Best. Straw Man. Evar.

Last night I watched a fascinating video on YouTube: 10 answers that every intelligent Christian must have. This video is a response to some other guy's video (10 questions that every intelligent Christian must answer) and far surpasses it in sheer pseudo-logical douchebaggery. But still I watched, and watched with a smile on my face, because I deeply enjoy well crafted irony.

This guy is awesome... he starts out by claiming that the 10Qs video is nothing but a set of straw man arguments, something which I suspect either makes perfect sense or not depending on whether you actually believe in God or not. But that's not what amused me. What amused me was the example of a straw man argument that he crafts in order to explain what one is. Brace yourself, it's a killer: If I can grab a box of crackers, you have no parents. Really. That, by the way, is a specific 'straw man' attack on the proposition that you have parents.

Best. Staw man. Evar.

How better to start an argument than by creating a straw man of a straw man, then tearing it down to show just how egregious straw men are! That loud clang was a huge lump of irony hitting the floor :-)

The rest of his arguments are every bit as bad, by the way. To be fair, he does at least attempt to answer the 10 questions, albeit with such impeccably douchelike logic that "attempt" is probably the best way to describe it.

On the bright side, I do now have a new phrase: crackerbox-grabbing insane.

Today I learnt...

Been caught out in a deception? Or maybe you've had your woeful ignorance of some topic brought to light... Well, never fear, with just four simple words you can in all honesty contradict your accuser even if they're actually right!

Repeat after me: "I would say that..."

That magic little caveat can be used to prefix whatever you like, and best of all it makes the whole statement not only true but self evidently true.

Here's a fine example: A Conversation with Expelled's Associate Producer Mark Mathis

It seems to me that the words "I would say that" have an unspoken implication - a parenthetical "because otherwise I'd have to admit to being wrong, a pillock, or both"

But then, I would say that, wouldn't I?

Marketing... "Not really... the power of suggestion!"

Excuse me while I blither a little... Having failed to get a good night's sleep yet again, I find myself sat in front of my keyboard and bored waiting for the missus to wake up. Hmm... let's see, Brain not quite engaged? Check. Bored, but with nothing much to say? Check. Internet? Check. OK, must be blog time.

I had a rather nice bagel for breakfast. It was a healthy bagel too, with "less calories than 2 slices of bread*". I have a couple of gripes with that claim, actually.

Let's start with the word "less". Why do people use "less" and "fewer" as though they are the same? It really, really grates on me when the wrong one crops up in a sentence (or, more likely, an advert). Is it really that hard to grok that "less" is appropriate for continuous values whereas "fewer" is appropriate for discrete values? Nobody would say "There was fewer water in the bathtub due to the leak.", so why do they not feel the same dissonance over something like "I had less ten pound notes than I expected." ? Is it because people are thinking of the money instead of the notes? But then again, "calories" is a continuous value... is the problem here actually that common usage typically refers to whole numbers of kcals, thus rendering calories discrete? Is it that we're referring to "calories" the unit (which is basically the same thing).

Bah.

I don't really care - "fewer calories", "less bagel". Hmm... Actually, there's a much better example: "less bagel for the money" vs. "fewer bagels for the money".

Where was I? Oh yes, bagels. With "fewer calories than 2 slices of bread*". Hmm, let's check that * out, shall we... Ah, here we go: two 60g slices of thick white bread. So that's 120g of bottom-end-of-the-scale bread. OK, I can believe that - especially since the bagel itself only weighs 95g. I guess that marketing didn't think that "Less food than two slices of bread*", or "More calories by weight than 2 slices of bread*" would get the package off the shelf and into your basket. And why stop there? "Fewer calories than a bucket of lard*!"

Actually, the claim has more to do with the subjective nature of the whole food/calorie thing. The point, apparently, is that a single bagel is as satisfying, if not more so, than two slices of bread* due to the more chewy texture... and all with fewer calories.

