PS3 Oblivion Cheat Codes

Good luck searching for real “cheat codes”.  All the sites that come up list general Oblivion glitches whether or not they apply to the version (1.2) used on the PS3.  In fact there doesn’t appear to be any codes you can enter and I wonder if it’s even possible to bring up the console.  Well, anyway I nearly gave up playing due to how hard it was for my character to accomplish anything.

As an Atronach Knight (A green orc I called Charlie) I advanced quickly to level 5 which scaled up the hardiness of the creatures and bandits as well as made it extremely painful to get through even a single battle.  While this certainly gave it a feeling of “danger” it quickly became a death fest in my honor and I resorted to searching for cheats on teh internetz.  At the point of giving up hope, one submitted cheat flipped the light bulb on in my head (and while I can’t believe the guy thought it was a “cheat”, I’m thankful it made me realize) …

The difficulty setting under Gameplay Options.  Duh!

I’m grateful for it, but I also wonder if it’s a side effect of a horribly imbalanced game system?  I love some of the freedoms allowed here, but the development team obviously didn’t have time to focus on giving everything proper amounts of advantage and disadvantage.  The issue wouldn’t be so pronounced without the, sorry, inane leveling whereby everything else advances in skill and equipment based on your experience level.  It must have sounded great on paper, but it either makes the game incredibly easy or difficult.

Fallout 3 spoiled me with its finite levels and perks, but I have to admit I missed the prospect of getting better via practice versus just selecting what my character accels at.  Thus in Fallout 3 my “perfect character” is going to max out all his skills even though he doesn’t use half of them.

Video Containment

I’ve spent over thirty minutes now clicking through links on Wikipedia, beefing up on MKV, H.264, MP4, XViD, etc.  I already knew the difference between codecs and containers, but I didn’t know if there were specific ties between some.  In particular I was curious about little sailor suit Matroska since I’m seeing most HD stuff on the torrents as MKV files.  It came out of nowhere to me, but apparently that container format has been striving for a while to gain ground.  Part of the problem is certainly the “chicken and egg” situation mentioned on Wikipedia, but also it could be that they’re trying to do things that most people don’t care about.  Sure an open format container sounds fantastic in theory, but what are you really gaining above AVI (long-time champ for portability in my book) and MP4 (new favorite of biggun’s Apple and Sony)?  Not to mention the massive user base already set to enjoy FLV via Flash players around the globe.

Subtitles / Alternate Audio: AVI definitely fails here with no common ground and only third-party extensions.  Strangely MP4 suffers a similar problem, but apparently most have standardized on Nero’s work-around.

DVD-style Menus: F**K ‘EM!  I seriously doubt anyone would miss having to navigate the custom “animted menu feature” hell we went through with DVD’s in a digital copy.

EBML: “Extensible Binary Meta Language”?  I’ve seen this drifting around and had no idea what it was, and I still don’t understand its purpose.  Unfortunately it even appears this was a primary point of contention between the lead developer and founder of the corporation that started MKV’s predecessor.  I wonder who wanted what?  The Wikipedia page says it all in a few sentences:

Extensible Binary Meta Language (EBML) is a generalized file format for any kind of data, aiming to be a binary equivalent to XML. It provides a basic framework for storing data in XML-like tags. It was originally developed for the Matroska audio/video container format.

EBML is not extensible in the same way that XML is, as the Document Type Definition must be known in advance.

Regardless of matching extensibility to XML, I have two problems with EBML without ever having looked the RFC/specification:

1. XML is surely verbose, but it’s highly supported, ported, and supple … or something.  The API’s for it might be crusty, but they’ve been around forever (in computing years) and every friggin’ system from gaming rigs to cell phones has implementations.

2. Why extensible?  The user in me just wants a file that I can playback on whatever device I’m using.  Extra sugar would simply be markers for skipping, subtitles, alternate audio channels, and possibly some sort of video layering.  These containers really only need to be a collection of streams kept in sync, and I can’t imagine what futuristic use an airy format definition is going to help with.

For myself, I wish more people would use either AVI or MP4 for the selfish reason that they will work without modification on my PS3.  Thankfully as this is only a container, clever people have made utilities to convert H.264 MKV’s.

AI Wish List

Just a couple of things I’d love to see computer-controlled characters do …

• Jump. How often have you escaped enemies by simply jumping on a rock?  Fallout 3 has a nice touch where things like scorpions will hide if they can’t find a path to you, but it doesn’t always work and more agile creatures don’t make any attempt to hop or climb up to you … even if you’re very close.  For example, a Death Claw will just stare menacing at you while you fire countless shots at it from any distance.
• Clean up bodies.  If you kill someone in Oblivion, all the other people will just crook their necks and look at the body but do nothing about it … ever.  After a while you’d at least think the corpse would rot and/or stink, which would be a neat effect.

I’m finally watching the Oblivion Documentary right now, which is making me think of these things.  I understand, however, that a lot of work goes into everything else.  Current thought: they spent a lot of time on this crazy horse lady.

Hosted Blessings, Backups, and Curses

Can you imagine the pain of your entire blog evaporating because the hosted solution you relied on used mirroring as their backup?  I think I would cry.  There is some hope if the site has been well crawled and possibly archived.  My reasoning for preferring hosted solutions in general is they have more experience in their business than I do and thus they should be more solid than anything I would spend a casual amount of time on alone.  However, that trust must be earned and validated somehow and about the only thing I go on right now is size and age.  WordPress and Blogger are big and old in internet years, so hopefully they’re not doing something so asinine with my precious data.

Of course, deleting things can be refreshing too.