The Life and Adventures of Tom

I was reading through my previous blog entries today and I saw that I had an entry about BF 2142. At the end of the post I made a comment about how it feels like good games are few and far between. Well at last there is a game to fill that void. Bioshock.

Unless you live under a rock and/or hate video games, you’ve probably heard of Bioshock one way or another. This game has everything including amazing graphics and remarkable story, and even some controversy about little girl characters in violent video games.

Bioshock starts you off in the year 1960 as a character, Jack, who has just been involved in a plane crash in the middle of an ocean. He is the only survivor. With pieces of the plane wreckage burning all around, you see there is a large lighthouse type structure. As you head towards the structure, very little is known about what lies ahead. You begin to learn more about Rapture, the underwater city, and its oddities as a character named Atlas coaches you though the beginning parts of the game, in what feels like a very immersive and plot-driven tutorial. As you get deeper and deeper into the story, it gets more and more twisted. I personally have only played about 4-5 hours of this 20+ hour game, and I am throughly impressed with every aspect of it. The visuals are very impressive, especially the water effects. The music and sounds add a sense of eeriness and work into the time period quite nicely. Everytime I play this game, I feel like I am walking around in a huge immersive piece of artwork.

I think, whatever type of gamer you are, if you enjoy a game with a deeply captivating environment, an incredibly amazing story, and a little bit of scare-factor, then purchasing Bioshock is a no-brainer.

I don’t read too many news stories that effect me in a way that this one has. I’ve known now for a while that Microsoft was trying to get their new Office Open XML document format ISO approved. I figured that Microsoft’s OOXML format was good enough, and that it would be a good thing to have an “Open” format as an international standard… Boy was I wrong.

I suppose in principle, a ISO open format would be a wonderful thing, but OOXML is definitely not ready to become that format. In her article, Stéphane Rodriguez lists 13 different scenarios where the Whitepaper results from Microsoft don’t seem to actually be valid. She even goes as far as listing the exact steps necessary to reproduce the results. From a programmatic perspective, OOXML is amazingly bad. A programmer could probably spend a good couple years trying to write code that would be able to work with these remarkably unpredictable XML documents. Some of the elements in the VML part of the documents aren’t even valid XML elements!

It is good to see that someone (among others) is standing up against bad standards. Microsoft is inciting a format war, that doesn’t necessarily need to exist. They are afraid of being left behind as governments and other public bodies see the need for an open format, and are starting to move to ODF. Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of open source and standards, said “What the world needs today … is a real open standard versus a vendor-dictated spec that documents proprietary products via XML. ODF is about the future, Open XML is about the past.”