That's one of the things I hate about advertising, actually - it's manipulative. It doesn't matter how much we require advertising to be truthful, as long as it can be technically honest in a suggestive way, we're just as lied to as we were before. At least when adverts could get away with lying we knew not to trust them... nowadays people seem to think that "they couldn't say it if it wasn't true!" which sort of misses the whole gap between what the advertisers are saying and what their audience is hearing.

Of course, if one is aware of the difference then the ads can sometimes make for interesting viewing. Take a recent-ish ad I saw for (hair) conditioner, for example. This is a product that is very relevant to me, what with the long flowing locks and all. Now then, do you sometimes worry that your conditioner is actually stopping your anti-dandruff shampoo from working? No, of course you don't, and neither do I. But that's the question the ad poses as it opens, and by asking the question it tells me all I need to know...

First of all, if there was any evidence that conditioner could impair the performance of anti-dandruff shampoo, wouldn't they be leading with that? Or at least mentioning it? I rather think that they would. I mean, let's not forget that the "hair care" industry loves to present evidence of its claims, for example that shampoo/conditioner that can reduce breakage by up to -100% (they actually said that at one point - "up to -100% less breakage"... so that's, what, twice as much?! These days they seem to have caught on to the double negative). Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, that incredible anti-breakage shampoo/conditioner (which I do actually use and like, FWIW). That claim? Based on something like seven hair samples washed, etc. in a laboratory environment. Junk science, in other words, but necessary for the claim to be "meaningful".

OK, but what about my anti-dandruff shampoo? I mean, how am I going to get women to stroke my hair if my damn conditioner is conspiring against it? Argh! If only there was a conditioner that didn't do that... like, say, oooooh, most (all?) of them. And thanks to Head & Shoulders' advertising I now know that I don't need to bother with their conditioner, which I might otherwise have given a whirl.

Hmm, come to think of it, the first shampoo/conditioner I really liked (now long since defunct), back when my hair was first getting long, was "Finesse". A brand that claimed that their shampoo was "activated by dirt", like, oh I dunno, let's say: any detergent. Also, the conditioner worked more the longer you left it on. No, really. That's what the ads were pushing.

Anyway, in other news, wifey is now awake and enjoying fewer calories than two slices of bread*, so I guess it's time to make the internet-to-real-life transition...

*sniff*

Today I failed, badly... because today it took me over eight hours to make a cup of tea.

OK, that's nothing startlingly new (although it is pretty bad, even by my standards). The whole turn kettle on, get distracted, repeat until actually getting as far as drowning a bag, get distracted, repeat... process is, thanks to the ADD, perfectly normal for me. So a few hours to make a cuppa is perfectly normal, even if that number is uncomfortably large.

What's bothering me is that today it took me eight hours to notice that the kettle wasn't plugged in.

I don't know how many times I thought I was reboiling the kettle only to get distracted before noticing that it wasn't working.

On the bright side, I nailed that cuppa on the first attempt once the kettle was actually plugged in. Yeah!

But still... Gah.

Night of the living Beebs

I've just had a funny few days (well, nights really - but they're logical days to me, even if they're physical nights to the rest of this timezone). It all started with a box of Beeb Micros that were gathering dust (and worse...) in a friend's place, so were offered to me since it's well known that I just can't get enough of 'em.

So, Job no.1 was to find out what exactly what I'd just been given. Looked like a 128K B+ (yay! I didn't have one of these before) that was in very good condition, a couple of filthy Bs (issues 3 and 7, one with 8271 DFS) and a couple of Master 128s that were positively vile. When I said that these machines were gathering dust, and worse, the worse consisted mainly of dead insects, cocoons, insect droppings and so on. Keyboards full of gunk, with some keys barely readable through the grime. Filthy to vile, in other words. The good news was that all the machines with the exception of one of the Masters actually powered up OK, or with a bare minimum of the laying on of hands (i.e. reseating ICs) in the case of one Model-B. That's pretty amazing, really. There was also a couple of (mostly working) disc drives and a (dead) monitor.

