Microsoft's operating system strategy - this must be wrong?

Word on tech street this week is that Microsoft is looking to make a significant change with the next release  of Windows and make it available on the ARM processor architecture as well as x86/x64. The original Bloomberg story hints that this is so that Windows can get a foothold in the tablet computer market. I hope they’re wrong.

Windows (the one based on NT, not CE) is a desktop operating system. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they cannot pull off the same trick as Apple has achieved with OS X – to reskin the user interface of their desktop operating system to work on mobile devices. This is because Windows wasn’t written to ever support that, and it’s codebase makes it difficult to achieve. Even if it was possible, is there really much point? The main reason for doing it would be to take advantage of the vast library of existing applications for the platform, but these haven’t been designed for mobile/tablet devices either and are going to be clunky to use.

The only chance of success I can see with an ARM-based version of Windows is in the netbook segment. These devices usually have traditional keyboards and pointing devices which is the only effective way to use Windows. Having said that, it's not going to be the biggest of markets - tablets are where it's at thanks to the iPad.

Can it not be this simple?

The variations of Windows CE are a different story. Windows Phone 7 looks like an excellent system – it has a user interface that makes the iPhone look dated in a number of areas. They did the right thing with this OS – break with the past and backwards compatibility and start again. It might still become a failure but that will be due to being massively late to market compared to Android and iOS, rather than because of any failure in the product itself.

Tablet computing represents a real opportunity for Microsoft. The market is younger and less established than with smartphones, and although the iPad has an significant early lead at the premium end there’s still a huge opportunity in the mainstream segment. Competition is already building up in the shape of Android tablets, so they need to act quickly.

Microsoft’s best bet for success with tablet computing is not Windows. They should use Windows Phone 7 as a starting point and produce a real tablet computer OS. Earlier this year it looked like this was going to happen with a bizarrely named OS called “Windows Embedded Compact 7”, a variant of Windows Phone 7. The system was even demonstrated on an Asus tablet and looked very promising, but even more bizarrely Asus has now dropped it in favour of Android.

Windows Embedded Compact 7, apparently

Whatever Microsoft does next – and it’s rumoured they’ll be telling us at CES, they need to do two things. Firstly, announce something that actually does the job and does it well – they have shown they can do this with WP7. Secondly, whatever they present must be shipping or guaranteed to ship very soon. People are sick of their vapourware, and it’s a pointless tactic when there’s viable solutions such as Android out there.

Android 3.0 is now rumoured to ship in March, and a revised iPad is expected in February so time is running out

Movie review: The Town

Ben Affleck’s second directing effort is a crime drama set in the Boston neighbourhood of Charlestown, following the career of a crew of bank robbers led by Doug MacRay (Affleck). The film opens with a hit on a bank where things don’t go quite to plan and slightly-unhinged James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner) grabs female bank worker Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) as a hostage. They let her go almost immediately, but a few days later Coughlin is concerned that she could lead the police to them and wants to eliminate her. MacRay objects to such an extreme solution and decides instead to follow her to try and determine if she poses a genuine risk.

It’s fairly obvious that MacRay feels guilt for what Claire went through and feels the need to try and help her, which means he doesn’t keep his distance very well and the two meet and strike up a tentative relationship, with MacRay seeing Claire as a way out of the life he wants to get away from. As you would expect, their relationship leads to some tense moments where MacRay’s cover is nearly blown, and his life is further complicated by the police starting to take an interest in him and his crew as they investigate the bank job.

I thoroughly enjoyed Affleck’s first film - Gone Baby Gone - being particularly impressed by the natural style and engaging characters. It has a unique feel, stripping back Hollywood gloss but not going over the top with grittiness in representing the lives and locations of people living in less than ideal conditions. The Town takes a very similar approach and benefits greatly from it. It’s difficult to categorise easily – it’s tempting to say his work has a documentary style because of the sense of realism, but this is doing a disservice to the high quality production, cast and stories he delivers.

