The Refined Geek

I’ve had a few people ask me how I come across some of the games that I review here and the answer is pretty simple. If I haven’t seen something that’s been on a lot of review sites (I don’t read the reviews, but if a game keeps popping up that’s a sign it might be worth a look in) then they usually come from me trawling through the new releases section on Steam. From there I work my way through the titles, looking for something that can capture my attention with just a few screenshots and possibly a short video. Mars: War Logs was one of these although it was more for the dev story behind it as Spiders isn’t a particularly large studio but they seemed really dedicated to creating a good game.

Mars: War Logs takes place in the distant future where humans have successfully colonized Mars. A hundred years ago however there was a great upheaval which devastated the colonies and lead to the rise of two opposing factions: Aurora and Abundance. Ever since then they’ve been locked in an ongoing battle for control of the world’s water supply, by far the most valuable resource. You play as Roy Temperance, a prisoner of war who’s caught between the two factions, trying to hide from his past that continues to haunt him.

The aesthetic of Mars: War Logs is reminiscent of many current gen third person titles with infinite shades of brown and grey colouring the world. Although this time around it kind of fits thanks to the world that it’s built in even though it has the unfortunate effect of making every place you go feel a little samey. The graphics are good but not great, which becomes quite noticeable when they’re combined with the rudimentary lip synching and low resolution motion capture. Honestly I’ve seen worse from other recently released titles so I won’t be too harsh on it for that but it’s hard not to draw comparisons to the many other, astoundingly better looking games.

Surprisingly though there’s quite a lot under the hood of Mars: War Logs in terms of gameplay, something you don’t usually expect from smaller RPG titles. The combat is mostly whacking other people with metal poles until they fall down with the added strategy element of blocking/dodging incoming attacks. There’s also a stealth system which allows you to sneak up on unsuspecting enemies, although how crouching down counts as stealth is beyond me. They’ve even incorporated a talent tree, crafting system and character perks allowing you a pretty decent amount of customization to how you play Mars: War Logs. This is a lot for a small dev studio to cram into a game and that unfortunately means that there’s a lot of depth lacking from many of these mechanics and some of them are still plagued by bugs that should have been picked up in QA.

For starters the combat, whilst somewhat engaging and enjoyable at certain points, varies wildly between being so easy that its almost pointless to being so hard that you’ll spend the majority of your time rolling around just so can whittle enemies down a couple hits at a time. This is because there’s no dynamic scaling of enemy difficulty and it only increases at certain points, usually at the start of a new section. The pacing of the game then becomes highly disjointed as you can be breezing through the last half of a particular section only to hit a brick wall at the beginning of the next, rather than having a gradual ramp up in the challenge. Some would argue that this is part of the strategy but in all honesty it’s just sloppy design, especially when “challenging” means that you lose the majority of your health in a couple hits.

The stealth system is a complete joke as whilst you can sneak around the benefits of doing so are minimal at best. When you’re first introduced to it stealthing up to an enemy and hitting them doesn’t take them out, it just takes away a good portion of their health. Of course that means that after doing that all the enemies close by will aggro forcing you to go toe to toe with them anyway. Now I didn’t invest any points in the stealth abilities so this could be somewhat improved by that but that tree is also the weakest out of the 3 when you consider that, no matter how well you stealth, you will eventually have to fight everything. I think Spiders would’ve been much better off skipping this feature altogether to focus more on the core of the game as it really adds nothing in its current form.

Although there’s a talent tree with 3 different styles to choose from only 2 of them are available to you from the start, with one of them being the aforementioned weakest of them all stealth one. This means that you’re kind of shoe horned into spending points into one specific tree (melee combat) and thus can’t take full advantage of the third tree (technomancy) until much later in the game. However even if you wanted to I don’t think it’d be very viable as the amount of damage output you need later in the game can really only come from charged melee weapons, unless you want to spend 20 minutes running around waiting for your fluid (mana) levels to regen.

The crafting system is equal parts good and complete crap thanks to the massive overabundance of materials that you’ll find in every area. Essentially you can craft a couple things like health packs and ammunition but the real power of the crafting system comes from upgrading your armor and weapons. Now not all weapons and armor can be upgraded so that really expensive top tier armor might look great but it’s in fact completely inferior to anything that comes with upgrade slots. This has the unfortunate consequence of making the vast majority of items irrelevant as anything that lacks upgrades is most certainly not worth it.

After the first section you’ll almost never be out of materials for crafting things you need, especially if you’re a veteran RPGer and seek out all the free stuff like I did. What this meant was that whenever upgrades became available (usually after having to run the gauntlet at the start where everything is stupid hard again) I was able to purchase them and then instantly upgrade them to their maximum. There are no rare items to be found or obtained from quests so literally the highest damage/armor item you can buy from the vendor is the best item you will ever see. If you’re low on serum there’s a good chance you have a ton of materials that you can pilfer for serum in order to get the upgrade and in fact you’re probably better off doing that then trying to convert resources as typically you’ll get more if you sell said items to the vendor then buy back the ones you need.