On to Job no.2 then: cleaning. I'm fairly sure that it's not abnormal to be in the shower at 5am clutching a sponge and a 23-year old, muttering words of filth and tenderness. OK, so maybe it is abnormal when the 23-year old is a lump of beige plastic in two halves. Still, TLC gradually overcame the filth and that left me with some nice clean cases. Cleaning the PCBs was fairly easy - just dust them down, for the most part. No sexual innuendo required. That just left... the keyboards. A few hours' work ripping them apart, dunking things in soapy water, rinsing and drying them, and then reassembly and I was good to go.

Sadly, although I was good to go, two of the machines weren't really interested in getting with the program.

The previously working Master was now being intermittent. Maybe it wasn't working well before either - I did nothing more than power it on and type a *command or two - or maybe some piece of vital dirt was now missing. Either way, given the lack of socketed components in the machine, it was beyond the critical "worth the effort" point. As luck would have it, the problem with the other Master was in the PSU, so I had an entire spare Master transplant... and \o/ all was well. Having a dead Master wasn't the end of the world, either - I already had a sickly machine that it could donate some parts to.

Since I was putting so much effort into these beasties, I replaced the CMOS battery pack in the good Master, and used the dead one's pack to make a new one for my existing machine. Great fun there - leaking Duracell AAs aren't overly nice.

Final score on the Masters: I started the day with one damaged Master and ended it with two working ones in excellent condition (and some spare parts). Win.

I didn't do so well with the Beebs, when it came time to give them a more thorough test. One died fairly soon - and resisted all my efforts to bring it back. Again, it was past the effort/worthwhile horizon, so I let it go to be spare parts and/or wallpaper.

The second B seemed OK, and I went to the effort of fitting a disc interface to it before I noticed that it had some interesting problems - the screen display would (after a while) start to corrupt itself in interesting ways. Some letters (MODE 7 FTW) would change, others wouldn't. Given the characters that were affected, it was obvious that bit 3 of something was being lost. Not all instances of the characters were affected - it was dependent on screen position too. Worst of all, using the cursor/copy keys reproduced the bit3-deficient characters so that meant that the problem was in the CPU/RAM side of things, not the SAA5050 side. "Ah well," I thought, "this might make for a fun one to fix."... and then I noticed that after a time the corruption got much worse, and that moved it into the effort side of the effort/worthwhile balance.

Final score on the Beebs: gained a 128K B+ and a fair few spare parts, including an 8271 upgrade I didn't have before.

So, disc drives... One was fine, but only a SS 40T drive. Not the best news, but functional. A second SS 80T drive didn't seem at all happy, so I ditched it. That left a dual drive with one DS 80T and one SS 80T drive. The SS 80T drive wasn't happy, so out it went to be replaced by one of my spare DS 80T drives... once I'd dealt with the remaining drive. It worked, but only if I held the disc in the drive and pressed down on the clamp. Looking at it, it was pretty obvious why: the clamp mechanism was bent. A bit of fun and games stripping the drive down to fix that and I was good to go, so in went my existing drive alongside the new one... and failed to work. Seems that my existing drive's head-load solenoid was sticking. On the bright side, it was the same model as the new one, so I'd just had a crash course in stripping that type of drive down.

Final score: gained a SS 40T drive I'll probably never use, and a dual DS 80T drive that I will.

With my Beeb nostalgia freshly stirred, I figured it was about time to play with some of my existing machines a bit. "It's been a while since I played Exile!" I thought, and then on a whim read a little online about it. And now I have to play Exile - this year marks its 20th anniversary! And what better machine to play it on than the Master Compact... can't be beaten in terms of Beeb keyboard quality and comes-with-a-monitor-stand-ness.

