Would you play this game?

Among many others, one thing that sets the Xbox 360 apart from other home entertainment consoles today is the Achievement system. For years past, we've been able to brag about our accomplishments in video games, but there really hasn't been any way to consistently prove this. Computers have screen recorders, but none are very reliable. You can record gaming footage from a console, but there's no way to prove you did it, as opposed to having downloaded that video from the Internet. With the Xbox 360, you have individual profiles; when you use it, you first sign into your profile (or use it as a guest), and your profile keeps all of your information separate from everybody else's, much like an account in Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X. Your profile has an avatar, improved upon but nonetheless based on the Mii on the Nintendo Wii, a 3D character of your own creation, which can be made to look sorta like you, or it can be something entirely different. Then you have your gamer picture, a square icon which predates the avatar, but is still used to represent you in a smaller capacity. After that, you have your gamer score.

Traditionally, and though there are exceptions, retail Xbox 360 games come with 1,000 gamerscore that you can "unlock" by doing certain things in the game. This 1,000 gamerscore can be divided up into 1-99 Achievements, set accomplishments which net a predetermined score. Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) games come with 200 gamerscore and must have 12 achievements, no more, no less. Exceptions include a couple huge games which have 1,200 gamerscore, and the expansions to the Rock Band franchise (e.g. AC/DC Track Pack, Track Pack 2, Classic Rock Track Pack) only come with 200/12 as though they were XBLA titles. How a game gives gamerscore depends entirely upon what the developer of the game wanted to do with the feature. Most games will give you a substantial award for completing the main objective. Many will give awards for completing important milestones in the game. Most award you for winning online matches. Some give you tiny awards for losing, as a sort of consolation prize. Many award you for finding secrets or by doing something creatively. For example, in the beginning of Half-Life 2 (from the game The Orange Box), you have no weapons, and you're being escorted through security checkpoints. A black stormtrooper guy knocks a soda can off the rim of a trashcan and tells you to pick it up, and throw it away. This is part of the tutorial. However, if, instead of throwing it in the trashcan, you throw it at HIM, well, he comes after you with a cattle prod. If you can get around him and away from him, you get 5 points for "Defiance". Later, in the course of normal game events, you're given the character's trademark crowbar from the first Half-Life, and you receive an award for this landmark.

Achievements and their associated gamerscore awards have become a point of pride for many Xbox owners. My account currently has 2405. My wife's is around 1800, and her brother has close to 12,500. But that's chump change; some people have 25,000 or more. A quick Google search lead me to a YouTube video showing a gamerscore of 237,355, but it's implied that this was obtained through an exploit in the system. On a given day of Xbox Live gaming, you're likely to see scores in the 40,000 to 50,000 range from time to time, but those are rare. Gamers in the 20,000 range are more common. What my brother-in-law does to get his, besides actually being very good at the games he plays, is, he has that membership at Blockbuster where, for $22 a month, he can rent as many games as he wants for as long as he wants, but he can only have one out at a time. Like us, he owns Rock Band and a handful of other games he plays just for fun, but he gets new games, and he beats them, not for all 1,000 points they're worth, but just to the end of the main story. He has 55-60 games on his profile (it keeps track of every game you play, as well). So that would be 50,000 gamerscore if he'd gotten all 1,000 from each. So it got me wondering: Would Xbox 360 gamers play a game which could take gamerscore as well as give it? This got me thinking, and I came up with an idea:

An auto insurance company and a car company team up to make a realistic driving game focusing on safety. While this game would seem boring, they'd map an entire state (New York or maybe California) and you'd be able to drive anywhere. The game itself could give you missions to drive people around, kind of like a tame Grand Theft Auto. The game's initial appeal would be that a total of 2,500 gamerscore could be obtained by unlocking all 99 of its achievements. However, there's a catch - there are a total of 99 "red" achievements which total NEGATIVE 5,000 gamerscore. Speed through a small town 10 miles per hour and get docked 10 points. The game could feature local trouble, you'd have a chance of getting a ticket and your insurance rate going up, creating an additional challenge to overcome within the game. You wouldn't get docked 10 points the next time you went 10 over, because the achievement was already unlocked, the penalty already imposed, but you could still be punished in-game if you were caught. However, maybe you go 15 over, you get docked 25 points. And so on until every green (normal) and red achievement were unlocked.

