My european copies of Gears of War, Lego Star Wars 2, King Kong and Tomb Raider Legend work on an american 360. Burnout and PGR3 don’t. I hope the PS3 marks the end of region-locked games forever; I hate them. Actually, I’m not sure if Wii games are also region coded. Anyway, that’s the mini-rant before going to sleep.

No more Vista posts for a while. 🙂

It seems that my bold predictions for the Nintendo Wii were only half right. The Wii is a runaway success (it is still impossible to find one on the shelves here in Vancouver), but in terms of software sales, Nintendo games are the only real sellers for that system. Add to that the impressive numbers for the Nintendo DS.

Meanwhile, the XBox 360 and the especially the PS3 are having a hard time penetrating the market. Both Sony and Microsoft are playing bait and switch with the idea of a price drop, but at some point they will have to stop the wordplay and just do it. My personal feel is that there are simply not enough great games to make people want to pay for a next gen system. Gears of War was fantastic, and Halo 3 will sell lots (and hopefully be very good too), but the rest, in general, are little more than PC ports and bumpmapped, hi-res versions of last-gen games. I will pay for that, but the average gamer is not in a hurry.

In other news, XBox Live Arcade has received a few really cool additions to its lineup: surprisingly good remakes of Prince of Persia and Pac-Man Championship Edition; and a little gem, in the form of an oldschool action game, called Heavy Weapon.

Another annoyance gone now: with Firefox installed and set as the default browser, clicking on links in applications would result in an annoying error message from Vista despite Firefox opening the link correctly. Same happens if you type a URL in an Explorer window. This popup only happens if Firefox was not already running. The fix is to remove or rename the registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxURL\shell\open\ddeexec

This key will reappear when Firefox is updated, so you may want to prepare a .reg file like:

---

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxURL\shell\open\ddeexec]

---

(Remember to leave an empty line at the end)

The Firefox people are aware of the problem, so hopefully this hack will soon be unnecessary.

In other news, I finished the Supreme Commander campaign yesterday. In a weird parallel, it left me with a similar feeling as the book I am reading (Blue Mars): fascinating but boring. The main problem in SupCom’s campaign is the lack of variety; every mission feels the same. The main problem in Blue mars is that there is very little story and an awful lot of description; Red Mars was already heavy on this, Green Mars went even further, and Blue Mars goes too far in my opinion.

I know a few people got the Starcraft urge after the SC2 announcement; a couple of them even went and bought it again. I might have done likewise if I didn’t have Supreme Commander. But this?

Starcraft Battlechest and Warcraft 3 Battlechest up in the top 10 PC sales. The former is 9 years old, the later 5. And of course WoW and its expansion taking the top 2 spots. It’s just insane. How do they do it? Quality, polish, attention to detail, support, marketing, and of course making an active effort to create and maintain a rabid community of fans.

If you have never played a Tower Defense game, now is the time to check them out by downloading the demo for Immortal Defense (via Indygamer). I believe this game concept originated as a mod for Starcraft and later Warcraft 3, but it has become a subgenre of strategy games in itself. The idea is simple: place and upgrade static defenses and destroy the incoming enemy waves. Different towers have different abilities, and the amount of enemies can be overwhelming at times, so make the most out of your limited resources!

I am getting used to Vista by now. Some annoyances are inevitable, but after turning off the dreaded UAC (User Access Control or something like that) it feels quite comfortable. Aero is nothing groundbreaking, but pretty and elegant.

If you are a Vista power-user wanabee, you may want to check out the tips collection in TweakVista. In the past, many users learned to love the TweakUI powertoy, but alas it is not yet available for Vista.

Speaking of PowerToys, most of the classic ones are also not available in Vista. What’s more, even though they are simple applications (like the Power Calculator), they refuse to install in Vista. Funnily enough, people who have upgraded their XP installations to Vista can’t uninstall them either. 🙂

I miss my Power Calculator with graph capabilities and whatnot. I even tried changing the msiexec.exe compatibility options to Windows XP SP2, but the installer still refuses. I will probably try to copy the installed exe from my XP-powered laptop.

Some PowerToys have become standard in Vista, most notably the "Open Command Window Here" Explorer add-on. Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided to hide it by default, but if you hold the shift key while you right-click on a folder in Explorer, it will show up. This works only in the right pane, not in the folder tree pane. 99% of the time I open a Command Prompt like this, I do it in the folder tree pane, so along with the annoyance of having to press Shift, the "feature" is nearly useless to me.

Or not?

Open RegEdit, go to "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\cmd", and you will see a little empty string key named "Extended". Remove it and Open Command Window here becomes available without the Shift key, AND in both panes. There is another hidden utility called "Copy as Path" which I haven’t yet uncovered. If you need this desperately, you can use ClipText (Change the .reg file to the correct exe path).

Edit: you may also want to remove the "Extended" key from "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\cmd" (for the context menu with no file selected) and "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\cmd" (for drive letters). Nothing is ever simple.

There are a million little details like this that may or may not affect you as a user. In a year or two, Vista will hopefully be polished, and tweaking tools will be plentiful so you can make the system as comfortable for you as possible. In the meantime, share what you can, and have fun exploring and Googling!

I have installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my desktop PC. So far, the usual: it is prettier but it feels noticeably slower and more unstable. The OS keeps asking for permission to do anything, but I know where that comes from and I don’t mind.

I just finished watching the 3rd season’s finale, and despite having found most of this season fairly uninteresting, I think the finale is among the best endings of a TV series I have ever seen. The finales of Battlestar Galactica’s 2nd season and Invasion’s first and only were very good as well, whereas this years’s Heroes has been a bit meh, 24 was "more of the same" and BSG was downright terrible.

Still, nothing beats Babylon 5’s 2nd and 3rd seasons. 🙂

I’ll keep it short: the actual game is not so terrible, and all in all it seems a nice update of true Total Annihilation gameplay. I played the first few campaign missions and I found them fairly uninspired: complete some early objectives before the map expands and then decimate a large enemy base. Fun but a bit monotonous.

The only problem that remains is that the game freezes my PC after about 10-20 minutes of playing. Hard reboot. I’m using the latest NVidia drivers so there’s not much else I can do. It doesn’t crash when watching a replay, so I don’t have much faith in new drivers. Ah well, at least I got to see some of the cool stuff the game can offer.

Edit: Good news! I downloaded the WHQL version of the NVidia drivers I was using (158.22, should be no difference), and the game apparently stopped crashing.

Unless you are hiding under a rock, you will know by now that Blizzard has officially announced Starcraft 2. Juciy cinematic and gameplay videos are cluttering the Internet, fanboys and detractors heated in dialectic debates about the apparent lack of a difference between this game and the original. Me? I loved the original and I don’t mind Starcraft 1.5 with a visual upgrade. I don’t mind that at all. It looks exactly how I hoped it would, nothing more and nothing less.

Until Starcraft 2 arrives, many of us have Supreme Commander, the spiritual successor of Total Annihilation. Now, few games have captured me like the original TA did. The sheer scope of the battles, the technical features, the mods, and especially the community-created movie recording and playback tools all sucked a lot of time from me.

The bad news is, Supreme Commander is a massive resource hog. However, I have a new beefy machine to play game on. I didn’t bring my old desktop to Vancouver, and the good old laptop was showing its age. Mirek of Kube Computers has built an excellent (and QUIET!) machine, so if you are in Vancouver and buying a PC, I recommend them.

The worse news is, Supreme Commander is annoying in many ways. I’ll give it a bit more time before I write a long tirade about the game and the severe lack of polish, but my disappointment is dangerously close to what I felt when the horrible TA: Kingdoms was released.