New problem: transferring Exile from a 5.25" DFS disc to 3.5" one (maybe ADFS, maybe DFS - I can be flexible with these things having fitted a 1770DFS ROM to the Compact), or hooking up a 5.25" drive to the Compact... although the way I saw it, if I was going to go to the effort of hooking up a 5.25" drive, I might as well do it properly and transfer stuff to 3.5".

You might wonder why adding a drive to a BBC machine would be anything other than a doddle, but you see the Compact has a non-standard connector - it's a 25D that I (eventually) found corresponds to pins 8-32 of the normal 34 pin connector. Luckily, I just happen to have things like IDC 25D plugs and sockets lying around the house, and even a spare 'normal' beeb drive cable to cannibalise. So now my Compact has an external 5.25" drive as well... and I could copy Exile across to the 3.5" drive. Excellent. (I went with DFS in the end - ADFS would have offered me more space for savegames, but I would have had to disable the 1770DFS (and supply some 'placeholder' *DRIVE, etc. commands - hardly a big problem) to make it work and that seemed like more faff than it was worth).

That then lead to a bit of a head-scratch... did I want to stick with my legally purchased Exile (I bought a second copy direct from Superior about 12 years ago, shortly after buying a Master 128 to play it on), or skip all that "type this annoyingly located word in from the novella" malarky and use a version downloaded from the interwebs. In the end, I gave my genuine Exile disc a loving stroke (in its envelope, of course) and put my working copy back alongside it. Haxx it was, even if it did involve using a RiscPC to transfer the downloaded data to the Compact via an L-format ADFS disc.

Actually, I used two RiscPCs since my main one decided that then was a good time to die. It's most likely a problem I've seen before with the PSU, but I put all of that to one side because, quite frankly, I was fed up with b0rked machines and just wanted my Exile fix.

Then I had some fun with Exile's save game facility - it was often ignoring the filenames I gave and using the drive number instead. Freaky (and not something I remember seeing happen before). Worst of all, it was often doing it, not always. I.e. it was going to be a bitch to figure out/fix. I dunno, maybe it has something to do with using the normal version on a Compact (the Compact had its own version, necessary since the Compact has no DFS by default and the 'normal' Exile uses DFS commands). That doesn't explain the problems I had reproducing the glitch, but hey: I don't need to use the game's own load/save routines at all.

I really wish that I'd known just how optional the game's own load/save feature is back when I was first playing (and hooked on) Exile.

You see, Exile is such a big game that it uses damn near every scrap of memory that a Beeb has available... and that means that there's no room left for the filing system, so no built in load/save. The way that Exile solves this little conundrum (and believe me, Exile with no load/save option would be exceedingly cruel) is by having the load/save functionality in the loading program. The game itself, upon a particular keypress, squirrels all the necessary data away in safe spot in memory, corrupts the rest, and then hangs. You then hit ctrl-break to restart the machine, and run the loading program which allows you to save your game, etc.

Sounds a bit convoluted, but not necessarily all that bad, huh? Well, when I was first playing Exile, it was the tape version. So "quickly" saving my game actually took about twenty minutes. Really. No hyperbole used, because none is required. Ah, but I digress. So let's get back to my filename mangling problem and the hint as to not needing to use the game's own load/save features.

Since the savegame data is squirrelled away safely in memory, all I actually have to do is to save that block of memory to disc, and a simple *SAVE command will do just fine. (In case you're wondering, or have stumbled across this entry whilst actually looking for such info and made it past the showering with a filthy 23-year old scene, the command is: *SAVE filename 2C00 +400). Better yet, I knocked up a couple of quick programs in assembly to function as *QSAVE (to quickly save the game as Q.SAVE) and *QLOAD to load Q.SAVE into memory at &2C00 and then run the game. I still gots me some beeb-smarts after all :)

Naturally, something that was by this point going so well had so have a problem. And sure enough, this evening my Compact started doing something strange. Every now and again when I was playing Exile, the screen would corrupt - and then recover. I was a bit surprised that the game didn't crash, but screen corruption isn't necessarily that fatal for beebs. Master series machines have even more scope for "screen goes screwed but nothing crashes" since there's the possibility of shadow RAM involved.

