Tips and Hints

- Link: How does hacking work?

- Each clinic has two praxis kits for sale for 5000 credits each. When you know where a weapons dealer is, it’s not really hard to get the money by taking single guns from your opponents to the dealer. Always make sure you buy them.

- Overall you will get all useful augmentations in the game, if you explore a lot. Exploring a lot gives you not only what you find, but a lot of XP bonuses too.

- Not killing enemies gives you more XP and is more silent, so use an appropriate weapon and knock people out instead of killing them. Hide them, as when they get found they can wake up again.

- Have a rocket launcher with you and save rockets for situations you can’t solve otherwise. The rocket launcher can solve every hard situation.

Good Augmentations

- Hacking power, and the augmentation to lower the chance of getting found while hacking. Important to get a lot of XP early on and also later in the game. Later in the game, hacking turrets is nice. I also bought the hack robot thingy, but there was no chance to use it so far.

- Raise carrying strength (there’s always more stuff you want, and the place in your inventory is very small – helps getting stuff to weapon’s dealers and helps having the rocket launcher with you when you approach boss fights)

- Raise lifting strength (with crates you can often get to higher places, use big crates to block line of sight or push away big things that stand in front of passages needed for stealthy actions)

- Social Optimizer (you get more XP if you persuade people and at least one level can be done without fighting just because of the optimizer). When you have it, just look for the weakest area of the person can choose the appropriate way of persuasion.

- Break though walls (at least 2 praxis kits and a lot of stuff are hidden behind breakable walls and some stealthy approaches are benefitted highly by this).

- Augmented reflexes (in many places two guards talk to each other and can be knocked unconscious simultaneously)

- The skin armor is the only really good augmentation when it comes to fighting.

Mediocre augmentations

- The Taifun looks cool, but I only used it once in a boss fight. Maybe I should just play this in hard mode. Again multiple enemies it’s hard to use, as they will have you killed before you get in the middle of them. Maybe good with a lot of battery and the cloaking augmentation, but there are rarely so many enemies in one place, and for those you also have the rocket launcher or grenades.

- The cloaking augmentation. If you hide well you should need this very rarely, though there are some few scenes where I just couldn’t fulfill all side-quests silently (police station) and it might have helped.

- Therefore the battery stuff might be useful if you use the Taifun and the cloaking, but I don’t like that battery only reloads to one battery automatically and everything else needs recharging by power items.

- The shooting thing is maybe good for players using a mouse, I played this game on a playstation and didn’t use and aggressive play-through. I didn’t use it.

- The jumping augmentation is okay, but not really necessary when you have lifting power and crates. But later in the game you will want to buy it anyways.

Worthless augmentations

- All stealth augmentations. Crouching towards enemies and keeping out of line-of-sight is always enough.

- All vision enhancements, maybe besides the look through walls thingy, that’s just handy from time to time, but not really necessary as you can always look around corners and have your basic radar.

- I bought the augmentation to fall down slower, but it seldom actives in the game, and I so far didn’t find even one chance to use the aggressive mode of this thing. Looks cool though.

- Breathing gas. Bought this in a situation where I didn’t see the thing that could close the gas vent behind a breakable wall. Did need it once, when an enemy threw a gas grenade at me, and once where it was easier to save a worker who was about to die from gas, but I don’t think you really need this.

- The vision timer and flash immunity… flash immunity is rarely worth it and the vision timer doesn’t shorten the time needed till enemies will become less hostile.

- Running speed and duration. What for? To play the game in 5 minutes less overall?

Buy augmentations in this order

- Hacking 3

- Silent hacking 2

- Lifting strength

- Social optimizer

- Break though walls

- Silent Hacking 3

- Reflexes

- Carrying strength

- Hacking 5

- Skin armor 3

- The stuff you want but don’t really need.

Hope this helps you a bit with your decisions. Have fun playing the best game I’ve played in my whole life. If you disagree or have any more hints to share, post a comment.

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What is Media

You think media means music, videos, TV and the newspapers, and thats true, but there is a lot more out there that you oftentimes don’t recognize as media. Media is a either a more or less unlimited channel of content (TV, internet in general, radio, a library) or a set size of content (a music album, a book, a video,  a videogame, a magazine, a blogpost, a newspaper). The “content” is what’s tickling your fantasy, mind, interests, thirst for knowledge, imagination, anxiety, … or just lets your brain consume  stuff so it is freed from the hard work of thinking itself. You could even argue that other people talking to you are a stream of content and therefore media. All these contents influence you and your ways of thinking.

photo credit: dearsomeone

The Problem

Technically, oftentimes you’ll find digital media bound to storage like CDs, DVDs or a lot of dead trees (formally known as paper). I never understood people hoarding their music-CDs, and their videos, be it on tape, VHS casette or DVD ar BD – even if I know a lot of people who do that. As a kid (when you watch movies dozens of times) I might have liked that myself, but since the dawn of digital media, I don’t see the point anymore at all.

The advantage of having collections of media around is that you can show off what you have, and what you’re interested in. It’s like wearing a T-shirt or your favourite movie or band: everyone instantly recognizes that interest of yours – that you’re into something. The opposite is like saying you’re a fan of Star Wars without having action figures, T-shirts or lightsabres around: people don’t instantly know.

