firehose

By Tim Stone on January 3rd, 2014 at 7:00 pm.

Both the OMSI and the OMSI 2 manual begin with the same Goethe quote. In 2011 “Such a work is never actually finished – one must simply declare it to be finished once one has done as much as possible given the time and circumstances.” felt like a dangled promise… a hint of riches yet to come. In 2014, in the light of the NG272-length bug list currently dominating my play notes, it feels like a whispered apology… acknowledgement that the follow-up to one of the finest driving games of recent years was bustled out of the door before it was good and ready.

I can live with the levitating pedestrians at Grundorf Bahnhof, U Ruhleben, and Charlottenstrasse…

…the permeable brickwork on the corner of Breite Strasse…

…the over-eager exiters pushing themselves part-way through doors on moving buses…

…and the huge shark fin protruding from the gutter at Staakener Strasse.

It’s the regular crashes, framerate hiccups, AI bus problems, timetable glitches, and mod compatibility issues that have brought me closest to mutiny during the past week.

If I hadn’t arrived an ardent OMSIist and fairly quickly discovered that many of my CTDs were linked to the sim’s overworked sound engine (reducing the number of wavs played simultaneously seems to stabilize OMSI 2 for many users) then I probably wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to develop a deep and deeply inconvenient affection for the new routes and rides.

While there’s no way I can recommend OMSI 2 in its present frankly rather embarrassing state, I’m dutybound to point out that 90% of the time I’ve spent with it thus far has been thoroughly agreeable. Hearing the NG272′s articulated midriff creak like an ancient barn door while turning into Grunewaldstrasse? Magical. Passing under the broad iron bridge at Stresowplatz while an InterRegio express rattles overhead? Marvellous. Bouncing along Falkensee’s threadbare throroughfares at dusk on my way to the recently opened Wall portal near Freudstrasse? Priceless. OMSI’s painstakingly researched and recreated period venues and conveyances made other sims seem pale and synthetic. In this sequel there’s twice as many evocative Berlin boulevards to barrel along, plus an extra pair of super-talkative, super-tactile omnibus types to do the barrelling in.

The Falkensee appendix represents the franchise’s first official foray into the GDR. It also showcases the sort of clever map morphing system I always hoped to see implemented in MSFS. Set the date to October 1989 or earlier, and Falkenseer Chaussee, the tarmacked north-western tip of the old OMSI map, ends almost as soon as it begins, a monstrous concrete curtain barring further progress westward. Return in December and, miraculously, the barrier sports a breach. Momentous political changes mean you can wiggle your way through an ad-hoc checkpoint as the Falkensee Bahnhof-bound E522, one of the first BVG services to run between West Berlin and the GDR.

That checkpoint is OMSI 2′s looking glass. Passing through it for the first time and finding myself amongst unfamiliar street furniture, comical Trabants (Alas, no Wartburgs yet), and outrageous potholes was genuinely disorientating… properly illuminating. History comes as standard in most military sims. To find it lurking so vividly in a bus sim is as unexpected as it is delightful.

Not that Falkensee is OMSI 2′s main attraction. That would be the 12km ribbon of scenery between Ruhleben’s U-Bahn station and the mental hospital in Falkenhagener Field. Less demanding than the original Stadtgrenze-Freudstrasse run (which features the huge, baby-eating Falkenseer Platz roundabout) but no less interesting thanks to a bevy of bridges and turns at the eastern end and some pleasing suburban stretches at the western, it’s a typically forensic piece of MR-Software civil engineering.

Unique prototypical structures abound. A new elevation system means inclines are subtler and more faithful. Yes, if you put your foot down you could probably drive from one end to the other in 30 minutes, but as with Stadtgrenze-Freudstrasse the length isn’t especially important. Factor in the transformative effects of different timetables, vehicular choices, seasons, times of day, traffic intensities and weather conditions, and the feeling of novelty will probably last for weeks if not months.

Assuming you select an example that’s in full possession of its sound effects (bizarrely, some of the game’s NG272s refuse to creak and groan when articulating) the new bendy bus is as impressive as the extra slab of Spandau. Weighty, vociferous, fault prone (all buses now suffer random technical problems) and – if handled clumsily in icy conditions – endearingly errant, the only thing the trailered newcomers really lack are giggling youngsters using internal turntables as makeshift funfair rides.

The debuting little’uns are all too busy auditioning for the Midwich Cuckoos to misbehave. Added along with grannies (Berlin’s grandfathers, like grandfathers everywhere, plainly prefer to travel by jetpack or PTT) infants dress more sensibly than their weather-oblivious elders, but stand in the same odd, will-this-nail-varnish-never-dry? poses, and stroll through lampposts and bus shelters with the same idiot nonchalance.

