Finding Nemo, from Pixar, is a truly amazing movie. I had high expectations (high enough to grab a US DVD rather than wait for the theatrical release here in Spain), but the it surpassed them. A true classic.

Well, the politically correct name is Euskal Encounter 11, but it will always be Euskal Party to me. It took place this weekend in Bilbao, and was tons of fun. Filled mostly with gamers, Linux fans and PC mod fans, but the scene was present as well, so we had a great time with our friends. I have uploaded a new gallery with the pics I took there. Enjoy!

I wrote another Code of the Day article for Flipcode, this time on extending printf() with positional parameter modifiers. As usual, I learned a good bunch from the pointers posted by others afterwards, for which I am grateful.

I went to watch The Hulk the other day, and was terribly disappointed. I originally expected a standard but well-made action flick (you don't call Ang Lee if you want to make Godzilla, do you?). After previews and initial reviews said it wasn't so much an action movie, but rather a psychological drama with a monster it it, well, my hopes got higher. I would have loved a good brainless action flick like Spiderman X-Men, or Residen Evil, but this sounded even better!

Well, turns out it was neither of the two.

The story underneath is thin, treated like it's actually deep. Just because you add in a childhood trauma and grown-ups instead of teenagers, doesn't mean you have a movie for adults. The characters don't really struggle (Betty's father is actually good), there are too many teenage-style cheesy moments, and the dialogue is slow and uninteresting. The action pieces were actually very good. Word-of-mouth is going to kill this movie because the fact is, it won't satisfy anyone. Nice try, better luck next time!

I also started playing Asheron's Call 2. I got the trial, 15 days to check the game out, and it got me hooked! Graphics are quite good, the scenery is vast, and it has a Diablo-like approach to combat that I like a lot. People are helpful thanks to the allegiance system, and progress is very satisfying during the initial 20 levels. I have bought it and am playing it regularly. I have been actually wanting to get sucked into an online game like this for some time (almost bought Dark Age Of Camelot last summer), I wanted to know what the experience was like. I just hope I'll be able to control the addiction.

I have several worries about the game, though. Population seems lower than it should be, and it's hard to find groups for all but the most popular tasks, so you end up relying on your allegiance teammates. Many quests have a much lower level requirement that they should given the difficulty. The uber-ness of some quest reward items (Soulbound weapons and Armors of the Ancients) is a stark contrast with the relatively poor drops, and lack of real prize for some other quests, which means I see most people running around with very similar equipment. Character variations are interesting and provide a good set of group tactics, but there is not much room for variety of skills within an already-built character. I have a level 30 Ranger, with Lasher, Envenom, Double Shot and the assorted Magic buffs and heals. I still have 20 skill points to earn and apply: 5 to Paragon, 2 to Ranger Mastery, maybe 2 for Fire Arrow, and then I'll have 11 for Ranger skills and maybe Make Portal - that makes 4 more Ranger skills and I'll be done. Turbine promised stuff for level 50s to do, but it seems it hasn't happened yet beyond repetitions of the same 2 or 3 superbosses. We will see how it all works out, for now I have enough stuff to do.

I play in the European Dawnsong server as "Pacorra", so give me a /tell if you also play there.

Edit: when I listed AC2's problems, I failed to mention the single biggest one: the chat system is a complete piece of crap. Any form of directed chat suddenly gets delayed for up to 15 minutes. Yes that is fifteen minutes for an in-game chat sentence to reach its destination). Email is way faster, and many people have resorted to playing in a window and using Messenger to chat with their in-game friends. Absurd isn't it? That you would put so much effort and dedication to a game like this, and then ruin it, because of bugs a chat system that any adequate student could code up in a week (and here I'm assuming there's more to MMORPG chat systems than meets the eye). He-llo, guys, this game requires a working chat in order to be played cooperatively, which is the whole point of online games. Frankly, if I didn't want to be sucked in a MMORPG for various reasons, I would have let the trial expired and they'd have lost a customer (or more, because I'd have spread the word among trial version friends).
I mean, it does make you scream "I want my money back!". Not good for a game that's losing customers daily. Hm. Maybe I'll Star Wars: Galaxies a try.

Edit 2: The idea of putting high level monsters inside newbie training areas is dumb. Thankfully I got past those areas right before they became newbie massacre grounds. Makes you wonder how many people on the trial saw that and removed the game soon afterwards.