Most of this would be forgivable however these are just some of the more obvious structural flaws that Mars: War Logs has. The interface is confused and doesn’t operate as you’d expect with fun quirks like: doors mostly requiring left click but sometimes pressing R, the attack button (left click, again) is also the loot button, pressing quick buttons for things like menus twice doesn’t minimize them and whilst you can assign 0~9 for powers you can only ever see the first 4 unless you go into the power wheel again. This is not to mention the issues with the incredibly stupid AI, both for your companion and the enemy, which routinely gets stuck on all sorts of terrain. Not only that many of their abilities are capable of friendly fire, leading to some incredibly frustrating moments where they inadvertently kill you. I’m hoping that it was intentional otherwise it’s yet another point where Mars: War Logs differs from the norm and not in a good way.

As always I could forgive nearly all of this if the story was worth anything but sadly, it’s not. Most of the lines are delivered completely flat in rapid fire fashion which, combined with the poor lip synching, makes for a jarring experience. It also doesn’t help that the characters have as much depth as a children’s pool with many of them changing their motivations on a whim. My particular love interest, Mary, went from murderous rage to sympathetic follower in less than 4 sentences and the resulting relationship could not have been anymore shallow. Indeed the game’s one attempt at invoking emotion feels incredibly cheap and only serves to anger the player.

Objectively Mars: War Logs is a decidedly B grade game with fundamental flaws riddling the core mechanics which, combined with the many other problems can make for a frustrating experience. There were times I had fun with it, especially when I got my build up to the seriously broken level, but unfortunately that wasn’t enough to make up for the numerous flaws. I commend Spiders for trying, I really do, but it just goes to show that sometimes you need to cut back on your ambitions a bit in order to solidify the core aspects of the game. I totally understand where they wanted to go with this but unfortunately it falls short of that goal, leaving us with a game that feels like it was halfway towards something great.

Rating: 5.0/10

Mars: War Logs is available on PC, Xbox360 and PlayStation3 right now for $19.99. Game was played on the Hard difficulty setting with 9 hours total play time and 71% of the achievements unlocked.

Even though I’ve got a very public email address the amount of spam I get is pretty minimal, likely due to the ruthless efficiency of Google’s spam filters. However there’s a special kind of spam that routinely gets through, that which is written by a human and sent to only a few people. The majority of this comes from manufacturers in China who make all sorts of weird and wonderful devices. Unfortunately none have fallen prey to my fake excitement and request for product samples, even though I have no idea what I’d do with an industrial air conditioner should they be able to provide it. One recent unsolicited email really caught my attention though and I’ve spent the better part of week researching it and the story I’ve uncovered is really something.

The original email came to me from someone by the name Arthur Fahy of Quantum Generation Pty Ltd. In that email he made some pretty extraordinary claims about having created a motor that was capable of over 100% efficiency, effectively creating an over-unity generator. Now any claim of this nature instantly triggers skepticism on my part (and I’m guessing anyone with a modicum of understand of science would to) and whilst I won’t reproduce the entire email here he’s helpfully posted much of the same information here:

After 14 years of R&D our Quantum electric motor/generator was tested at the University of NSW. The efficiency was measured to be 148% (free energy). It ran at this efficiency for five minutes before it seized, it was designed to be 170% efficient. The reading was put down as an error but an error could not be found.
What are the odds? Lenz’s law and Faraday’s laws are obeyed.

Where does the energy come from? NASA has just announced that it is getting energy from the quantum vacuum of space at their Eagleworks lab. “The lab will commission the facility with an existing Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster”, “a Q-thruster uses quantum vacuum fluctuations as the fuel source elimenating[sic] the need to carry propellant.”

As far as I could tell the email came to me because I wrote a post last year on quantum vacuum plasma thrusters which are a curious new technology that uses the vacuum of space as reaction mass. What they don’t do is extract energy from the vacuum of space, instead they still require a power source to produce thrust and are essentially using the stray photons in space to pull themselves along. Fahy claims to somehow be using this effect to extract energy from the vacuum of space which has led to his overunity motor which he also claims to have tested with two universities in Australia.

Figuring that if such a claim had any merit to it there should be some evidence with research papers or even some record of testing of this nature occurring at said universities. Researching both of the universities online returned no documents indicating that any research of this nature has taken place, nor of any devices like this being tested. With that in mind I sent back a semi-sarcastic reply that tore into how such a device simply could not work (since the principles he was claiming to use don’t support his idea) and asked if he had any evidence to back up his claims. I thought that would be the end of it since  further research indicated he was looking for funding for his idea, something that sets off all kinds of alarm bells when it comes to these free energy ideas.

To my surprise he replied.

Manners would be a good place to start.

