The Last Candle

Tonight’s celebration: friends and a Porcupine Tree show in Grand Rapids. Hopefully the Intersection, the venue for the show, will be air conditioned, or at least well-ventilated, unlike last night’s Porcupine Tree show at the Majestic in Detroit. Great music, but holy Moses it was hot and humid and awful.

Just cranked up my DS — the once-a-year higher-pitched twinkle on starting the system signified that it remembered my birthday as well — and received my birthday cake from an Animal Crossing: Wild World pal. Someday to show my appreciation I’ll spend more than five minutes in my Wild World town and uproot the hundred or so weeds that have taken over the much-neglected town of Sandwich.

Ever since the November 2005 of release of Guitar Hero I’ve been a fan of the finest-yet rhythm game, but not enough of a fan to shell out money for the sequel. While I still enjoy rockin’ out to the most recent iteration of the series at a friend’s house, most of my interest stuck to the original game and didn’t transfer.

My first reason for not feelin’ much for Guitar Hero II is that the song list doesn’t appeal to me nearly as much as the first game’s list. The original had absolute guitar classics — Hendrix, Vaughan, Boston, Priest, Billy Gibbons in ZZ Top and so on — stuff that the guitar made legendary. Guitar Hero II has plenty of good music, but the emphasis on what tracks were picked appears to be more about the popularity of the song as a whole, rather than the use or impact of the guitar work.

(The soundtrack to the recently-but-not-surprisingly-announced Guitar Hero III appears to be more towards what’s hip and hot, featuring even fewer actual guitar heroes. This may be due to the third game’s developer switch: Harmonix, developer of the first two games, has handed the work to Neversoft, a developer well known for…the Tony Hawk skateboard games.)

The second reason for skipping out on the rocking is I’m more than a little bored with the series. My toy guitar-playing friends and I jammed to Guitar Hero from November ‘05 up through the summer of ‘06 — the total hours-played tally among us was easily above a few hundred hours. That’s some quality gameplay, but after a sequel that offered little more than a different set of songs I was Hero‘d out.

Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80’s, a newly-announced and pending release in the Guitar Hero franchise, has piqued my interest in the series again. The 80’s is known for most of the growth of metal and solid rock, after all. And if the rock isn’t represented, then there’s always the nostalgia factor.

Hey, some of the Encore titles have already been announced! Short clips of the tracks are available at the offical site, but let me take a look at the list.

Skid Row, with 18 and Life? That’s a good rock song. Slowish, and not much of a guitar song, but solid.

Accept? This is serious! Accept was a big name in the 80’s for speed and power metal.

A Flock of Seagulls, aye? We’re into nostalgia territory with this one.

Twister Sister’s I Wanna Rock fills a quota for quinessential rock tunes of the 80’s. I don’t particularly care for it, but at least it shows that the folks behind the song suggestions aren’t forgetting the easy ones.

Play With Me by Extreme is pure awesome melodic speed metal. That’s the best guitar track on the list.

What’s this? Oingo Boingo? There’s going to be an Oingo Boingo song in the next game? Okay, that’s awesome. Only a Lad isn’t a guitar song — Boingo jams are pretty much Danny Elfman songs, to great effect — but it’s one of my all-time favorite tunes. Way to push my buttons, Harmonix.

14 songs for the game have been revealed thus far, and 16 are left to be announced. I’m not overly swayed by the revealed setlist so far, but the Oingo Boingo inclusion pushes me a long way back to joining the Guitar Hero roadie ranks, and over half the music is still pending.

That press release announcing Guitar Hero Encore: Power Metal Mania is coming any day now.

Between now and last night, when I laid down my wild rant about how much the new Nightwish singer absolutely sucked, Nightwish has released three more clips from songs on the upcoming album.

I have listened to the new clips, and I am now a believer in Anette. That’s right — flip-floppin’, baby! My reversal isn’t quite a about-face — more like 140°. I definitely hopped o’er into album-buyer territory after hearing the new songs, at least.

Now I’m listening to Eva, the new single, from Nuclear Blast’s webshop, released today. Only cost me a Euro, and the tune is pretty darn good. Who would’ve thought a four and a half minute song — the whole thing — was more indicative of overall quality compared to a 30-second clip?

I went to bed last night a Nightwish hater, and now I’m going to go make a pizza to celebrate being firmly back in the Nightwish fan camp.

