leaping off the edge

this is right around the time when shopping for new games becomes a massive headache. all the best titles seem reserved for this time and you see ur good friends indulge in flaming fanboy wars that are utterly futile.

i had the followed games pencilled on my list of must haves around august.

fallout 3

fable2

gears of war 2

tomb raider underground

prince of persia 

saints row 2

mirrors edge.

since then though, i've had to scratch out fallout 3. the reason being that i had had enough of dystopia, and wanted to play some good old fun games again.

i agree gears isnt the most positive outlook on life, but any game that lets you chanisaw enemies stays in my list.

but i must admit to having been completely floored by mirror's edge so far. from what i've seen so far, this game looks to be the 'portal' for 2008. and in my books, that's just about as high praise as one can offer games.

i admit being disappointed with the games released this year thus far. it's not a patch on last year, when i tearfully parted with my earnings but felt justified with hours of pure pleasure playing Bioshock, Assasin's Creed, Gears, Halo 3, R6 Vegas, Fifa 08, PGR3 and Mass Effect.

this year, i have only been impressed by Burnout Paradise, which i think is the best reason to get the wireless steering wheel and the beloved and unfortunately banned GTA 4.

but just like Assasins and Portal(love that song btw, look up "portal- i am still alive"), Mirror's edge has become a game changer. 

a different protagonist from the usual stereotype? check.

a game world played entirely on nausea inducing rooftops? check

total dependance on wits and not guns, to survive? check

total sense of immersion into the game world? check

dont know about you, but while i wouldnt mind not getting any of the above listed games well into next year, Gears and Mirrors edge have made a move from should haves to must haves for me.

that and the nokia 5800 xpress coming to UAE and India in December and rest of the world in 2009(yay!!)

Nehalem headaches for AMD

oh my god!! that was my first reaction when the nehalem(aka intel Core i7) benchmarks hit the net.

they say that imitation is the best form of flattery, but what happens when the imitation outperforms the original?

Intel's version of the AMD Hyper Transport is called Hyper Connect, and boy, does it connect or what..

even in the conroe days, AMD always held the edge in Memory latency and read write tests due to the pioneering integrated memory controller design they implemented in the athlon 64 over 5 years ago. (has it been that long? wow)

well, intel decided to bury the grizzled Front Side Bus and usher in their version of the integrated controller in the core i7. where they really blew AMD away of course, was by making it a triple channel controller, over the dual channel approach that AMD has favoured.

while the Core i7 is an absolute delight for workstation applications, gaming scenarios arent all that clear.

the cheapest core i7 (which would be the 920), isnt all that faster in games when compared to the similarly price Q9770. in fact, if you get right down to it, you could get a much cheaper dual core, say an E8500, add in a solid water cooling kit, OC it to near 4 Ghz and get double the gaming performance.

this is because most of the games right now are written to take advantage of dual core systems as the lowest common denominator in performance.

the few games that do utilise the extra cores (which right now seems to be supreme commander, not convinced that Crysis, Bioshock or UT3 make good use of quaddies), benefit far more from the much higher clock speed that u will get with a dual core.

there's the rub. since the i7 is in it's infancy, u have to shell out huge money, to get a decent motherboard, DDR3 memory(it wont run on DDR2).

plus there's also the fact that intel offers much better performance when it revises and refreshes product lines. it happened when it made a transition from 65nm to 45 nm and will happen again when they move from current 45nm to 32 nm sometime next year.

bottom line is, the i7 is mostly a fancy piece of nanotech that will be an absolute must 6 months down the line, when prices drop.

my suggestion till then, is to get an 8500, OC it to 4Gs, pair it up with a pair of radeon 4850s in crossfire(much better than the 4850x2 imho) and pack in 4 gigs of ddr2 1066 ram and u will have a system that will serve u fine for atleast 2 years.

The Inconvenient Truth

well, the world has changed a lot since i last blogged.

Tina Fey blew the world away with a better Palin than Sarah.

Kim Jong II is trying desperately to prove to the world that he's still alive and kicking( or hasnt kicked the bucket).

i finally saw two programmes in HD that finally justified the promise that my LCD tv held, apart from being spectacular for gaming.

have spent 50 hours in Oblivion and have only finished 30 % of the game.

biggest whammy of all though, is that Obama won the race to the white house.

i'll admit, i was one of the skeptics who thought there was no way an african american would ever win the presidential ballot. 

i admired the guy ever since he decided to advertise on Burnout Paradise. more than his acceptance of internet donations, the burnout  decision proved to me that this was finally a 21st century candidate.

but that was always tempered with a realization that it didnt matter an iota what the world thought of him. what would matter is whether the american voting public would buy his message for change.

did they ever.

but while Obama basks in congratulations for a much deserved victory, New Delhi is rightly concerned. while the indian news media went gaga over O's victory, not ONE of them bothered to check his views and thoughts on matters pertaining to the subcontinent.

strange as it sounds, democratic presidents have never been good for India.