The Casimir effect is just one way to access energy from the vacuum (NASA). Lamb shift and others.

Every magnetic field, i.e. around a current carrying wire, changes the magnetic fields in the vacuum around it.

I have had motors tested at both uni’s, neither of them have a program as such. The state gov. paid Wollongong uni.

I have conversed with Hal Puthoff  over the years, he offered to build and test a motor, he is backed with billions.

And so on …….:

What might you be able to do for me??

A quick Google will reveal that neither of those principles support the idea of generating energy from a vacuum and the second sentence seems to be a confused interpretation of electromagnetism. After receiving this email from him I pushed him further to provide contacts at both universities as even though I think this idea has absolutely no merit to it I’m still interested to see what testing was actually conducted and what people other than Fahey had to say about it. At time of writing these contacts have still yet to materialize but at this point I don’t think it would matter as by his own admission:

The possibility that it was an erroneous reading is high, the university dismissed it. We have not been able to get anywhere near this since, 78% efficiency is the best result to date. But still, the stakes are so high, we’ll keep trying.

Your run of the mill electric motor that you can pick up from your local electronics store has an efficiency of around 88% with high efficiency motors getting above that. Whatever this motor is doing it’s not doing it very well compared to traditional wire wound motors and, as Fahy himself states, the universities dismissed the overunity ratings as erroneous. You’d think that’d be the end of that but at this point I was genuinely interested in finding out just what the heck he had created and what impressions people had come away with after seeing it.

This is where things start to get interesting.

As it turns out Fahy is something of the inventor having 17 (all expired) patents directly to his name and one filed under his company Quantum Generation Pty Ltd. Further research through Google’s Patent search engine reveals that he also has several other patents for various mechanical gear systems lodged in the USA and, intriguingly one for a generator:

It looks like a variation on a Faraday’s Disc and if this is the device that supposedly derives energy then I can’t see how it would work, nor does it make any claim to that effect in the patent itself. Indeed I’d invite anyone who’s more inclined in power generation to take a look at it because I can’t really see what kind of advantage this tangled system would give over a traditional motor.

Indeed looking through all the patents that I can see attributed to his name the vast majority are for squeegees, washing apparatuses, stilts and a drinking lip for soda cans. Indeed none of them seem to support the idea that he’s been working on an over unity motor for 14 years as he claims unless you count the various gear systems lodged in the USA (the motor was lodged in 2002).

Stranger still was the utter lack of web presence of the company Quantum Generation Pty Ltd except for mentions in Fahy’s LinkedIn profile (where he’s the CEO and that’s the only company he’s worked at having no connections to anyone else) and on various angel investing and clean energy sites. Initial searches to try and verify the actual company (as claiming Pty Ltd status in Australia requires a bit of paperwork) didn’t turn up anything when searching for an ABN. Turns out that the company does in fact exist, it just doesn’t have an ABN which isn’t uncommon but is decidedly odd. However the company was listed for deregistration in October last year which means that ASIC has no reason to believe that it is actually conducting any business, research or otherwise.

It was clear from his emails that Fahy was attempting to locate sources of funding and somehow I fit into his idea of someone that could either a) give him money or b) find someone to give him money. Strangely enough in his emails he stated that he had talked Hal Puthoff who “…offered to build and test a motor, he is backed with billions.” which would seem to negate the need for additional funding. I mentioned this point to Fahy but did not receive a response nor have I recieved any further emails since he asked me about my experience in raising capital.

Suffice to say I do not believe that Fahy has a device that produces the results he claims to have seen. By the sounds of it the device may very well exist and it’s entirely possible that he had it tested at the universities in question but by his own admission they don’t give the results he’s claiming they do. Additionally whilst there’s some indication that he might have some experience in mechanical engineering there’s nothing to suggest that he has any experience in the fields required to produce a device that makes use of the principles he’s claiming to. He may genuinely believe that he’s building a revolutionary device but all signs point to that not being the case and I could not in good faith recommend anyone investing money with him.

I openly asked for contacts at the university multiple times during our engagements and not once were they forthcoming. I might be a sceptic at heart but I’m also one that’s open to be convinced otherwise, should the evidence be sufficient enough to do so. In this case however it appears that all Fahy was after was an investor and, based on the evidence I have gathered, I could not have any confidence in seeing any return on any capital invested in his idea. Should any evidence come to my attention to contradict my findings here I’ll will gladly post corrections detailing to that extent but in all honesty I can’t see that happening at any time in the near future.

This year was already shaping up to be a great run for gamers, what with all the new IP heading our way and multiple high quality sequels, and the next console generation will likely be upon us before the year is out. Had you asked me last year what my predictions were I would’ve told you that we’d be lucky to see the next generation Xbox this year and it was far more likely that we’d see both of them sometime in 2014. I’m quite glad to be wrong in this instance however as whilst I might still be primarily a PC gamer I grew up on consoles and will always have a soft spot for them.