If there was one criticism I had with Gone Baby Gone, it was that the behaviour of the characters occasionally went beyond the limits of credibility, or perhaps more correctly - the film didn't do a good enough job of justifying their actions. The same is also true of The Town to a lesser extent – the characters are mostly excellent but one of them in particular is sometimes a little unbelievable: Claire is overly giddy and flirty with Affleck in a scene where they’re having a drink together - out of place given that they are strangers who met in a laundrette moments earlier. Her trauma from the bank job seems to disappear and reappear to suit the story and on the whole it's not a very convincing piece of acting. On the other hand, Ben Affleck plays his part well and makes the character likeable despite his chosen career, although the character’s emotional issues caused by the departure of his mother early in his childhood could have been explained more concisely.

Apart from those minor criticisms, The Town is an excellent film and almost certainly my favourite of 2010. The action scenes aim for realism rather than overblown thrills but still remain tense and exciting. The Boston setting gives the film a unique feel - a welcome departure from the usual crime story locations of New York or Los Angeles. It falls just short of being a classic but is another excellent piece of work from what is turning out to be a surprisingly good director.

Cars: The Chrysler 300C is not a Bentley

I’ve always liked the Chrysler 300C – the reviews say it’s not that great from behind the wheel but it’s made-for-gangsters styling is nicely done and translates well outside of the US, which is usually a problem with American cars. But soon after they appeared on British roads, a disturbing trend for replacing the standard grill with a Bentley-style grill became popular. As if that wasn’t enough, yesterday I saw a 300C that actually had Bentley badges on the boot lid.

There’s an obvious issue right away – it’s a pretty desperate move to stick badges from a more expensive car onto a cheaper car. It’s worse than the young lads who buy Fords and Vauxhalls and de-badge them. If you don’t like the brand, perhaps you shouldn’t buy the car? But turning your 300C into a fake Bentley is worse for a more important reason – you’re completely misunderstanding the car and the person who designed it. It is actually the case that the design of the 300C was inspired by a well known British car brand, but it is in fact Rover, not Bentley.

Now before any 300C owners get upset, it’s not as bad as it sounds. The Rover in question is the P5B Coupe, one of my all time favourite cars from an era when Rover was a very well regarded brand. These days, the Rover name is mud, ruined in two phases - firstly by putting the badge on warmed over Austin’s in the early 1990’s, and secondly by continuing to sell severely outdated models in the years before the business collapsed in 2005. But decades ago, the P5, P6 and to some extent the SD1 were cars that cost a few bob and were the preferred means of transport by Prime Ministers, Government ministers and even the Queen.

How are the P5B and the 300C similar? Firstly, the P5B was innovative for offering a coupe option which brought a low roofline and shallow windows, but retained the four door saloon body. This is heavily echoed in the 300C. The standard 300C front grill (not the Bentley one!) and headlamps are very similar in concept, and more so at the rear with the tall thin tail lights.

By the way, the Rover is the one at the top!

Are there any 300C owners out there principled enough to put the original grill back on their car and add some Rover badges?

Movie review: The Expendables

One Saturday morning back in the summer I saw one of those cheaply-produced movie shows that mostly consists of trailers for upcoming films and - if you’re lucky – an interview with one of the stars. There was a piece about a new film called The Expendables and after watching some clips and the enthusiastic and funny interview with Stallone I was sold - it looked brilliant. A film that pays tribute to the great action films of the 1980’s, with an all-star cast. To top it off, I think Stallone did a superb job of the recent Rocky and Rambo updates. Many people cringed at the thought of another Rocky film after the franchise was destroyed by increasingly bad sequels, but what we got was a sincere and honest film with an engaging and surprisingly credible story. It was also smart enough to realise that the only truly great Rocky film was the first one because it also knew that what actually matters is the characters and story rather than the overblown fight scenes of the sequels.

Speaking of character stories, that is exactly what The Expendables isn’t. Who are these guys? How did they meet? What are they trying to do? None of these questions even come close to being answered. The answer is almost certainly that it doesn’t matter, they are ‘expendables’ after all. My problem with this is that for an action movie to be good, you have to enjoy the action scenes. For action scenes to be good you have to care about the outcome, and for that to happen there has to be some sort of connection with the characters involved.