Edit 3: I found another gem in this game: platform jumping. With instant death on failure. In a laggy, online game that is meant to be about skills play and group / solo tactics. It feels like playing Mario 64 with boxing gloves on. Frankly, I'm about to close my account. If I die again in there when I retry it, I will give up, and that is a promise.

Edit 4: I gave the jumping place another go, and completed it without dying. I still think it sucks. Would I have gone ahead with my promise? We will never know. I'm level 36 now.

I recently had the pleasure to watch Equilibrium. It is a good movie, not groundbreaking or terribly well done, but it deserved more than the mere 3 weeks in US theaters. It hasn't even been released anywhere else (maybe a limited release in the UK?), and it's hard to figure out why. It's not the blockbuster type, but a very decent dark tale along the lines of "1984" and "Brave New World", with several action scenes that are quite innovative. Some talk about it as an alternative to Matrix.

The first season of 24 just finished playing on the spanish TV. I think this was the best TV series ever, place previously held in my opinion by the first 5 episodes of Twin Peaks (the rest was utter garbage). Can't wait for the second season...

Other stuff in my list of current interests: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on PC, Ratchet & Clank on PS2, strong desire for the Diablo 2 1.10 patch to come out, and a bunch of books I'm reading.

Went to watch Bowling For Columbine. It is an amazing movie, terribly disturbing, fun, and controversial. Moore mixes provocation, information, speculation and... yes, a good bit of bias. I thought his funny use of Hitler's image to point out that other contries have a history of violence was simplistic, and the stream of executions and headshots that followed was frankly disgusting. At least Moore accepts that he is not someone to be trusted himself, more a showman than an intellectual.

My view? Without much elaboration, I think that the USA's culture of valuing power, violence and success as a measure of someone's quality is 90% of the problem. In my year long stay in the USA, I did get the feeling that achieving what you desire is perceived (even if not explicitly) as proof that you somehow deserve it; the means by which you got it come later. Weakness is seen more as a fundamental flaw than just another trait of the human character. (*) Aside from that, I believe that guns are as much a part of US culture as, say, music is in the UK or videogames in Japan. You can't expect to find contemporary causes for a phenomenon that dates back more than a century, thus Moore's question (gun culture brings violence?) goes unanswered. There is no single, simple, oneliner reason to explain USA's level of street violence. Moore keeps the audience hooked by making it sound like he's found such simple answer, and his failure to show it makes the movie feel somewhat empty and pointless. But don't be deceived: the road trip he takes you through is the real point, and it is fascinating.

Chris Rock's appearance is awesome, Marilyn Manson sounds intelligent, the K-Mart incident is disturbing, and the cartoon is terribly funny. Making a fool of Charlton Heston is a bit cheap, but at the same time, if he is just an old man, why is he be giving energic and provoking speeches as head of the NRA?

(*) As with any other broad generalization, take it with a grain of salt.

Just arrived from the first day (and, for me, the only day) of Festimad, a 3-day long music festival near Madrid. Getting there meant suffering a terrible traffic jam, but after 2.5 hours, we were ready for the show.

• Disturbed: Good stuff, they are very competent on stage, and the music is great for live performance.

• Evanescence: Pretty bad. The songs are good but fairly similar. They feel kinda like a teenager version of rock. I guess it is a fair compromise if your sweetie doesn't like hard rock concerts, but their performance was... generic, that's the word. Halfway through, everyone but the core fans was either walking away or just chatting without looking at the stage. I had never been this bored in a live show since Guns'N Roses performed their unplugged, sitting-on-a-couch act more a decade ago.

• Deftones: I don't like their music, however, they were very good up there, more than enough to turn me from curious to interested and even to outright enjoying it. They feel like rich kids that like pumping energy without getting their hands dirty, but also without caring much for anything. They acted confident, like nothing could ever be a concern. However, they seem to enjoy their stuff and the fact that others appreciate it too.

• Marilyn Manson: The reason why I was there in the first place, and boy was it worth it. Fantastic show, simpler than their tours, but still very powerful. The guitar sound was the best, and Grotesque's songs work really well when performed live. Plus, people seemed fairly tired by then (well past 1:00 am), and I got away with fewer bruises than I expected.

All in all, very fun day.

