Windows Vista… first reactions.
Posted on Saturday, June 24, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Much like I did with Windows XP about 5 years ago, I signed up for Microsoft’s Customer Preview Program for Windows Vista. If you’ve got a fast connection and a DVD burner you can download the proper ISOs and create the DVDs yourself… and you can also pay about $10 for shipping and get them delivered to you. If you’re all into the latest and greatest, but not well connected enough to be in on the actual beta test, here’s your shot to get to play with Vista before it comes out.
Once I received it, I dropped in an old 80gb hard drive so I wouldn’t destroy my current XP install. Setup for Vista is, well, slow as balls. I understand the reason for this, though… it’s been vastly improved over XP, and no longer does it go through the ugly blue ‘n white DOS-based pre-setup routine. It loads the entire setup app – including the pretty backgrounds and cleverly faked Aero windows – straight from the DVD. So pretty and user-friendly comes at the cost of speed. Vista’s new app for partitioning and formatting drives is so much easier and friendlier now. After you’ve gone through all the setup options and everything, it finally actually starts the install. And this, too, is much slower than XP. Maybe not slower, per se, but it just takes a lot longer since Vista is about 3 times bigger than XP. Vista took almost a full hour before it was finally finished, while XP typically takes about 20 minutes on my machine.
My driver compatibility results seem to be markedly better than Paul Thurott’s, who has become very pessimistic about Vista lately. The only device that failed to be automatically installed was my sound card (Audigy 2 ZS). I installed its XP-era drivers from the CD, and it seemed to work fine, giving me a nice clean Device Manager. Unfortunately, the drivers didn’t actually work, as once I busted up an audio app (I tried both WiMP 11 and Winamp) the sound was very stuttery and seemed to be slowing down everything else. I finally found some supposedly Vista-ready drivers from Creative, and installed them, but they don’t work all that well either. The stuttery sound is gone, but it now only plays sound out of the back two speakers and the subwoofer… it completely ignores the front 3, for some reason. Odd.
Enough with the bad experience with my sound card. Let’s get to some good stuff. First, let me assure you, whatever screenshots you’ve seen of Vista and its new UI, Aero, do not do it justice. Aero is so pretty. When you open a new window, it sort of floats up out of nothing. When you close it, it floats back down into nothing. Some windows and dialog boxes are composed almost entirely of Glass, so the entire window blurs out everything below it… which is quite impressive to see, if not the most outright useful feature. Flip3d, the new alt+tab replacement, is really nifty. Maybe not quite as easy to use as Mac’s Exposé, but it’s definitely a helluva lot better than your standard issue alt+tab.
Several things in Vista have now received long-overdue updates – most notably (as far as I’m concerned) the default games and screensavers, which haven’t been updated since, like, Windows 95. Solitaire and Freecell now have really pretty full-color cards, animations, and sounds. Also, for those of you old enough to remember a Windows 3.1 program called Taipei, it’s back in the form of Mahjong Titans. Personally, I still prefer Kyodai, but it’s better than nothing. The screensavers have also been updated all of them now appear to be full Direct3d apps. Even Mystify, aka Dancing Lines, is totally updated with nice anti-aliasing and shaders.
User Account Control is really really annoying, but this is something I was expecting going into this whole Vista thing. One of the unfortunate things about Microsoft’s new push on security is that now pretty much anything you could possibly do in the OS is now considered a security risk by default, and you must explicitly give Windows permission to do whatever it is you’re trying to do.
I think, in the interest of keeping this post from getting too long, I probably ought to stop there. This is simply my reaction to a few parts of Vista, after only about 6 total hours of use. I think as I use it more, and as they continue to improve it before launch, I may have more to say about it. But I better quit for now.
2 Comments
New theme, again.
Posted on Saturday, June 17, 2006 at 11:39 am
Yeah. New theme, called “Twist.” I actually went through several possible designs for this, and the reason it was called “Twist” was present in one of the early ones, but I never got around to changing the name. So it’s still called Twist, even though it doesn’t really mean much at this point. As before, this looks best on Firefox – not only because of the alpha-blended PNGs, but also because apparently IE doesn’t even know how to render regular 8-bit PNGs correctly and you can tell a definite color difference between the JPG-formatted logo ball and the rest of the otherwise PNG-formatted sidebar. Ghey.
I’ll be rolling this out to the forums once Threads v7 is released and the beta is stable enough to use and customize without patching it every day.
As usual, you can still get the older themes if you must, they’re on the sidebar. I did remove the “Reset CF” theme, though, as the more I look at it, the more I can’t stand it. It just looked too dumb.
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The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers – Ought Six!
Posted on Sunday, June 4, 2006 at 1:48 pm
If my 2005 version of Tiger Woods PGA Tour can be considered “par,” this one can probably be considered “a bogey gimme because the putt for par stopped a half inch short of the hole.”
