This Week in Mobile Tech Manor #67: MW2 FTFail!
This week was short due to the Thanksgiving holiday here in the States, and as today is Black Friday this week’s column will be shorter than usual. No doubt some readers will be standing in some line trying to get a great deal on a gadget or two as I write this. The week past was a bit rocky for me as I battled the flu, not the porcine variety. I did breeze through the single player side of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and found it sadly lacking compared to the last version of the game. Come on in and I’ll share the week with you.
The flu hit me last weekend, just after the MTM recount from last week. It was particularly aggravating as I had finally gotten the regular flu shot on Tuesday of that week. I suspect this bout with the flu was because of the shot, which I believe gives you a mild case so the body can learn to fight it off. My case was hard enough to fight, but not nearly as bad as the case some loved ones have contracted, so perhaps the shot worked.
Inking revisited
No new gadgets arrived at MTM this week, and nothing was sent back. I spent a lot of quality time with the gadgets that have been here a while, especially the ThinkPad x200 Tablet PC. I found myself sitting comfortably using the x200 in slate mode with the pen, and it was quite productive getting back to inking a lot.
The Tablet PC bits in Windows 7 are a great evolution from the Vista version, and I found the automatic switching between touch and pen to be seamless. I interacted with the slate with my fingertips mostly, pulling the pen out when I needed to enter more than just a few words of text. I found the need to pull the pen out to not happen that often. Tapping letters on the touch keyboard felt very natural, and I absolutely love the way the touch keyboard dims to a low transparency when input stops so I could see through it to the windows underneath.
Pulling the pen out and inking a lot into the Tablet Input Panel (TIP) proved to me once again how good the HWR is in Windows 7. The TIP was routinely uncanny in its deciphering of my chicken scratches, and I found it regularly figuring out contextually what I meant when I scrawled a word badly. It was as if there was a gremlin inside the Tablet PC, one in tune to what I was writing. It was almost spooky to tell the truth.
The heavy inking I did this week left me with a renewed respect for the Tablet PC, and proved to me without a doubt that if the fabled Apple tablet ever sees the light of day, it had better handle inking well. That’s never been Apple’s focus, so if they do produce a tablet it will be interesting to see how they approach HWR. They already have a basic HWR ability in OS X, but a tablet is going to require inking support a lot better than that. Typing on the screen is OK for small bits of text, but it’s just not a good method when entries need to be longer.
Speech revisited
The good folks at Nuance, the company behind Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS), saw my column from a couple of weeks ago where I rambled about the speech recognition in Windows 7. I have used DNS in the past, but had never seen the current version 10, and Nuance wanted me to take a look at it. They sent it over and I got it loaded up and have been testing it for a few days this week.
I installed DNS 10 on the MacBook in the Parallels Desktop environment running Windows 7. I installed it there for the simple reason that it has an internal optical drive, needed for the install. I really wanted to load it on the x200, but it lacks the optical drive and I didn’t want to go looking for my external drive. Hey, in my defense I was battling the flu.
The install of DNS in Windows 7 went largely without a hitch, although the system requirements for DNS does not list Win 7. I had a problem when I ran it the first time, as it gave me an error with an unclear message about not working in “elevated mode.” I had to Google the message to find what was blocking it from running. Elevated mode turns out to be running under a user account with administrator rights, something DNS will not do. The solution was to turn off the UAC for DNS, and once that was done the program duly launched. It was not an elegant beginning to using the program, and it would really confuse a novice.
DNS 10 comes with a headset by Andrea that is optimized for comfort and speech recognition. It plugs into the audio in and out jacks on the computer. One of the strengths of DNS 10 that allows it to have high recognition accuracy out of the box is accomplished by scanning the user’s emails and documents to get a feel for the writing style. I don’t use Outlook or Word so I had little for the program to scan, and I didn’t get any benefit from this scanning.
I will be continuing the testing of DNS 10 but so far it is bare bones compared to the speech tools in Windows 7. Win 7 speech makes it possible to control the PC via speech, which DNS 10 doesn’t do. I found it necessary to manually switch DNS in and out of dictation mode as a result. The accuracy of DNS 10 out of the box was about the same as that of Win 7 speech. That surprised me as I did a brief training session in DNS to improve the accuracy, something I did not do with Win 7. I also thought using a proper headset would help DNS, but it seemed as accurate as the Win 7 speech tools using no headset.
Modern Warfare 2
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 broke sales records when it was recently released, and I grabbed it as soon as a computer arrived in Mobile Tech Manor that was powerful enough to run it properly. I couldn’t wait as Call of Duty 4 was one of my favorite games ever.
It took only a few hours to get through the single player missions, and while I won’t give any spoilers I have to say I was sadly unsatisfied when the game was over. The missions felt disjointed, with no logical connection from one to the next. The mission objectives were often unclear to me as I went through them, and it was hard to feel like I was really in the game. That’s an area that COD4 excelled in, and a big disappointment for me in MW2.