Today Microsoft officially announced their successor to the Xbox360: the XboxOne. If you’ve been following the rumours and leaks like I have there’s nothing too much surprising about the console itself as it sports the exact specs that have been floating around for a while. However there are still a few surprises from Microsoft’s next generation console and the launch event clarified some of the more controversial rumours that had been flying around. Suffice to say that Sony and Microsoft have very different audiences in mind for their next gen offerings, meaning that the choice between the two might no longer be based on platform exclusives alone.

Whilst I won’t go over the hardware specifications as they’re near identical to that of the PS4 (although I can’t find a confirmation of DDR3 vs GDDR5) there were a couple surprises under the hood of the XboxOne. For starters it’s sporting a BluRay drive which was kind of expected but still up in the air thanks to Microsoft initially throwing its support behind HDDVD, giving a little credence to the rumour that they wouldn’t incorporate it into their next gen offering. It also brings with it a HDMI in port, allowing those with set top boxes to run their TV through it. Whilst that doesn’t sound like much it’s telling of the larger strategy that Microsoft has at play here: they’re marketing the XboxOne as much more than a games console.

Indeed all the other features that they’ve included, like Snap Mode and the upgrades to their SmartGlass app, are all heavily focused on media consumption and making the XboxOne the central point of your home entertainment setup. Considering that current generation Xboxs are used to watch media more than they are to play games this change in direction is not surprising however it could alienate some of the more hardcore games fans. It seems Sony was well aware of this as their launch focused far more heavily on the gaming experience that their console could deliver rather than its additional media capabilities. The delineation then seems clear: if you want a gaming machine go for the PS4, but for everyone else there’s XboxOne.

The Xbox had always been Microsoft’s last piece in the Three Screens puzzle and it appears that the XboxOne will in fact be running a version of windows under the hood. In fact it’s running 3 different operating systems: Windows 8/RT, a second Xbox OS that’ll remain largely static (for developers) and the third layer sounds more like a hypervisor, managing access to resources for the 2 main operating systems. I speculated last year that Microsoft would be looking to bring WinRT to the next gen Xbox and that appears to be the case although how much of the functionality is directly compatible is still up for question as Microsoft has stated that you’ll “need to do some work” to port them across.

Unfortunately it does look like Microsoft wants to take an axe to the second hand games market as whilst the rumours of it needing to be always online have turned out to be false (although games can make use of Azure Cloud Gaming services which would require an online connection) installing a game to a hard drive locks it to that particular Xbox account, requiring a fee to do it on another. Whether or not you can play games without installing them is still up for debate however and the answer to that will make or break the second hand games market.

Additionally there’s going to be no backwards compatibility to speak of, save for transferring of licenses for media and your gamer score. Whilst this was not unexpected this combined with the lack of a second hand games market might be a dealbreaker for some. Whether this will push more people to Sony remains to be seen though as whilst they’ve alluded to backwards compatibility possibly coming via some kind of cloud gaming service that won’t be something former Xboxers will care about. It’s far more likely that the decision will be made on what the console will primarily be used for: gaming or media.

I’ve been something of a stalwart “buy all the things” consumer ever since I had a job that would allow me to do this but with the announcement of XboxOne I’m not sure if that will be the case anymore. I say this because I believe that the vast majority of titles will be cross platform, thanks to the x86 architecture, and as of yet there hasn’t been any compelling exclusives announced for either platform that would draw me to it. The Xbox360 landed a purchase solely for Mass Effect but I get the feeling that we won’t see another title that’s bound to a single platform like that again. With that in mind it’s highly likely that my current console collection will be slimmed down to one, and the last man standing will be the PS4.

I would love to be convinced otherwise though, Microsoft.

You can see light’s presence everywhere, but have you ever seen it moving? Due to the speed of light being the fastest thing we currently know of it’s a rather elusive beast to see in motion, especially on the scale we exist in, and whilst it might look instantaneous it does have a finite speed. Whilst we’ve done many experiments in slowing light down and even trapping it for short periods of time but being able to watch a light ray propagate was out of our reach for quite some time, that was until the recent development of a couple technologies.

The above video is the work of Ramesh Raskar and his team at MIT which produced a camera that’s capable of capturing 1 trillion frames per second. However it’s not a camera in the traditional sense as the way it captures images is really unique, not at all like your traditional camera. Most cameras these days are CCD based and capture an image of the whole scene then read it off line by line and store it for later viewing. The MIT system makes use of a streak camera which is only capable of capturing a line a single pixel high, essentially producing a one dimensional image. The trick here is that they’re taking a picture of a static scene and doing it multiple times over, repositioning the capture area each time in order to build up an image of the scene. As you can imagine this takes a considerable amount of time and whilst there are some incredible images/movies created as a result the conditions and equipment required to do so aren’t exactly commodity.

There are alternatives however as some intrepid hackers have demonstrated.

