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New Monster PC + Windows 10

I got myself a new monster PC two days ago. My previous PC was 6 years old and still running the same Windows Vista that it came with. Although it actually didn’t start rusting apart just yet, I still felt that it was time to upgrade. The hard disk probably wouldn’t keep on working for much longer, and I also wanted to try new technology. Especially a Solid-State Drive, as I had heard a lot of good things about it.

I bought a PC online at a Danish web shop called MM Vision and got it delivered, assembled and ready to go. The old days of assembling my own PC was not something I wanted to bother with again, as long as I could just select the components on a list. So I ended up with the following…

July 26, 2015March 18, 2023PC Games

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Adventure Games

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I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

Developer: The Dreamers Guild | Released: 1995 | Genre: Adventure, Point & Click

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a point-and-click adventure game based upon Harlan Ellison’s short story of the same title, developed by The Dreamers Guild, co-designed by Ellison and published by Cyberdreams in 1995. The game’s story is set in a world where an evil computer named AM has destroyed all of humanity except for five people, whom he has been keeping alive and torturing for the past 109 years. Each survivor has a fatal flaw in its character, and in an attempt to crush their spirits, AM has constructed a metaphorical adventure for each that preys upon their weaknesses. To succeed in the game, the player must make choices to prove that humans are better than machines, because they have the ability to redeem themselves. Woven into the fabric of the story are ethical dilemmas dealing with issues such as insanity, rape, paranoia and genocide.Wikipedia

I started this game after a recommendation on Extra Credits. I have completed my fair share of adventure games and are quite picky about them these days (I thought the new Broken Sword 5 was downright boring) but I must confess that this classic has some quite interesting adult themes to spice things up. The dialog is well written and it doesn’t hold back from putting you through dark and disturbing issues. There are lots of tasks that are optional or branch out into two or more solutions, and they are of course often based on a moral choice. But even though the game has wonderfully bizarre backgrounds and quite logical puzzles, it still bored me a little in the end. This is very much an adventure game of its time, in spite of the adult theme and the interesting dialog. It’s very possible to get into the dreaded trial-and-error loop where you try inventory items on everything and scrutinize the screen for overlooked hotspots.

July 1, 2015January 6, 2016Site

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I’m Back!

After about 4 years of hiatus I’ve decided to try blogging again. This is my second attempt at it since 2011, and just like the last time I have developed my own WordPress theme to go along with it. I have even included most of the posts and comments from the half year of blogging I did in 2011, the ones that may still be interesting to read. There are topics about TV shows, my ventures into various MMORPG, as well as a few other gems. They can all be found before this first post of 2015.

Chordian.net in 2011 — This is what my blog looked like in 2011.

2015

4 years later…

May 28, 2011March 18, 2023HTML MMORPG PC Games

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Lord of the Rings Online

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Animated Day Cycle

I’ve made a nice crossfading experiment in jQuery just for fun.

A while ago, while I was exploring the new zone Enedwaith in LOTRO, I decided to stand still on a hilltop and gaze into the distance for quite a while, taking a screenshot as the day grew brighter. This gave me three screenshots ranging from night to day.

A little later I combined the three screenshots and saved it as this GIF animation:

Spoiler: GIF animation

But then earlier this week I had this thought that perhaps the transition could be made really neat by crossfading the images using jQuery. Yesterday I threw the idea together and you can now see the result by clicking the DEMO link below.

DEMO DOWNLOAD

Note: If you use the slider for a faster speed and the current crossfade animation is slow, you have to wait a bit for the current stage to finish before the new speed is actually applied.

If you wish, you can download the lot (468 KB) and replace the three “stage” images with your own. Perhaps there’s another computer game you’d like to see a dawn effect from? You’re also welcome to adapt and post it on your own web site.

May 24, 2011February 15, 2020Associations Chiptunes

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Associations: Task III vs Omikron

Task III (C64) and Omikron: The Nomad Soul (PC) — Task III (Commodore 64) and Omikron: The Nomad Soul (PC and Dreamcast).

With my past as a composer on the Commodore 64, naturally I was interested in all games with unique music back in the day. One of these was Task III from 1987 with great SID music by Frank Endler. Especially the high score tune had a special “mashing” style that I really liked:

It may be a little odd to begin with, but hang in there. There are a few cute changes here and there, especially at 0:41 and 1:00.

In 2001, I completed Omikron: The Nomad Soul on the PC. The game was actually released in 1999 on PC and was a bold attempt at creating a hybrid of third person adventure, fighting, as well as first person shooter. It was quite atmospheric and even had in-game music by David Bowie.

May 23, 2011February 16, 2020Site

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Web Site Statistics

Almost 5 months has now passed since I utilized WordPress and opened this blog, and I thought I would show you my latest daily statistics. I often find these kinds of posts very interesting on other blogs, and I hope you agree too. Maybe it will be the first of many.

Today I use four tools to measure the visitor statistics at this web site. There’s the built-in statistics at my domain host (One.com) as well as exporting the Apache log files and viewing them with WebLog Expert Lite. Let’s just say both of these methods leaves a lot to be desired.

Luckily I also use two other methods which I think are both much better at giving me the overview and data I require. The first is of course Google Analytics, which has a lot of interesting graphs and details. I’ve been using this since I converted to the blog and it shows me that there’s been a steady amount of approximately 140-150 visitors per day for the most part.

Halfway through May, I discovered the wonderful plugin WassUp for WordPress. It’s now my fourth and preferred tool of measuring visitor numbers. I has a great list of exactly what pages visitors go to, how they browse around, where they come from (link, search engine, directly) and other juicy details. The way this is represented makes it easy to get an idea of what’s popular.