Talking of idiot nonchalance, AI vehicles seem a little less Vauxhall Cavalier this time around. I’ve yet to be rear-ended by a Manta, side-swiped by Golf, or cut up by one of the fleet of new panel vans, though admittedly that might have something to do with the fact that I drove for a couple of days without realising vehicular collisions are off by default.

There’s been a concerted attempt to improve OMSI’s approachability. Right now the tutorials are rather undermined by some missing translations and the same bugs that blight the rest of the sim, but the overhauled Train Simulator-style menu panel, and the slim selection of ready-made scenarios (in OMSI you usually start a session by choosing a date, placing a bus at a route terminus, then selecting an appropriate timetable) should make transitioning from that ETS2 HGV or TS2014 EMU somewhat easier than it once was.

Wisely, Marcel and Rüdiger have resisted the urge to shoehorn needless structure into their creation. You drive what you want, where and when you want from the outset. Though profiles quietly record every prang, ticket sold, and mile driven, and quantify driving skill and passenger comfort levels, there’s no attempt to turn this data into distracting XP or pointless online leaderboard positions. You play OMSI, and now OMSI 2 , because you want to hear the symphony of engine roar and transmission whine. You want to feel chassis and body tussle under heavy braking. You want to see late Eighties and Nineties Berlin brought to life on your desktop. Give it a month or two and I’m sure OMSI 2 will be everything Simulatia hoped it would be. Even now its greatness is glimpseable behind the exasperating error messages and huge guttershark fins.

Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation has built 100 energy-efficient and eco-friendly houses in New Orleans to replace homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, the organization believes that some of the wood it used is now rotting, reports The New Orleans Advocate.

The organization used TimberSIL, an innovative glass-infused wood product produced by a South Carolina manufacturer, to build porches and outside steps. The absence of chromated copper arsenate and other chemicals typically used to prevent rot and decay was a selling point for Make It Right.

The absence of chemicals for preventing decay was a selling point

"Instead of treating the wood with toxic chemicals, it's actually infused with sand, or silica, such that it takes on the properties of treated lumber," Tom Darden, the executive director of Make It Right, said in a 2010 interview. "At the end of its life cycle, which is estimated to be about 300 years, it can be mulched and composted, believe it or not."

Unfortunately, Make It Right has found that TimberSIL can't stand the moisture in the balmy city and has turned dark gray and begun falling apart. The organization has replaced wood in 30 homes and is considering legal action. TimberSIL has reportedly caused trouble for at least one other client: a project in Western Massachusetts that had to be repaired when the builders found the wood retained too much moisture and couldn't hold paint.

The San Francisco medical examiner's office has ruled that the sudden death of the well-known hacker Barnaby Jack at the age of 36 was due to an accidental overdose from combining heroin, cocaine, Xanax, and Benadryl.

Jack was an ingenious programmer from New Zealand best known for making an ATM spit out bills and figuring out how to wirelessly hack into medical devices, including a pacemaker and an insulin pump. He was scheduled to give a talk on the latter last year at the security conference Black Hat, where hackers present their exploits in order to make the public aware of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. His talk was one of the most anticipated at the convention, but he died six days before he was supposed to give it.

Because of his prominence in the hacker community, there were conspiracy theories that he had been assassinated by the government or one of the medical companies whose products he'd hacked. Others wondered if he was the latest victim in the community to succumb to depression.

Jack's famous ATM hack.

Instead, it now appears that Jack's death was a tragic accident. According to an autopsy report obtained by The Verge, Jack had a history of abusing opiates, cocaine, and Xanax. His girlfriend found him lying in bed unresponsive, amid bottles of beer, champagne, and e-cigarettes. He seemed fine when she spoke to him earlier in the day and they had dinner plans, she told police.

Jack was widely mourned in the security community. His Black Hat talk was not replaced, the hour left "to commemorate his life and work." A memorial was also held for him at Def Con, the annual hacker convention that takes place after Black Hat.

Yahoo released a new version of its Sports app today that has been redesigned for iOS 7 with a heavy emphasis on GIFs. Yahoo Sports' GIFs, which it calls Loops, take short clips from game highlights and allow users to overlay text. They can then share their creations with the community, with the GIF appearing inside a feed on the main game results page. "We have a tradition around creativity, and empowering creators from Tumblr and Flickr," says Josh Schwarzapel, senior product manager for mobile and emerging products. "We took that mind set and applied it to sports."

