Firsly, Ill say its fun, and engrossing, and the visuals arent too bad, for a game made up of giant Dulpo style blocks.  Building and exploring holds attention for awhile.  But, Im not happy with the price – $25 is a ripoff, especially compared with other Indie titles, and the negatives…

The negatives off the top of my head (and there are plenty more):  The game runs like SHIT.  Even people with high end machines have trouble.  There are popular loaders to help fix up the crappy coding, but the fact that they exist and are well known is testament in itsself.  Secondly, its FULL OF BUGS.  Im sick and tired of having to run cross country to get back to my castle,  because the fucking spawn point (bed) is “obstructed”.  Fuck off it is.  Again, lots of people complaining about it.  Another popular problem is Java itsself.  Really? Java might be great on some devices but its a constant problem on many PCs.  I honestly ended up having to re-install my whole operating system to get a playable (read: terrible) framerate, and thats after it kept crashing every 10 minutes (literally).  If anyone wants a tip – if you can, just install Windows 7 64 Bit and JRE 64 Bit.  I had Win 7 32bit installed and Minecraft really did not like it.

Oh, for those on the Minecraft cheer squad, this machine will play Deus Ex, Left 4 Dead 2, among other much higher polygon count games.

Even bugs aside, the game feels half finished.  There is no aim to the game.  There are only a small number of monsters, and they are just annoying and repetitive.  Once you drop items on death, and the fucking game re-spawns you on the other side of the world, youve got NO CHANCE to get your gear back… dont bother.

In fact, thats the best way to describe Minecraft – play it for free, or don’t bother.

Its fantastic to know that there are at least one or two politicians in Australia that want to pull their head out of the sand and see what is really going on in this country.

The Centrelink payments here are a joke.  I pay more in rent than my total weekly payment, leaving me to cover ALL other costs with my own life savings which are now nearly gone.  Hopefully something good will come of this.

Well – 6 sessions with my 4th (?) psychologist and he basically tells me he can’t help me anymore because he thinks I don’t want take his steps to change my circumstances.

Without going into the details, I told him in the first session that I wanted a sounding board, someone to reflect my actions and thoughts and hopefully give me some more insight.  Todays session I had to remind him of that…

Simply put, his advice just boiled down to “do something different, step outside of your boundaries and try something new”.  He obviously didnt hear my repeated complaints that I keep doing new things and my situation gets worse.

Ive been largely ambivilent towards psychologists, but in recent time my view has become dimmer.  Every one I have seen has given me very different approaches, one would tell me to stop doing whatever, and the next one tells me to not worry about it, and another then says to do more of it.  Psychology is NOT a science.  Science requires a systematic approach, measurable results, and consistency.  Ive found NONE of that with psychologists.

They are just a bunch of people who keep suggesting whatever is their preferred brand of “remedy”, until something works.  I dont even find them particularly observant, insightful, or understanding.  If there was any rigor to the process, they would be some consistency, some way of determining what approach would suit a patient, then proceeding with the approach, evaluate, adjust, etc.  Instead they roll a dice, or dish up another serve of their only recipe.

I think Im pretty much done with them.  Doctors I have little faith in anymore too, but thats another story…

THEN, I got on to the next set of maps, and the challenges.  What a FUCKING JOKE.  DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME AND ENERGY.  These maps suddenly got stupidly hard, especially for solo play.  So I thought I would try online – get a few random people in to play through some and earn a few achievements… and that was WORSE.  No only does the game reuglarly drop its connection, its a bandwidth hog – EVERY TIME you pick an object up it has to verify its authenticity with TrendyNet.  That might be well and good for people with a server only a few miles to a few thousand miles away.   Here in Australia, with more expensive, slower, and worse internet infrastructure, these drop outs make playing the game nearly impossible.

No joke, I find my self getting through a couple of waves and thinking that, wow, I might actually get to complete this map, or die trying at least, without a disconnect.

So, given that TrendyNet and the developers of Dungeon Defenders have latched on to this cash cow, they seem to be too high and mighty to address many of the complaints that pop up through each patch / update.  They are up to version 7.12 as of writing this.  7 MAJOR version, and they still cant fix some the basic mechanics of their software?