And all that hating from last night? My main complaint now, which I conveniently left out of yesterday’s short screed, was that I don’t care for the Eva artwork. It’s part CGI, part hand-drawn, and part Photoshop touch-up, none of which jives with the others very well. That jowl on the youngster is a little spooky, too.

But yeah, back to the business of two nights ago. That is, this year continues to be the best for power metal I’ve ever seen.

Power metal band Nightwish, after more than a year of searching and auditioning, has revealed the group’s new lead vocalist (and revealed her a week earlier, too, thanks to someone leaking the single early). A clip of Eva, the upcoming single featuring Anette, the new vocalist, is available as well.

Tarja, the previous vocalist, was good but not great. She sounds better than this new woman, though: while Anette has an unarguably pretty voice, the tone sounds very ordinary compared to the general realm of power metal.

Tarja had a unique set of pipes within the genre, distinguishing Nightwish against the throngs of other dark-dressed metal bands. With Anette’s voice, Nightwish has moved themselves out of their gothic-y niche, choosing instead to huddle amidst those other, less interesting metal bands such as Within Temptation, Epica, After Forever, and the totally overrated Evanescence.

Yawn. Tuomas is a pretty good songwriter, but I’ve never thought he alone could carry the band — Tarja helped a lot when she was part of the formula, as does Marco (the bassist) when he joined the chorus with his rough, emphatic voice. Marco’s still around, thankfully, and maybe the full single or the harder, faster tracks from the upcoming album will sound better to my ears. So far, however, Anette sounds like a step backwards for the band’s sound.

She is Swedish, though. And Anette’s video greeting is…good, as the boys in the band say.

In short: Windows Vista has proven itself, in my experience, to be a big pain in the keister. For now, at least.

The computer in the living room, used mostly for watching videos and playing communal games on the TV, was getting a little weird, an odd twitch that develops eventually under Windows if you don’t “refresh” (i.e., format and reinstall) the operating system every year or so. The machine was getting a little sluggish, a little crash-prone, but worst of all my game-playing compadres and I suspected that something insidious rooted in the OS was keeping us from playing System Shock 2 multiplayer.

All ailments put together (but mostly due to the lack of System Shock 2 playability), I decided to do the annual refresh. The previous candidate for operating system was Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. The additions to the Media Center Edition — a revamped, reskinned Windows Media Player that attempted to be way too hip in its earnesty to be used as a party media player; a gummy, chewy new visual theme; and several new screensavers, including the seemingly-ubiquitous 3D aquarium screensaver — were hardly used, but the Windows XP base was very usable and competant to the computer’s needs. The Windows Dancer was also good for a gag when the collective blood sugar in the room ran a little low.

Through my place of work, however, I had access to Windows Vista under a limited, development-only — i.e., no games! — license. I didn’t expect to do any gaming — in the short-term, anyway — in the time it took to see if Vista was worth keeping around. In the case that Vista was good enough to keep around…well, the Media Center installation was used under the same license, and many a fine game of System Shock 2 was enjoyed prior to it going belly-up. Fight the power.

The installation of the Vista Home Premium edition occurred exactly one week ago today, and I’m currently in the midst of resinstalling Media Edition 2005 again, after clearing Vista from the hard drive. Here’re a few of my beefs that I ran into during the “trial run” of Vista. Note that this is not a comprehensive review of Vista, but more like Vista in 60 Seconds.

Issue number one was that the computer’s hardware was a little underpowered for the eye candy, which in the end dragged down other functions of the system.

Aero, the new 3D-accelerated, GPU-utilizing windows manager, appears generally useless in new features but is aesthetically pleasing, and good at distinguishing the operating system from the Windows 95 look that has lamentably fueled Windows for over ten years. The translucent, fogged window borders are beautiful but a little distracting, and “distracting” crosses the line to “irritable” when moving said foggy windows makes other operations, such as filesystem changes, noticably drag, at least as much as a progress bar makes clear. Viewing high-resolution videos in Vista were considerable slower compared to the same videos played through Windows XP.

I didn’t get around to testing any games for a worthwhile period of time (although System Shock 2 did work), but the performance of the basic Desktop GUI made it clear that this machine, a Athlon 2200+ CPU with 768MB of SDRAM and a Radeon 9600 video card, was doomed to hard labor while generating Vista’s polished visuals. This is not a complaint against Vista, just an indication that Vista wasn’t appropriate to run on this particular box.