The other day I calculated the average for a day out of one week and came up with 185 visitors per day – a little more than the estimate from Google Analytics. It includes spam attempts but not spiders and bots. 89 (48%) of these were referred (i.e. came from clicking an external link), 39 (21%) from search engines (including searches for images) and 8 were spam hits (4%).

WassUp also has a useful search ability, and with this I managed to get the exact number of visitors for certain areas of my web site as well. I added the data to an Excel spreadsheet and created the following column chart:

As you can see, the section for LOTRO is by far the most popular area of the web site. The one for weapon glows in WoW is a bit lower, but it’s also a relatively new section. Many visitors come from referrers or direct hits, but there are also a nice lot coming from search engines.

I converted to WordPress in January hoping that I could lure some of the MMORPG visitors over to my new blog, but this actually hasn’t worked out very well. Almost all of these visitors only browse the MMORPG pages and then leave. Recently, I even added a BLOG menu item in top to make them more aware of the blog, but even this didn’t make much of a difference. Most of the hits in the red column originates from external blog links or search engine hits.

May 19, 2011June 26, 2019Television

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TV Shows: Thoughts & Opinions (Part 4)

This is the fourth and final part in a blog series about what shows I’ve watched and what I thought of them. Just a few remarks for each of them. The text will be with only minor spoilers, so it should be relatively safe to read this in case you’re curious about shows you haven’t seen before.

Don’t miss out on TV Shows: Thoughts & Opinions (Part 3) with my opinions about Fringe, Heroes, House M.D., Jericho, Lie to Me, and Lost.

May 18, 2011March 18, 2023MMORPG PC Games

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Star Wars: The Old Republic

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SWTOR: 1+ Hours of Gameplay

Here is an ~~interesting link~~ to 1 hour and 30 minutes of gameplay in Star Wars: The Old Republic. The player procrastinates a bit here and there, but it’s still worth checking out if you have any interest in this upcoming MMORPG.

I actually didn’t want to post it at first (the name of the page is “Don’t Say a Word!”) but since then I’ve seen it pop up in forums and other blogs, so I guess the rabbit is out of the cage anyway. I wonder how long it will take before it is “foxed” by BioWare? UPDATE: Not long. The video is already gone.

Back when I first saw the link in a forum I actually watched most of it and wrote down a few notes:

Generally there are many conventional MMORPG clichés. A bit worrying.
Nice UI layout with health, pets, buffs and more all in the bottom, close together. Makes it fast to see the important stuff in battle.
The chat window in the top left corner is a little strange, however. But maybe I just need to get used to it.
Very odd “blue soap bubble” map. It even goes partly transparent when you run while it’s still open – I wonder if they were inspired by Rift there?
Combat seems a little boring to be honest. Same old. And of course no blood.
Tooltips are very WoW/LOTRO-style – even has bonus sets too. But there’s a nice delayed “slide-out” comparison with gear tooltips.
Some textures are too WoW-style for my taste (i.e. cartoonish), especially inside caves.
The KOTOR-style voice NPC talk and choices are pretty cool. Nice lip sync and voice acting. Also a nice touch with the good or bad choices in debates showing a cyan or red tint on the screen afterwards.
Some humans have long faces. I don’t have a problem with that, actually – the models still look good. It’s those textures on the cave walls I’m worried about.
Action icon GCD cyan refresh is too interfering – can’t see icons well enough.
Groups of 2-3 mobs seems to be quite common?
Many mobs stand still (LOTRO-style). Good. I’ve had enough of excessive patrolling like in Rift for a while.
Not a lot of background music – often silent. Perhaps this will change in the final version?
Almost devoid of loading bars. Interesting.
Taxa on small speeders.
Large inventory – 48 slots! I hope that makes it to the final version.
I saw the player enter a big building that had its entrance obscured by a wall you had to run around. It’s 2011 and we still need this trick in 3D engines?

May 16, 2011March 18, 2023MMORPG PC Games

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Rift

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Rift: Fat and Fifty

Finally hit level 50 in Stillmoor a few days ago. I was surprised there wasn’t a lot of additional solo quests left after that. I barely completed less than half a dozen quests for ~~Icecrown Citadel~~ The Endless Citadel in the west end, and then the same quests just turned into dailies.

I decided to finalize my time with Rift after that. I rode through Freemarch and Stonefield just to see the zones and then parked my Cleric in Sanctum. I actually have a level 16 Rogue at the Defiants side as well and I was thinking about playing him through those zones, but I must say that I’ve had more than enough of Rift now. As mentioned in an earlier blog post it just feels like a shallow game world devoid of much soul, and the quests were for the most part uninspired.

The dynamic rifts and invasions were an interesting new gimmick, but often an inadequate experience one way or another. Either there are no or too few players and the rift is too difficult, or there are zillions of players and the rift is too easy.

Last week there was a world event invasion in Fortune’s Shore in Shimmersand. It started with the usual intimidating villain speech and smoke rising from the town. Hundreds of players from both factions soon arrived and in the beginning it was exhilarating that we were so many beating on these elite mobs, but soon it dawned on me how undirected it was. I had no feeling of who or what was healing or tanking, if at all. Some gave orders in raid chat, but I think most players minded their own business. Lots of gravestones, layers upon layers of sound effects, and spells flying in all directions. Sometimes an invasion was defeated and the rabble floated onwards like a colony of ants. I got a lot of nice rift rewards out of it, but I wish it didn’t feel like something that will grow old quickly.