Anyways – here is a summary of the issues you WILL face when you make the mistake of wasting part of your life on this game:

• Dropouts, crashes, disconnects OFTEN
• Getting stuck on the scenery.  Characters will get blocked by the smallest piece of scenery that any normal game character should just slide straight past.
• Ive seen mosters wander off in funny directions and get stuck in scenery too.  Then to have them reappear somewhere completely different.
• I often play on a low end laptop.  Other games play fine on low detail settings.  Dungeon Defenders graphics settings make very little difference to performance.  Their textures and models are all high detail, and don’t get their polygon counts reduced for low detail settings.  The only change that helped performance was to go to the absolute minimum resolution (640×400)
• The Android version of this game is EVEN WORSE.  The characters are completely uncontrollable as you have to strafe capability, and you end up fighting the camera all the time
• The different view settings (over shoulder to top down views) are more frustrating than useful.  You cannot see the RANGE of your towers with any of these views, so you have to guess to work out if your tower will reach the area you want it to protect
• The upgrade function on Towers is really frustrating.   Even if you have one tower in front of you, and it might be the only one, and you run up to it to upgrade it, the cursor will shoot off and reposition itsself at the nearest tower in range with the lowest rank, ready to upgrade that one.  If Im STANDING RIGHT AT A TOWER, DONT assume I want to upgrade a completely different one?!
• The challenges: what a fucking joke (incase I havent said that).  Forget about their “reccommended level”.  Thats a load of bullshit.  A level 70 character seems to have LESS chance of beating a map than a lower level character.
• And, all through the normal maps, the rule seems to be no time limit on harder or lower difficulty.  Once you try a challenge, youll find arbitrary time limits for building, and fighting, ON ALL DIFFICULTIES.
• After level 70, your ability to level up is SEVERELY reduced.  It has taken more time to get from level 73 to level 74 (after many hours of playing Im still only 1/4 there), than it took to get from level 60 to level 72.
• As I may have mentioned – the game adjusts the difficulty, seemingly based on what towers are present, rather than the Heroes that are defending them.  So, using a low level character, then bringing in a high level to build a few towers, and switching back to the low level character results in enemies so tough that you have no chance of beating them.
• The developers either dont seem to care about the less obsessive players, or they are insisting on us playing until our fingers bleed in order to have some fun.
• Dont mistake the number of hours played as an indication that the game is enjoyable.  Its an indication of how much time and effort you need to put in, in order to have a chance of even playing through all the levels you have paid for.
• Dont waste your money on the Downloadable content.  You only get more unplayable challenges that are so stupid its pretty much luck that will determine if you will beat them.   Or you can buy a few outfits for your character, and access to other hero types- which are really a copy and paste of the first 4 with a couple of tweaks.  DUNGEON DEFENDERS DLC IS A WASTE OF MONEY!
• If you prefer solo play, again, dont bother buying this game.  You will only get about half way through without wanting to tear your hair out in anger and frustration.  Or, you can just go over the same level repeatedly to farm experience points, but that becomes as exciting as watching grass grow after a short period of time.
• I can waltz through a stage on Insane with a boss at the end of it , barely having any damage done to the crystals (eg The Throne Room etc).  Then when the boss shows up, its like my defences just dont exist. (even with my Tower spec’d Level 73 Apprentice)  The enemies waltz though like they arent there, and its game over.  Start again, laboriously re-placing towers AGAIN, just to die slightly differently next time the boss shows up.  The Ancient Dragon was no different..  Would it be that hard to have “play this wave again” option instead of building eveything from scratch?
• Classes like the Huntress cannot test their towers in the Tavern, like just about every other class can.  How the hell can we fine tune our character when we cant even get an accurate idea of how the trap is working, what damage its doing, its range, and so on.
• Speaking of interface stupidity:

1. Get rid of the fucking START option that pops up after the intros.  I am not on an XBOX, Im on a PC, at least take the time to remove pointless screens and extra clicks.
2. TrendyNets fucking messages ALWAYS appear when you connect and you have to close them to proceed.  I dont even bother to read it anymore it changes so rarely.
3. Its now February.  GET RID OF THE CHRISTMAS CRAP OUT OF THE TAVERN.
4. Dont make me Re-pick the same character EVERY TIME I connnect to TrendyNet
5. The middle scroll wheel is the WORST button to use out of any input we have access to.  People ALWAYS accidently scroll while pressing it.  Which means when you want to sell something (for example), you often are fighting with your camera.  Change it.
6. Why can the Apprentice only use his spell casting buff in combat… WHY??  Let him use it during the build phase too – its not that big an advantage considering his disadvantages.
7. Positioning Towers is a time wasting exercise.  When building a tower – it would be nice if the screen just showed the areas that you can build (green transparent overlay or something?).  Instead you have to carefully move the mouse around until you find just that one pixel wide spot where you know the tower can go, wasting heaps of build time.  Hell, you do it with upgrades – snap the tower to where it can be built.  You will also find trouble with orientating your towers depending on your current camera view.  If you are in an up close view , and you want to put a tower infront of you, you will often find that itll swing around to face towards you, instead of away.  The cursor just gets screwy.
8. Give me an option to go to my Tavern, or Quit the game completely, from any point in the interface workflow.   Dont make me go back through EVERY FUCKING SCREEN to get out of the game.  ALT+F4 wont even kill it quickly.  DD usually crashes when you try and switch to the task manager, or just locks up.
9. Incase the message wasnt clear enough, When I finish a level, let me return to the tavern, instead of having to load up the next level, then quit out of it, just so I can they get out of TrendyNet.  Then get out of the game menu, then I can quit completely.  Trust me, there are times when Id like to just get out of this frustrating piece of shit, but even the menus manage to add to that frustration.

Look, I like a challenging game, one that will make you think and have a bit of fun, that isnt too easy.  Or too hard.  But seriously guys, find some middle ground.  Just because you and all your mates have the best gear and stats, doesnt mean us plebs do.  Stop testing the game (Im assuming they do occasionally test it) with these ridiculous characters and try playing though as a normal player (or solo) and see how frustrating it is.

I want to like this game, and I did, very much, for awhile.  Now I despise it, it gets me angry, it wastes too much of my time for too little reward, and I dont often even get to complete a game because of their abysmal network infrastructure.  I hope the developers read some of this and take note, but I doubt they will.   They dont pay much attention to complaints on the forums.  For each person like me complaining there are at least 100 more who are shitted off too, but havent complained.    I also hope everyone out there reads this before considering buying Dungeon Defenders.  its cheap, and good for a few hours to kill, but dont expect any more.  The reason I didnt post this in a forum is that Im also sick of the chearleading squads that are often employed to troll the forums and say how great the software is, to every complaint.  And that the people that should be reading it, dont.

Incase you dont know it, Im a programmer / analyst / developer.    These sorts of problems should be OBVIOUS to any developer who has tested things out properly.   Im so sick of companies like this relying on patches and updates to make up for the fact that they dont test their software out fully before release.  These problems are definitely fixable if they could be bothered, but I guess if the money keeps rolling in, do the minimum required to support the people who have already paid.

Rating:  When I first got it 3.5/5.  Now after playing it for many hours, Id give it  1.5/5.    If you want to play a casual game and not get too involved, give it a go.  If you are likely to get involved in a game, go and spend your money somewhere else.  Otherwise, more than likely, you’ll end up quitting playing Dungeon Defenders in frustration.

I didn’t realise how long a song it was – 6:27 … so much fun to play

Anyway, here is my latest attempt at Metallica’s The Unforgiven.

Just to get the petty stuff out of the way…. why the hell have they even said “Banned”?  What, is the government going to scourge the land search for anyone who may have a fiber optic connection, and send them to jail for it?  What sensationalist narrow minded bullshit.

Do politicians even know what an internet connection is?  Stephen Conroy continually proves he has no clue about his own portfolio as Communications Minister.  Don’t they realise, that while fiber may be an expensive initial outlay, it will give us capability to transfer data at very high speeds, for a very long time to come.  Instead the shortsighted wankers will feed bucket loads of cash to Telstra and competing telcos, to patch up and already dated network.  What do they care – they will most likely be out of office in 4 years, so it wont be their problem.

