Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

Katt gave me an early Christmas present this year: an import Nintendo DSi! I haven’t had too much time to tinker with it, and the menus are all in Japanese (no language selection in this firmware; more on that in a second), but here’s a breakdown of what’s new.

• The unit is covered in a matte finish, as opposed to being glossy
• It’s a little wider and a little thinner than the DS Lite. The build quality is also better.
• It comes with two cameras, a 0.3MP one on the center of the hinge and a 1.3MP one on the top cover
• It has an SD card slot and upgradable firmware!
• Opera is preinstalled
• The screens are larger (3.25 inches as opposed to 3.0 inches), but they run at the same resolution as the older DS models
• It comes with a “DS Shop” application (much like the Wii’s)

So far, the build quality has been fantastic, and the screens are definitely better in terms of color and contrast. My only complaint is that unlike the other DS models, there’s no way to switch the firmware language to English. I’m hoping the homebrew community finds some way to convert Japanese units to north American ones at some point…

With that, here’s a bunch of pictures!

Valve (the makers of Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress) just can’t seem to release a bad title. Their latest project, Left 4 Dead, is everything I’ve been looking for in a recent PC game: zombies, zombies, co-op play, and zombies. The premise is fairly simple: your team of four survivors (or four special Infected zombies, but I’ll cover that in a bit) needs to reach some sort of rescue location so they can escape a horde of zombies. What makes the experience special is that it does cooperative and versus play the right way. In order to survive, you need to work together as a team. Anyone who goes off wandering by themselves will quickly find that they are incapacitated (and soon after that, very deceased).

The survivors of Left 4 Dead are:

• Bill, a Vietnam veteran
• Francis, a biker
• Louis, a (former) Junior Systems Administrator
• Zoey, a college student

The survivors are all alike as far as gameplay is concerned. They just look different and say different things.

Left 4 Dead comes out of the box with four campaigns (although modders are working on more as we speak):

• No Mercy, where you fight in the city of Newburg through an apartment complex, a subway and sewer, then through Mercy Hospital to reach a helipad on the roof
• Death Toll, a small-town suburban campaign that has survivors trying to reach a fishing vessel anchored on the far side of town
• Dead Air, after fighting through a mall in Dead Rising, what could be better than fighting through an airport?
• Blood Harvest, if the other settings were too urban for you, this one takes place in the woods!

Each campaign consists of five levels, with a safe house in between each that contains weapons, ammunition, and health. Instead of spawning things in the same locations every maps, Left 4 Dead takes a new approach to resource management. The “AI Director” is constantly monitoring your progress and overall status. If it looks like you’re crusing through the level, it’ll throw lots of zombies at you and you won’t find power-up items as often. If you’re horribly wounded and about to bite the dust, it’ll ease up a bit. The random spawning ensures you’re never playing through the exact same game twice, and works extremely well in practice.

Speaking of being horribly wounded, I should take a second to explain the health system. It’s one of the more interesting ones I’ve seen in awhile. Each survivor has a health bar, much as you’d expect. However, there are two kinds of healing items available: pain pills and first aid kits. Pain pills can be taken instantly, but the health they bestow is temporary, decaying slowly over time. To make matters worse, any damage you take comes our of what’s left of your permanent health first. I’ve had a few situations where I died walking through the safe room door at the end of a level because I has a single point of temporary health left (that subsequently decayed as I walked through the door). First aid kits heal permanent health, but they take a solid, uniterrupted 5-6 seconds to apply. You can heal your teammates as well, just by using right click instead of left click (health items are in your weapon list, so you ‘use’ them like weapons).

This brings me to death. Where would a zombie game be without a desperate last stand? When you reach 0 health, you fall to the ground and become incapacitated. You’ll pull out your pistol (which has infinite ammo) and gain 300 temporary health points that quickly decay. If one of your teammates doesn’t help you up (an action that leaves them exposed), you’ll bite the dust (although you’ll come back if your friends reach a safe room, or if they find you barricaded in a closet someplace). You’re not invincible though, even when you get picked up. The first time you become incapacitated, your vision will blur a little. The second time, all of the colors in the game will desaturate, you’ll get tunnel vision, and you’ll be able to hear your heart pounding. The third knockdown, you’ll fall (and won’t be able to get up!)

