The “Break it Down” Blog

NOTE: If you are coming to this article after Googling the subject in frustration, here’s the quick-fix for you: Upgrade the modem’s firmware to QAQ01-31.00L.33 or later and you should be fine.

Qwest has been rolling their new high-speed fiber-optic DSL service out throughout Denver and Arizona for the last year or so (it’s not fiber-to-the-house, but with 40mbps available, who cares?). I’ve been a happy Qwest DSL client for about 3 years now — no complaints and more importantly — no outages.

When the fiber service started rolling out with speeds of 12mbps and 20mbps offered, I would reflexively crap my pants and throw myself into jealous rages because it wasn’t available in my area — that all changed last week.

Not only has Qwest rolled out fiber in my area, they also rolled out a new 40mbps/20mbps service as well for $115/mo — that doesn’t have any bearing on this post, it’s just awesome.

Anyway, I ordered the 20mbps/5mbps service which required an upgrade to the Actiontec Q1000 Qwest-branded modem. This is a Gigabit-capable 4-port modem with Wireless-N capabilities — I’ve had Actiontec equipment in the past from Qwest and it was garbage — replaced within months by 2wire which worked much better. Fortunately after a week with this Q1000 it looks like Actiontec may have cleaned some things up, the modem works fine with some basic firewall, port forwarding and advanced routing rules — this was something the older Actiontec modem that Qwest was selling couldn’t no — no joke, it literally couldn’t employ port forwarding rules AND the firewall at the same time — fail.

Anyway, after getting the Q1000 setup and the service enabled, I hooked my Xbox 360 via a WAP (I’ll give a review of later) and when I tried to get the Xbox online, I would get an error similar to the following:

Unable to connect to Xbox live, the MTU setting of your router is less than 1365 and must be increased. Please fix the problem and try again.

There is literally no MTU setting anywhere on the Q1000 — and reading through some other threads online, folks had suggestions ranging from disabling uPnP all the way to manually changing the MTU settings on your Windows machine (yea, I have no idea how they thought that would help).

As the threads went on, more and more folks said upgrading the firmware did the trick for them and magically the Xbox 360 started working again without any problems.

This sounded easy enough, but believe it or not, I was actually confused by the Upgrade Firmware screen on the Q1000 — on the older 2wire I had, there was a button that I clicked that would check the firmware against the remotely available version and then upgrade it if available — it also automatically upgraded itself constantly too (which got annoying after a while).

On the Q1000, there is simply a Download button and you end up with a file that has no identifying name or type, just firmware.

Believe it or not, this s all fine — and it worked great. So I’ll give you the instructions on how to update your firmware incase you are bamboozled by this — and get your Xbox 360 back online:

1. Go to 192.168.0.1 (or whatever IP address you gave your modem)
2. Login to your modem — I believe the default credentials are “admin” or “admin”/”admin” or just try password “admin” — it’s one of those.
3. Go to Utilities
4. Click Upgrade Firmware in the left menu
5. Click the Download button in section #1 — you will likely be prompted to safe a file named “firmware”, save it anywhere on your local computer.
6. Now scroll down to section #2, and click the Browse button and select that “firmware” file you saved.
7. Now scroll down to section #3, and click the Upgrade Firmware button, this will upload the file you just saved and apply it then restart the modem

And you should be all set. Let us know if you run into any problems. Happy gaming!

Summary [5.5 out of 10]

A sequel to the 2006 original, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 offers up a hybrid Secret War/Civil War storyline and the same four character, top down beat-em-up action found in the first game and the X-men Legends titles before it. Vicarious Visions left the basic game play alone and streamlined the interface to attempt to fix the few issues the previous game had. Sadly, this attempt failed and a decent chunk of enjoyment was streamlined instead. Add to that a host of bugs and technical issues and you have a title that should have been a sure thing turns into a fumbling attempt at home plate before you’ve  even bought the girl dinner.