So, to really hammer the point home (because it seems people’s heads are so far up their arses they cannot hear anything but their own voice), there are 43 countries around the world with a faster and probably much better quality service.  These countries include many obscure places you would probably think are third world – like Lithuania, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, the Ukraine, Ghana, Faroe Islands, Vietnam… need I keep going?

Also, do any of these self serving assholes have kids?  You only have to walk down the street and see all the mobile phones, laptops, iPads, etc in use these days.  Do the politicians not realise that our kids are growing up with an internet connection in their hands.  Each one of them will be streaming video, music, etc, and as more and more people become “internet savvy”, and more of these online services become available (would anyone like to see Hulu in Australia?), our already bogged down network will be brought to its knees due to lack of foresight.

Here are a few stats:

• Number of Connections:  We are #11 when it comes to the number of people connected to the internet.
• Speed: We are listed as #44 in the world, on this site.  Our internet connections are that much slower than everyone else listed.
• We are approximately 7% below the average world internet speed
• Our average internet speed is approximately 75% SLOWER than the top performing country – South Korea
• Also in terms of speed, the average of the top 10 countries is 24.24 Mbps (Mega Bits Per Second).  Australia’s average is 8.01 Mbps.
• We are approximately 67% SLOWER than the average of the top 10 countries in terms of internet speed.

As the saying goes, we get the government we deserve.  Seems we deserve as backwards thinking, narrow minded, ignorant government.

Do you still think Australia is “the lucky country”?  If you consider #44 in the world to be lucky then I’d love to have some of what you are smoking.

Also, I have tried many other applications, some of which have not helped, and others which have made things worse.  These tend to be reliable and do what they say.  BUT, of course make your your system is backed up to a memory stick, hard drive, or burnt DVD, before running these sorts of applications just in case the unforeseen happens.  When was the last time you backed up your PC?  (Now that I think about it, its been a few months for me…)

First things first, head into the Control Panel, and uninstall any programs you don’t use anymore… after that, try these to finish off the cleanup process:

• Registry cleaner (Free):  http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
• All round cleanup / performance tool (15 day trial, but that should be enough to clean up your pc.  $50 US for the unrestricted version):  http://www.tune-up.com/products/tuneup-utilities/
• Stop unnecessary programs starting up (Free):  http://www.malwarebytes.org/startuplite.php
• Then, once you have cleaned up the PC using the software above, defragment your hard drive.  Personally, Ive found this free program quite good.   If you do install this, run the full “defragment and optimise” on all your drives the first time, and after that the software recommends weekly, but monthly will be enough for most home or small office users:  http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download/

With all of that, the machine should be a little snappier.  After that, you could always overclock it!  Once your PC is out of warranty (as overclocking can void warranties) then its a relatively easy way of getting 10-20% more power with very little, or no cost.  Think of it like boosting the performance of the engine in your car…

Oh, one last word of advice, if you want to know more about how to do things Ive mentioned then just type it in to Google.  Don’t forget, Google is Your Friend!

I suppose that’s one drawback of searching for truth and the reality in this world – its not something you can forget (heh, even Morpheus knew you couldn’t go back once you took the red pill).  As the song states “happiness is fine but its momentary, A momentary lapse of reality”, and from my experience, it is very true.  Most people throw on a set of rose coloured glasses and choose to see the world through them, but once you’ve taken them off and take a closer look at whats out there, putting them back on doesn’t put the mystery back in.  Its only serves to remind you of what can no longer be unseen….

