nick@kavassalis.com's blog

So, I put 6 hours into Dragon Quest 9 in its release week, and began to write this article. The week after, I brought myself up to about 13 hours, and still only had written down the title of ‘early impressions’.  Here we are almost a week almost a month later and I’ve not finished writing the article at about 30 hours in. To sum it up, DQ9 is a fantastic game, but is definitely a sign of the times for gaming.

As many people who will read this already know, I am a Dragon Quest fanatic. I have always loved the fantastic stories, tongue and cheek humour, Toriyama character designs, heavy grinding and awesome difficulty level. DQ7 on the original Playstation may have been the pinnacle of the series for me, with its 100 hours of gameplay without going for any of the lunatic challenges and proper difficulty level. DQ8 was a fantastic game, 3D graphics and 3rd person perspective included, despite a very mixed localization from new owners SquareEnix (pluses: re-orchestrated score; minuses: new sound effects, voices (disable-able thankfully),  some new animation, removing of christian symbolism and tweaking of gameplay balance), the only real let down of the game was the rather lax difficulty. My rule of thumb is that any game where I can beat the final boss on the first try without any grinding first, is anti-climatic and too easy. What concerns me the most is the number of forum posts I’ve read between 2005 and now claiming DQ8 was a very difficult game. Sigh, this younger generation of gamers… The DS remakes of DQ4, 5 (and surely the upcoming remake of 6) have all been easy-ied up as well to Nintendo-ize them. Thankfully they too are such fantastic games that this doesn’t really matter. (I cannot wait for the DQ6 remake, as it was really a fantastic game too)

In comes Dragon Quest 9. Back is the top down view, back are the classic sound effects. The looks are along the lines of the DS remakes, but where player characters and certain important non player characters are 3D. The hybrid of 3D and 2D characters works well 90% of the time, occasionally a tight camera shot with some 2D NPCs moving around a corner will look a bit out of place but it doesn’t really detract. It looks like a Dragon Quest game, sounds like a Dragon Quest game, in general, I approve.

The story in DQ9 is pretty good, I won’t comment on specifics to prevent spoilers. It’s typical Dragon Quest fare with one throw back: there are no story-based player characters. Like the earliest games in the series, you must hire (create) friends to fight with you. I sorta miss having conflict between story characters and the resulting dialog, but the game doesn’t really feel like its lacking since the hero has a non-playable companion, Stella (Sandy in .jp), who provides plenty of dialog. 30 hours in, I’m pleased with the pacing and general writing found (as well as the translation).

Next comes game play. It’s a very fun game, but definitely has been modernized westernized (i.e. made easy). Grinding is way off from previous games, in fact aside from being out at sea, there are no random encounters. Yes, it amuses me that Dragon Quest has borrowed the system seen in Dragon Quest parody series Mother for encounters: enemies will see you on the map, rush toward you if they pose a threat, run away if they are trivial. As such the encounter rate is much too low 90% of the time. Not that this is a bad thing, but to counter this, you get a ton of experience and money, both of which are slightly flawed in DQ9.

First off let’s talk about money. In Dragon Quest games you are historically dead broke travellers through all but the last stretch of the game. This works well as it keeps you struggling. The economy in DQ9 is so trivial you will never really be strapped for cash. Problem 1) you get way too much money constantly. Problem 2) you never need to spend that money reviving your party after you are wiped out. Yep, gone are the times of dragging around 3 coffins because you cannot afford to bring them back, if you are wiped out the entire party starts at full health (sans the usual 50% of your cash). However if you use a bank this penalty is negated so dieing is not a huge pain like it was in previous games. I find this overflow of money is most seen in healing items. I have never (in 30 hours) found myself in a dungeon, deep in, worried about running out of HP or MP, as even MP items (usually very hard to come by in DQ games) are pretty affordable (500 gold / 30 MP). This sort of resource management and having to keep your HP/MP up while adventuring was a big part of the Dragon Quest experience and is totally non existent in DQ9. You will be so rich you will never ever be starved for the latest equipment and supplies. No challenge sadly, and I miss this.