This is not to say you’re defenseless against the zombie hordes. Early on, you’ll have your choice of a rifle, machine gun, or shotgun to fend off the undead. In later levels, you might stumble apon a second pistol (akimbo-style, baby!) or upgraded weapons. The shotgun becomes an automatic, the rifle gets a scope, and the machine gun becomes more accurate. If your arsenal wasn’t large enough, you can also find and use the occasional molotov cocktail (just don’t light yourself on fire…or let your teammates light you on fire…) or pipe bomb (complete with zombie-luring smoke detector on it).

The real twist to the “hordes of zombies” theme is the presence of the “special” Infected:

• The Boomer moves slowly, but has a vomit attack that blinds survivors and causes hordes of zombies to descend on unfortumate vomitees. He explodes when shot, so you need to knock him back with a melee attack first (unless you want to get covered in his vomit).
• The Smoker has an extremely long toungue he can use to drag survivors towards him. Survivors are helpless while being dragged, so you need a teammate to help you out if you get grabbed. The Smoker explodes into a cloud of thick, black smoke when he dies, blocking survivor vision and disabling text communication.
• The Hunter has little health, but can pounce survivors and leap around with incredible agility. Pounced survivors die very quickly if left unaided.
• The Tank only spawns once or twice each level, and has powerful melee and ranged attacks. He also has gobs of health, making him difficult to kill. He does, however, move more slowly than your default run speed.
• The Witch is the only Infected that you can’t play in Versus mode. She may or may not appear in a level, but can easily be identified by her sobbing noises. She’ll leave survivors alone if they don’t disturb her, but is a whirling dervish of destruction when angered.

The game periodically throws these special zombies at you, but they can be identified by the noises they made. In Versus mode, infected players will randomly spawn as the Hunter, Boomer, and Smoker. When the AI Director decides it’s time for a Tank to show up, Infected players will get a chance to play him in-order.

Speaking of game modes, there are two. The first is Campaign mode, where you and three other human-controlled survivors face off against the computer to reach safety. The other is Versus mode, where teams of human Survivors fight against an opposing team of human-played Infected. Sides try to make it as far as possible in each level as the survivors, gaining points along the way, and then switch sides (playing the same level over again). After both teams have played through a level as the Survivors, you move to the next section of the campaign. I have to say, Versus mode is a blast, mostly because the Infected can cooperate in ways the AI never uses in Campaign mode. Plus, playing as a zombie is awesome.
 
Left 4 Dead is available on Steam now for $49.99. I can’t recommend it enough!

I’ve been having some rather painful RSI issues with my wrists and hands over the past few months, and was reading up on some more ergonomic input devices when I stumbled across the Evoluent VerticalMouse 3. Instead of having a traditional palm-down grip to it, the VerticalMouse turns a regular mouse on its side and allows you to use a handshake grip instead. Since the natural position of your hands is at your side, palms facing inward, this grip keeps your hands and wrists in a neutral position. According to ergonomics and medical professionals, this should relieve most of the stress placed on the median nerve (the pinching of which is the source of carpal tunnel syndrome).

One of the guys I know at work recently picked one up, so I sat down to use it for a few minutes and was instantly hooked. Mine arrived from Amazon yesterday, and I’ve been using it fairly heavily for the last day or so. My impressions:

The Good

• The grip is far more comfortable than on traditional mice (if you have some arm support)
• The sensor, despite being infrared, goes up to 2400dpi (that’s even better than my Logitech G5 laser mouse)
• The build quality is solid (except for one button…)
• The pain in my hands and wrist is getting better already!