Introduction

I really loved the first Marvel Ultimate Alliance. I didn’t really get into X-men Legends mostly because I got frustrated by the terrible teammate AI, but everything the X-men games bungled, Ultimate Alliance did well. It had a great story, branching endings, varied characters, a wide variety of stages, tons of unlockables, and a preponderance of awesome goodies for fans of Marvel comics. It was just loaded with content and I played it over and over to find everything and use everyone I could. It wasn’t perfect. The User Interface(UI) wasn’t great and leveling could be tedious. The item collection was a cool idea but got confusing and bothersome to keep up with. Overall though, the game was awesome.

So by all rights MUA2 should have killed. Word was the UI was fixed and everything would be smoother and more user friendly. Somewhere along the line, and I think it was at that part in the line where the developers look at the calendar and realize they are running out of time fast, things went really wrong.  They didn’t really monkey with the core gameplay terribly much aside from adding Fusion powers which allows two characters to use their powers in conjunction with each other for a more devastating special move. That is pretty cool and is a neat addition, although it paves the way for some frustration but I will get to that later.

Where the developers really went wrong here is that there was a lot of half-assing going on. They tried to fix the item issue with boosts, but those are just as annoying and tedious as the items were. They tried to streamline the UI but managed to make things even more frustrating on one level and feel incomplete on the other. Also they forgot to make it very fun.

The Great

• Deadpool:  If Deadpool hadn’t been in this game I would have probably stopped playing pretty early on. He is funny in his quips in-game and his discussions with other characters are amusing and on point with the character. His moves and powers are awesome and his healing factor means he can stay in the game a lot better than a lot of the other characters. Even other characters with healing factors don’t pan out as well, like Wolverine some how manages to go down for the count quicker than anyone reading this would against Mike Tyson. This game is the best evidence I could give that Deadpool needs his own game and it needs not to suck.

The Good

• Gameplay: The core gameplay mechanics work pretty well. If you love running around beating things up with a sprinkle of cool visual effects, you are generally in good hands here.

• Graphics: The visuals are mostly good. There are times when it looks REALLY good and other times, not so much. Some of the cut scenes are iffy but generally the graphics are good.

• Character Interaction: They could have done more with the branching conversations like Mass Effect, but the conversations with other characters are cool and change depending on who you are using and who you are talking to. Spider-man talking to the Green Goblin is great and is one of the ‘Key Conversations’ which will net you an achievement or trophy if you get 10 of them. There is some cool comic background stuff that happens here without getting to be too inside baseball and it is a nice addition. This isn’t much different than the first game aside from being able to be aggressive, defensive or diplomatic but in this game keeping things the same is a definite plus.

• Trivia: The trivia game is cool and adds a bit of a time crunch in for you. You can compete against other players if you aren’t alone and it becomes a bit like You Don’t Know Jack: Marvel Comics without Buzz or Cookie making wisecracks. I am a comics geek so I dig the trivia. The game pretty much supplies all the answers to these questions if you pay attention during loading screens and, well, the game.

• Multi-player: Like the first one, MUA2 supports both local and online multi-player. This REALLY makes the game more fun. Four people can play at once and having other people control your characters rather than the game’s AI is always better. Not only can you do more and do it better with real people actually making good choices, but you have someone to talk to when things get repetitive or a boss fight takes 20 minutes for no apparent reason whatsoever.

• Roster of Characters: The game features a lot of characters to play and interact with and not all of them are the mainstream sort you would normally find in a game like this. Like the first one, this game makes the most out of its license and it is really cool to see video game representations of characters I never thought I would see in a game. It would be nice if there were more that were playable but it was good to just get to see so many of them around. If you are a Marvel comics fan you will probably not be disappointed with the characters here.

• Cut Scenes: While some of the graphics can be iffy, the cut scenes are generally pretty cool, particularly the ones that show key moments from the Civil War comics. Captain America jumping out of a heli-carrier window and commandeering a jet looks just about as cool in motion as I thought it would and seeing Nitro blow Stamford to hell was pretty awesome. This reinforces my belief that they should make an animated movie of Civil War.