Next is experience. Dragon Quest 9 has a very cool job system where by you gain skills under different vocations. It has been done in many DQ games before, and it definitely works here. As a result of the far lower encounter rates, you level up pretty quickly (especially early on). Since you start at level 1 whenever you change a job (or recruit a new party member), the game tries to balance experience away from the lower level people, which is fair. This means you can’t just go jump into a boss fight and dump a ton of experience into someone at level 1 and bring them up to level 20 in one go. Where it gets strange is how it handles experience for dead characters. Oddly they still get some experience (half) when dead at the end of battle, which means yes, you can drag around low level corpses and eventually level them up. This is both stupid and negatively impacts the difficult of the game. Weirder still? People are often still hit by the experience penalty after being brought back to life before the battle ends. Not 100% sure how the experience formula works, but this behaviour is just strange, and punishes weaker magic user characters who are repeatedly wiped out in boss fights. However the experience is so plentiful you won’t ever be hurting with under leveled characters anyway.

Now the game isn’t modern Final Fantasy levels of easiness, bosses certainly (though sadly not anymore for me) have some difficulty. I find myself never hurting for HP/MP like you should in a Dragon Quest game, and I’m never wiped out by random encounters. I imagine both of these things can be difficult frustrations for younger gamers, but they were a big part of the enjoyment of the meat-and-potatoes of the series for me, i.e. DQ4-7.

The big sell in the North American marketing was the character customization. While they sell it as new levels of character customization, it really translates to: whatever you equip your characters with, you see on your characters in combat and while walking around in the field. This is very well done and certainly a welcome addition to gaming in general. Sadly, and maybe the only time I wished the game wasn’t on the DS, the characters are pretty small and the coolness of most pieces of equipment was totally lost on me. I sorta stopped caring like 10 hours in what they looked like and just ran around with whatever the best equipment was at the time.

Lastly I’ll touch on the side quests. Since Square wanted to make this game easily enjoyable for multiplayer, there are tons of non-linear side quests to do. Even if you have no intention of ever playing multiplayer (like me) these provide lots of added enjoyment, quirky little story bits, and plenty of challenge along the way. There is also the addition of treasure maps, which provide locations to grottos which are essentially side-quest dungeons. These dungeons can provide real challenge, something thats sadly missing from the main story. Never the less an awesome addition to the game.

I could ramble on for ages, but I’d rather get back to playing the game this morning. I’m hoping I’m only about half way through, we shall see. I’d like to summarize by saying Dragon Quest 9 is an excellent game, not the crowning achievement of the series, though it could have been had the difficulty been a bit higher, which would have easily been achieved had the game starved the players of money, and as a result HP/MP while adventuring or in dungeons. The fact that you can buy the MP potions fairly early in the game and fairly cheaply is a real shame. I originally missed having a party of story characters, but the game doesn’t feel lacking. It’s an awesome game, and the DS means you can whip it out and play on a 30 minute subway ride as well as on the couch at home.

UPDATE: Another complaint I have which goes to the general easiness and lack of having to manage your resources is dungeon length. Dungeons are very short, even 30 hours in. Having to back track because you died on a boss is trivial, and you will never run out of HP/MP curatives in the first place.

So I’ve been working on a DQ9 review for the past 3 weeks, which went from early impressions, to mid impressions, and now I’ve just gotten side tracked. Anyway, here are some photos and a brief story.

On August 3rd, Eva found a caterpillar on the dill while we were house sitting and taking care of Molly. We quickly identified him as a Black Swallowtail caterpillar thanks to google:

Some quickly googling further and we made a little home for him out of a Chinese takeout container, dirt, a water dish a small stick and lots of dill. Seen here on top of the coffee maker getting some sun.

By August 6th, he had more than doubled in size (after eating almost all the dill we could pick), and we decided he needed a larger home.

We had picked a vase up when grabbing some stuff from home the previous day, so we built him a new home. Same dirt, a bigger stick, new water dish and more dill.

On the morning of August 8th, we noticed Dylan had suspended himself by a thread under his log, and we knew he had finally eaten enough.

We checked back all day but no change, however this morning…

Sure enough, it was just as we read, his cocoon matched the color of the stick (they apparently can range from brown to bright green). Goodbye Dylan the caterpillar. 9-11 days and Dylan the butterfly will emerge. Dunno if we will be here to see it, but here’s hoping!
I feel like I’m writing a children’s book :)

So my security related opposition to the G20 was proved very valid. Things got much worse down here in the financial and shopping districts of Toronto that I even imagined though…

Early in the afternoon on Saturday June 26th, all of the peaceful protests were in full swing in downtown Toronto. Despite having what I was told as 10,000+ police officers in the downtown core, a small group of several hundred protesters managed to break away from the marches and began rioting on Yonge St. They destroyed businesses in the name of hurting multi-nationals, Starbucks were a preferred target. Never the less they destroyed and looted many locally-owned stores like the iconic Zanzibar strip club an independent jewler on Yonge. Destruction was wreaked up Yonge from King to College for over an hour before police showed up. Where were the police? The only police I saw were cop cars on fire… Store after store was vandalized, peoples livelihoods destroyed, all afternoon and into the evening.