Of course, I went to see Matrix Reloaded and, like everyone else, I have my opinion. I was never too fond of the first Matrix' excesses in dialogue and bland philosophy, but I loved the action. Well, Reloaded is exactly what we could expect: a more excessive and less original version of the first movie. The highway scene is an instant classic and replaces the hall sequence of the first Matrix, as the "best action sequence ever filmed". The story is unnecessarily filled with confusion, characters and pretentious meta-enigmas. Bah. But some people love that. The more they emphasize the whole idea of "The One" as a balacing piece essential to the Matrix, the more the story reminds me of the beautiful novel The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. The movie seems to prefer confusion over substance, in the best soap-opera style of ensuring they keep the audience on their toes for the next twist and surprise. I'm just not interested, I'll wait for the DVD and watch the highway scene a few dozen times.

There has also been a very entertaining controversy between NVidia, ATI and FutureMark about drivers that cheat to get better 3DMark03 scores. Check Beyond3D for the latest updates. To me, all this discussion is academic: any driver codepath that is explicitely and exclusively targeted to benefit a benchmark score is a cheat. If the codepath improves performance at the expense of image quality or adherence to specifications, then it is a very dumb cheat. For all I know, this discussion may be just the next chapter in NVidia's attempt to discredit 3DMark benchmarks ("look how easy it is to enhance scores, it's just meaningless"). With the current situation where NVidia is friends with Doom 3, while ATI is friends with Half Life 2, it doesn't make much sense as a consumer to worry about videocards until your choice of game comes out. DX9 compliance, raw fillrate and adequate pricing should still prove sure bets if you plan on playing a number of different games.

Started playing Return To Castle Wolfenstein on the XBox, so far it feels more shallow than what I remember of the PC game. Maybe it's just that Halo and Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault have upped my expectations for a shooter, but I doubt I will be playing RTCW for too long. Along with Ratchet & Clank and Metroid Prime, my next game addiction might well be going back to multiplayer Diablo 2 1.10... I so desperately miss freezing and burning monsters with my Sorceresses. Zone of the Enders 2 still has no European release date that I know of.

I forgot to mention about E3: Nokia's N-Gage machine looks to me like a brilliant piece of useless junk. It's amazing to see Tomb Raider & Tony Hawk running on that little machine, but do I think people will want to buy that? No way. If phone makers would agree to a standard cellphone games platform, there might be a market, but the way things are moving, it will just be a gimmick toy. I'll pull numbers off my magic hat, but Nokia has to realize that:

• at most, 1% of cell phone users want a portable games machine
• at most, 20% of these gamers will choose to buy this particular gaming cellphone over other cellphones
• less than 20% of those gamers will actually want to spend any substantial amount of money on cell games

which leaves you with a estimated market somewhere between 40.000 and 200.000 gamers. With a 1/5 attach ratio for the top selling games, you're looking at very unsubstantial figures. As a developer, I would only think of working on a N-Gage game if I was either desperate, a hobbyst, or working under contract (because Nokia will fund the development of some games). Add to this the solid position of the Gameboy Advance, the prospect of Sony's portable Playstation, and I'm willing to bet by Xmas 2004 N-Gage will be a thing of the past.

Ok, so E3 came and went and it was a great trip. I spent most of my time wandering around the booths checking stuff, trying games, and taking pics with the booth babes. The general feeling was that there were not that many great games, but most were of good quality. The coolest stuff in my opinion:

• Prince of Persia. It was unexpected to see this game featuring cool visuals, absolutely gorgeous animations, and a number of twists on the classic platformer.
• Halo 2. The presentation looked amazing, if a bit heavy on the scripted side.
• Call of Duty. Having played Medal of Honor recently, this looks like more of the same... but fantastic production value and great fun!
• Half Life 2. Only saw the camcorder videos of this due to the large queues on the show floor, but it looks fantastic!
• Painkiller. Classic, simple FPS but very well done.
• Empires, Castlevania, and the MGS3 video visuals were very good. Maximo 2 kinda surprised me too, with much better gameplay than the first one. World of Warcraft looks as interesting as ever.

The weekend trip to Las Vegas was a great experience too - that city is just sick! We stayed at the New York Hotel, which has a rollercoaster around it. Seeing that many people gambling was distressing, I could never shake the feeling that they were all just extras on some kind of movie. The high point of this trip was the (expensive!) helicopter ride my brother and I took to the Grand Canyon.

Upon arrival to Madrid, I went directly to the Bruce Springsteen concert... traffic was completely jammed and I got there 45 minutes late, but it was a great show nevertheless.

I have uploaded the Durango 2003 pics. The E3 trip gallery should be coming up soon.

Well, in a few hours I'll be flying to Los Angeles for this year's E3. Can't wait! This is my 5th time and I am still as eager as ever to go there and have a good time... especially given that this year I don't have to do presentations and such stuff. I'll try to be busy meeting brother, friends, and taking the usual bunch of lame pics with the gorgeous booth babes.