Illy (feat. Owl Eyes) – It Can Wait

its like that money in my palm, soon as i spend it, want it//
soon as its on im off it, soon as i get it, lost it//
its like the moment compared to staring at pictures of it//
it pick you up then drop you down, you blink you missed it, wish you watched it//
so amazing when its there, when it aint its so unfair//
go from square one to atmosphere, then back to here, and//
i thought i had it on lock, turns out you cant restrict it//
cant rush it cant predict it, thats part and parcel with//

Happiness, happiness is fine but its momentary//
A momentary lapse of reality//
Reality is fine, but for the moment it can wait//
I’m addicted to the chase of my//
Happiness, happiness is fine but its momentary//
A momentary lapse of reality//
Reality is fine, but for the moment it can wait//
I’m addicted to the chase of my happiness//

we take that weekend by storm, tick tour dates off tour posters//
start that long sleep to sober, then just like that its over//
we party like rock stars, looking down on how kings would live and//
wake up to setting suns, smoke stains on our fingertips, but//
its perfect in that moment, we own it, its ours//
no happy ever afters, just happy for right nows//
so fleeting so profound, thoughts full in my head//
its nights i wont remember, with mates I’ll never forget that’s my//

Happiness, happiness is fine but its momentary//
A momentary lapse of reality//
Reality is fine, but for the moment it can wait//
I’m addicted to the chase of my//
Happiness, happiness is fine but its momentary//
A momentary lapse of reality//
Reality is fine, but for the moment it can wait//
I’m addicted to the chase of my happiness//

full tilt, we hit them highs, man they come and go like seasons//
i know when its arrived, hardly catch it till its leaving//
hold tight, for them up and downs//

hold tight, hold on, and don’t slow down//
thats my up and downs//

yea, aint no amount of words, close to define that feeling//
reality and dreaming, tow that fine line between em//
soon as it got here, its leaving, dunno when its going round again, but//
move forward, push towards it, means justify the end, so//
we’re scouring far and wide, through love and fear and hurting//
but after all that searching, goddamn it its worth it//
bang the head of the nail, we don’t dream to scale//
long as there’s wind in my sails, ima stay hot on the trail, my//

Happiness, happiness is fine but its momentary//
A momentary lapse of reality//
Reality is fine, but for the moment it can wait//
I’m addicted to the chase of my//
Happiness, happiness is fine but its momentary//
A momentary lapse of reality//
Reality is fine, but for the moment it can wait//
I’m addicted to the chase of my happiness//

• The Unforgiven [5mb]
• Nothing Else Matters [5mb]

Let me know what you think

Now, on to the real cynicism

It’s all rather self serving. Ie.  If the government and the media have exaggerated the danger presented to start with, then after the threat passes we find less damage and problems than they told us would occur, people will automatically assume that they did an excellent job and that’s kept people safe.  When in reality there was less danger to start with…

I thought I’d check off all the usual stuff that happens after a cyclone (some mentioned in a previous post):

• People might die – Sadly, Yes… though it wasn’t really caused directly by the cyclone, just a related incident.
• Houses will be destroyed – Yes.  I do love that photo… not much they can do except have a beer!
• Looters – Yes
• Whingers who will get their 15 minutes of fame – Yes (I’m not saying it isn’t justified!)
• Postage/freight problems – Yes
• Electricity problems – Yes
• Council clean-up problems – Yes
• Making tax payers helping foot the bill – Yes
• Telethons – Yes
• Fighting over payments / relief to the area – On its way
• Insurance companies wont pay out because they’ll argue flooding – Not yet, its too early.  They will still be waiting to get assessments done.
• Relief concerts – Not Yet
• Scum suckers who will abuse the relief funds – Not Yet
• Relief concerts – Not Yet
• Charity ribbons etc -Not Yet

Other things that always happen after a cyclone, that I didn’t put in the post (they are so obvious it’s probably not worth mentioning, but I will just for completeness

• Post cyclone flooding
• Increased cost of bananas, sugar cane destroyed, etc
• Politicians visit the area
• Communications problems
• Bad flood / cyclone puns:  “Deluge of Donations” (not as many as I would have thought… maybe a little too soon?)

You’d think by now they would be pretty well versed in how to respond to a disaster in North Queensland by now, especially after Cyclone Tracy, Cyclone Larry, and many others.  But, I have a friend who has registered to volunteer with the cleanup etc, but as yet none of the organisations (he registered with multiple) have not called him back, even just to tell him whats going on, let alone to tell him to head to North Queensland to clean up after Cyclone Yasi.

Maybe someone should point out to Gillard and team that they could probably set up a template in their preferred word processor software?