And then things got annoyingly familiar. Every now and again, when I reset the machine in order to load/save, the normal "Acorn MOS / Acorn 1770 DFS / BASIC" messages would flicker into lowercase. A little (literal) prodding revealed that the issue was brought on by holding the ctrl key down which pushing the machine down onto the table. Pressing the underside of the case also caused the lowercase thing, and it would last as long as I pressed in a certain area. It was annoyingly familiar because, just like my dead beeb, it's a 1-bit difference (bit 5, if you care). On the bright side, there wasn't the extra "and if I wait a few more minutes, it craps itself all over the memory anyway" problem that the beeb had. On the other hand, the Compact would hang hard if I tried to do anything with it whilst the text was in lowercase.

So there I was, at "bedtime", with a machine that had a problem. A machine, furthermore, that I was very much looking forward to enjoying the fruits of my Exile-related labours with. So that most definitely lands on the worthwhile side of the effort/worthwhile balance. Just to force my hand in the issue, I'd actually downloaded the Master Compact service manual a few days beforehand.

Who needs sleep when you have a malfunctioning computer and a circuit diagram?

Long story short (cries of "too late" from the Airplane! fans), there are some plastic "support" thingies moulded into the bottom tray of the Compact's case. One of these had pressed a leg from IC14's socket (which is where the Acorn specific serial chip would be fitted if I had it) into the track that ran next to it and over time the nice green coating had worn away leaving a little patch of exposed metal. Once that had happened, all it took was a little pressure to make a connection and presto: the system VIA's PB5 was pulled to logic 1 in step with the SERPROC's ¬CS signal. Ouch.

I guess that when they said "THIS PRODUCT MUST STAND ON A HARD FLAT SURFACE" they really meant it. That alone would have prevented this issue, or at least massively reduced the chance of it happening.

And the moral of this rather long and mixed up story? Frankly, I have no idea. I was going to make some off-colour joke about fiddling with 20-year olds, but now I've forgotten it. Maybe I'd have done better if I'd gotten any sleep... Oh, wait, I have Exile and a Master Compact to play it on instead...

You gon' git yours, Triax...

Oh, and I guess I should fix my RiscPC, too :(

Hosting UT3 games... a truly daft solution!

Well, last night I finally got sick of that stupid UT3 error message telling me that my NAT was incompatible with hosting games, and that I should check my router's manual about setting up 'port forwarding' and 'DMZ'. Oddly enough, you see, I actually know all about that. You'll also note that at no point does it bother to mention which ports need forwarding, making this particular error doubly crap: it's misleading as well as eroneous.

Anyway, all this malarky started when Patch 1 beta 1 was installed, and one of the things that patch did was to add STUN support for hosting games behind NAT. None of the later betas or the final patch have improved matters in this respect, BTW.

Now, you may well be wondering what STUN is and why it's useful in this context. I know that I was. And, quite frankly, I still am. STUN (more info here) basically just lets an application find out the machine's public IP address (i.e. the address that the NAT results in) and what sort of port-forwarding is in operation. OK - so far, so good.

Where it all goes a bit wrong is that if, like me, you're behind a 'restricted' NAT (and you probably are, if you have any useful sort of NAT at all - especially the type that acts as a very primitive 'firewall') then UT3 throws its chubby little hands up in despair and gives that error message. Even that isn't the real problem, annoying as it is. No, the real problem is that UT3 then will not let you untick the 'LAN' option when creating a game.

STUN might be useful for some things... but in this context, it really doesn't help.

So, like I said way back at the beginning of this entry, I'd had enough. If UT3 wanted to use STUN to annoy me, then I figured that I'd also use STUN to shoot that stupid error down.

