What games are you playing and why?

Damnit. It still crashes anytime you do anything related to the window size or position. It crashes at alt-tabs. And it is totally unplayable.
(To clarify, it does not cease to be running when it crashes. It just sits at 100% CPU usage on one core forever. No screen updates or anything. Just a hard lock to the game. The Task Manager easily kills it, but that is no consolation.)

/sigh

I guess I will play b43 until RC3 or later. What a shame. The prodigies looked good. And the addons are even better.

 

I managed to get it partly working. I forced full screen instead of windowed mode and it will work. But if my Internet access is unavailable for an instant, I have to reboot for my "Donator" status to update. I made a Stone Warden just to see how it is. But I cannot even play it without either staying in game uninterrupted the entire time I am playing or disregarding the Donator BS altogether.

 

43 hours of Mount&Blade: Warband..

LORDLY PLATEBODY, Y U NO IN MARKETPLACE >_<

 

I'm going to be playing Amalur this evening. I've only HALF downloaded The Secret World, will have to leave it to finish tomorrow.

 

I haven't been able to install Amalur successfully.

First attempt, it looked like it installed succesfully, but then I got to the Origin installation and I aborted that (Because I didn't want it on my machine. But after I did that, I couldn't access the game -- it said it had installed, but it really wasn't.

So second attempt, I installed the game and installed Origin. However, it then asks me to insert a disk (???) to continue the installation. There's no correct response to that lol.

 

Origin is fine. It's got a bad reputation over, well, nothing. If Origin does anything, it's attacked. If Steam does it, then it's like "Well, Steam does X, Y and Z so your momma is fat".

But, seriously. Origin is fine. I've used it for a year or so and I'm not dead.

Edit: Started Amalur tonight. Pretty good, even if it feels a bit "MMO". The world seems a bit big and empty, but in 38's favour there is a fast travel system.

 

I hated the ranged combat in the demo and how the pov kept getting screwed up, and all the cut scenes (cut scenes are fine, so long as they don't happen more than once in a blue moon, and not in the middle of combat). But that was an early build -- I hope they've fixed that. I was dumfounded when people kept exclaiming how superior combat was in that game to Skyrim, when everything i was seeing made it feel so awkward. But I do love open world games so I think I may be able to live with it (just didn't want to pay full price for it).

BTW, I was finally able to install it. The problem was that it tells you that the game was installed properly, when it wasn't (it was Origin that it was installing, and there was no explanation anywhere that I saw as to exactly what Origin was. My first assumption was that it was dumpware -- one of those programs that they stick in that really has nothing to do with what you actually wanted to install. You get conned into installing it then 3 weeks down the line, you start wondering why things on your computer stop working. So pretty much if I don't know what something is that is getting installed, my first instinct is to abort it. Usually it's the sensible choice. But I guess not for this game.

And why the installation asks you to insert a disk, I still do not understand.

I won't say that it's worse than Steam because Steam has had its own problems (steam cloud issues, italian menus (lol), etc.). I still prefer Steam, though.

 

The camera rotates around a weird position. When you're looking at the rear, you feel close but not UE3 close. It's okay like that, but even on low sensitivity it's a pretty eager thing when it comes to rotating, and Motion Blur doesn't have its own setting which pisses me off. Ahem. But I rotated the camera around once and got a screenful of boob, and during a cutscene all I could see of my character was her ass.

As for the combat? Needed a lock, which I might have overlooked, otherwise it's a bit directionless. It's functional, though, and I'm having fun running around with my omniblades going LOLWTFYOUDIENOWYAY.

Biggest problem I have right now is I've found no storage for items I don't want to carry around.

 

Yes, that's my account password in plain text in the URL. It's over SSL, but still enjoy your password stored in your browser history, in EA's webserver logs and in your company's MITM firewall if you happen to do that at work.

E: Also if EA's web developers thought this is a good idea regardless SSL or not, I seriously doubt how secure their stuff is. How could that even pass a security audit?

 

They can and will eventually be sued for lost accounts due to idiocy such as that.

SSL is only partly secure. There is literally no way to make a perfect encryption. SSL takes anywhere from a second to several minutes to crack. If a man in the middle attack were done, this would be broken in no time in every case.

I kept up with projects like Tor and Freenet for the main purpose of understanding the risks we take every day with the Internet. What I learned is that unless every server you connect to on your full route to your intended destination is secure, none of them are. And I have never once found a site I can connect to that does not have hops that are insecure or unknown.