Obama is a guy who's against the following:

• he's gone on record saying he's against outsourcing and would like to introduce legislature that makes it financially inviable to move jobs offshore.
• He's also against increasing the number of H1B visas quota that industry giants like Microsoft have been clamoring for.
• Days into his election, he issued a statement saying that he was looking into placing Bill Clinton as an interlocutor between india and pakistan, to resume the stalled peace process
• he also represents the traditional Washington thinking that always hyphenates India Pakistan together, rather than deal with each seperately.

ironically, the greatest improvement in indo us relations after the 98 nuclear tests was reached when there were two right wing governments in respective centres.

the congress would like us believe that the whole deal was a personal endeavor for manmohan singh, but the truth is, the seeds and details were sown in by Jaswant singh and Robert mulford in the previous administrations.

Obama inherits an america that is being broken slowly in financial terms. good old companies like Ford and GM have announced they are on the verge of bankruptcy.

the 150 billion dollar bailout package that obama has proposed seems highly impractical. where's the money to put into this scheme, when america has spent more than a trillion dollars on needless warmongering?

in fact, the american press has proved more questioning of fairy tale packages, while the indian press largely ignored the 12000 crore bailout package that the government put into UTI when it crashed.

methinks that once the party is over and housecleaning begins in january, new delhi might be in for some nasty surprises.

The Pieces Fall in Together

Yawn!!! Sorry. Couldn't help it. Been a long night keeping tabs on the Google Android launch. More on that later.

The big G is one of those companies that seems to inspire a lot of love on the net. Which kind of makes it an antithesis to Microsoft, which inspires (almost) universal hate. I mean even Jerry Seinfeld couldn't help Bill Gates.

Admittedly, Google is a brilliant search engine. No other search engine comes close. However, hints of a Microsoftesque ambition unravelled one by one.

Take the foray into desktop search, Office document management, Maps, Street view, Earth, Blogger, Orkut etc. The list goes on, and is diverse. In fact, Google is trying to be omniscient and omnipresent.

The only thing that held them back however, was a compelling platform to integrate services. For a myriad of reasons (maybe they're cooking it up in G labs, as we speak), the integrated one stop point for their services has been a tough sell to the PC market.

And then all of a sudden, they released the Chrome browser. That was when one had to say " Aha!! The game is afoot".

As a Chrome user for more than 2 weeks, i can say that it doesn't offer anything revolutionary over other desktop counterparts. Other than  the ability to run each browser tab in separate memory threads, it's a run of the mill browser and didn't make any sense as a Google product. It wasn't like it loaded Maps or Docs or Talk at start. Those still require visiting the website or downloading the App.

No, what was interesting though, is that it was an attempt to launch a platform for their web services, and gain some developer feedback. Much like Apple's Safari was. Now you see where we are heading, aren't you?

A couple of hours ago, T-Mobile launched the G1 phone(aka HTC Dream). Like i was telling a friend of mine, the Dream looks like a nightmare, but it's the underlying software that's the talking point.

Hardware wise, it's a decent package, although the lack of video recording and stereo bluetooth support is galling for a 2008 phone. we can assume that developers will get cracking on those issues with the Android SDK right away.

Android!! The cornerstone of Google's strategy. The reason d'etre for their 'Be there, everywhere' syndrome. All of Big G's plans seem to be tied up with their mobile OS. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than the G1.

For starters, the phone requires logging in with a Google Account. thereafter, it ties up you phone contacts with the Google Address Book. it also treats Gmail as the default Email client.  Gtalk is ubiquitous as the default chat client. Maps and Street view are presented in all their glory. Docs come preloaded, and there are default Facebook and Orkut and Blogger(YAY!!!) apps as well. and for browsing, you get the Google Chrome(AAH!! Now i see)

and there's a wonderful App Market that is better than Apple's Iphone Apps, simply because it doesn't tie you down to using a proprietary software to sync.

 Oh, and it comes with a direct Google Search App(well, duh!!)

look, tying up contacts with the google address book can be a wonderful idea. the worst case scenario that the ads are showing, is where you drop your phone into water, and get a replacement phone. then you simply login to your google account and presto, all contacts restored!!

this is the closest we have come to mass cloud computing. Cloud computing is an approach which stores data in a central server, and treats every thing else as an access terminal. the benefits are that the end user's computer needn't be all powerful. all the configuration expenses are met at the server end. the only thing needed on nodal ends are input, output devices and a strong network connection.

what concerns me however, is that with the million handsets that HTC is going to sell for sure, and with the beautiful Qwerty keypad plus WiFi means that surfing on a mobile will be terribly attractive.

what it means for Google, is that with each user logged into a Gmail account, they now get more user data, which can be used to main profiles. granted, they say that all user information is deleted in 9 months, plus that user privacy is respected. i admired the way they stood upto the Bush administration and refused to hand over search tracking data. Something that some other companies didnt have the guts to do(Yahoo, MSN anyone?)

But it seems that with Android out, and the way it has integrated all it's apps to the moblie platforms, that user statistics and potential ad base for the Ad sense are the only reasons for the strong push Google is putting in.

Big Brother is finally here. and it's name is Google.

and finally, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then apple must be blushing right now. not a single touch screen phone has deviated from the Large Screen and minimal buttons approach that Apple Pioneered.

should you buy the G1 with the attractive 179 $ plan? i would suggest waiting to see what Nokia cooks up with the Tube(AKA Xpress Music 5800) before jumping in.