I'm on a LAN here, which is why I have NAT in the first place. And on that LAN I have a linux box, ee-i-ee-i-oh. Well, actually I have quite a few linux boxes, but just one will suffice. You can certainly do what I'm about to describe using windows, and even on the same PC as you're running UT3 but, since I haven't tried that yet, I'll stick to describing what I have done.

I've set up a STUN server on the LAN, is what I've done. It's not visible to the outside world, which makes it utterly pointless as a STUN server since the only applications that can query it are also running on machines on the LAN, and thus the result will always be "open internet" (unless some firewall rules on the box(es) interfere, of course). Just for added value, the STUN server isn't even configured quite properly either.

I'm sure you can see where this is going ;)

So now my UT3 is configured to query the local STUN server, which leads it to believe that it has a direct connection to the internet with no NAT. UT3 then quite happily hosts games because, coming back to the original point, I have read my router's manual and set up 'port forwarding' properly (screw using a DMZ - that's way beyond what's actually required).

BTW, hosting games matters to me because the only way to really enjoy the single player campaign is to play it multiplayer. Yeah, I know. But then using a STUN server on the LAN makes no sense either. I'm getting almost used to that with UT3 now.

OK, so here's the juicy details, step by step, of what I did:

• Download the STUN server/client from here
  Obviously, I downloaded the source and compiled it. If you're using windows, you'll probably want the precompiled windows binaries.


• The STUN server wants to use two IP addresses on the box it's running on. Luckily, by stretching the point a little, you already have two with no need to muck about: your ethernet interface & the loopback interface. In my case, those IP addresses are 192.168.3.86 and 127.0.0.1, so I run the server like this:
  ./server -h 192.168.3.86 -a 127.0.0.1 -v
  (that -v is just for verbose output so that I can see what's going on).
  NB you do NOT need to be root to do this.


• Check that the server is 'working':
  ./client localhost
  That should return "Open".


• Next up is editing UT3's configuration to tell it to use the local server instead of stunserver.org (the default). This is set in UTEngine.ini, which you'll find in My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Config (phew). Searching that file for "stunserver.org" is probably the easiest way to find it. Replace stunserver.org with the hostname (or IP address, I guess - I haven't checked that) of the machine your STUN server is now running on.


• Now you need to actually forward the relevant ports from the outside world to the machine that you're playing UT3 on. All the ports are UDP and their numbers are:
  7777, 7778, 7787, 6500, 13000, 27900
  Disclaimer: I'm not 100% certain that all of those ports are required. Some of them probably aren't. I arrived at that list thanks to enough trial and not enough error, i.e. it works with those ports forwarded, but I haven't tried closing them to see what makes it break ;)


• Enjoy public, non-LAN games! I know that I do :)

In conclusion: my 'solution' is hacky, dumb and should never have seen the light of day. Much like UT3 in its current state. -- zing! --

zomg UT3 is teh sux0rz :( Epic FAIL.

Sad, but true: UT3 is 90% suck.

The eye-candy is spot on, for the most part: it does look very pretty indeed. Certain elements of the game's looks have come on in leaps and bounds - vehicles, for instance, look pretty frickin' sweeeet now. The maps are detailed and gorgeous to look at. The characters are pretty good looking too, although their animation still looks clunky and cartoonish.

Over all, visual quality is top notch. Indeed, reviewers everywhere seem to have noted this and heaped praise upon it, and for good reason.

Sadly, there's very little else positive to say about it. Vehicles (for the most part) handle a lot more like vehicles and less like bricks. That's good. Some have fared better than others in the "upgrade" though.

Scorpions have received possibly the most mixed blessings of the "upgrade"... Their blades are now at the front, making them look like Scorpions in an "Oh, yes! Now I see it!" kinda way. On the other hand, they no longer fire those tricky to use (but powerful) energy string jobbies. Now they fire frickin' Oreo cookies. I mean, really.