Loops are available for professional football, baseball, basketball, and hockey, along with with college football and baseball. Yahoo is using technology from its acquisition of IntoNow to record highlights from nearly every play in televised sports, so GIF creators can quickly scan through a game's plays to find the moment they wish to highlight.

Yahoo is using technology from IntoNow to record highlights from nearly every televised play

Loops are the most prominent new feature in the Sports app, which Yahoo says is used by millions of people every day. A redesign for iOS 7 gives the app a flatter, more image-rich look in line with the company's other recent redesigns. Player statistics now include a prominent photograph of the player, for example, and the app pulls in articles about games from the web and puts them on the game results page.

The update will likely be welcome news to the app's users, even if Loops feel a bit harder to find than they should be. If you don't get taken straight to the game results screen from a push notification, you have to first select the sport, then the game you're looking for, and only then scroll down to see the GIFs. But it's a creative step from Yahoo that does makes the app more visually enticing — and shows another way way the company's acquisitions have begun to cross-pollinate its lineup of apps.

Q: Do you think that, for all their superficial campiness, the Adam West Bat-villains are actually the least likely to reform or even feel bad about the crimes they’ve committed? — lego-joker

A: I’ll be honest with you, folks: I got this question on Tumblr a few days ago, and while I wrote a (relatively) brief answer over there, it’s something I’ve been thinking about ever since. Fortunately, it’s my column, which means that the only rule is that there are no rules. And, you know, the weekly deadline. That is a pretty serious rule if I intend to stay employed.

Point is, there’s a very simple answer to this question, which is that it’s absolutely right. The arch-criminals of Batman ’66 will never, ever reform, mostly due to the fact that nothing is ever meant to change on that show. There’s a status quo that has to be maintained, one that’s even more strict than the one in the comics. But at the same time, that lack of momentum says a lot about how those characters and the world in which they live are constructed.

The thing about Batman ’66 is that it’s a heck of a lot smarter than it usually gets credit for. It had to be — that’s the only way that a show like that, meant to appeal equally to both wide-eyed kids enraptured by the brightly colored heroism and the smirking adults who got a laugh out of the irony of the same. I think that’s the reason so many people have this visceral hatred for the series, even now, when it’s experiencing a renaissance thanks to finally getting some merchandise deals worked out: The show was every bit as good at satirizing its subjects as it was at representing them with a pretty fair amount of accuracy.

The flattened characters were a function of both, really. The Comics Code prohibition against glorifying crime and the hidebound storytelling of the Silver Age meant that the bad guys couldn’t ever be shown as sympathetic. They existed purely as obstacles to be overcome, and when the TV show came around, it flattened that down even further. The villains were the big draw of ’66 in more ways than one — they were the choice roles that had big-name actors requesting parts, and that constantly stole the show from West and Ward, whose major function was to act as a straight-man soundboard for the arch-villains to bounce off of — but in a lot of ways, they were cookie cutter parts. The quirks of the crimes were different, of course, with cat’s eye opals, gold-plated sarcophagi and valuable clown paintings all reserved for the appropriate villains, but if you swapped out a couple of adjectives and a bit of set dressing, one could work as well as the next. The motivations were all the same, particularly in that they didn’t actually exist.

The crooks of Batman ’66 didn’t really have any life-changing, motivating tragedies — and, incidentally, neither did that version of Batman. They just had affectations, high pitched giggles and sparkly catsuits that were applied to the same formula of crime and deathtrap. Nobody ever really seemed like they were that hard up for cash, so crime wasn’t a vocational thing for them. They didn’t need the money they’d get from heisting the ancient riddle scrolls or whatever, and there’s only really one episode I can think of where someone is actually frustrated at being unable to fence stolen goods and actually profit from the crime. It wasn’t about the money for them, it was about the act. They weren’t just criminals, they were arch-criminals — they only existed to break the law, committing crime simply for crime’s sake.

And I love this idea.

I’ve mentioned before that my personal view of Batman involves an evolution of both crime and crime-fighter. Bruce Wayne’s parents die in a very, very simple criminal act. There are versions that take away the randomness of the crime and make it an act of retribution for something Batman’s father had done before, and in a way, that works — it shows you a world where no good deed goes unpunished, establishing that even a stalwart pillar of the community like Thomas Wayne can’t really fight against a system that irrevocably corrupted — but I love the simplicity of a mugging gone wrong in a place where they thought they were safe. Wrong place, wrong time, one man, two shots. That’s all it takes to change everything, to show Bruce that he’s living in a world where there is no safety from crime.