Coding things like this is a recipe for disaster.

But in their defense, as I said there is no way to have perfect encryption. At least it is not possible for encryption to be secure and usable at the same time. It is all about a tradeoff of one for the other.

I have not used Origin, and will not purely because EA is involved.

 

If that were completely true, Internet commerce and banking would cease to exist. It is true that attacks like BEAST and CRIME are out there that can bypass SSL, but they require other stuff to be done first before they can be used. In the case of BEAST, it required you to first be able to man in the middle the network traffic of the victim. CRIME required you trick the victim into visiting a malicious website. In both cases, the attacks can be mitigated by patches on the server OR browser side. And there are good tools available like Qualys' SSL Server Test that can tell you the the SSL configuration of the server you are visiting. Scan your banks and merchants with it.

In general, though, the sky is not falling. Attacks are found, they are disclosed to vendors, and they get patched. The worst thing you can do is not patch your software regularly.

 

The very first thing that happens when you attempt to negotiate an SSL connection is the passing of data that is supposed to be unknown to everyone but the two intended sides of the connection. Yet it can be recorded and used at the same time by a properly setup MitM attack.

That data is generated at the beginning of a connection handshake. And is different each time. But there is literally no way to exchange it over an open Internet without others being able to see it. Usually those others that can see it have zero interest in it and are just intermediaries. But the user never knows for sure.

In general, the sky is not falling. But SSL is in no way unbreakable in real time. The good news is that all this mess is handled in hundreds of different ways between different protocols and even different versions of SSL and TSL and such. And there is no way to make a universal SSL breaker. You can only attack one specific type of connection at a time with any chance of success. And the odds of detection are very high.

But to the root of this subject, the SSL connection used by Origin is only going to use one or a few different methods. Those can be singled out and successfully attacked. (The probability of detection remains high.)

In general I support open sourced software over closed. But for encryption used globally it can be advantageous to mix the two and leave potential attackers guessing. And all the scumbags that attempt any of this stuff should be imprisoned for life or just drawn and quartered.

To think that some insane people think DES is a "Secure" encryption method sickens me. Triple DES is better, but a layer of AES and Blowfish would push the possible decode time up to hours or days from minutes with DES/Triple DES.

 

I can't explain that, it also seems to be something to do with using their site over a browser and not the client (which is what I was talking about).

That's pretty stupid, though.

 

Started The Secret World tonight. Didn't stay on it long as I couldn't be fudged with an MMO tonight, but I've created my character. She looks like a cross between me and Noomi Rapace. I'm not complaining, but she does look a little... odd.

So I quit, played Amalur for a similar amount of time, but it was getting late and I'd had a long day at work so balls to that.

Then I gave Alice: Madness Returns a spin. WOWZA THIS IS WIN.

 

The characters in TSW all look odd, I think it's a deliberate aesthetic. I've heard some people call it "everyone's fugly!", but it's grown on me.

I'm taking a couple weeks off from the game because the event going on right now is shite, but it's definitely worth staying with it for the story.

 

I played TSW for a bit (I actually, unfortunately, paid for a lifetime membership, and I kick myself every time I think about that).

I don't have any problems with the appearance of the game. But I simply could not play the game with the character that I made, past Blue Mountains, and I refuse to grind to build a character that MAYBE will be good enough to get past it. The problem is that the combat takes a good deal more hand-eye coordination than I am capable of. I enjoyed the first zone a lot. The second zone a bit less, but it was ok, and the third zone just frustrated the hell out of me at one point. All the fun-type quests that were in the first zone seemed to be nonexistent after that. And I'm not sure why.

 

You can fix a build later on down the line - would you like a hand getting some AP? I know the desert is sorta the low point of the game, it will get good again afterward. The missions go from interesting in Kingsmouth to irritating in Egypt to downright amazing in Transylvania, in my opinion. I've hit the point where there's not much for me to do but farm Nightmare dungeons for bullion and help players out with earlier missions, the latter of which is much more enjoyable for me.

 

Anyone playing ToME 4 RC2, here is the current patched version of the Infinite 500 addon.
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=35016&start=15

If you play an Alchemist, check this addon.
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=35755

The Talent Point Planner looks promising too.
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=34113

But the addon I am waiting on is the additional prodigies addon. It is not yet up to stable for RC2. You can use it anyway, but it will generate additional errors every once in a while. I hope it gets adopted by Darkgod like many good addons do.

They updated it while I was typing this? WTF? Where is the camera?!?!
http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/new-prodigies