Not that those Oreo cookies aren't deadly. In fact, on higher difficulty settings in the Campaign mode you'll be hard pressed to find an instance of a bot missing its target with them. Ah, let me rephrase that: you'll be hard pressed to find an instance of an enemy bot missing. "Your" bots, your team, your AI chums... ah, not so much. Turns out that they're semi-catatonic retards.

That bot "AI" is a real bastard. UT3 has four difficulty levels: "Easy" (i.e. walkover), "Normal" (i.e. tricky at times, but not that hard), "Hard" (i.e. massively frustrating) and "Insane" (which I have yet to try, but based on previous experience I'm not expecting it to be even remotely possible).

Here's one of the things that's wrong, and really badly wrong: no matter how good you are, you'll struggle on "Hard" difficulty because your bot team mates are so mind-numbingly retarded that you'll wish you could teamkill them. If you're anything like me, once a match is beyond the point of no return, you'll spend those last few minutes (in overtime, natch) contriving ways to punish them. For some reason, the enemy AI seems to be spot on, however.

Time after time after time I've seen my "team" doing such retarded things as:
Dropping the flag (knocked off a hoverboard) and not bothering to pick it back up but just running back to base without it.
Deploying the Leviathan in a location where it simply cannot see anything it might want to fire at, such as nodes, cores, or even enemies. Hell, I'm sure that they only deployed it there (FOUR times in one particular match) because they couldn't figure out how to wedge it somewhere so stupid so that it was unrecoverable.
Picking up the orb right next to a critical node, and then running away with it. Go bots! That'll stop the enemy in their tracks.
Sitting in powerful vehicles firing shot after shot into the walls/floor. Keep it up bot, I'm sure that the seven-hundredth shot into that wall will actually hit whatever the fsck it is that you think you're targetting.
Jumping in the path of my just fired rockets/flak causing my messy death and a cry of "same team!" from them.
Taking the enemy flag and yelling "I'm under heavy attack here!" for as long as they live. You know why they're under heavy attack? Because the retards haven't even tried to leave the enemy base.
Sometimes they do try to leave the enemy base. But then tragedy strikes! Maybe they left their wallets in there, or something, because right back in they go! One time the retardobot made it all the way back to the flag stand, no mean feat I might add - and only thanks to my covering fire.

I'll not get into the whole "trying to cast a tournament game as a single-player 'story' like game" thing. The story kinda works in the sense that it more or less justifies the series of tournament games you actually play. I could have done without the cries of "fo' shizzle" and "you da man, daaawg", etc. mind you. What really spoils the "story", such as it is, is that it's short. Oh, and it has a blatant "sequel" ending on a par with Merchandising, oops, Pirates Of The Caribbean 2. After fighting both annoyingly good enemies and amazingly bad friends to get that far, you deserve more.

OK, so single-player kinda sucks. The single redeeming feature of UT3 over 2k4 in this regard is that you "can" now play the campaign through with your friends (or even complete strangers on the internet) replacing any/all of the bots on your team. That alone fixes the single-player campaign, by making it not single-player. Oh. Um. Errrr.... And, you see how I said "can" with the quotes and everything? Well, that's because it's supposed to be possible, but might not work out so well. My UT3, for instance, fortified as it is with the 1.1 beta 1 patch simply refuses to let me host anything because it's got some insane notion that my router doesn't have port-forwarding enabled properly for UT3 (which it does).

Anyway, enough "single-player" bitching.

Sadly, multi-player is annoying as hell too.

UT2k4 requires finesse... you have to flow around the maps... UT3, well... the vehicles might not move like bricks now, but the players certainly do. It feels like UT99 with lead boots on. There's no fluidity at all.
I read one review where the reviewer liked this because it meant that movement was no longer a vital skill in the game. Really.

Then there's the changes to the weapons... they feel nowhere near as meaty as they did in 2k4 (or even 99). It's a bit subjective and hard to pin down, but they just feel more tacky.