Instead of using the extremely expensive streak camera and titanium sapphire laser their system instead utilizes a time of flight camera coupled with a modulated light source. From reading their SIGGRAPH submission it appears that their system captures an image of the whole scene and so to create the light flight movies they change when the light source fires and when the camera takes the picture. This process allows them to capture a movie much quicker than MIT’s solution and with hardware that is a fraction of the cost. The resolution of the system appears to be lower, I.E I can’t make out light wave propagation like you can in the MIT video, but for a solution that’s less than 1% of the cost I can’t say I fault them.

Their paper also states they’re being somewhat cautious with their hardware, running it at only 1% of its duty cycle currently. The reason for this is a lack of active cooling on their key components and they didn’t want to stress them too much. With the addition of some active cooling, which could be done for a very small cost, they believe they could significantly ramp up the duty cycle, dropping the capture time down to a couple seconds. That’s really impressive and I’m sure there’s even more optimizations that could be made to improve the other aspects of their system.

It’s one thing to see a major scientific breakthrough come from a major research lab but it’s incredible to see the same experiments reproduced for a fraction of the cost by others. Whilst this won’t be leading to anything for the general public anytime soon it does open up paths for some really intriguing research, especially when the cost can be brought down to such a low level. It’s things like this that keep me so interested and excited about all the research that’s being done around the world and what the future holds for us all.

The story of the majority of IT workers is eerily similar. Most get their beginnings in a call centre, slaving away behind a headset troubleshooting various issues for either their end users or as part of a bigger help desk that services dozens of clients. Some are a little more lucky, landing a job as the sole IT guy at a small company which grants them all the creative freedom they could wish for but also being shouldered with the weight of being the be all and end all of their company’s IT infrastructure. No matter how us IT employees got our start all of us eventually look towards getting certified in the technologies we deal with every day and, almost instantly after getting our first, become incredibly cynical about what they actually represent.

For many the first certification they will pursue will be something from Microsoft since it’s almost guaranteed that every IT job you’ll come across will utilize it in some fashion. Whilst the value of the online/eLearning packages is debatable there’s little question that you’ll likely learn something that you didn’t already know, even if it’s completely esoteric and has no application in the real world. For anyone who’s spent a moderate amount of time with the product in question these exams aren’t particularly challenging as most of them focus on regurgitating the Microsoft way of doing things. This, in turn, feeds into their greatest weakness as they favour rote memorization over higher order concepts and critical thinking (at least at the introductory/intermediate levels).

This has led to a gray market which is solely focused on passing the exams for these tests. Whilst there are some great resources which fall into this area (Like CBT Nuggets) there are many, many more which skirt the boundaries of what’s appropriate. For anyone with a modicum of Google skills it’s not hard to track down copies of the exams themselves, many with the correct answers highlighted for your convenience. In the past this meant that you could go in knowing all the answers in advance and whilst there’s been a lot of work done to combat this there are still many, many people carrying certifications thanks to these resources.

The industry term for such people is “paper certs”.

People with qualifications gained in this way are usually quite easy to spot as rote memorization of the answers does not readily translate into real world knowledge of the product. However for those looking to hire someone this often comes too late as interview questions can only go so far to root these kinds of people out. Ultimately this makes those entry level certifications relatively worthless as having one of them is no guarantee that you’ll be an effective employee. Strangely however employers still look to them as a positive sign and, stranger still, companies looking to hire on talent from outsourcers again look for these qualifications in the hopes that they will get someone with the skills they require.

I say this as someone who’s managed to skate through the majority of his career without the backing of certs to get me through. Initially I thought this was due to my degree, which whilst being tangentially related to IT is strictly speaking an engineering one, but the surprise I’m met with when I mention that I’m an engineer by training has led me to believe that most of my former employers had no idea. Indeed what usually ended up sealing the position for me was my past experiences, even in positions where they stated certain certs were a requirement of the position. Asking my new employers about it afterwards had them telling me that those position descriptions are usually a wish list of things they’d like but it’s rare that anyone will actually have them all.

So we have this really weird situation where the majority of certifications are worthless, which is known by all parties involved, but are still used as a barrier to entry for some positions/opportunities but that can be wholly overwritten if you have enough experience in that area. If that’s sounding like the whole process is, for want of a better word, worthless than you’d be of the same opinion of most of the IT workers that I know.

There are some exceptions to this rule, CISCO’s CCIE exams being chief among them, but the fact that the training and certification programs are run by the companies who develop the products are the main reason why the majority of them are like this. Whilst I’m not entirely sure that having an independent certification body would solve all the issues (indeed some of those non-vendor specific certs are just as bad) it would at least remove the financial driver to churn as many people through the courses/exams as they currently do. Whilst I abhor artificial scarcity one of the places it actually helps is in qualifications, but that’d only be the first few tentative steps to solving this issue.

