etwas weniger Geld durch die Personenmitnahme kriegt (früher waren wohl 5€/Semester im Gespräch) wiegt da sicher nicht so schwer.

Natürlich hatte das Studierendenparlament am Ende keine andere Wahl, wie auch das sehr eindeutige Ergebnis (39 Ja-Stimmen, eine Enthaltung, ein Nein) zeigte, und persönlich finde ich das Angebot auch immer noch sehr, sehr gut für die Leistung. Aber sollten die Listen bei der nächsten Wahl zum Studierendenparlament behaupten, dies sei ein Erfolg für sie gewesen, dann würde ich das nicht so stehen lassen.

Interessanterweise wurde dies auch bei der Sitzung größtenteils ausgeblendet. Bis auf eine Dame (Sorry, ich habe mir hier die Namen nicht gemerkt), die dafür sehr insistierte, nahmen die meisten das Grundangebot als gegeben hin und debattierten vor allem über Sinn oder Unsinn der Personenmitnahme. Die Argumente dafür und dagegen waren größtenteils die selben: Es ist billiger als selbst eine Einzelfahrt (bzw. 3 Einzelfahrten innerhalb der City-XL-Zone), aber andererseits sicher kein unverzichtbarer Bestandteil der studentischen Mobilität. Nur ein MSP erwähnte, dass die Preisersparnis durchaus relativ ist: So lange mir meine Freunde nicht Geld für die Mitbenutzung des Tickets zahlen, spare ich ja eigentlich nichts.

Persönlich denke ich, dass die Personenmitnahme ein unnützer Luxus ist. Auf der anderen Seite: Wenn sie schon mal da ist, werde ich sie auch einsetzen, und ich denke schon dass ich die 2,38€ im Semester wieder raushole. Wenn zum Beispiel meine Eltern zu besuch sind, fahren wir oft am Wochenende mit dem Auto in die Aachener Innenstadt. Mit dem neuen Ticket müssen wir das nicht mehr zwingend tun.

Neue Bahnstrecken

Ein Punkt, der mir am Rande auffiel: Herr Sistenich vom AVV wurde immer mal wieder gefragt, was der AVV denn so für Verbesserungen plane. Abgesehen von sehr vagen Aussagen zu mehr Nachtbussen führte er immer wieder die Bahnstrecke nach Heinsberg und den Ringbahnschluss an. Beide Projekte sind für mich als Bahnfan sehr interessant, aber der Nutzen für Studenten ist eher fragwürdig.

Wurmtalbahn

Die Bahnstrecke Heinsberg-Lindern, auch bekannt als Heinsberger Bahn oder jetzt vor allem Wurmtalbahn ist ein sehr interessantes Projekt der Reaktivierung, besonders da die Strecke elektrifiziert wird. Da aber nur 200 Studenten in Heinsberg wohnen, bringt es nicht wirklich viel. Natürlich wird Heinsberg damit interessanter als Studentenschlafort, aber diese Aufwertung ist nicht die Aufgabe des Semestertickets. Nebenbei liefert das geplante Flügelzugkonzept (zwei Triebwagen Baureihe 425 fahren in Aachen los und werden in Lindern getrennt; einer fährt nach Heinsberg, einer nach Krefeld) mehr Sitzplätze im Abschnitt Aachen-Lindern, aber ob die so dringend gebraucht werden? Tatsächlich klingt die Sitzplatzzahl für mich arg übertrieben; ein 426er (nur halb so lang) sollte es nach Heinsberg auch tun.

Ringschluss

Der Wiederaufbau der Strecke Alsdorf-Stolberg bindet Würselen ins Euregiobahn-Netz ein und bietet die Möglichkeit, Züge von Stolberg über Aachen, Herzogenrath, Alsdorf und Würselen wieder nach Stolberg fahren zu lassen (wo sie die Fahrrichtung ändern müssten für die nächste Runde). Nette Sache, aber man muss auch sagen: Die neue Strecke umfährt Aachen und die RWTH in einem weiten Bogen. Für Würselener wäre die Reise mit der Bahn zum Aachener Westbahnhof bestenfalls genauso schnell wie mit dem Bus zu fahren. Die Strecke dient Leuten, die durch die StädteRegion fahren wollen, aber nicht Pendlern die in die Aachener Innenstadt oder eben zur RWTH wollen.

Beide Projekte sind Sachen, auf die der AVV sicher Stolz sein kann, aber ein echter Vorteil für die Studenten entsteht hier nicht. Im Umkehrschluss heißt das auch: Die Projekte würden und werden auch ohne Studenteninteresse entstehen; es macht also keinen Sinn die Studenten hier überdurchschnittlich an der Finanzierung zu beteiligen.

Fazit

Mit dem neuen Semesterticket hat letztlich der AVV die Verhandlungen gewonnen. Weder auf der Preis- noch auf der Angebotsseite gab es echte Verbesserungen. Die Personenmitnahme ist kein schlechtes Trostpflaster, aber eben auch nicht mehr als das. Mich stört es nicht, denn das Ticket bleibt ja immer noch enorm günstig. Aber letztlich haben Studierendenparlament und AStA nicht die großen Ankündigungen erfüllen können, die es nach dem Ablehnen des letzten Angebots gab.