Random Thoughts: New Super Mario Bros. U and other stuff

Last night, I used the Luigi Guide on the Final Battle and I could not wait to get through this agonizing experience.  All through my time playing this game, I've felt more and more angered by this game.  It's drudgery.  It's a total drag to play.  It's unfortunately the game my nephew wants me to play.  Whoever thought of the Luigi Guide should be shot.  The idea of making players progress by seeing some scripted play through just downright sucks.  Allowing players to take control right after the segment they got stuck only partially alleviates my grievances of this concept.  I would have preferred a level having dynamically set difficulty configurations than this.  Make the player go through the level and feel like they accomplished something.  I hope never to have to play this game ever again.

Sleeping Dogs seems OK.  The game's mission structure is quite unimaginative and sometimes, just downright lousy.  It's unforgiving difficulty setting also makes for a crazy time for players, but so far, it's been kinder to me for some reason.  Unfortunately, the story just doesn't feel like a Hong Kong film.  The lines and writing feels more like Western games like GTA and Mafia than something from an Ekin Cheng triad movie.

Saints Row IV is HILARIOUS!!!  Enough said.

Mass Effect 3 has been an awesome, awesome ride.  Somehow, playing the Wii U version doesn't feel less or lacking.  Sure there are some small bits and pieces that aren't there, but they aren't significant enough to make me angry.  Great game on Wii U.  Please BioWare.  Please put Mass Effect 1, 2 and all the DLCs on Wii U.  Please.

Saints Row IV Crash!!!

I experienced what seems to be a very common problem with Saints Row IV on Steam.  There are countless complaints about crashes that happen at start up right after the company logos and stuff.  I managed to find a thread that helped me get my game working.  Basically, it involves looking for the display.ini file in the SteamApps copy of SR4 and setting "fullscreen = false" and "Preset = 1".  The game launched afterwards but switching to full screen would crash the game.  Setting it to borderless though doesn't, which works pretty much the same way!

More Tablet Details

So, looking at the Thomson M6 made me curious to see what the SoC is.  Finding the means to unearth that information lead me to look for apps that do that.  There's lots available on Google Play and on SlideMe (for the unfortunate Coby Kyros).  I read the findings and here was what I found.

Thomson M6 Android Tablet

I've been figuring this one out.  It says I have a TF Card which normally means Micro SD cards.  Does it support Micro SDHC?  The manual says it supports it up to 32 GB.  Another thing that bugs me is the processor.  It says it's a Cortex A-5 1.2 GHz but there's nothing on the GPU.  Any guesses?

Random Thoughts: Wii U and the Thomson Tablet

I find myself surprised at how addictive Mass Effect 3's multiplayer is.  The singleplayer story has been a great ride, but I had no plans on ever dabbling on the multiplayer part.  It seems to be very well designed in that it makes the game very hard to put down.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about New Super Mario Bros. U.

For a Mario game, I found myself slowly loathing the game the farther I got into the game.  The levels turn into a total drag to play and the Luigi Super Guide is just not a fun way of pushing the game forward when you've hit your limit.  Alas, my nephew loves the game, so I am forced to tolerate this drivel of a game.

Just got a new Android tablet called Thomson M6.  Here's some pics of the box.

Specifications

Thomson M6

It seems to be a Chinese OEM tablet released in Australia and New Zealand.  After all, how else can the NZ Herald Times app be preinstalled in this?  For a cheap 7" tablet, I found the fact it was dual core very attractive.  The tablet is plenty zippy and it also comes with Google Play Store.  Strangely, it didn't have Google Play Services which seems to be required for apps like Youtube.  You can install it via Play Store though so it shouldn't be much of an issue.

There are two main downsides to this tablet.  First is the screen.  The touch is just plain weird as it sometimes registers incorrect gestures.  Dragging icons seems to be very difficult on this tablet.  The LCD screen also suffers from colour loss when viewed from an angle.  Truly not one of its shining moments.  The second is the battery life which really sucks up fast.

Over all, it seems to be okay.  Doesn't hit all the bells, but for a cheap price tag, that is to be expected.

ORA-01873

Well, I came across some curious issue with Oracle where in I had to increment a timestamp by a certain number of days.  At first, I thought it would be as simple as something like:

SQL> select systimestamp + 2 from dual;

I quickly realized though that the result of this would effectively drop the time component.  Makes sense though as Oracle implicitly converts values so perhaps it was being converted into date (without the time data) before the addition operation.

After some research, I found that preserving dates means using interval in this fashion:

SQL> select systimestamp + interval '2' day from dual;

Well, while this seems to work, the timestamp column I have on my table doesn't work.  Instead, I get this error!

ERROR at line 1:

ORA-01873: the leading precision of the interval is too small

Good grief.  After mucking around with Oracle and reading some stuff up, I came across a rather helpful article by Philip Greenspun.  What I ended up doing was roughly like this:

SQL> select some_timestamp + interval '2' day(3) from (...)

Damn Oracle and their implicit datatype conversions!