ADPrep.com

Infamous is an open world game by Sucker Punch, the makers of the Sly Cooper series for PS2.   I have not played the Cooper series, but Sucker Punch delivers a hit with Infamous on the PS3.  

In Infamous, you play Cole who delivers a package that sets off a massive explosion throughout Empire city.   The city has been locked down by the government and is now at the mercy of 3 rival gangs that each control a section of the city.  When Cole wakes up from the explosion he now has the ability to control electricity (initially just by shoot electrical current out of his arm), climb buildings and he heals very quickly.  With your new-found powers, you have to decide if you want to be a Hero or a Villain.  You do not choose in the setup screen, but rather by your actions.  It is in your best interest that you fully commit to being either bad or good, because as your reputation grows you can additional abilities through experience points and citizens reactions will change more depending on how good or evil you are.

Open world games, I find, are often very fun when just waisting time pulling often stunts, taking down the citizenry or just seeing what is possible, but they often lack enough structure in the story line\mission based part of the game.   Sucker Punch has created a great open world, where you can do anything and go anywhere, but they also keep you focused on the storyline, by hanging carrots in front of you.  In Grand Theft Auto and other open world games, you cannot get all goodies at the beginning of the game, but I find the do a bad job of pushing you to get those goodies.   In Infamous, you play a superhero or villain whose powers are upgradable and Sucker Punch shows you exactly how can improve your character’s abilities in a “Powers” menu.  If you complete a certain number of good or evil missions you gain additional abilities.  You also earn experience points, which can be used to acquire new abilities.   Depending on whether you are playing a hero or villain, you can gain experience by taking out bad guys or citizens, heal individuals, or putting electrically handcuffs (for lack of a better description) on people, but those experience points are minor; the easiest way to get big amounts of experience is to complete missions.  Sucker Punch has just elevated what can be achieved in the open world game by dangling rewards in front of you and then by making those rewards easiest to acquire by completing part of the storyline. 

The best part of the game hands down is the game play.  Cole is a climbing machine.  You can climb anything you can see in the game if it has a ledge, light, pipe, or anything else that Cole can latch onto.  The best part is the Sucker Punch did not make it insanely difficult to land on small targets.  If you point toward the object and your distance is close, you will land on the intended object.  The controls are spot on and the animations of all these movements are perfect.  Later in the game you gain additional abilities which were all implemented great.  Some of the abilities like the Electric hand grenade or the ability to glide across power lines and railroad rails you will a lot more then other abilities, but it does not feel like any of the controls were an afterthought.   I do have a few complaints with some of the buildings you can climb on later in the game, some of them are missing physical boundaries.   There is one specific building that was very poorly constructed as you will be climbing a wall or running on the roof and before you know it, you are halfway under the cement inside the building. 

The story in the game is alright, but the cut-scenes that describe the store are awesome.   The cut scenes are drawn just like a comic book and really add a lot to the superhero/villain fun in the game.   At the end of the game, the story starts to get more interesting, but it does not break any new ground. Lets just say, Sucker Punch has set the story up well for a prequel or sequel.  I am sure we will get both at some point.  The side quest missions and some of the story line missions are a mixed bag.  There are a set of maybe 5 missions that you will see over and over throughout the game which I felt really started to bring down the fun factor.   These missions range from destroying security monitors off a building, to performing stunts for a photographer, and fighting a group of baddies to collect medical supplies for a paramedic.  There was one of these repeated missions that was incredibly fun and I hope Sucker Punch includes more of these missions in future games.  The mission involved disabling Satellite “dishes” for lack of a better term off the top of buildings.  As you disable one, a new one pops up on a distance building and you then have to disable that dish all under a very strict time limit.  To get to these satilities you had to run, jump, climb, ride electric power lines and use other abilities to get to the next dish before time ran out.  Some missions would have you disabling 3 or 4 dishes, some were more like 7 or 8, but I found myself moving to the edge of the couch each time I played one of these missions, because I was so engaged.

The best mission though were the storyline missions that had you doing unique tasks.  There are about 40 storyline missions  and I would say 15-20 were unique.  One of them has you riding on top of a bus that is transporting sick passengers to a hospital.  It is your job to protect the bus as it makes it’s way slowly throught the city neighborhoods.   This mission was rather difficult and a whole lot of fun to play.  I won’t ruin any other mission for you, but these unique missions are one more reason why you will want to advance the single player game.

The graphics in the game were good, basically what I have come to expect on the PS3.  The sound was really good and one of my favorite parts in the game is how citizens will react based on Cole’s actions.  If Cole shoots electricity around them, the citizens will start screaming and run away.  If you run into a citizen, some will say they are sorry, some will yell at you.  Some citizens will run up to you and ask you to help with a theft or a fight going on down the street, all very entertaining.  Speaking of the citizens, they really make Empire City come alive.  The citizens will appluad you, give you compliments and take pictures of you when you are good and are terrified of you when you are evil.  A little later in the game, if you are playing a hero, citizens will openly fight with the bad guys and sometimes they will even take out a bad guy or two by throwing rocks at them.