The Bad

• The mouse is fairly light, so if you prefer some heft to your pointing devices (like I do), using the VerticalMouse takes some adjustment
• You need to have good arm/elbow support (armrests on your chair or a wrap-around desk), otherwise the grip is difficult to maintain for long periods of time
• Thumb button feels cheap
• The DPI switch is on the bottom of the mouse

As far as features go, the VerticalMouse has a few nice things that distinguish it from the large quantities of mice out there. The optical sensor is one of the best available, and can be adjusted in hardware anywhere from 800dpi all the way up to 2400dpi in terms of sensitivity (adjustments are made in 400dpi “chunks”). There’s a rare third mouse button (right where your little finger lies) as well; with the included software, you can map the buttons on the mouse however you like.

If you’re suffering from wrist or hand pains, you should give the VerticalMouse a try. It’s pricy at $69, but so far I believe the comfort benefits are worth it. I’ll be doing some tests with a few games this weekend to see how the mouse performs in that arena!

My search for a new laptop ended abruptly yesterday, as I took a trip to the local Apple Store in the Burlington Mall (about 15 minutes north of Waltham on Route 95/128). After having read about so much awesome Mac software like MarsEdit (which I’m using to write this post), Coda (really cool one-page web development software from Panic), and OmniGraffle (think Visio, but much easier to use), I decided to take the plunge. I realize that there’s a Centrino 2 revision on the horizon, but at the end of the day, I figured the best of the present-day was fine for my purposes. Yes, I purchased a 15-inch Macbook Pro.

The machine is pretty zippy, having the following specs:

• 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo “Peryn” with 3MB L2 cache
• 2GB DDR2-667 RAM
• 200GB 5400RPM hard drive
• 1440×900 LED-backlit screen (matte finish)
• 802.11a/b/g/n wireless and Gigabit ethernet
• GeForce 8600GT-M with 256MB of VRAM
• Slot-loading DVD+/-RW burner

The first thing I noticed about the Macbook Pro was its all-aluminum construction. I’ve never used a notebook whose body was completely made out of metal (Lenovo’s high-end ThinkPads with their magnesium frames come the closest). It’s extremely solid, although the metal does tend to heat up more quickly than the plastics on my old notebooks have. The screen is the real shocker; this is the first LED-backlit panel I’ve used, and it is downright awesome. Not only is the screen super-thin (for something real crazy, go take a look at the Macbook Air in person), the colors are rich and the contrast and brightness are worlds-above what my X61 tablet could manage. I’m really liking the feel of the keyboard keys. There’s no flex to the keyboard at all, and when it’s dark in the room you’re typing in, the keyboard backlight automatically turns on to help you see. The only real issue I’m having has to do with my transition from Windows - I keep pressing Control-C/V/X to copy, cut, and paste (it’s Command-C/V/X on the Mac).

The speakers are better than the mono one on my old ThinkPad, but (as you might expect from a notebook with no subwoofer), they’re lacking in the bass department. I haven’t tried plugging in my headphones yet to listen for any line noise. The slot-loading DVD drive is a nice touch as well, but it’s pretty noisy, and I feared that my discs were getting eaten judging by the noises I first heard. Apparently, after some research, I found that slot-loaders DO tend to cause more wear on your discs after awhile. We’ll see how everything goes.

OS X is very shiny; there’s a lot more gloss spread around than there was on XP (or even Vista). I can see how the general experience is geared towards “creativity.” It’s almost like OS X is pushing you to just jump in and start making something (Apple has bundled movie, audio, and image creation apps right into the OS). I’m going to start playing around with GarageBand, so expect to see some horrible loop-generated music hitting the blogs soon!

I suppose my only real complaint so far is how expensive the 3rd party software is. Parallels (the virtualization software) runs $80 per copy, and other awesome apps like Apple’s iWork suite and Panic’s Coda run $80 per copy as well. I’d like to get copies of all of these things, but $240 is a lot of money for software.

So far, I’m liking what I’m using! I’ll keep putting up any additional thoughts as they come into my head.