Don’t get me wrong, the graphics and technical aspect of MW2 are superb. The game is simply stunning visually, and it’s a big improvement over COD4. But gameplay was not as good for me personally, and I was disappointed when the game was over. I particularly disliked the end-game. I’m sure there will be many who disagree with my assessment, but that’s the way I felt when it was all said and done. Hopefully, multi-player mode will be more fun, but I hear it has problems that need to be addressed (latency issues).
e-Book of the week
This week I picked up one of Jeffrey Deaver’s older novels, The Blue Nowhere. It is a story about a serial killer who is a master hacker, and the book takes us into the underground hacker scene. It was a good story, although Deaver felt it necessary to explain hacker lingo and concepts all through the book which got a little old.
Wrap-up
That’s the week as it went down in Mobile Tech Manor. I hope you enjoyed sharing it with me, and if you are in the U. S. I hope your long holiday weekend is a good one. Safe travels, if you are visiting others, and until next week — take care.
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It’s funny but I feel the opposite re COD MW2. Other people have said what you have but I am loving the atmosphere, and absolutely stunning graphics and get really absorbed in the game. I’ve never been much of a multiplayer game fan so enjoy a good single player game. I know it’s pretty much on rails so not what everyone likes but I’m really enjoying it. Could you max out all settings on the Acer?
Oh, and spot on re the inking in Windows 7. It is fantastic and I’m enjoying using it with my Bamboo Pen & Touch.
Games are certainly very personal, like many things. :) I found that COD4 was totally engrossing for me and made me feel like “I was there” the entire game. I just didn’t feel that on MW2. I felt like I was watching someone else play. Stunning graphics though, and fluid motion throughout.
Forgot your question. I ran everything at maximum detail using 1024×768. I could go all the way up to the 1920×1080 but things slowed down too much. I suspect I could have used an even bigger resolution than that and kept everything at max but I was too impatient to get playing.
Personally, I love MW2. I’m not sure if the difficulty level has anything to do with it as I played it in veteran our of the gate. I quite enjoyed the story and thought the ending was pretty much in line with the style of ending from COD4. Like you said though, it’s a matter of personal tastes. However, if you liked the COD4 multi-player mode, I think you’ll love the multi-player on MW2. The maps are great and there are so many new options. On top of that, the co-op missions are a lot of fun if you have a buddy to play them with. Whatever you felt lacking in the campaign I think the multi-player mode will more than make up for it.
James Kendrick, a fellow core gamer? I never would have suspected! (Then again, this is a mobile tech site.)
MW2′s multiplayer latency issues are because of a peer-to-peer networking model, rather than the usual client-server system that most PC games use. When it was known that MW2 would have no dedicated servers on PC, among other things, people were FURIOUS and even organized boycotts (one of which had a lot of hypocrites based on Steam status).
(As an aside, it’s a shame that there are no more Tablet PCs with dedicated graphics anymore. Can’t I have my games AND my Wacom pen on screen in one package?)
Would have posted this in the comments of the “Sponsor Post” but they are locked for comments so I’m posting it here.
I’m really starting to turn away from visiting JKontheRun these days as it doesn’t feel like the site I discovered a number of years ago and loved for it’s personal content and homely feel that made it very different from most other tech sights on the net. You guys using your tech with your day-jobs made it feel very real and in-touch with peoples real-world usage scenarios. The design of the site was very distinctive and had a quality that a lot of sites lack these days.
Now though JKontheRun doesn’t feel different at all. It often feels like a bunch of comments that aren’t from the real world, the design feels very boring, generic and plain, and the “Sponsor Posts” were really the final thing to push JKontheRun out of my must-read list and onto the one-a-week glance. The advertising is so intrusive and overwhelming, it never used to be like that.
Thanks for the years of JKontheRun guys, but alas for me it is a part of history, because the new site doesn’t feel like an update, but a step away from what made JKontheRun awesome.
Thanks for the Dragon love James! Just want to offer up a couple of quick points of clarification for folks who aren’t familiar with Dragon: 1) Dragon NaturallySpeaking doesn’t support the Mac OS, even w/Parallels, Bootcamp, etc. We are, however, Windows 7 compatible and certified on the PC. 2) Dragon does indeed allow you to control the PC by voice through a wealth of command and control features. A lot of info regarding commands is available on our Web site here – http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/products/additional/user-guides.asp
In the interest of full disclosure, I work for Nuance, the company that makes Dragon.
Thanks for chiming in, Erica. I will be installing Dragon on a native Windows PC to make sure I am getting the full experience.
I’m glad to hear about the command and control features and will give this another look. I didn’t see any way to do them within the program, so you guys may want to include some tutorials to demonstrate that in the future.
Thanks James! Great feedback on the tutorials. They probably aren’t as prominent as they should be on our Web site, and I’m sure that we can do more.
Here is a good link for Dragon newbies – http://www.nuance.com/gettingStartedWithDragon/.
Also, a direct link here to some feature demos – http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/products/additional/feature-demos.asp.
Thanks again for the suggestion. We’ll work on making more/more accessible demos/tutorials.