I’ll keep the plot summary brief as you’ve probably either read it elsewhere already, or quite possibly don’t care: the basic premise is that a fictional island called Vilena is being ruled by a corrupt ex-CIA operative and a home-grown dictator. Barney Ross (Stallone) and his crew are offered a big payout to overthrow him, so they head over there on a recon where they meet a girl who’s one of the few locals putting up any kind of resistance. There’s soon trouble and they have to flee but Barney is fixated by the girl and vows to return and save her.

Without any characterisation in the film, the action sequences have a massive job to do because they have to deliver real spectacle to keep the viewer entertained - which they do with mixed success. There’s a great scene where Jason Statham pops out of the nose of a seaplane with a cannon and they carry out an aerial strafing attack on a jetty, finishing it off by dumping fuel out of the aircraft and igniting it. But some other scenes are less impressive - in particular I found the car chase sequence with Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren) dull. The grand finale is also a bit patchy in places.

Some of the jokes and plot devices in the film are particularly dated. Lee Christmas (Statham) has an on-off relationship with a woman who has a new man that turns out to be a woman-basher. Eventually Christmas finds out and beats the living daylights out him while she looks on in admiration. Very contrived and something that should have stayed in the 1980’s. There’s also a scene where you feel embarrassed for Jet Li acting out a supposedly funny dialog about being short.

The Expendables isn’t a terrible film but the problem is the feeling of it being a wasted opportunity given the talent involved and all-star cast. A follow-up is apparently in the works, but it really needs to offer more than just a simple concept and an outstanding cast. I’d like to see a prequel that fills the story out a bit more, but the age of some of the actors is going to make this difficult. Perhaps some scenes showing the FBI looking over the character profiles of the expendables crew would be enough to provide some kind of identity to the characters. Either that or get Michael Bay in to direct the action scenes and push that side of it a bit more.

Maybe stick to Rambo and Rocky next time Sly – from his other films I’d recommend First Blood, Rambo (2008), Rocky Balboa and even the cheesy Cliffhanger as offering more quality and fun respectively.

The best Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas experience (in 2010)

After completing GTA IV and the Liberty City stories, there didn’t seem many options left for getting a GTA fix. But there was one interesting possibility: due to my lost decade of gaming I’d never played GTA: San Andreas, and word on the street is that it’s great - quite possibly better than its successor. But I don’t own any old consoles, so playing the game wasn’t going to be straightforward...

Xbox version

The obvious choice was to get a copy of San Andreas for the original xbox and play it on my 360. It would be hassle-free to get running and I could use the excellent 360 controller. A copy arrived in the post from an eBay seller and I fired it up expecting great things. What appeared on the screen turned out to be a massive disappointment. I was surprised at how poor the visuals are, even for an old game. It runs in a non-widescreen mode and the 3d rendering is very basic, but the biggest issue is how blurred and washed out everything looks. It reminded me of the old composite video outputs from 1980’s computers. To be fair, my use of a 720p Optoma projector throwing an image roughly 8ft across is not an ideal display for pre-HD gaming, but even so the results were very poor. My hunch is it must look better running natively on the original xbox.

Left wanting from the xbox version of the game, I was interested to see how other platforms fared. A video on Youtube shows a comparison between the xbox and PS2 versions, but I find it inconclusive. Lighting looks better on the PS2 version but other elements looked worse. It didn’t really matter anyway because I don’t have a PS2 (or a PS3 to use in backwards compatible mode).

Over to the PC

The only remaining option is the PC version. I have an Atom/Ion powered HTPC, optimised for quiet/cool running but it should be powerful enough to run a 2005 game. So another eBay purchase got me the PC version of San Andreas. Although the game is old, it will run on Windows 7 - the OS detects the game and applies some compatibility settings, turning off Aero to avoid issues. When I got the game running it was obvious from the start that is was streets ahead of the xbox version. Significantly, widescreen resolutions are available and 1280x720 suits my 720p projector perfectly. As you would expect, the graphics on the PC version are still basic by today’s standards, but even so they are a massive step up from the Xbox. The game’s display options page offers a number of settings, so I upped the visual quality to very high and added some anti-aliasing. Although not a powerful machine, my HTPC copes nicely even when the draw distance is  increased to prevent pop-in.