Overall, Infamous is an excellent game that could use a stronger story line and a wider range of side missions.  In the end, those negatives hardly weigh on what is a very strong new IP from Sucker Punch. 

Graphics - 8/10    Sound: 9/10    Story: 6.5/10    Gameplay: 10/10  Replay Value: 9/10

Overal Score: 8.5/10

     I just beat InFamous on the PS3, playing as a Hero.  I will give a full review of the game soon, but for now, I need to get some sleep.

To everyone who has mentioned that the blog does not show up properly in Firefox, thanks.  I have made a minor tweak to the content style and it appears to be showing up better in Firefox 3.5.  I need to do some more CSS formating in the near future.  The CSS file is quite extensive for this theme, should be interesting. 

Two of my co-workers and myself were investigating a schedule task that was no longer running after a member server had been promoted to a domain controller.  There is a very specific reason for this and once he writes a blog entry about it, I will post a link - it will be a good article. 

Anyhow, I was looking through some of the help information in schtasks.exe and I thought some of the help examples were funny, including this one:

     The job is pointless - running freecell at Noon and then killing it a 2:00PM - but the fact that they used Freecell to document how to use a process is cool by me.  Anytime, a developer &/or documenter can add some levity to technical documentation, without losing the detail need for the text, I think it is a good thing.    To whoever documented schtasks.exe, thanks, keep it up!

     I built a new pc this weekend for the purposes of being able to run a larger virtual environment.  I got a great deal from Newegg for a bunch of the components, including an Asus P6T Deluxe V2 Motherboard.

     I built the machine up and installed Windows Server 2008.  After the OS was setup, I installed some Intel Chipset drives, the machine rebooted and I got a message similar to “Adapter 1, No Disk Drives Found” and then it went to a makedisk screen.  I went into the BIOS and made sure all the settings were fine.  I have 2 - 1TB disk drives, both were recognized by the system, the BIOS had set the correct drive as the Primary Master.  I also checked the boot options, which were fine - CD Rom first, Primary Master Hard Drive next and then a floppy drive.   I did not have a SATA RAID configuration setup, so that was not the issue.

    I powered up my other machine and started searching online for other people that had similar issues.  Most people that had similar issues said to disable the jmicron ide controller.  I knew this was not the issue, because I was using the Advanced Host Configuration Interface (AHCI).  Just to do a sanity check I set the drives to ide and of course this did not change anything.  Some other people recomended to update the BIOS drivers, but that is a last resort for me.   I am not going to just install drivers and not find out the root cause is, if at all possible.  After reading a few more forums, I came across one that said they changed several things at once (never a good idea for troubleshooting or problem resolution, it can actually make things a lot worse) and it started working.  The mentioned that they updated their BIOS drivers, re-installed the OS and they changed the boot order so the disk drive was first and the CD was second.  I wasn’t going to update the drivers and I had already installed Vista at somepoint and it crapped out at the same point.

   All that was left was to change the boot order.  I changed the boot order and I was thinking to myself, “this better not be the fix, cause if it is, how can an issue like this exist now, let alone, 15 years ago?”  On the other hand, I was hoping it fixed the issue, so I could get my system up and running.  Sure enough, Windows Vista started to boot.  I have read the manual several times and checked the ASUS website for BIOS updates regarding this issue.  I will be submitting a ticket tomorrow morning ( I need to get some sleep soon) to let them know about the issue I ran into.  I will let you know what I find out tomorrow.  Asus has really good techinical support, so I am sure the response will be good.

    I took some pics of the components and the machine.  I will upload them sometime soon.

     I have been away from the blog for almost 3 months now.  A family matter came up which became my priority.  I have only logged on twice during that time to approve a few comments (and delete some also, SPAM filter only works so well I guess).  Hopefully, I can get back to posting in the next few weeks, but no promises just yet.

     I was just given a big ILM2 project so hopefully I can share some more information with on that matter in the near feature.

Microsoft is changing the name of ILM2, the new name is Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 .   To read the announcement go here:  http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ilm2/thread/e7c054c9-9a21-43ad-85c7-c66bfef8eef7

I think ILM was a much better name and I hope that Microsoft marketing will reconsider.  Identity Lifecycle Manager described exactly what the product was doing, I am not sure why marketing feels the need to remove Lifecycle from the name and add ‘Forefront’.  In my opinion, the Forefront line of products should focus just on security.  ILM should be part of the directory services group along with AD and ADAM.    I realize ILM can play a key role in securing your environment (as can AD and ADAM), but I do not see the need to add it to the Forefront group of products.  Now I am just waiting to see what AD will be renamed in the next full Server OS release  — Microsoft Forefront Active Directory Domain Services 2012???