To put things in perspective for people: they literally hit every store I frequent on a daily / weekly basis (aside from our grocery store which is a bit east of the riots), and I’d been to every Starbucks destroyed, and there were many… Thankfully the Eaton Center was quickly put on lock down to prevent rioting, and for that I am grateful. Apparently anarchists are opposed to people like themselves being employed in the retail and hospitalities industries, because they surely will cause a lot of closures while places pick up the pieces this week… (Yea, guess what, destroying a Starbucks hurts more than just Starbucks Inc. in Seattle)

It hurts me that people would be chanting ‘Our Streets!’ while trashing my city. That riot was a few blocks from my home, on my street, and along my walk to work. There is absolutely no chance these people are downtown Toronto residents, financial district, south of Lakeshore or otherwise. These are not their streets, they have destroyed my neighbourhood. Many people suggests they were bussed in from long distances, specifically Montreal. (Google and Twitter searches on pro-anarchist hash tags have lead me to believe a lot of this anti-G20/anti-capitalism support comes from there as well, not to single them out though…)

There were more such incidents, specifically one on Queen near Spadina in the evening that involving more torched police cars going unchecked for large periods of time from law enforcement. The area near the fence was completely secure, even over night, but rioting went near unchecked across our downtown core. I am very disappointed in our poor security effort, though it was a near unfathomable task by hosting it in Toronto. See my other article on this subject…

The protesters look mostly like white trash. Lots of these so-called “anarchists” look predictably like angry older teens and 20-somethings. If they have an agenda to push, they are stupid beyond words; but I strongly believe they are just angry kids wreaking havoc by trashing property. What it says about our society I don’t know, but it sure is sad. Thankfully many of these protesters and even the so called Black Bloc protesters were photoed, often changing out of their black masks, thanks to journalists doing their part. Publish all the photos, black list these sociopaths.

Aside from the actual protesters, there were huge amounts of onlookers, who I am also disgusted with. Crowds of people supporting the rioters but not causing damage themselves, crowds of people with cameras (the small DRebel-esque SLRs seemed very popular) and cell phone cameras standing around photoing destruction in the city disgust me. Nobody aside from an elderly security guard seemed to try and stop the rioting. Are we that apathetic as a society? I even saw a lot of people smiling at the chaos, even if they were only there taking photos. That too is sociopathic behaviour, and is disgusting. These people should be prosecuted as well.

Violence went on over night, though nothing as organized. Trains, subways and even most surface transit is closed still. Hopefully today will be better than yesterday, but I’m not that hopeful. I am saddened by the state of society that caused this havoc, and the people too apathetic to do anything but snap photos for Twitter. Now we have massive damage from King to Bloor, pretty much everywhere between Spadina and Jarvis.

Harper government who put the G20 in *downtown Toronto*: Terrible.  Toronto police who focused too much on protecting the fence and not the rioting: Unacceptable. The human beings who would destroy other peoples property in the name of a political agenda? The worst of all. You people do not deserve the civil and human rights you obviously take for granted in this country.

So again I’ve been slacking on blog posting, but things have been busy. We’d been working on getting a very large and rather-out-of-our-comfort-zone (tech-wise) campaign for the last few weeks. It’s definitely been fun and thankfully the craziness had subsided this week. Onto the matter at hand!

So the G20 summit has descended into Toronto. It does not make me happy for several reasons. The city spent the last several weeks erecting giant fences around Front Street West, around York, Bay and Yonge, around the Westin Harbour Castle, and preparing to close all of the Gardiner off ramps in the area, as well as lanes on Lakeshore. Unfortunately we are smack dab in the middle of it.