We've lost Assault, Onslaught, Double Domination, and Bombing Run and gained... Warfare. Okay, so WAR is supposed to be a mishmash of AS, ONS, and, to a certain extent, 'classic' DOM - and for the most part it is. But BR is just gone. *poof* It's a crying shame since BR is one of, if not the, most skilled gametypes in the 2k4 collection.

Movement, strategy, teamplay, thoughtfulness under pressure - all are vital to success in BR. And all seem to be playing a dim second-fiddle to the eye-candy and "mayhem" of UT3. This is most obvious in the WAR gametype... AS and ONS both required finesse and skill. In WAR the orbs turn the whole game into a much more frantic, deathmatch-like experience. The same's true of the translocator in CTF - it sucks now. Yeah, you can get around with it, but it no longer requires skill and finesse to use effectively, because you simply can't use it anywhere near as effectively as in 2k4.

I would say that UT3 is the UT2003 of 2007, but that would be being unkind to UT2003. Sure, UT2k3 was a massive leap forward in graphics quality, just as UT3 is, and yes it also sucked, just as UT3 does... but
oh boy does UT3 suck.

You might have noticed that I haven't mentioned the menus and UI at all so far. There's not anything in particular wrong with them, honestly. There's everything wrong with them. They're an abomination that should never have seen the light of beta-testing, never mind release. The only thing that's any good at all about them is that they whoosh around in a quite unnecessary manner. For that matter, that gets old pretty damn quickly and goes from being 'good' to being a bloody pain.

The whole GameSpy ID thing is a damn nuisance too, and adds nothing to the experience. Sometimes it completely replaces the experience with a login failure, for instance. Other times you might think that it's logged in OK only to find that your "Friends" list is now empty. Turns out that it isn't logged in anymore. No idea why. The only positive aspect that I can think of is that player's names will now be unique. Having been impersonated in the past (and by a foul mouthed, racist bot at that) I'm all for there only being one {R$A}Adny, however it's really not worth this much hassle and frustration.

Even the sound is a pain in the ass. There is no comfortable setting for volume. Everything is either too loud or too quiet. The announcer overwhelms everything.

Speaking of the announcer, one of the improvements in UT3 is that announcements now get 'queued' so that they don't get lost. On the face of it, this is a good thing - it always bugged me in UT2k4 that getting a killing spree, etc. with a headshot (very common for us snipers) would basically seem to pick which of the two announcements to play at random. Where this goes horribly wrong is when there's a lot of announcements quickly, and/or when some of the announcements are important and 'time-limited' in their usefulness. OK, a "killing spree" is nice to be informed of - but the enemy flag is probably more important. Throw in that bots' messages (and therefore presumably other players') get queued as well and you have near zero chance of a message concerning the flags, etc. actually being meaningful when you hear it. You can, of course, by means of fragging real hard manage to get so many announcements queued up that the pain never seems to stop. Yay. Bear in mind that the bloody announcer is so damn loud that it's overwhelming. Wonderful, it isn't.

Auto-taunts are a pain. Seems like every 13 year old prat just wants to sit and hammer those "taunt" keys at the end (or even during the normal gameplay) of a game. This is, to say the least, annoying. At least in ut2k4 you had some control over which taunts got played... fresh out of luck in UT3 - yet another feature lost. Maybe there's a cryptic ini setting you can twiddle - it's hard to tell, frankly. But I'm extremely annoyed that I even have to think about ini files in this context.

Something I've noticed, switching between UT3 and UT2k4 is that in UT3 everything is "bigger" and more cramped. It's all huge, pretty and in-your-face. Even the menus are 'designer' and intrusive (which is no mean feat when you consider that what they're intruding on is, in effect, themselves). Playing a game of 2k4 after UT3, all the characters look small and the corridors look massive. You know, with room to move.

My overall feeling about UT3 is that it is an epic failure. Epic/Midway have basically turned the magic that is Unreal Tournament into Yet Another Crappy Console Shooter Game. But, oh my, it is pretty. Sadly, pretty though it is, it stinks.

One word review: FAIL.