The point of keeping books around that you might need for reference also diminishes quickly: you can keep digital versions of books and read them on screen, on your ePaper device or even your smartphone. Reusing music is common, but stories, news and movies are also not used much more often than maybe once or twice.

photo credit: jm3

Availability

Music is available through a multitude of services: either you rip them from your CD and keep it on a harddrive (or even in the cloud), sharing it with you game console and all your other household networked things. Or you buy them via iTunes and just stream them from there to anywhere. Or you use Pandora, Last.fm and all the other free music stations in the net, or the usual old radio stations which are all available digitally streamed.

Apart from music, nearly everthing else is available for download, be it in a paid version as with rented movies, music tracks or eBooks or in a free version as with a limitless source of information in form of blogposts or news. Having media bound to physical objects needs to to have them around in one place and to carry their weight if you need them somewhere else.

Prices

• Buying movies on disc isn’t too cheap. If you get a cheap 3 for 1 BD box, you might be paying 20€ if you’re lucky, but usually it’s more expensive. As opposed to renting it in a video renting service for 2,40€ per movie you can rent a movie for 2,99€ via online renting (and therefore not paying for fuel and use less time to get it) in iTunes, Playstation Network or a lot of other services I didn’t even try out.
• Buying music digitally is basically the same price as buying them in the real store. But here you can get the two songs you really like instead of the 12 tracks you don’t really want much cheaper. And you already have all the metadata included. I mean I don’t see too many people still walking around with “discmans”, so to get their stuff on their custom media player, they’d need to rip it and add all the metadata in a time consuming way.

• (Many people say they’d miss the artwork and booklet on the digital thing. To me, this is stupidity. Yeah, I also read the booklets back then, but times are changing. Enter the World Wide Web. Just head to the artists website, we’re not in the eightees anymore. There you’ll find much more artwork than you can ever hope to fit into some paper booklet. Oh, and you’ll find the lyrics there too.)

• Buying eBooks isn’t more expensive than buying a “real” book. Here the market still didn’t finish converting to the digital medium as often fiction books are still not avaible in open ebook formats, but you can see it happening faster and faster, and soon the rainforests can rejoice when all people have Kindles and iPads around and can easily obtain digital versions.
• News and information basically cost nothing. You can of course buy well researched or well authored stuff, but those authors have to fight the free price you get though the free news websites.
• Games are same price online or offline, if you can get them online. But games are a special case, because most of the publishers still stick to the old distribution model. If you’re looking at the Apple appstore, digitally distributed games might even be much cheaper than games bound to boxes, discs and paper, but that will soon be known when the Mac appstore becomes tested and when Microsoft copies the concept.
• (TV and Radio was always distributed in a way that wasn’t bound to physical objects other than the receiving machine. Not much change there, other than the quality of non-paid TV broadcasts diminishes while paid services are like a flatrate for content.)

And there’s another price people don’t think about: either you spend time getting your analog media, or you pay for postage and packing that wouldn’t be necessary if you downloaded the digital versions.

Conclusion

Digital Media does not rot. After about 10 years, a CD or casette might even be unreadable and thereby broken. Digital media can be copied an infinite number of times and you can create as many backups as you want.

The main point of this post is that analog media is written on three dimensional stuff that just takes up a lot of space. For that space, you usually pay rent (or pay interest on loans in my case). Therefore, your media should pay a part of your rent. But it doesn’t. So please understand that media is about content, and not about collections of paper, CDs, DVDs and such. The digital versions are much more economic, overall cost less time and money to obtain and are better for the planet’s ecological environment.

photo credit: purplemattfish

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photo credit: Mark Strozier

I played a lot of games

In my teenager times (and arguably also after that), I loved playing every kind of game. I enjoyed board games, strategy games, mind games, card games, role playing games (pen-and-paper) and all kinds of computer games (economic simulations, fighting games, RPGs, strategy, puzzles,…) . And I think after some time, you realize that most of the game mechanics and strategies involved reoccur in other games, and that playing games makes you better in playing other games too.

Side note: When we discussed a school reading (don’t remember if it was “The Catcher in the Rye”), my English teacher hammered in this one sentence that was occurring in the book: “Just connect”. My teacher stood there, looked at us if it was the only thing we really needed to understand so that he could gladly leave the room and know that we’ve learned something today. Just connect the pieces of information. I didn’t like my English teacher too much, because he was pretty much focused on discipline, but he was clearly the teacher I learned from the most. So, if you don’t take anything away from this article, please remember that you just need to connect all the information from the different areas of experience and you’ll understand the big picture more, every time you do it. Just connect.

Becoming an expert

In fact, I firmly believe that you become an expert in anything that you do a lot. Your brain is like a complex muscle, and training a certain activity will strengthen this special muscle and support other muscles when doing related activities. It’s the same with your job, with games, with sports and any skill you can imagine – which is positive.

