There are quite a few things about Windows 8 that really bug me. While the context switching of Desktop vs. Metro apps is certainly annoying, I can deal with it. I can even handle that I must look in three different places to get all my windows updates (Windows Update from desktop control panel, Windows Update from Start Screen settings panel, and the Windows app store). Then there’s my Bluetooth never staying on. Ugh. But really, it comes down to two things that have pretty much been deal breakers for me when it comes to Windows 8.

Power Options are Underpowered

When I tell my laptop that I don’t ever want it shutting down when it’s plugged in and I’m away, I actually mean it. I’m the kind of person that likes to have multiple machines at my finger tips at any given time. That usually means remote desktopping (via Windows Remote Desktop or the super handy Chrome Remote Desktop). It’s hard to Remote Desktop into my laptop when it’s shutdown because Windows 8 went ahead and decided that it needs to sleep even though I have explicitly set the sleep timer to “never” when plugged in.

It’s possible this is a bug. It’s also possible that I could dig through the “Advanced” power settings to find some poorly named setting that will tell Windows 8 to actually not sleep. I don’t know. I thought “Put the computer to sleep: Never” would have covered that. Silly me.

It’s My Computer, I’LL DO WHAT I WANT

No, actually I won’t. Like most tech-savvy power users, the first thing I do on a new system is disable User Account Control. It’s annoying, it hampers functionality, and I hate it. However, I noticed something interesting on my Windows 8 install. And by interesting, I mean infuriating.

When you disable User Account Control under previous versions of Windows, there’s an automatic elevation process that happens behind the scenes, so that when you do something that requires you to be the literal Administrator of the machine (and not just a member of the Administrators group). So, most of your programs will automatically run in the context of “Administrator”.

Well, that doesn’t happen on Windows 8, anymore. At least by default. There is a group policy that allows this automatic elevation to take place. Well, I didn’t think that would be a big deal. That is, until I lost all permissions to one of my extra hard drives. For any file operations performed in Windows Explorer, I would get a pop-up saying I don’t have permissions to do that (remove a file or folder) but I can click “Continue” to be given those permissions. What. So, the annoyance that was User Account Control has returned, but this time with a vengeance. Since desktop programs you start don’t automatically elevate, when they try to write to my extra hard drive, they are flat out denied. No message. No prompt. Just denied. Took me forever to figure that out.

So, I went in and decided to flip the group policy to allow the elevation. By the way, if you’re editing group policies to restore basic, core functionality, that’s probably not a good sign.

Everything was hunky dory until I decided I wanted to try out the cool new Xbox SmartGlass app from the Windows Marketplace app store. I clicked “Store” and was met with a terse, “you can’t open Store unless you enable User Account Control. Click here to turn it on, you filthy plebian.” Wow. Okay. I guess I can kind of see why that would be an issue. Well, I’ll open up the Metro Chrome app. Same Message. Huh?

Yeah. You can’t open ANY modern-style Windows 8 apps if you disable UAC and turn on the elevation. I turned off the elevation setting in group policy and my access was restored, however then I had the issue with my extra hard drive. What is one to do? I decided I would take a page out of my old Windows 2000 playbook. Let’s log in as ADMINISTRATOR!

By default, the Administrator account is disabled in Windows 8. Of course, I enabled it, and then logged out of my normal user account and logged back in as Administrator. Odd, it didn’t ask for a password or anything, but I figured I would worry about that later. I tried using some Metro apps, and was told I can’t because those apps are not allowed to be opened using the Administrator account.

This means I cannot use my computer the way I want to, until Microsoft figures out this fustercluck of a permissions model.

Windows 8 Post-Mortem

Like a zombie breakout, there’s just too much garbage in my way to actually accomplish the things I want in Windows 8. I can understand that Microsoft has seen the light of Apple’s closed system gospel, but if they’re going to hogtie me on my own computer unless I do something akin to jailbreaking my Windows 8 install, I’ll stick with Windows 7 for the foreseeable future. And if Windows 8 is wildly successful and this is the new Windows truth, then I’ll probably have to do something distasteful like use Linux as my default OS. Yuck.

So, at least for now, I’ll probably wash my hands of Windows 8. At least until the inevitable Service Pack 1.

Fallout 3

I think this might be my top game of 2008. Before I had even realized what happened, I had finished the game after about 50 hours play time. There have been some complaints online that the main storyline was too short. I did a pretty good job of staying focused on the main quests… only did a few side quests here and there… and I finished the game in FIFTY HOURS. That’s a lot of gameplay in my opinion. And I still need to go back and play the evil and neutral paths.

Fable II

As far as RPG’s go, this seems like a very deep, very involved RPG. I need to spend more time with it. It’s a lot of fun. However, there are so many other titles to play right now… this will probably be a major title for me after the initial holiday glut of titles is past and I start getting tired of WoW again. (More on that in a minute.)

Force Unleashed

I wanted to like this game. It started out really well, but it punishes you SO MUCH when you make a wrong move. And sometimes, there is no obvious indication that you are making a wrong move. OH YAY I KILLED THAT BOSS! Okay, now I all I have to do is jump across this area… oh crap I died. WHAT THE HELL WHY IS THE CHECKPOINT BEFORE THE BOSS AND NOT AFTER I HAVE TO FIGHT HIM AGAIN BLARGGRLRGRLGRLLRRG!!!! Another notch in my “I Hate Lucasarts” belt.