The Bad

• The Bugs: First and foremost, the bugs are the downfall of this game. I have a lot of complaints but this was the big one. I am not sure how this thing got out of beta testing let alone finding its way to store shelves. This thing is buggier than a new Microsoft Operating System. For one thing, you can’t turn the auto-leveling feature off without turning it off and taking away a point from something and then putting it back. Otherwise, it will just turn itself back on every time you leave the menu. That is just annoying, but some of the other bugs are worse. Like when I did a guided Fusion with Wolverine and Spider-man that, when it ended,  melded them together like conjoined twins if one of the twins rode on the other’s back while flashing in and out of existence.Or the one at the end of the Wakanda level where the Green Goblin disappears and you just keep fighting a steady stream of bad guys forever. I went for an hour and leveled up something like six times. I eventually looked it up online to make sure it was a glitch. Sure it seemed obvious but I couldn’t imagine such a big problem making it to retail. It did. You have to turn your system off and back on to fix this. Sometimes, according to things I read on a message board, you have to do this multiple times. Then there are little things like beating everyone in a room to open the door to the elevator and the door doesn’t open…and the one you came in is closed off too so you are just stuck in the room until you reboot the game. Or when the game will stop in the middle of ANYTHING you are doing to load and then do it again and again for about an hour. Or when you perform a successful targeted Fusion so you can get a healing token to bring one of your characters back and the game arbitrarily doesn’t give it to you.  I could go on as there are more bugs but you get the point. The game has been out almost a month and there have been no patches. For shame.

• Unskippable cut scenes: Yeah I praised the cut scenes above and I stand by that, but I was talking about the first time you see them. When you just died because of some cheap bullshit or because you have just had to restart or reboot because of one of the many bugs, you don’t want to sit through the same cut scene over and over. I know that the game is loading behind these scenes and that is why you can’t skip but it is a huge pain and is reflective of bad game design.

• Civil War Storyline: Okay, so I am not a hater on the Civil War story at all but using it for this game created a lot of problems. For one, it limited the characters that could be used at any given time. For another it locked the story into a sort of static framework that kept the variety out altogether. The storyline for the first game was kind of crazy and sprawled all over everwhere, from Atlantis to Asgard and Latvaria to Hell. This game has a lot of labs, warehouses and city streets. Not much variety to be found in the locations and it is mostly because of the story. Also, the branching of the story, where you have to choose Pro or Anti Registration forces you into another play through to unlock all the characters and see everything there is to see. If you save your game before you choose, you can just go back and make a different choice but you have to unlock everything again. So if you don’t have Thor, Hulk or Jean Grey yet before that save then you have to get them again. The alternative is to play again at a higher difficulty which has you retreading a lot of the game before you get to the choice and only really gives you a handful of new stages, which aren’t really new as much as just mirrors of the ones you already did. Some cool things could have been done with this but weren’t.

• Streamlining: The first game had a ton of cool stuff to collect. Every character had four extra costumes, each with their own bonuses and attributes. There were different powers for your characters you could assign based on your preference and a lot of cool things to find. This game gives you one alternate costume per character and only about four of those are worth having. Each character only has four powers and that is it. No choice here whatsoever. Also, because of the auto-leveling bug, manual point distribution is more tedious.

• Boss Battles: While some of these are cool, the majority of them drag on forever and are more of a chore than they are challenging. When you add in the fact the game will actively screw you out of healing tokens when you’ve earned them and you end up having to replay the fight it really sucks. Given that boss fights are supposed to be exciting and intense, to have them be boring is never a good sign. I hate the boss fights in this game generally just because I knew I was going to have to be doing the same thing over and over for a really long time. Build up fusion meter, perform target fusion, repeat for what seems like four hours. Thanks a bunch Titanium Man.

• Healing/revival system: I understand what the designers were trying to do here. In the first game, in order to revive a fallen character you had to wait until you got to one of the hubs scattered around that would let you revive characters, teleport back to base or switch out characters. Here you can change characters on the fly and revive a character with a health token. The problem is, unless the game randomly decides to bestow a token on you, the only way to get it is to pull off a successful fusion. If you do a clearing fusion, typically you need to hit between 15-10 enemies to get a token. The guided is pretty much the same way and a targeted fusion you need to hit someone important. So that is no big deal generally except that this is the ONLY way to revive a character and you can ONLY do a fusion when you have two characters. So if three of your guys get taken out, and the magical healing token fairy doesn’t give you any, you are out of luck unless you make it to the end of the level. The other option is to just let the last guy die and do stuff over again and hope that you are better this time or that there are no more bugs.