If you really went for all achievements, you'd have 99 green ones and 99 red ones, and you'd have 2500 gamerscore less than when you played the game. But, having accomplished this, would you really consider yourself worse off? In other words, is it the number of the score, or is it the sum of the accomplishments of playing and completing the games?

Why not to trust Firefox

I typed the name of this article very grudgingly, but a point must be made. Over the past week, the second-rated security extension for Firefox, NoScript, went behind its trusting users' backs and slipped malware into the code. They were quickly caught, of course, because like Firefox itself, the extensions are open source. More to the point, the .xpi files are really fancily-named .zip files and can be unpacked very easily, their code laid out plainly before anyone with the wit to understand what it does. Of course most of us don't, so we just trust our security software to keep us safe online.

NoScript is an interesting extension. As its name implies, it blocks scripts that can potentially harm your computer online. Scripts are used legitimately 99% of the time, so for sites that use them, you'll have to tell NoScript they're fine. Presumably, after a couple weeks of surfing, you should have your NoScript trained. Then, when you happen upon a site you don't know (in other words, you're surfing for porn or warez) and it tries to run a script to take over your computer. NoScript stops it, and makes it ask permission. Since you don't trust the site, you say no and it does nothing.

The #1 security extension is AdBlock Plus, which does that plus it blocks the regular ads, too. Before a week or so ago, they could be used together for extra protection. The authors of NoScript wish people wouldn't use AdBlock Plus at all, however, because their site is allegedly loaded with ads. Ads that make NoScript's developers money and fund development. And recently, the NoScript team has been pushing out updates left and right, sometimes unnecessarily, because when you update NoScript and restart Firefox, it loads up their page to remind you that you're protected. And as a coincidence you get to see all their ads, and they make more money.

Unless you're using AdBlock Plus, that is, in which case you see no ads, and since they never tried to justify the updates, you're probably just wasting your time and their bandwidth.

Until recently, however, when a new version of NoScript sabotaged AdBlock Plus by inserting a filter for ABP which allowed the ads on NoScript's site. (This is nothing new: the most popular filter for regular AdBlock back in the day was Pierceive's site, and he sold whitelisting to Yahoo!, which meant AdBlock/Pierceive users saw ads on Yahoo!.) Well, a lot of people threw a fit.

There's another, much lesser-known Firefox extension called GameFOX. If you've ever been to the GameFAQs forum, you know that besides it being a cesspool for everything that's wrong with the Internet, it's pretty ghetto by forum standards. Founder Jeff Veasey (username CJayC) famously coded it himself. It's not Invision, it's not vBulletin, it's not a paid forum package which is routinely updated, it's a hackjob which Veasey maintained and is now maintained under the guidance of his successor, SBAllen (I forget his real name). Though SBAllen is much more liberal, where CJayC was fairly conservative, it's still short on updates. Features users of other forums take for granted are unavailable, while, ironically, practices on most other boards are allowed. GameFAQs is one large contradiction. Anyhow, this extension basically modernizes it though scripting, and GameFAQs has been waging a cold war against its authors for a couple years now (basically, since it got popular). Among stunts which are too mind-numbingly stupid to name, they say in their Terms of Use that "third party modifications" or some such bull might "steal your account info". Trouble is, they're quite right. GameFOX could very well be programmed to do just that. And GameFAQs has reason to fear, because their little secret society, "Life, The Universe, and Everything" (rumored to have all sorts of illegal stuff, but also alleged to just be something people can say they're a part of for the sake of it) might be compromised, if a user with LUE access (or, presumably, worse, a moderator) were to have their account compromised, immeasurable havoc could be wreaked across the site.

And that's the thing about open source. It lowers the bar for new programmers. Before open source got big (thanks Firefox!) aspiring programmers had to write their own code and learn from examples which were just that - worthless examples that did a whole lot of nothing. "Hello world" for example. Now anyone can peek at the source and study it, and learn like that. A malicious user can take an open source program of some repute, alter it slightly, and offer this altered version. (Though, to prevent against this, Mozilla trademarked the Firefox name - an altered Firefox must be called something else - Iceweasel is a famous example of this - and Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition by PortableApps.com is a famous exception.)