You will become better in everything you do a lot. You can even become some kind of “negative expert” when you do a lot of unadvisable stuff, like watching TV all day, getting sucked into World of Warcraft style addictive games, drinking too much alcohol, hanging out with questionable people and doing questionable or illegal activities, eating fast food or developing fear of something because you keep away from it too often (people, new experiences, work, …).

Good games

What I always liked about games is that with many of the games you can evolve and become better. You learn the rules, you make them your own, you see the hopes that you can exploit, you try and test and fail and try again and succeed. I often see this theme in other players, and with all games that take some time and are somewhat competitive. Competition itself is also very important, and usually also the factor why you want to grow your skills in the first place – as without competition or other gains, why would you?

Speaking of qualities, the games I like have to be enjoyable. They always include some kind of strategy. You always have some way of being clever, interacting with other players or make risky but rewarding maneuvers. You often have an entertaining story that gets told, or some imagination that awakes in your head as the game progresses. If all that doesn’t happen, the game is crap.

The best game I have played to this date is called “Magic – The Gathering”. It’s a card game with ever changing rules, diverse strategies and a big social component to it, as I usually played it on tournaments – and getting there was always a matter of finding people to attend, organizing a car for the day(s) and then beforehand reflecting over the cards that everyone was playing, and what the other tournament-players would pick for their decks (this was called the “metagame”, and your deck was highly dependent on what other players were playing).

To be true, for my life this game was like the worst thing that could happen. I got sucked in. In classes, I wasn’t trying to understand what was taught, I tried to find better combinations of cards, or a silver bullet combination for the metagame. If I would try to calculate the CPU cycles my brain spend in thinking about Magic-decks, I guess I would find several years of my life wasted. Okay, it was really fun playing this game, but after all it got me nowhere, as to be able to make a life out of it, you would need to stop having another life and play and reflect on this 24/7, and a whole lot of luck – and filling in lottery tickets only needs luck and doesn’t cost that much time. So the economical responsibility to stop playing this best of all games and find a better one that could be combined with having a life.

Game mechanics

Having played a lot of games, I can tell that game mechanics are never unique. You always see them in a lot of different games, and you can always draw on the experience of other games when you recognize a game mechanic. In resource driven games for example you can most likely benefit from acquiring the most possible resources as this makes it possible to acquire even more resources. If for example a race-like mechanic is included like the game ends at a certain point an you need to collect points, you have to recognize the time when you have to switch from buildup resources to power out resources for points.

After having spent enough time on games, you realize that many game mechanics also can be found in the real world. Here understanding game mechanics is often referred to as “Logic”, “Economy”, “Statistics” or “Creative thinking”. I also saw many game mechanics in my studies in computer science. In fact, the central theme I picked for one of my assignments was “gaming theory”.

photo credit: Toni Blay

Life

And finally, I think I found the only game that you can enjoy to full extend without having to not have a life anymore: it’s life itself. Life has a big number of players, is a competitive setting and there’s an infinite number of rules to learn, bend and use, and there are far more scales that count the points you receive – happiness, money, experiences, enjoyable moments, building a family and having a profession that you can master. The spectrum of values that you can collect points for is diverse, you can define yourself which points you care for the most and that should be added to your most favorable counter.

I think that playing games to a certain extent prepare you for a successful life, as you can transport many of the logical connections you learned that work in games also describe problems in the real world, that you then can solve more easily. But after all, its always the real world that you come back to, so never get stuck in a game or a fantasy reality, no matter how good the story is, how good the mechanics are or how strategic the options in this game are, because after all, you shouldn’t specialize in a game but in mechanics you can reuse in the real world. And ultimately, the most challenging, competitive, strategic and most enjoyable game with the best stories, gameplay and mechanics is life itself. So play that – and have fun!

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Be sure to also update BOTH the playstation system and the game itself if this happens to you.

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There’s another linkjuice-win-me-some-hardware-if-you-link-us-game for us german bloggers (sponsored by a bank called creditplus) that I’d like to take part in. If you’ll also try to win an Android G1 or a netbook, just follow the link and write a blogpost like this one. Those guys ask to write about a rather interesting but relatively unspectacular question: What would you do with 20.000€?

I think most people would get rid of some debts, buy a new car or some new furniture or a kitchen or something like that. I in fact would do the opposite: take another debt! Or to put it in other words: make my next big debt easier to afford.

Me and my girlfriend are actually searching for a flat or a house to buy, and that stuff comes with debts in ranges of 150k-200k€ … and even if you know a house costs 170k€, you’ll most of the time have to pay 10% (+17k€) for feeding the bureocrats and the real-estate agents. So I’d have to take a debt of about 187k€ if I wanted to buy a house thats worth only 170k€, and the debt for the last 17k€ is usually more risky for the banks as that money has no direct safety (say, if you died, the bank could take the house to make up for the 170k€ you won’t be able to pay them anymore, but they can’t take back their 17k€ you needed additionally). More risky debts mean higher interests, and that means it all gets more expensive.

Image by wallyg via Flickr

Therefore I think I’d take that money and feed it to the real-estate-agents. Who get way too much money for the work they do anyways. The remaining money … well, I think I’d buy a kitchen and a new computer like everyone else.

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