Configuration woes

So all would be well, except for the Achilles heel of the PC platform – control methods. The game works fine on the keyboard but that doesn't suit me – my keyboard is a really cheap wireless model with no keypad. Besides, the GTA IV control system using the xbox 360 controller is superb and this is the experience I wanted with San Andreas too.

I bought an xbox 360 controller for Windows and tried to get it working with GTA:SA. Using the games built-in configuration options was hopeless – the biggest issue being no support for using the second analogue stick to move the camera around.After trawling through a bunch of GTA forums I discovered a utility called SAAC which allows a much fuller set of configuration options for San Andreas. This is an excellent piece of work and a credit to its author. Unfortunately it took some serious faffing about to get working. I had to grab a patch that installed some older DirectX DLL’s just to get it running. When it did run, GTA refused to load, crashing on startup. Eventually I realised that this was because my version of the game is 1.01 which doesn’t allow any hacks or plugins. To fix this I had to find a 1.0 version of the game EXE file and use it to downgrade my copy. Once this was done, GTA would finally run. Except for one annoying issue - the widescreen resolutions had disappeared. Apparently these were only added into 1.01, so I had to find another patch to re-enable them on 1.0. Grrrr!

I used an existing SAAC profile for the 360 controller off the internet, but tweaked a few settings to bring it more in line with the GTA IV control system. One minor issue is that I couldn’t replicate the left/right trigger set up for targeting and shooting because the triggers are on the same axis and conflict with each other. Strangely, they work fine in vehicle mode to handle braking and acceleration.

Success at last

Once the controller was working well, I finally started to settle into the game. It’s still great fun six years later. The dialog between the characters is entertaining and frequently very funny. The opening sequence of the game where your character and his gang are on BMX bikes is hilarious to play. As I spent time with the game only a few more tweaks were necessary – I had to increase the dead-zone on the analogue stick in SAAC (the D slider) to stop the character walking around on his own. I played about with the graphics a bit more and got a nice compromise between frame rate and detail – but this wouldn’t be necessary on more powerful PC’s.

So it is possible to get a good game of San Andreas in 2010, and if you can’t you’re just a buster man - a buster!

Call of Duty: Black Ops - campaign story

I've recently blogged a full review of  Black Ops, where it came in for some criticism for dated graphics and poor computer AI. Although I felt the game is of fairly average quality, one high point for me is well fleshed out story line and it's brilliantly chosen Cold War setting.

Story background

The Cold War is a unique forty year period in history - for the first time ever humanity was in possession of weapons so powerful that the two major superpowers of America and the Soviet Union could lay waste to the entire planet. The threat of a full-scale nuclear war was something the world had to live with and during the Cuban missile crisis we were on the brink of it actually happening.

Fortunately the act of firing nuclear missiles at each other remained unimaginable for both sides, but the USA and USSR remained in a state of tension, fighting proxy wars against each other in Korea, Vietnam and later Afghanistan. Rather than fight each other directly, they funded and supported third parties who fought against each other. The main driving force behind the conflicts was America trying to prevent Russian communist rule from spreading further around the globe - much of Eastern Europe fell under Soviet control at the end of the Second World War.

With such a tense setting, Black Ops has massive potential for a great story line and it tries to make the most of it. The story begins with your character - Alex Mason, seemingly being interrogated and midly tortured - while facing questions relating to involvement in various operations in the theatre of the cold war. As your character recounts these episodes, you get to experience them by playing out the mission. This is an excellent way to allow lots of flexibility in the time frame and geographical location. A summary of the campaign story follows below - with spoilers - so don't read further if you don't want to know the key plot twists and turns!