So the first issue as far as I’m concerned is the disruption of it all.  Anyone working in that zone, was pretty much let off work unless they were essential. Certainly for many workers especially those working the Front St hospitalities this meant lost wages for 1-3 days. Anyone working in the downtown core, or even commuting through via the TTC or GO was suggested to take the days off, work from home, etc, due to delays, protests, etc. More lost wages surely, and more importantly, massive loss of productivity. So the near $2 billion (I believe) they spent on the summit doesn’t even scratch the surface of nixing Toronto’s productivity and tourism for 3 days. Bad enough.

Anyone brave enough to drive into the city may have been met with random full 427 and Gardiner closures as dignitaries came through. I’m told this was going on even earlier in the week as well since many arrived early. More disruption to massive numbers of people’s lives, many whom live and work very far from the summit. Mind you, if you already were downtown, the roads were empty as nobody had any way to even get off the highway around here :) I’d have done some rallying around the once-in-a-lifetime empty downtown core if the police wouldn’t have shot me. Toronto G20 Supecial Rally Stage-o, fighto!

Why put it *downtown* Toronto? Why not put it out by the airport? Easier to get to *from the airport* Why not leave it in Huntsville (where the G8 was)? Sorry to the Huntsville and airport’ians but the disruptions to productivity, wages and lives would have been minimized.

So my second issue with the G20 here was security. I’m not really sure who the security effort was tailored to stop. Today is the day of the biggest protests, and its estimated to be under 10,000 (unlike Montreal’s 50,000, I’m not sure what that says about Montreal), which is almost half the number of police downtown for the G20. Certainly the protestors stand no chance of… disrupting anything. They are just masochists who dream of getting 15 minutes of fame from a news program. The only risk is that commuters and tourists may get caught in the scuffle, hospitals were ramping up just incase…

I assume the other thing that the massive security budget was for was to stop potential terrorist attacks. Of course having Obama here (and others) you are immediately running the risk of having a terrorist attack, domestic or international. This bothers me because you’ve immediately put the people and businesses at risk in the most dense area in Canada! Anyone commuting through Union Station, or even living here where we are, is at risk of some sort of attack. Frankly, if someone had wanted to do something, they could have snuck something or themselves into any of the buildings next to the Convention Center earlier in the week. 151 Front Street W included. Unless I’m mistaken, police did not sweep datacenters, filled with the property and equipment of tens of thousands of unknown individuals (many of whom are from overseas). Not that I’m trying to give ideas to the terroristas, but these are people willing to die for what they believe in, they are pretty dedicated and don’t need tips from a tech blogger. Just as someone who has worked in the area for years, I’m saying it would be trivial even with the big scary fences and police presence.

So my other problem with security is that our government rather silently took away some of our civil liberties during the summit anywhere near the fence to. Too bad on my walk for *coffee* I pass the fence as does anyone who uses Union Station. Better be ready to submit to search and seizure if they don’t like how you look. Thankfully they did not attempt to take my camera when I visited it, but I was certainly escorted off by 5 officers for taking photos. Scariest bit: The regulation also says that if someone has a dispute with an officer and it goes to court “the police officer’s statement under oath is considered conclusive evidence under the act.” Thank god this is only 3 days… but seriously Canada, you are regressing! Again, the government is certainly not acting with the will of the people in mind.

So as far as I can tell, security would have been cheaper and easier *anywhere* other than downtown Toronto. Lot’s of nearby tall buildings, tall buildings that have lots of places to hide a person or tool of evil. The risk to the population of downtown is the highest anywhere in Canada because we are the most dense, and the risk to businesses is highest because this is where all the commerce (and telecommunications!) are. What the hell was going through the heads of the Harper government when they chose downtown Toronto?

The choice of downtown Toronto does not benefit anybody. If Canada really had to host the G20 (and that’s a geopolitical question for people other than myself), why the hell would you host it downtown?  By the aiport, in Huntsville (like the G8 from earlier in the week), ANYWHERE would have been better than here. By putting it here you ensure that you disrupt the most peoples lives, most people’s livelihoods, and put the most people at risk, by increasing the cost of security dramatically, while lowering the effectiveness of you security.

It’s early in the morning, I’ll likely revise the grammar of this post when I’m more awake, but fuck the Harper Government anyway.

As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing worse than those who crawl through domain whois records for the purpose of emailing me. I get a lot of it. Funny thing is, it’s strictly forbidden in ICANN’s (the sole registrar accreditation body) rules. ICANN’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement section 3.3.6.3 states:

“Registrar’s access agreement shall require the third party to agree not to use the data to allow, enable, or otherwise support any marketing activities, regardless of the medium used. Such media include but are not limited to e-mail, telephone, facsimile, postal mail, SMS, and wireless alerts.”