Note: I have to start thinking of a way to separate old versions of the news.... Let's try one thing!

Humm.... time for another article on Flipcode, Reducing Game Load Times. Also, this Thursday I'm giving a lecture at the Facultad de Informática of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Update: The lecture went pretty well, but during the job market roundtable that took place afterwards, the general atmosphere was a bit depressing. Students were concerned that the current job market for IT people is really crappy, and even starting one's own company is doomed to fail. Well, I guess all I can say is, they're right. Now what?

I also went to watch the movie The Quiet American, and liked it a lot. It has a very slow pace and is nearly boring at times, but the stories it tells (both the love triangle and the political plot) are well worth your time. Acting is fantastic on Michael Caine's part, Brendan Fraser once again tries to move away from his comedy roles (without much success I think), and Do Thi Hai Yen is beautiful. To think that a great movie like this might have never been shown is saddening.

Quick update: I fixed the Guestbook PHP, is_int() was not the correct way and it now uses is_numeric(). I also added a counter of total guests.

The source code for the Guestbook is available here.

Update: It seems that PHP security is not quite obvious, as evanGLizr has proven to me. People can fake URLs by appending ?var=value codes to pre-initialize the PHP variables and cause errors inside the script. People can even create their own local pages to redirect to mine with form parameters set, for maximum potential damage. I have protected the page a bit, adding the check is_int($first_guest), and made slight layout changes.

I installed the RealOne Player in order to watch the GDC conference videos offered by Gamasutra. Not a good idea: my Win2K machine froze twice while watching Jason Rubin's talk. The weird thing is, that is the kind of crap I got the last time I installed a Real Player (about 4 years ago I guess). I can't believe these guys from Real Networks can release such a crappy and buggy product, and then brag about their supposed value. Even funnier to think they're trying to compete in the complex world of digital rights media. I mean, get a freakin' simple player to work and then talk about grown-up stuff, ok?

Something happened to my DNS server, or my internet connection. It was after the two computer crashes I got, but I don't think it is related. I was connected, browsing slashdot and chatting on IRC and MSN, and suddenly the links I clicked started giving me DNS errors. Any new connections I tried would fail, but the ones already established still worked fine. I tried ping'ing my DNS servers and they were responding. I also tried ping'ing other machines far away for which I had IPs, and they responded correctly, but I can't establish a data connection to anywhere (they can be established to me if I put some server up, however). I don't know what the problem is, I have tried restarting the machine and shutting down the Firewall but it still doesn't work. When I get it back up I will be able to upload this along with the update on the fix.
Update: when I turned off my machine, I didn't do the same to the ADSL router. I have done that now and things are working fine again. Go figure.

I have been finally playing Gran Theft Auto 3 on the PC. I gave my copy of the PS2 version to a friend because I didn't enjoy it much, but I loved it on the PC. I enjoy the improved graphics and framerate, and using the mouse while on foot is so much better than the pitiful PS2 analog sticks. After completing about 40 missions and collecting 50 hidden packages, I opened up the third island and started to lose interest. The new island does not give too many opportunities for plain fun racing, it is so curvy. Some physics bugs also killed me three times (my character suddenly jumps in the air and dies), my cars disappear from the garage when I load a saved game, and the experience is just not fun anymore. I got to see the entire city, use all weapons except the flamethrower, and even get six stars and get nailed by a tank, so I think I have seen pretty much everything. It is a fantastic game. I remember meeting Sam Houser back in 1996 when he worked for BMG, and I didn't think too much of him at the time, but with Rockstar and this game, he has shown me once again that I know jack. :)

Payback and retaliation are not the answer.

The weirdest part was finding out that the router seemed to be interfering with FTP sessions in order to trap and translate PASV server responses, patching in the correct, public IP address. Since FileZilla supports a custom PASV config precisely for NAT operation, the router got confused with the already correct PASV response and dropped it entirely. Weird weird (should I say bad, bad?).

Still waiting to get Metroid Prime for the GameCube. The game is already out in Europe, but stores are out of stock. Halo should keep me busy until that happens. Tried the MechAssault Live demo and had some mindless fun... the voice bantering was nice although it was hard to figure out who was who.

I tried to buy a new recharger for my Nikon 995 but they didn't have it on the store (El Corte Ingles), and even told me I was going to have a hard time getting one from Nikon. Duh! If that happens, I will being an active Nikon boycott... too bad because the camera is wonderful.