Long time readers will know that I’m not much of a fan of DLC as those little extra tid bits of gameplay are rarely worth the price of admission, usually only adding small amount of extra game time and little more to the overall story. Still there are some that capture my attention like the Missing Link DLC for Deus Ex and the Knife of Dunwall DLC for Dishonored is another. This can wholly be attributed to the single image they used to market it, showing a view from a rooftop showing the main character of Dishonored in the pivotal opening scene. Since that whole side of the plot remains something of a mystery to you during the main game the possibility of playing the other side was just too good to resist and I snapped it up on release.

But there’s a reason why I’m only getting around to reviewing it today.

The events of Knife of Dunwall take place alongside those of Dishonored, telling the story of Daud the master assassin who is responsible for killing the Queen and stealing her daughter away. The DLC starts just after that pivotal scene where it’s revealed that Daud is one of the Outsider’s chosen, just like Corvo, except that his powers differ slightly from that of protagonist from the main game. The Outsider also reveals that Daud’s life will soon come to a close but before that will happen he is given a clue, a single word “Delilah”.

Now I’ll be completely honest here, when I first saw the screenshot that announced the Knife of Dunwall DLC I figured that it would centre around the events that lead up to the Queen’s death, letting you plan out your route and ultimately deal the final deadly blow. Instead you’re dumped in right after those events, with the introduction being one of a myriad of comic book panel styled cut scenes that depicts your role in Dishonored’s key moment. I will admit that this disappointed me greatly as whilst it’s cool to see part of the story that you didn’t really have an insight into I really wanted to play that particular scene from the other side, as I’m sure anyone who played Dishonored would.

Like most DLCs Knife of Dunwall doesn’t deviate too much from its parent game, keeping the vast majority of key mechanics whilst introducing some new powers and reworking other elements to fit Daud’s story. All of the core abilities are still there, like blink and most of the mechanical arsenal you had, but there’s also the addition of new skills and weapons that can change the gameplay significantly. Again you can make the choice of playing it as a guns blazing ruthless killer or a hide in the shadows humanist who doesn’t kill anyone. If I’m honest Knife of Dunwall seemed to urge you to be more of a killer than anything else, but that could just be due to my frustration with some of the other elements.

Since there’s no hometown for Daud like there is for Corvo in Dishonored you’re instead presented with an upgrades screen before every mission. This means you’re essentially picking your play style before you start which is probably a good thing considering how short the DLC is and forcing you to do the same level of work in order to get the same upgrades as you had in Dishonored would just be tedious. You also have the option of purchasing favours which will make certain sections of the missions easier or provide you with upgrades. They’re usually worth it too, save for one in the last mission that didn’t seem to help at all.

Knife of Dunwall plays somewhat similarly to Dishonored with the core mission structure and numerous possible paths to get to it being par for the course. As I mentioned before, and somewhat similarly to Dishonored itself, whilst you can do the entire thing without killing anyone (apart from a few at key points) Knife of Dunwall seems to try its darndest to get you to use lethal force most of the time. There are many sections where you’ll be confronted with a couple enemies that don’t move and you’ll be forced to either sleep dart both of them (something which you can only do a limited number of times) or go rambo and just mow them all down. Whilst I tried my best to be sneaky I got fed up with it after a while and just started going to town on everyone and I have to admit it was pretty fun.

The additional insight you gain into Daud’s motives and origins is nice however the plot is a little lackluster, possibly due to the heavy amount of foreshadowing that the Outsider gives you. It’s certainly not terrible and the voice acting is above games of similar calibre which helps it tremendously as even the best plot can be ruined by flat delivery. It’s quite possible that my impression is heavily tainted by my expectations of what the Knife of Dunwall would and wouldn’t include however.

For a DLC Knife of Dunwall provides a decent extension to Dishonored, providing multiple hours of gameplay that’s different enough from the core game so that you don’t feel like you’re retreading the same ground again. Whilst I may have fallen prey to the hype machine of my own head I still can’t refute that it’s a solid addition to Dishonored, expanding on the idea and giving some insight into the main plot. It probably wasn’t worth the price I paid for it and whilst $10 is semi reasonable I’d probably recommend holding off until its on sale unless you’re desperate for more Dishonored action.

Rating: 7.0/10

Dishonored: Knife of Dunwall is available on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox360 right now for $9.99 or an equivalent amount of points. Total game time was approximately 3 hours.

Before I dig my hooks into the reasons why negative gearing isn’t to blame for high house prices (a seemingly controversial view these days) I will tell you, in the interests of full disclosure, that I’ve been negatively gearing property for the past 5 years or so. Back when we first bought our property I lamented the dearth of good properties that were available in our price range, focusing much of my anger of the property boom that took place mere years before we went into buy. However we found something that we could just afford if we played our cards right, even though it was out in the sticks of Canberra. During that time though I never once blamed the negative gearers for this predicament but the more I talk about it the more it seems my generation blames investors for it when they should really be looking elsewhere.