Technical Documentation

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc720552.aspx - Tons of great documentation, start here if you are just getting in MIIS 2003

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/miis/bb677112.aspx - check out all the Documentation Links at the bottom of the page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Identity_Integration_Server - obligatory wikiapedia link

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/ida-identity-lifecycle-management.aspx - New Microsoft portal for ILM 2007

Technet Forum (Good for all of your technical questions)

   http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/identitylifecyclemanager/threads/

Bloggers 

   Brad Turner’s blog - http://www.identitychaos.com/ - This is probably the one I visit most  as Brad is one of the most prolific ILM bloggers

Bobby and Nina’s Blog http://blogs.technet.com/doittoit/

Mark Gabarra’s Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/MarkGabarra/

   Carol’s MISSMIIS Blog - http://www.wapshere.com/missmiis/

   Identity Management Extensibility blog by Joe Schulman  - http://blogs.msdn.com/imex/

    I enjoy watching the stock market.  If you have no interest in it, please return your regular scheduled program. :-)  So Google had to report their quarterly earnings today.  Google announced a profit of $1.42 billion in the last quarter, although their gross sales were below estimates (but not by much).  The “earnings season” started around a week ago, with Alcoa reporting very bad results.  This was not a good way to start the earnings season, but things quickly changed.  Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson and Google have all reported profits that topped estimates[1]. 

    With these companies reporting better then expected profits and the government stimilus slowly starting to kick in, there is a chance that unemployment numbers will finally bottom out in the next few months.   As people get put back to work to build roads, bridges, energy installations, etc, those workers will then have income to spend on products & services.  My hope is that these companies have cut the extra human capital as much as it can be and that as demand for their products goes up, they will have to hire new employees to meet that demand.   If these companies still have extra production capacity to meet increased demand, I fear that we will not have a strong recovery.  The government can only create so many public sector jobs, the real recovery will occur when these public companies and private companies start adding to their payroll.    My hope is that these companies will start doing that soon…

[1] — Citigroup reports earnings tomorrow (04/17/2009) and it is expected they will report a loss, but this should not be taken as a general indicator any economic recovery.  Citigroups issues are much deeper than all of the other banks.

     A few things I would like to discuss, some related to the site and a few  comments.   First, I see that I am starting to get some decent traffic, a lot of it related to my article on Invalid MV SQL tables.  Thanks to everyone who is visiting my site, I really appreciate it and I plan on adding content on a regular basis (sorry it has been a little while since my last update.)  

    In the last few weeks I have been teaching my self some ASP.NET (with C# code behind files).  I really want to get the rest of the site updated so I can create tutorials & feature articles - things that are beyond the normal scope of a blog article.  I have been using www.asp.net and a book by Cristian Darie & Watt Barnett called Build Your Own ASP.NET 3.5 Web Site Using C# & VB.   If you are just starting to learn ASP.NET like I am this is a great book, because it starts with the basic building blocks of ASP.NET, VB, C#, and object-oriented programming and builds on them chapter-by-chapter.  The book also has a lot of examples, which I really enjoy (each example is list in VB & C#).  I really recommend this book if you are new to ASP.NET

     When it comes to buying books, I always bargin shop for the cheapest prices (but I almost always buy new books, I do not like buying used technical books).    I usually by them from Amazon or Borders.  If you sign up for the Border’s Reward program you will get a set of coupons in your email every week or two.  Usually there will be a discount coupon in the email for any book over $10.   The discount will usually be anywhere from 20% to 40% off the price of the book.  Without the coupon, Amazon is always cheaper, but with the coupon Borders is usually competitive and you can have the book now.    The other site I will use is Bookpool.com, especially when I need to buy a certication book (ie. MCTIP books).  I find it hard to beat their certication book prices.  So who do you like or recommend?

    I have not changed the layout yet at the root of the website, but I am going to set a target date of May 1st for the updates.   I am working on creating a Master Page that I will be happy with for most of the layout and then I can tweak it here and there for each page.

      On the more personal side, I would like to applaud the Michigan State Spartans basketball team for their incredible run through the tournament.  The Spartans accomplished a ton in the post season, by defeating the former champs - Kansas and two #1 seeds in Loiusville and UConn.    Unfortunately, the Spartans were run over by the Tarheels in what I thought was a very poor gameplan by Izzo  (Izzo is probably the best coach in College basketball, but not on this night).  I do not understand why he tried to run with the Tarheels, they had no chance at doing that.  The only chance they had was to slow the game way down like they did against Louisville. 

     On another note,