...Or at least that's what Microsoft and others would like you to believe. Internet Explorer 8 is newly released, and to some pretty generous fanfare. Internet Explorer is a professionally designed software application whose source code is not open to review, let alone malicious tampering. It's also no big secret that Microsoft has a cozy relationship with advertisers. For $30 you can buy a pass which will block some ads in Internet Explorer, but won't block all of them - I guess some pay a premium to keep their ads from being blocked, I suppose. And therein lies the problem with NoScript. They just decided to override the end users' choice and force their ads through in a quick grab for cash. But where Microsoft succeeds, apparently, NoScript failed. Hard.

Update: 4 May 2009: It would seem that NoScript couldn't take the heat, and have not only released a new version of NoScript which does not attack AdBlock Plus, it also removes the malicious whitelist, if you had one of the versions of NoScript in question. I'll proudly point out that I never said NoScript was a bad extension, only that it didn't do anything for me. I hope the authors have learned their lesson and have found a more honest way to make money for their hard work, and that if their apology is genuine, that those who previously found their extension useful will do so once again.

Wow, Doctor Who is awesome.

Doctor Who is the UK's long-running science fiction show, it's older than Star Trek by a few years. It's the main influence for the Bill & Ted movies - phone booth that can travel through space and time? Yeah, they nicked that from Doctor Who. Only the original phone booth is only a phone booth on the outside, it's much bigger inside. One could almost imply that Star Wars' R2-D2 was influenced by the long-running villain, the Daleks.

I first heard about this series a couple years ago, when I was still on the Disturbed board. The wife of the admin was a big fan (or rather, she had a crush on the Tenth Doctor, the bloke with the 3D glasses at 0:07 in the video) and I always wanted to check it out. I got Series 1, which ran, I think in 2005, but she told me that Series 1 (we'd call it Season 1 in the US) has the Ninth Doctor, and it's the Tenth Doctor, who doesn't appear until Series 2, who she likes. (Don't ask me why, but they started over in 2005, kind of like how Star Trek did with the series "Enterprise" and now this new movie... yet they keep the count on how many Doctors they've had from the original.) Anyway, while the show is kind of silly, I love it and can't get enough of it. If you get a chance, it's worth a look, and unlike the best of Star Trek, and Babylon 5, and Battlestar Galactica, you really don't have to watch them in order, unless it's a two-parter. I just don't know when Doctor Who comes on in the United States - it's made by the BBC. I bet you can download them though, but don't go asking me how to do anything illegal. ;-)

In this video, two evil alien robots have a little war of words. Interestingly enough, they both look like robots (think C-3PO and R2-D2 from Star Wars) but both have living creatures inside them. The Cybermen (the upright ones) have human brains in their heads, and the Daleks have these little octopus-looking things inside.

Sick burn, or just a couple tin cans rattling on about nothing? Have a look and decide.



Cyber Leader: Daleks, be warned. You have declared war upon the Cybermen.
Dalek Sec: This is not war. This is pest control!
Cyber Leader: We have five million Cybermen. How many are you?
Dalek Sec: Four.
Cyber Leader: You would destroy the Cybermen with four Daleks?
Dalek Sec: We would destroy the Cybermen with one Dalek! You are superior in only one respect.
Cyber Leader: What is that?
Dalek Sec: You are better at dying.

The coolest picture on the Internet

A couple weeks ago, I was being a horn dog and Googling under images with SafeSearch set to Off. There's a picture you can find (on your own) with a girl posing with a Guitar Hero guitar - and nothing else - and another one with a girl posing with a Super NES (with Zelda 3 in it for extra points) and the two controllers (again, and nothing else). I was searching for "xbox girl" looking for girls posing with Xbox or Xbox 360 gear. There's actually a market for this - gamers are usually guys (though girl gamers are becoming less uncommon these days, and not just on the Wii and DS) and they're usually nerds, so if a girl poses with some geek stuff, it's a turn-on. I dig it.