Depending on what figures you’ve read though I’d find it hard to blame you like the table above (from this ATO document) that has been doing the rounds lately. On the surface it seems pretty hefty with some $7.8 billion in total losses being claimed by investors with negatively geared property. Realistically though the total cost to the government is far less than that as even if everyone was on the top marginal rate (which they aren’t, most are on $80,000 per year or less) the total tax revenue loss is closer to  $3.5 billion. Out of context that sounds like a lot of dosh, especially when this year’s budget came in at a deficit of $18 billion, but it’s like 0.9% of total tax revenue which is significantly dwarfed by other incentives and exemptions. If your first argument is that it costs the government too much then you’re unfortunately in the wrong there, but that’s not the reason I’m writing this article.

The typical narrative against negative gearing usually tells a story of investors competing against homebuyers (usually first timers), driving up the price because they are more able to afford the property thanks to negative gearing and the higher amount of capital that they have. Whilst I won’t argue that this never happens it fails to take into account the primary driver for upward trending house prices: owner occupiers. Initially this idea sounds ludicrous, since homeowners aren’t taking advantage of negative gearing gains nor are they in the market for new property, but the thing is that the vast majority of capital gains in Australia are held by just such people, to the tune of 84% of the total property market.

In Australia the primary mechanism which drove house prices up, with most of the increase occurring between 1994~2004, was current home owners upgrading their houses. For a current homeowner  especially ones that own their property outright, the cost of upgrading to a larger property is a fraction of what it would cost to buy it outright. However anyone looking to upgrade will also try to extract the maximum amount of value out of their house in order to reduce the resulting loan and thus the cheaper priced houses get pushed up as well. Couple that with the fact that the majority of Australian owner/occupiers move at least once every 15 years and that selling your primary place of residence is exempt from capital gains tax and you have a recipe for house prices going up that’s not predicated on negative gearing’s influence.

Indeed the ABS Household Wealth and Wealth Distribution supports this theory as the average value of an owner occupied property is $531,000 which is drastically higher than the Australian average (which includes all investor properties) at $365,000. Considering that the bulk of the Australian property market is dominated by owner-occupiers (since investors only make up 16% of it) then its hard to see how they could be solely responsible for the dramatic increases that many seem to blame them for. Most will retort that investors are snapping up all the properties that would be first home owners would get which is something I can’t find any evidence for (believe me, I’ve been looking) and the best I could come up with was the distribution of investment property among the 5 sections shown here which would lead you to believe that the investors are normally distributed and not heavily weighted towards the lower end.

The final salvo shot across the negative gearing bow usually comes in the form of it providing no benefit to Australia and only helps to line the pockets of wealthy investors. The counter argument is that negative gearing helps keeps rent costs down as otherwise investors would be forced to pass on the majority of the cost of the mortgage onto renters, something we did see when negative gearing was temporarily removed. Indeed the government actually comes off quite well for this investment as using that revenue to instead build houses would result in a net loss of rentable dwellings which would put an upward pressure on rents.

I completely understand the frustration that aspiring home buyers go through, I went through it myself not too long ago when I was in a position that wasn’t too different from average Australian. But levelling the blame at investors and those who negatively gear their property for the current state of the Australian property market is at best misguided and at worse could lead to policy decisions that will leave Australia, as a whole, worse off. You may believe to the contrary, and if you do I encourage you to express that view in the comments, as the current Australian property market is a product of the Great Australian Dream, not negative gearing.

It’s no secret that I’m something of a fan of Windows 8 but then again my experience is somewhat biased by my extreme early adopter attitude. I haven’t yet had to support it in a production environment although I have installed it on varying levels of hardware that I have access to and I’ve yet to struggle with the issues that plagued me with previous Windows releases. The thing is though, whilst I’m a firm believer in Windows 8 and the features it brings, I’m of the opinion that it probably won’t see a high level of adoption in the enterprise space as the default desktop OS but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Despite the fact that Windows 7 has been out for a good 4 years at this point many enterprises are still in the midsts of deploying it within their organisation. This is wholly due to the initial disaster that Windows Vista was which caused the vast majority of organisations to not consider it as a possible upgrade to their Windows XP infrastructure. Past SP1 though Vista was a perfectly usable operating system and by that point many of the OEMs had caught up with their drivers which was the main cause of headaches for Vista users. Still it seemed the damage was done and Vista never managed to gain the market share it needed, leaving many organisations languishing on XP.

Not only was this bad for Microsoft in terms of sales it was worse for the organisations who stayed on it. Now systems that were designed for XP became far more entrenched and the rework required for applications to be Vista compatible got further delayed. Thus when it finally came time to move operating systems the cost of doing so (in both real terms and the effort required) was quite a lot higher and the larger the organisation the longer the transition it would take. Indeed the organisation I’m currently working for still has XP (using Netware for directory services no less) is only just getting around to rolling out Windows 7 this year due to the numerous number of applications that require remediation.