• Balancing: I understand the need to balance the characters so that each one is playable but I absolutely refuse to believe that a pantywaist like Shocker is going to take out the Hulk. The way the balancing works, there is little difference between a lot of the characters. It doesn’t really matter that much if you are playing Iron Man instead of Miss Marvel or Iron Fist instead of Daredevil. They all just sort of break down to projectile vs melee or flying vs ground based. There are a few characters that stand out and seem more effective but in general, a lot of the characters are interchangeable and the repetition of fusions further highlights the problem. Also whoever decided that Wolverine should be on death’s door the second you take him over is an idiot. Seriously, he is supposed to be the best at what he does. In this game what he does is go down like a bitch.

• Camera: The camera in this game is ridiculously bad. I lost track of the number of times that I was in the middle of a heated battle and I was suddenly looking at the rafter in the ceiling and not seeing the action at all. You can move the camera a bit but it doesn’t really help that much as in a lot of the cases of this the camera is stuck somewhere. It also sucks when you try to do a targeted fusion on someone standing right next to you, probably hitting you  upside the head at the time, and your target circle goes flying off screen and you can’t bring it back or even find it even when trying to move the camera around. Also, the camera will zoom out to weather map distance so that you can’t tell what is going on because you can’t find your character in the virtual ant farm of explosions and laser beams. The number of times that the camera zoomed back in to let me know that I had been beating up a tree for the past 10 minutes is staggering.

• Controls: The button placement, which you can’t change, is very strange. The jump button is mapped to the Y/triangle button and it feels really weird. This may just be my own personal thing but it seems like it should have been mapped to the A/X button. Regardless, the layout feels wonky and I found myself doing the wrong things a lot because of the confusing and uncustomizable configuration.

The Ugly

• Black Widow: How can they take one of the sexiest women in Marvel comics and make her look like she’s been hit with a brick made of ugly? Nick Fury looks sexier and I think pictures of him naked are the punishment for stealing in some countries.

Conclusion [5.5 out of 10]

I really wanted to like this game. I was really excited and I traded in Batman Arkham Asylum so I could get it. I’ve been kicking myself ever since.  The basic gameplay is intact but gets bogged down by bugs and systems that lack polish. Really that is the biggest issue with this game over all, it is not polished at all and feels like a fourth tier effort instead of the AAA title it is supposed to be. The old axiom ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ applies here and they really should have taken that to heart. As it stands, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is deeply flawed and very broken. If you really, really want to play out of deep devotion to the series or because you think I am an idiot, then do yourself a favor and rent the thing. You should be able to beat it in a weekend and hopefully haven’t broken any controllers.

Many thanks to Chris Hunkele for the pics and video’s from the grand opening!

If you live in Phoenix or Scottsdale you like saw the news that Microsoft has opened it’s first (new) Microsoft Store in the Scottsdale Fashion Square mall and from the looks of things, it was a huge hit. With a few hundred people milling around the store itself Chris explained a bit more about the setting:

… what you didn’t see were the 5 mall cops and 7 Scottsdale police officers monitoring the outside of the store where fabric lane dividers stretched down the hall.

I’ve been inside Fashion Square enough times to know that “down the hall” like means “22 miles”… or there abouts… it’s a long mall.

The “store” idea was actually something Microsoft tried back in 1999 (before Apple) with the “microsoftSF” store – back when Microsoft thought DirectX was awesome and APIs were a good way to market beige colored desktops. That idea didn’t pan out and Microsoft focused on tech for about 8 years before deciding it had to become “cool” again — like Apple.

Fast forward 10 ass-sore years later and now that Microsoft has finally gotten the company lined up behind the Xbox-leading vision of developing and delivering trendy “cool-tech”. The timing was perfect to try the store idea again and there is plenty for Microsoft to be eager to show off.