So anyway, I'm searching for "xbox girl" up there and found this:



Now is that not the coolest thing you've ever seen? First of all, they've got a chromed-out 360 and matching wireless controller (I've never seen that before) but they're using the 360 as a bed for the baby. Not the best for either of them but it still looks good.

Well, I'm 29 now... (The Rock Band cake post)

But don't all say Happy Birthday all at once. I'm not too thrilled with the prospect of only 365 days until I hit the big three-zero.

I've had a lot of cool birthday presents, but few match the cake Jen made for me this year. As some of you might know, I like to play Rock Band using the Guitar Hero X-Plorer controller to play bass guitar.

Wanna see it? Oh, I know you do...



This is it before it's finished, but the picture also shows the actual Guitar Hero controller for comparison. Here's the finished product:


Body... The D-pad is made up of a ring of chocolate frosting and four M&Ms. The whammy bar is a Pocky stick (Mexican shortbread stick dipped in chocolate), and the strum bar is a Kit-Kat. The green M&M represents the Xbox guide button, and the other two halves represent the Back and Start buttons.


Neck and head... each of the five fret buttons is represented by four M&Ms of the same color. The tuning knobs at the head are represented by four brown M&Ms - we didn't have room for all six.


The whole finished project.

If you want to see more pictures of the cake, for a limited time you can see the topic I made on GameFAQs' Food board. I say limited time because after so long of a post not getting replies, they'll purge it. I can re-post the other pictures here, I just haven't got the time right now.

And as with all pictorial blogs I post, you can click any image to see it full-size, if you'd like a closer look.

Oh yeah... under the frosting, it's a Devil's Food cake... mwa ha ha ha ha. It was good... We served it with Breyers Triple Chocolate ice cream.

Gas station owner tip #42

Got high gas prices and want to bring in customers? Obscure your sign. They know they're getting f---ed in the a-- without a reacharound, but if they don't know just how high your prices are they might just stop anyway as opposed to getting discouraged and hope for slightly lower prices up the road. The Shell in Grimesland, NC has the vendor park in front of the prices like this:



See? Companies can work together to screw consumers. But hey, at least Shell doesn't buy its gas from the Middle East, so I know no part of my $43 and change is going to buy weapons to kill American troops. Go me. Oh, and the gas was $3.59 a gallon. Oh my bad. $3.59 and nine tenths.

Automatically type backwards, no joke

Of course I have to start with the story as to how I found this. Years ago, I was a member at the test board for the Invision Power Board forum platform. The board installation on their site, which was probably first a test board and announcement system, had evolved into a community, led by the IPS staff. I ran a board running IPB in those days, and left the community shortly after they shut my board down, not for not paying or anything, but because I suggested someone might be able to find a game they were looking for on eMule. Didn't provide a download, just told them where to get the program and how to search. Basically a load of BS, but I guess they were covering their asses. Still, lesson learned: Don't trust a program that can stab you in the back. If you pay for it, it should serve you, not someone else.

Anyway, I had heard the name HydrogenAudio a couple times, it was supposed to be the authority on digital audio. The name stuck in the back of my mind, and having a question about MP3 I'd been meaning to ask for a while, I finally signed up on their forums, asked my question, and was looking around, when I came across this little bit.

There is a certain character that, if you copy and paste it, everything afterwards is typed in reverse. Sound dangerous? Well, it is... various sites have voiced a concern about it being used for various illicit purposes. I guess you can think you're getting a picture, video, or song, and you're really getting a virus. I mean, "EXE.STUFF.MP3" looks like a song file, but backwards it's "3PM.FFUTS.EXE" which Windows will try to execute as code. And if it really is code, as opposed to sound, you may be up the creek. But this wouldn't be here, in this blog posting, this would be in an email or on a web site that's set up to cheat you in the first place. In other words, by itself the character is not harmful, just tricky.

A character, for the non-technical, is a letter, a number, a symbol, a space, something like that. It's computer language. The word "blog" is four characters, and "Nathan's Blog" is 13 characters, because we count the letters, the apostrophe, and the space.

Here's more information on the potential danger of this character.

http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/96498

And a link to the page I got this information from:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=57324

Now for the fun part. I post the character - and then I'll copy the entire blog thus far and paste it after the character - that is, in reverse. (PS: Use it wisely.)