Whilst Microsoft will likely make good on their promise of delivering more updates, like they’re doing with the Windows Blue update this year, and major releases more frequently it’s likely that organisations are still reeling from their Windows 7 transition. Windows 9 is still a way off with estimates for a release dating anywhere from mid-2014 to somewhere in 2015 but that’s around the time when enterprises will be looking to upgrade in order to get the next set of killer features as Windows 7 starts to show its age. Now it’s entirely possible that with the frequent Blue style updates that Windows 8 will become far more attractive for enterprise before this date but if history has taught us anything the disruptive versions of Windows are usually the ones that end up being skipped, and Windows 8 certainly fits that bill.

There’s definitely potential for Windows 8 to make inroads into the enterprise space as the Surface would seem to be an ideal fit for the enterprise, even if most of the usability comes from the non-Metro side of it. Developing proper Metro applications for Microsoft’s enterprise products would go a long way to improving its market penetration and I know that IT admins at large would much prefer to maintain a fleet of Surfaces than a comparable fleet of iDevices. It’s clear that Metro was primarily consumer oriented but as we know many IT decisions a top driven in nature and if they want to get more people on board providing a better tablet experience to organizational executives could be the in that Windows 8 needs.

Still after 2 decades of watching Windows releases it won’t come as a surprise if Windows 8 gets passed over in favour of its next generation cousin. What we really need to avoid though is another decade of OS stagnation as whilst Windows 7 it has the potential to keep the mentality that developed with XP alive and that just makes change more painful than it needs to be. With Microsoft being committed to more releases more often we’re in a good position to avoid this and all that’s needed is for us to continue pushing our organisations in the right direction.

Even if you’re not a space nut like myself you’re likely familiar with Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut who’s social media presence has captured the attention of hundreds of thousands of people. He’s been responsible for dozens of videos showcasing life aboard the International Space Station and has done numerous outreach programs during his time in orbit. As I write this he’s in the final stages of preparation for departure which will end his nearly 5 month tenure as the first Canadian commander of the ISS. As if he didn’t already have enough to do whilst he was up there he recorded this amazing video of him singing a (slightly modified) version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, and it’s bloody brilliant:

There’s nothing more I can add to this, really

I have to be honest after my experience with buying from Kogan last year I was pretty soured on buying from them as the hodge podge shipping and strange purchasing requirements didn’t endear them to me. It wasn’t bad enough that I actively told people to not buy from them, indeed I said as much in my post about it, but for some strange reason that post seem to strike a chord with a lot of people who had similar issues. Whilst I’ve always been a terrible judge as to whether or not a particular post will resonate with a larger audience having that one be so popular didn’t help Kogan’s reputation in my mind.

Then they went and started stocking GoPros.

So I’ve been a GoPro user for about 2 years or so, getting my first one (a HD Hero2) as a birthday present in the lead up to my first Tough Mudder event. They’re a great little unit being able to take a massive battering and keep on trucking without issue. I used mine for all sorts of things from snorkeling in Bali to taking time lapses of my backyard and I was quite impressed with the results every time I used it. Of course when the new version came out I was instantly captivated by its specifications, not least of which was the addition of WiFi which would open up quite a few new use cases for an intrepid user like myself. However the price of getting one in Australia, either by paying the outrageous shipping cost from GoPro themselves or the markup in retail stores, meant that it was put in the “nice to have” basket along with a multitude of other things I always have my eye on.

Kogan however were selling them for an incredibly reasonable price, some $150 below the RRP when I saw it, enough so that that with the few additional accessories I wanted the total price was actually cheaper than just the unit itself with shipping included. Now I’m not usually one to be suckered into a deal, especially from a place that had burned me in the past, but I figured that it was worth it given how much use I had gotten out of the previous unit and how long this one would remain current. So out came the credit card and I sent Kogan a chunk of change in exchange for the promise of a new GoPro and I anxiously awaited the multiple packaging spree that was about to occur.

Except, strangely, they sent me a single tracking notice with all the items on it. Score one point for Kogan.

Indeed not only did they actually ship everything as one unit despite their site stating that it would probably take 2~3 weeks for my order to arrive I received it bang on a week after I placed my order. This is in stark contrast to my previous transaction with them that required me to verify my identity through a landline phone and arrived piecemeal over the course of a 2 week span. The GoPro also came with all English manuals that weren’t reprints like my Canon manuals were, a small thing that has gone a long way to improving Kogan’s image in my books.

So there you have it, a year on since my last purchase from Kogan and I’m glad to say they’ve drastically improved their whole experience. Whilst I have no idea if anyone from Kogan ended up reading my previous piece it does seem like they’ve taken the feedback to heart and fixed up the issues that their customers were complaining about. If my last post on this had you wondering whether or not you should buy from them then hopefully this one shows you that you can, at least if you’re ordering a GoPro.