The act that takes away his parents is, Biblically speaking, the oldest crime in the book. It’s a simple crime, so he makes an equally simple promise: to end crime. And he does. That’s one of the great things about Year One and Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight: they show us that the very first thing Batman does is the last battle against crime as we know it. When Miller and Mazzuchelli show Batman snuffing out the flames on Carmine Falcone’s dinner table, they’re showing us the end of an era.

But that’s only one facet of crime, and if Batman is a new kind of person, someone with limitless resources and fantastic determination, then Crime is going to have to evolve to keep up with him, metastasizing into a purer strain of criminal. Just like Batman no longer really needs to avenge the death of his parents, the criminals of Gotham City don’t really need to profit from their crimes, making them a means to an end. Crime is the profit, evil is the end, re-establishing that imbalance, trying to inject that element of fear and chaos back into a city that outgrew traditional ideas of evil. There aren’t any more muggings in Gotham City, there are trick umbrellas, explosive birthday cakes and skywritten riddles. One is just as chaotic as the next, but there’s a logic behind one that, without Batman, is absent in the other.

If you take that idea and flatten it out, ironing out all the psychological complexities and simplifying it for a 22-minute time slot every Tuesday and Wednesday, smoothing everything over with a healthy amount of irony, you’re left with Batman ’66: Criminals who commit crimes purely for the sake of crime, and a crimefighter who battles against them purely for the sake of the law.

That’s one of the reasons that I think the show got away with only mentioning Batman’s origin once in the pilot and then never bringing up his parents’ murder by “dastardly criminals” again. By flattening everything out, they were left with a hero who was every bit as compulsive as his villains, only on the opposite side of the scarred-up coin. It’s why Batman is relentlessly square, obeying every law to a fault. He’s the embodiment of the Law, the opposite of Crime. One of the most important distinctions the show makes — also a product of the comics — is that Batman isn’t a vigilante. He’s a duly deputized agent of the Gotham City Police Department. The hotline phone isn’t just a good visual and a convenient bit of of TV storytelling, it’s also a great visual signifier for how the character works. He’s the cops’ cop — the person the police call when there’s a crime. He’s that much of a crimefighter.

There are a couple of really interesting things about the way that’s set up. First is that eliminating the origin and the setup of Batman’s war against crime in favor of arch-villains recasts him as a more reactionary hero. The villains always act first, taking the initiative away and forcing him to react. They set the challenges that he has to rise to, and as a result, those challenges are almost always tailored specifically for Batman. The Riddler’s the best example, delivering his crimes with literal written invitations for Batman to solve them.

There’s a reason he’s the lead-off villain in the very first episode of the show. He sets the tone.

The same idea is why the show occasionally dips into stories where Batman and his foes are competitors in addition to being mortal enemies. “Surf’s Up, Joker’s Under,” in which Batman and the Joker have to win a surfing competition, or “Hizzoner the Penguin,” in which Batman and the Penguin face off in a mayoral election, are often held up as the height of the show’s excesses in this regard, but really, they make a lot of sense if you look at them the right way. If the criminals can best Batman, then they point out his flaws. If Batman is flawed, then the law itself is flawed, and crime becomes a viable alternative in its own right. The faith of the people is shaken, they start to wonder why we’re bothering locking these people up, they give into fear, they surrender themselves to rule by criminals and psychopaths. If Batman takes second place in a surfing contest, the whole system comes crashing down.

The second thing is that it brings this interesting idea of fatalism into the story. The criminals commit crimes because they are capital-C Criminals, compelled to do so for no reason other than Crime For Crime’s Sake, and Batman (along with Robin, Batgirl, Alfred and, to a lesser extent, Gordon and O’Hara) battles against them because he’s just as compelled. It’s who he is — you can’t imagine square, stentorian ’66 Batman committing a crime himself any more than you can imagine him flapping his arms and flying to the moon. It’s just not in his nature.

And, to bring it back at last to the original question, neither can the criminals.

My all-time favorite moment of the show, right up there alongside Surf Jams Joker and Robin being vexed by a gang of mod pickpocket schoolgirls in Londinium, is from “Catwoman Goes To College”/”Batman Displays His Knowledge.” You can probably guess the premise from the title, but the end of the episode is great. There’s a blatantly sexual seduction scene that’s stuck in my memory from the first time I saw it for a variety of reasons…

…but the one that’s important for our discussion today is that Catwoman, even though she’s working an elaborate deathtrap, seems to genuinely want to be with Batman, and he genuinely wants to be with her. She tells him that they can be together, the two of them “against the world,” just as they both want. But when he asks about Robin — two being a number that does not allow for sidekicks — Catwoman’s response is a blunt “I’ll have him killed, painlessly.”