Issue two came about when I attempted to upgrade the Radeon’s drivers, an attempt to gain a little performance through new manufacturer software. Drivers, especially for intensive peripheral devices such as video cards, are always a little suspect coming off of the original installation disc: the drivers could be months old, or be less stable due to the manufacturer throwing whatever was available out the door at the time of delivery. Or, the drivers could be sufficient out of the box — as was the case with the default Vista software, surprisingly — but an attempt at squeezing a little more juice out of the hardware through a quick update is always welcome.

The new drivers, downloaded straight from ATI’s web page, signed for Vista and everything, didn’t work at all. After running the red-adorned skate punk installer from ATI and rebooting the machine to start the new drivers, Vista refused to acknowledge that a good Radeon driver was installed at all. Adding a little insult, an ATI-endorsed error dialog appeared on booting up, explaining something to the tune of, “Your video card drivers are bad, bad, bad. Please get an official drivers package.” Making things more frustrating, the GUI graphical polish ceased to work after the new drivers were loaded, as if to put a full-stop on the fact that my video card was now operating at less capacity than under the drivers that came with the operating system.

Everything I tried wouldn’t remove the new, bad drivers and put the old ones back in control. So, having the current installation worth very little, I reinstalled the operating system from scratch again (only about a twenty minute process — the speed of installation and warm boots under Vista are noticably improved). Once again the drivers worked okay out of the box, and once again installing the official, signed ATI drivers pack induced a failure of several functions of the video card, the most obvious being the ability to make the window borders shiny and pretty. Even attempting to grab drivers through Windows Update, circumventing ATI’s site entirely, resulted in the same bad result.

The situation was not acceptable: I was worried to install any new drivers now, for fear of ruining some other necessary function. Not to mention that I couldn’t bloody install the bloody official, signed drivers direct from the original manufacturer’s website, and that I couldn’t in any way gain the benefits of the official ATI utilities — available only through the driver packs — without first crippling the system’s usability.

Issue three was another driver issue: the motherboard chipset, nForce2, was evidently compatible with Vista, as said by the lack of drivers availabe on the nVidia page. Oh, great: there goes two Ethernet ports, the on-board audio, Firewire, etc. Now my window borders were opaque and I received system alerts through the PC speaker in the form of a tinny “beep!” It was like Windows 3.11 all over again.

At least, the non-support for nForce2 is what nVidia’s web site purported, as Windows Update grabbed drivers for all of the appropriate mainboard devices, which through voodoo magic made the USB, audio, etc. operate correctly.

So, nVidia, does the nForce2 have drivers or not? Microsoft thought so, and proved it through the Windows Update. The chipset manufacturer had made it clear that it wasn’t interested in supporting the four-year-old nForce2, putting its entire support cycle within the product cycle of one edition of Windows XP, and ignoring Microsoft’s latest iteration of the OS. Of course, XP was Microsoft’s major OS for six years, which is somewhere in between sad and sadly impressive.

So I had a video card that would run either with crippled drivers or old drivers and a motherboard chipset that wasn’t supported under the original manufacturer. In the face of hopping back to Windows XP, all of the problems experienced thus far were coersion enough to regress back an operating system version.

But issue four was having to deal with the new rigors of Vista’s locked-down security. Want to change the screen DPI? You must confirm. Screensaver? Confirm. Network, memory specs, privacy settings? Everything must be confirmed. If I was a snooty jerk in competition with Microsoft, this would make terrific, rich fodder for an advertisement campaign.

Maybe there was a way to turn all of the redundant security off. That, or I could just go back to Windows XP, which looked less pretty but worked for my purposes almost flawlessly. What’s another hour of installation compared to months of figuring out how to deal with Vista’s seemingly many quirks?

XP is now back on the media-game machine, and the ATI drivers are working just fine. Vista was leagues more impressive visually compared to XP, but the robustness and functionality seemed considerably marred. I’ll give it another shot in about, oh, six months or so, but for now Vista is not worth the time, and I’m glad I didn’t spend any money on the week I wasted testing it.

The pickings are a little sparse, but getting everything together for the gallery after only about a week is not too shabby at all.

California, May '07

Enjoy the elephant seals! Video coming…later. Yeah.