The overall vibe of the store is exactly what it should be: “Here’s cool tech we have had a hand in, go ahead and play with it”.

Whether it was laptops, netbooks, Xbox 360s hooked to a wall full of LCD TVs:

or the molestation-thrilled Microsoft Surface – which had a very solid showing – Microsoft had every sexy product out and ready for show.

Yes this idea sounds familiar, but it works when you have something that can attract a crowd of onlookers and gadget-lovers. Besides the customer support angle, Microsoft has never offered anything compelling enough to structure a store’s existence around; now they do.

For the longest time Microsoft was a software-only company and you can’t launch a store to show off… what… Exchange Server 2010 and Outlook? Even trying to establish deals with exclusive vendors 10 years ago to decide which Microsoft-blessed hardware would go into such a store would be just as boring, there was nothing flashy to show off… just a big green Start button and an Explorer view that now had a web browser in it. As for hardware, everything was black and boxy — what was compelling about that?

To get consumers to stop and peek in, you need glitz and ‘window appeal’ — give customers something they want to walk in and put their hands all over (Surface).

The only reason Apple pulled off the “store” idea in recent history is because they were offering solutions of sexy hardware and sexy software. If Apple had only nailed the sexy hardware, but ran say Windows XP — I doubt the stores would have lasted. But they managed to provide a refined hardware and software experience that you couldn’t get anywhere else and then mixed in the support and developed a really compelling reason to peek your head in the Apple store’s door as you walked by: “Oh, I want to ask about a bluetooth headset for my iPod”.

Enter the Xbox 360, Windows 7, Microsoft Surface, Zune HD, Windows Mobile 6.5 and mobile/tablet touch-screen devices and a slew of other 1-off items and you suddenly have the makings of a store that’s fun to walk into and play around with until you’re ready to buy something. It’s basically Gymboree for adults — not saying that if Microsoft put a huge pool of balls in there I wouldn’t jump in… just that Surface and Xbox 360 with motion control are just as fun for adults.

If you go walking by the Microsoft store and on a 150″ plasma (yes they have one) you see someone playing Halo Reach on one wall and then see someone throwing paint on a dog on another wall of LCDs with Project Natal, I’m going to bet you’ll walk in — and maybe ask a question or two — and maybe walk out with a new mouse, maybe a Zune HD (Zune 2) and high hopes for an Xbox 360 for Christmas.

Brilliant

You throw some decent customer support on top of that, and next time your laptop tells you that it cannot install the driver for your digital camera, you throw that shit in your car and roll down to the Microsoft Store and ask them what’s going on — as opposed to calling India and talking to Rajesh* about reformatting your AOL internet.

* No offense intended, Rajesh is a hell of a guy and great at backgammon.

Update #1: Thanks to Dave Bullock for the heads up that you can actually get your RROD’ed Xbox 360’s fixed at the new Microsoft Store. Basic repairs can be done in-house, like faulty power connectors, but more common repairs (like heat-sync failing and typical RROD causes) the console will still need to be shipped out, however, Microsoft will ship you a replacement console immediately after the store has taken it into custody and you don’t need to wait those extra days for Microsoft to confirm receipt of it.

Update #2: Chris has done a technical analysis the likes of CSI and we are pretty sure Bill Gates doesn’t work at the new store… or at least he does and he was having a bad hair day:

Videos

You can scroll through the playlist of videos from the Grand Opening below.

Pictures

Thanks to Ted Regulski for the heads up on these. We actually had about 10 mins of alone-time with God of War 3 at PAX 2009 and can say this: It’s exactly what you want.

If you liked God of War 1 and God of War 2, the God of War series continues with the exact same controls, exact same epic world-feel, exact same style of play and level transition — it feels like home; if your home were caked in gore and you were running around your living room with a sword tied to a flaming beast.

We love it.

Thanks NeoGaf!

Well it’s coming and everyone is waiting for it, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare 2, so we figured we’d put up as many screenshots as we could find that were tasty. Unfortunately it looks like still no main-story-line co-op, but they are offering co-op in the SpecOps mode which is taking down foes in special levels for multiplayer.