In fact this has been on the books since 2003. Yet on a daily basis I receive whois-crawled spam. Now yes, you can definitely whois any domain and readily spam the owner. But these people are not just spamming one or two domains, they’re spamming thousands, if not tens of thousands at a time. (As with all spam, you’ve got to fish a lot to catch anything). Access to this requires what ICANN calls ‘bulk whois’, which pretty much any registrar with an API will provide you. However it is up to them to prevent people from using this as a means to spam people. While I realize it is not trivial to track the spam back to the registrar allowing the mass harvest, it’s not like there is an infinite number of registrars. Tracking down the people providing this information to spammers would not be impossible. Considering ICANN is pretty much useless for everything else (it took them how long to stop turning a blind eye to domain tasting? oh right, 10 years), they could at least enforce this policy, track down offending registrars and remove their accreditation. (I kid, ICANN will never do this, their rules are pretty much toothless, and this article is really just to ridicule spammers who take themselves seriously)

Now, whois-crawled spam is a bit different than your usual spam. No viagra, OEM software or luxury watches. No, whois spammers usual take themselves a lot more seriously, which makes it all the funnier because they’re just as pathetic as the guy selling Chinese V1ag4ra. Let’s look at a few of  the types of assholes who take part in this practice. (and some of my favourite examples)

Web hosts offering quality web hosting at low low prices:

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The idea behind this type of domain spammer is pretty simple. You own a domain name, everyone who owns a domain name has some sort of hosting for it, everyone likes cheaper hosting. Amusingly sales@ and abuse@ evul.net get *tons* of it, which is usually very poorly targeted (and ironic when it goes to abuse@). However, the spam pictured above was actually well targeted, because its offering local large scale hosting, the kind that evul.net might want. However there in lies the problem, why as a web site owner (or a web host like evul.net) would you ever want hosting from a *spammer*. It immediately calls into question the ethics, let alone the quality of such a provider. They all end up getting spamcop’d and in the case of this one, I wrote to the idiots to personally express my disgust, they are locally known and slimy. Hopefully enough spamcop reports will get these wannabe providers upstreams to slap them, as they’re almost always sent from North America.

SEO/marketing experts asking for links:

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This one gets me. It’s pretty brainless. We get a ton of these at work for any blog that we have our email address on the whois for. The idea is that if you ask nicely enough for a link (they *always* come from female, likely fake, names) someone will give you that link, and your google pagerank will be increased! In reality you are a spammer. It must work enough of the time that it makes it worth while for these people to do it. I try and spamcop these guys, but it’s like pissing in the ocean: the email sources and spamvertised sites are almost always in South America, Asia or eastern Europe. (This particular one came from some ISP in Argentina) I have a feeling they are usually fronts for something else, (get a pseudo legit page pageranked up, use it to then push other pages up) as no legit page bulk emails out begging for links.

People selling ads/ad network services:

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I save the best for last. These are the most ironic and we get them from time to time at work. People spam our own sites essentially offering their own advertising services. It’s even better (ironic), like in the above example, when they are spamming an obvious campaign site, showing there is likely no human intervention in the spam. They’re just looking for well pageranked sites and spamming the owners. This again begs the question, who actually receives one of these and takes them up on their most reputable (lol) offers. Sadly some people must to make it worth while. Since these are all pseudo legit (wannabe) marketing companies, they’re almost always in the US, so spamcop for great justice.

We received a good one from a company selling a Twitter trending solution recently, again well targeted against an actual twitter-based campaign site, but it begs the question of how new are these people to the internet. How is it, that in 2010 there are people out there who still believe their business has any legitimacy as soon as they send out unsolicited-bulk email to the same people who have been fighting such email for nearly *20 years*. In short, stop buying services/products you see in spam, have sweet dreams of useless ICANN actually enforcing the bulk-whois-marketing rule instead of ignoring registrars who allow it willy-nilly, and spamcop everything for great justice.

And to “Data Centers Canada Inc.”, “Comodus” and “Linkstar”, congrats you are spammers, any hopes you had of every being taken seriously as legit businesses went down the drain when you sent out unsolicited bulk email to domain owners, no matter how well targeted it was.