West doesn’t get the credit he deserves for the acting he did on this show, and neither does Julie Newmar. Her matter-of-fact delivery and the way he tenses up are fantastic, despite the well-earned reputation for campiness, and it says so much about those two characters. Catwoman, even when she’s reaching out, is quite simply incapable of thinking without considering crime. She’s not even being malicious about it — giving him a painless death is actually a step up, an act of unbridled kindness compared to 15 minutes before, when she was trying to drown the dynamic duo in boiling hot coffee. That, to her way of thinking, is as appealing a solution as there can possibly be. He’s out of the way, he doesn’t suffer, so what’s the problem? But for Batman — and, hopefully, the audience — the suggestion of murder just to make one’s life more convenient is anathema. It’s where the tone of the scene changes, where the attraction in West’s voice is gone and he resumes his righteous proclaiming.

When I wrote about this scene and how much I love it on Tumblr, a reader pointed out that this is actually more vicious than Catwoman’s comic book counterpart, who (at the time) was a thief, not a killer, something that set her apart from Gotham’s other villains. I think that’s a function of the ironing-out process mentioned above, but it also points to another idea that springs out of all this talk about reformation. Putting those limitations on Catwoman keeps her as exactly the kind of viable romance that she isn’t on the show. Theft can be more easily forgiven than murder, after all.

That’s the way it is for a lot of female villains, characters that seem to be evil only as long as there’s not a man around whose love can turn them into a good woman, something that puts them in a pretty dubious place as characters. Don’t get me wrong, Catwoman’s one of my all-time favorite characters, and I love her just as much as the unrepentant special guest villainess of Julie Newmar’s performance as I do with Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke, Brad Rader and Cameron Stewart’s antiheroine of the East End. She’s not the first one to fill the role, either, and I like Princess Aura from Flash Gordon too. But still, the evil woman who has to be smooched over to the side of the angels is a trope that’s pretty insultingly overwhelming when it comes to villainesses.

That’s one of the reasons that I think the Baroness from G.I. Joe is such an important character, my pattern of affection for haughty, bespectacled brunettes notwithstanding. With the exception of the hilariously awful character assassination in the live-action movie, she’s a fully unrepentant villain, evil by choice and not likely to be seduced away from her life of international terrorism. Her descent into evil is based on a misunderstanding of events, but so is Dr. Doom’s, and neither one of them is going to be lured into heroism by Channing Tatum and his smile. You could probably argue that the Baroness is certainly influenced by Destro, but that came as a result of her devotion to Cobra, not the other way around. Besides, who isn’t influenced by Destro?

Point being, she isn’t going to be seduced from her path in life, and neither is Newmar’s Catwoman, even with her obvious affection for Batman. But for the latter, there isn’t even a choice. She, like the other ’66 villains, is trapped by a flattened, fatalistic view of morality, a reason for being that predicates her entire existence on villainy.

They can’t change. There’s nothing to change. They’re arch-criminals, existing in service to crime.

Ask Chris art by Erica Henderson. If you’ve got a question you’d like to see Chris tackle in a future column, just send it to @theisb on Twitter with the hashtag #AskChris.

He says it all started from one Titanic photo but quickly escalated from there. When redditor mmsspp decided to recreate some of the best scenes from Hollywood blockbusters with boss's dog, Wrigley, he proved that having a pet-friendly office can be awesome...awesomely distracting!

Submitted by: Kyler_Cheez

The Western localization of Nintendo 3DS title Bravely Default: Flying Fairy includes less-revealing versions of costumes, among other edits made to tone-down the game's more mature content, according to a post on the IGN forums.

Forum user "BangSilverGang" posted a set of screenshots comparing two costumes' original Japanese and Western versions. The Western versions on the left are less revealing than their counterparts on the right. Additionally, the user reports that some characters' ages have been changed from 15 to 18 and some dialogue including sexual innuendos has been removed after translation. The Final Fantasy Wiki further corroborates statements of age changes, noting some characters who are 17 in the Japanese version are now 20 for the Western release.

The images appear in the European version of the game and "BangSilverGang" reports the changes do not appear to affect the storyline.

Bravely Default: Flying Fairy launched in the region last month and is slated to launch in North America on Feb. 7. Bravely Default has a rating of Cero C, which is 15-plus, in Japan, while the title is rating T for Teen in North America.

This is not the first time a costume has been edited for modesty during localization of a 3DS title. The original Japanese version of Fire Emblem: Awakening's DLC mission "Summer Scramble" included a scene where a female character's backside was explicitly shown. For the Western release of the game, the view was obscured by a piece of cloth edited into the scene.

Polygon has reached out to both developer Square Enix and Nintendo for more details and will share information as we receive it.