‫‬‭‮‪‫‬‭‮҉

Of course I have to start with the story as to how I found this. Years ago, I was a member at the test board for the Invision Power Board forum platform. The board installation on their site, which was probably first a test board and announcement system, had evolved into a community, led by the IPS staff. I ran a board running IPB in those days, and left the community shortly after they shut my board down, not for not paying or anything, but because I suggested someone might be able to find a game they were looking for on eMule. Didn't provide a download, just told them where to get the program and how to search. Basically a load of BS, but I guess they were covering their asses. Still, lesson learned: Don't trust a program that can stab you in the back. If you pay for it, it should serve you, not someone else.

Anyway, I had heard the name HydrogenAudio a couple times, it was supposed to be the authority on digital audio. The name stuck in the back of my mind, and having a question about MP3 I'd been meaning to ask for a while, I finally signed up on their forums, asked my question, and was looking around, when I came across this little bit.

There is a certain character that, if you copy and paste it, everything afterwards is typed in reverse. Sound dangerous? Well, it is... various sites have voiced a concern about it being used for various illicit purposes. I guess you can think you're getting a picture, video, or song, and you're really getting a virus. I mean, "EXE.STUFF.MP3" looks like a song file, but backwards it's "3PM.FFUTS.EXE" which Windows will try to execute as code. And if it really is code, as opposed to sound, you may be up the creek. But this wouldn't be here, in this blog posting, this would be in an email or on a web site that's set up to cheat you in the first place. In other words, by itself the character is not harmful, just tricky.

A character, for the non-technical, is a letter, a number, a symbol, a space, something like that. It's computer language. The word "blog" is four characters, and "Nathan's Blog" is 13 characters, because we count the letters, the apostrophe, and the space.

Here's more information on the potential danger of this character.

http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/96498

And a link to the page I got this information from:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=57324

Now for the fun part. I post the character - and then I'll copy the entire blog thus far and paste it after the character - that is, in reverse. (PS: Use it wisely.)

This is funny, but messed up.

So, I'm reading the GameFAQs board for Pro Wrestling (WWE) and someone submits a picture of their girlfriend to brag on her shirt (and to ask for opinions on it) but almost nobody comments on the shirt. They go on about whether the girl is a guy or a girl, how hideous she is...

...Now, I'm not a big fan of shallow cruelty, but the following passage was just epic (ironically, the topic creator described the girl's shirt as epic).

Jesus: Dad, I know you like to make ugly people to balance things out but what you did here is just mean!
God: What? I wanted to get creative. It takes talent to make something that hideous. *Orton poses*

The Orton pose is a reference to current WWE champion Randy Orton, click the first link to see it. It's like a victory pose.

And no, I'm not posting the girl's picture, I don't really want to contribute to her torment - just post a funny passage from the topic. And by the time you find the Pro Wrestling forum on GameFAQs, the topic will most likely be purged - topics only last a day or two anyway.

Funniest videos on the Net

I can't now recall if, when posting about the vacation, I posted a link to the wrestling fan crying. I belive that I did, but if not, here it is: It's still real to him!

We saw that on TV, on a VH1 program called Web2.0, and at the time, it was the funniest thing I'd seen in a long time.

No more.

There is a new "funniest video on the Net", and it's not surprising it involves a little kid. What would be surprising is if you hadn't heard something about this. Ellen even flew her out for an interview.

Little girl kicks monster's ass Ellen interview

If you don't care to watch it, or if your connection is too slow, here's the transcript:

MOM: And tell Mommy again what you said you were gonna do to him if he came here.
GIRL: I said, "I'm gonna kick his ass."
M: Oh... *laughs* That's not nice.
G: If he's gonna come in here, he's gonna kick my ass!
M: *laughs* He will?
G: Yeah, uh huh... he's gonna come outta the movie, come out, he will come out and kick my ass.
M: *laughs* OK
G: And I can kick his ass!
M: OK... But that's not a nice word. You should say "kick his butt".
G: ....Oh...

New funniest video ever. The transcript is funny, now that I read it, but you have to see the video for how it's said.