Ok, I’ll really try to refrain from golf-inspired euphamisms from now on. Really.
But seriously, yeah. It’s pretty good, but to me, it comes up just a little short of the previous edition of the game – mostly due to the fact that it’s simply changed a lot of things up that I was used to handling a certain way. Perhaps if I’d never played the ‘05 version, I wouldn’t mind the changes made here. But since I had, it was a little unsettling.
First and foremost, putting is vastly different. In ‘05, you had the nice little “caddy tip” that said something to the extent of “aim 6 inches up, 10 inches right” or whatever. This made it fairly easy to properly place your little aiming arrow, once you’d figured out a rough estimate of how the game calculates distance. And then it was just backswing, swing, and in the ball goes. Now there’s some crazy grid with little dots moving on it that indicates the direction the green is sloping at any given point. And there’s the “ideal putt camera,” which gives you a rough estimate of where you should aim your shot. But after that, you still have to figure out which putting “zone” to put your arrow in, and figure out how much of a backswing to put on it, and all kinds of other stuff. I’ve gotten used to it, now, so it’s not all that much of a big deal, but it’s a little screwy to get used to up front. Lisi hasn’t gotten it yet, and she regularly complains that she hates this version. Go figure.
Next, money no longer buys stat points. In ‘05, you would generally get pretty hefty sums of money for any little thing you did, and you could use that money to buy clothes, equipment, and skill points that upped your statistics. You could also cheat and gain lots of money really fast by simply creating a new character, betting all his money against your real character, and have your real character lose (but don’t save it after the match). Ka-ching, you’ve doubled your new character’s money. Granted, you do have to have at least one character who has already made a huge amount of money the legit way in order to be able to take advantage of this particular loophole, but still… It took roughly $12 million (read: about an hour of bet-play-lose-repeat) to get a completely maxed-out character. This was a really easy way to have some new friend over for so-called “Drunk Tiger Woods Nights,” as it only took about an hour to get the new friend’s character up to speed so everyone had a level playing field.
Sadly, this doesn’t work anymore, as stat points are actually based on real experience points that you earn for each little thing you do. You can’t buy them with money anymore. So, say, you hit a really long drive one time. That means you get X amount of experience points in Driving. You then can save up these experience points, and buy a stat point in Driving, which increases the range of your drives. So you actually do really have to work at it now. Stat points get exponentially more expensive the higher up you go, so it takes a helluva lot more work to get from 9 to 10, than to get from, say, 3 to 4. Of course, this is not really a fair thing to base a review on, given that all they really did was close up a loophole that let you cheat. But…. you know… I liked being able to cheat a little bit to pump up a new character. Drunk Tiger Woods Nights aren’t going to be as fun if you can vastly out-drive the new guy every single time.
The new Rivals mode in ‘06 is roughly analogous to the old Legend Pursuit, with a little bit of a new skin applied. You now travel through four different “eras,” playing golfers from each era to a setting of period-piece clothes, equipment and lobby areas. (Like, in the 1920s, it plays old-timey music, everyone wears those goofy looking plaid pants, and they play with leather-wrapped golf balls.) Other than the new look, it’s still basically the same. Several little bitty matches for a specific purpose (chipping, putting, driving) and then 4-6 full or half course general purpose matches.
You still get sponsored by companies as you go through the game (we actually got a “bonus” sponsor right up front, because it detected an ‘05 savegame on the memory card). One thing that bugs me, though, is that so far, it seems you can only get new sponsors by going through the Rivals mode. But you don’t actually get any sponsorship money from Rivals mode, only from the PGA Tour mode. This seems weird to me, since the only way to get new ones doesn’t pay you anything, and the only way to get paid anything doesn’t get you any new ones.
I may be wrong, but it seems like there is a LOT fewer items in the shop, now. Maybe more will show up as I progress through, but for now, it really doesn’t seem like there’s hardly anything in the shop – even counting the ones that are locked until I complete certain tasks. All items are a ton cheaper, though. Since money now only counts for items, and not stats, you never have to pick between buying a new driver and buying a new Driving stat point; ergo, supply and demand, items cost less. I think my level 4 driver only cost me $3500 or something, rather than $200,000 like it did in ‘05.
Other stuff…
The new courses are all pretty good. The graphics are marginally improved. The Game Face feature is quite a bit easier to use, if a little slower to load (probably due to better quality texturing). The AI golfers all still suck hard. And now they’ve got a gay-ass Dave Matthews song for the menus instead of a gay-ass Outkast song. And of course, though your actual score will suffer severely, the game is all kinds of fun when you have a few friends over and you’re all on your 4th or 5th margarita.
That about sums it up. Overall, it’s a good game, but it falls just a little bit short of the previous edition, in my mind. It is good clean fun, though, and it’s one of the few video games my wife enjoys enough to play with me. It’s only $30 now, so you really should consider picking up a copy – especially if you’ve got a small get-together coming up!