Dead Space

I played this for a few hours. It definitely seems like it could be fun if I play through the whole thing. Feels like a 1-play-through kind of game, though. I don’t see myself playing through it multiple times, but who knows.

Mega Man 9

OH MAN! Not only has this game managed to completely, flawlessly capture every iota of nostalgia I had for the old NES titles, but it is a great platformer in its own right. It’s definitely challenging, but instead of driving me away, it just pulled me in deeper. Plus, it gives me an excuse to turn on my Wii! (That’s what she said.)

Gears of War 2

I played the single player campaign and it was pretty awesome. It added metric tons of story and plot. Can’t wait for the 3rd game. Multiplayer has been kind of fun, but hasn’t really been able to pull me away from…

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

The Death Knight is the single greatest class I have played in any MMO, ever. It just feels really powerful. It’s kind of everything that I used to love about my warrior. High survivability AND high DPS. LOVE IT! The starting area has got to be one of the best sets of MMO content, anywhere. Blizzard’s new “phasing” concept is fantastic!

Left 4 Dead

I just recently picked this up and it’s been the only 360 game lately that has pulled me away from WoW in a significant way. I’ve been playing a couple different modes. I hope that the multiplayer for this game stays active for a long time, because this is easily the best multiplayer gameplay of 2008.

 

So I did.

First, I’d like to provide a little background on this latest Oddworld game. (Anyone who’s seen the Discovery Channel documentary on the Xbox will remember this.) Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath was originally being developed to be published by Microsoft Games. Ed Fries (liaison between MS and its developers) eventually told Lorne Lanning (Creative Director for Oddworld Inhabitants) he lacked direction and wanted to do too many things at once. This culminated in Microsoft dropping Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath. I suppose they were still smarting over the poor quality of Munch’s Odyssee, which was an Xbox launch title, and notable for the symbolism of converting developers of one of the Sony Playstation’s best known games over to the Microsoft camp. Well, to make a long story short, Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath got picked up and published by the company where all good games go to die, Electronic Arts. Only… this game didn’t die.

Playing OSW brought mixed feelings at first. My initial reaction was, “Oh, this is kind of different.”

This isn’t your standard FPS where you get a bunch of weapons and somewhere near the end you pick up “die uber rocket”. In OSW, You play a bounty hunter (who resembles any western character played by Clint Eastwood) armed with one weapon, a crossbow, and a whole mess of ammo types, which come in the form of cute little creatures. You can have two types of critters loaded at a time, one on each trigger, double-barrel fashion. There’s big beetles, skunks, bees, and my favorite, a trash-talking squirrel called a “Chippunk.” He would sit there on my crossbow shooting his mouth off. “My brothah. What’s up, my brothah?” “Do you got someone that needs talkin’ to?” Nice. Some critters were more powerful than others, but there always seemed to be a good place to use each kind of ammo.

Which also illustrates the great design in this game. Enemy and terrain placement was done in such a way that certain areas would be much easier if you used a certain type of ammunition. In most cases, they also gave you more reloads of that ammunition as well. Notably, it also seemed like there was more than one approach in several missions. You could rush in, stingbees blazing, or maybe you’d like to opt for a stealthy approach and lure enemies with a chippunk to an area that you had trapped earlier.

On the downside, in the first half of the game some of the areas were a little repetitive. Initially, I was excited and having fun. After several hours of catching outlaws, I was beginning to get a little bored with the game. I was seeing the same enemies over and over again, and the only thing keeping things fresh was a steady stream of new critters to use in my crossbow.

Just when I thought I couldn’t handle it anymore… the game delivered. Big time. The game switched gears completely, and I was left sitting there, saying, I’m glad I persisted and kept playing, because this is awesome. The plot became deeper and the gameplay was refreshed and changed in significant ways. In short, Microsoft should be kicking themselves for letting this one go.

Control-wise, the 3rd person and 1st person views worked well together. Like all 3rd person games, however, there was definite camera weirdness. Most 3rd person games will zoom the camera toward the character to keep the camera within the game’s geometry. Bad things can happen if a camera starts moving through terrain willy-nilly. It just looks bad. One of the problems with this approach is that if the character is standing close to a wall, and you turn to look out, away from the wall, the character will take up the whole view, anyway. In Oddworld, if I was standing right next to a wall, the camera would NOT allow me to look away from the wall. When the camera hit a solid object, it just stopped. There were points that was annoying, but thankfully, most of the levels were designed in such a way that this type of thing very rarely impacted gameplay at key times.

The scenery in OSW is nothing short of beautiful. It is really well done, and I place it at the same level as some of the vistas seen in Halo 2. Overall, however, I’d have to say that graphics in OSW are better than Halo 2 in almost every department.

A few closing remarks: Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath is amazing. It is fresh, has new gameplay ideas, an unpredictable non-cliche plot, and pushes the limits of what it means to be a “first-person shooter”. In fact, to lump it with all the other FPS games does a great disservice to the developers of OSW. This game really deserves a brand new genre, that I shall hereafter call “FTPSAA” (First- Third- Person Shooter Action Adventure).

As far as how it stacks up against Halo 2? Well, it’s not even fair. Comparing OSW to Halo 1 is more of a fair fight. Halo 1 stretched the concepts of what makes a FPS. Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath completely breaks the mold. If this had something besides just a single-player campaign, and wasn’t published by EA (who I am currently boycotting), then I would probably own this game.

In fairness to Halo 2, I feel like Halo 2 is the well polished sequel, like Return of the Jedi. OSW is like the edgy, cult film that did everything right.