Opening sequence and early missions

The opening sequence of the game takes place in Cuba where you carry out an assassination attempt on Fidel Castro. Although never officially acknowledged, Castro survived a huge number of attempts on his life, the majority of which are thought to involve the CIA. As the mission draws to a close, Mason does shoot Castro but it later appears to be a body double. You are captured and Castro hands you over to Nikita Dragovich, who throws you in Vortkuta prison. At this stage you meet Victor Reznov - a former Russian captain who becomes a central character in the story arc of the game. He helps you accomplish a difficult escape from Vorkuta but is seemingly killed.

Back on US soil, there is a lengthy cutscene where your character walks through the Pentagon and the White House, leading up to a meeting with JFK about the threat that General Dragovich represents. Dragovich is involved in a plot use a Nazi-developed biological agent against the USA, and President Kennedy asks you directly to put a stop to his plans. The campaign against Dragovich begins with you infiltrating Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan - initially in disguise - to stop a missile launch and kill Dragovich. Arriving too late, the missile launches successfully but you have an opportunity to shoot it down. At the end of the mission you destroy a limo carrying Dragovich but fail to verify his death. This turns out to be a poor decision as you will later find out.

Vietnam

The next chapter of the game takes place in Vietnam and has you taking part in the battle of Khe Sahn as well as seeking intelligence on Soviet involvement in the war. At one stage you are reunited with Reznov, which you might find a bit odd - and you would be right.

In the middle of the Vietnam section of the game is a mission called Project Nova (my personal favourite), which is a flash back of Reznov relating to his experiences at the end of the World War II. He was part of a squad led by Dragovich and Lev Kravchenko who found a smashed boat containing Nazis and V2 rockets loaded with the Nova biological weapon. Dragovich tries to kill Reznov at this stage but the arrival of the British SAS scuppers that plan and Reznov survives.

Back in Vietnam, intelligence relating to a downed cargo plane that could be carrying a biological weapon needs to be investigated.When the plane is found there are a few nasty surprises - firstly the weapon has already been retrieved by the Russian special forces who then capture you and hand you to the Viet Cong.

Recalling scenes from The Deer Hunter, a very tense scene involving Russian roulette takes place, but Mason manages to make a break for freedom along with his comrade Frank Woods. After finding a helicopter the pair fly to intercept and kill Kravchenko. Reznov reappears again in this mission. When Kravchenko is located he puts up quite a fight and clobbers Mason pretty badly, but Woods intervenes and stabs him. Kravchenko's last act for hate's sake is to set of his grenades, forcing Woods to throw him and himself out of a window to save you.

Intelligence in Kravchenko's office makes it known that Steiner - the Nazi scientist who developed Nova - is continuing with development on Rebirth Island. Your character gets into the compound and after a fight, Reznov kills Steiner, and it's at this point that the story starts to unravel.

The big reveal

The CIA arrive to late to stop Steiner being killed, but they arrive just in time to see your character - Mason - kill him. But didn't Reznov do it? Well, it turns out that Reznov doesn't really exist, or rather he doesn't exist in reality after the escape from Vorkuta. Reznov is a creation of Mason's mind, caused by the brainwashing he suffered while held captive in Vorkuta.

So who brainwashed Mason? Well initially it was Dragovich, who was trying to programme him to assassinate JFK - but Reznov later brainwashes him to have him kill Dragovich, Kravchenko and Steiner as an act of revenge.

If you've seen the film Fight Club, the framework of the story will seem familiar. Just as Tyler Durden was a figment of Edward Norton's character who he became at certain stages in the story, it is the same with Reznov and Mason.

Redemption

Even though Mason has been compromised by the enemy, the US still needs Mason because he may possess the ability to find Dragovich and stop his now imminent plan to activate sleeper agents in possession of Nova weapons across the USA. If this Dragovich isn't stopped, World War III would start when the USA counter-attacks Russia with nuclear weapons.

Under further interrogation, Mason remembers that the numbers station - the trigger for the sleeper agents is onboard a Russian ship. You immediately scramble to attack this ship using a helicopter, and then land on the ship and clear it of enemy personnel. After searching the ship it becomes clear that there is an underwater base beneath the ship, connected by a tether. Mason proceeds down to the base and finally confronts Dragovich. After a fight sequence, he is defeated and the transmission from the numbers station is prevented.