If you haven’t seen the Infamy trailer yet, it gives an excellent overview of the look/feel and environments from the game — I’m impressed to say the least, just hope it lasts longer than Modern Warfare 1, which I just finished recently.

Saw this on TwitPic, it’s the United States superimposed on top of the land-mass that is Antarctica and holy-hell, I honestly didn’t realize it was so big.

Thanks to Grant Gochnauer for the heads up on the news that Canon is working on a firmware upgrade for the 5D Mark II folks that will allow 1080p video recording at 24 and 25fps.

London, 20 October 2009 – Canon today announces that it is currently developing a firmware update to the EOS 5D Mark II to enable the recording of high definition 1080p video at 24 and 25fps. The decision to develop new firmware to support these features has been taken following feedback received from cinematographers and photographers.

Introduced in September 2008, the multi award-winning EOS 5D Mark II was the first DSLR product to offer full frame 1080p HD video recording, opening up a multitude of new creative possibilities for photo journalists, news photographers and amateur filmmakers. Since then, Canon has continued to develop its groundbreaking EOS Movie functionality, firstly with the firmware update to the EOS 5D Mark II that enabled manual exposure control, and more recently by introducing a choice of video recording frame rates with the EOS 7D and EOS-1D Mark IV.

Canon currently expects the firmware update to be made available during the first half of 2010. An announcement regarding details of the update and its availability will be made closer to the release date.

SmugMug’s Don MacAskill blogged about Vincent Laforet’s new ‘Nocturne’ short that was shot in 1080p at ISO 6400 on the new Canon 1D Mark IV — for those of you with your 5D Mark II’s, apparently the 1D MIV has better low-light performance, but the body runs a solid $5k — so probably just buy 2 instead of 3.

Overall quality looked excellent, wouldn’t know the difference between this and a “real” camera used in Hollywood, but I’m not professional photographer. Interesting for the folks out there that want to shoot this kind of work and have $5k to drop.

Vincent was also known for breaking-in everyone’s 1080p expectations with the Canon 5D Mark II when it was just about to hit the market as well.

Borderlands is the new 4-player co-op, FPS/RPG that just dropped today to retailers and so far is getting solid 8.5/10 reviews from the few sources we’ve seen.

Overall we’re pretty pumped for the title and it looks like Gearbox hired a pretty savvy marketing group to put together a mock advertisement about how “mainstream” Borderlands really is — I found it hilarious so wanted to share it here with you.

Take note of how awesomely “Stiffler-esque” the main character is, the end sequence I found hilarious with his growing rage:

Most of the Dragon Age: Origins screenshots we’ve seen up until now have focused primarily on battle and the party in the game. That is why I was excited when an environments-only screenshot pack dropped in our lab tonight.

These screenshots show of the world that Dragon Age: Origins takes place in. The type of environments, both inside and outside of towns, that you will be walking through and experiencing as you go on your journey.

Absolutely a darker tone to the environments which we’ve noted before, the game definitely makes you feel like you are in a sullen/repressed world that is in need of helping.

Dragon Age: Origins was a game we got some special time with at PAX 2009 back in September. It was about a 30-minute private playthrough that honestly took about 2 hours to get into. Curses on BioWare for running their demo like that at the conference — they never bothered to walk back in line and tell everyone after person 30 that they would never play the game that day.

Honestly, we were about 15th or so in line first thing one morning and it took us almost 2hrs to finally sit down and play — they took people in groups of 10 and let them play for 30 mins, even if you finished the private demo early and left, they still held the computer unoccupied for the full 30 mins until everyone was done… bah.

That’s neither here nor there now, the game is done and coming out soon, so here are our thoughts on it:

• It’s Mass Effect set in medieval times
• Graphics were solid. Although with BioWare games you come from the intricate stories and and inter-character relationships and Dragon Age looks set to deliver on that.
• Check point system seems a bit lacking — we were playing the 360 version and I ended up walking out of the demo because I got 3/4 of the way through it, died and respawned at the checkpoint coming out of the town where the demo started… there was no way I was going to replay all that stuff again. This may have just been part of the PAX demo though. I would imagine the check point system will be identical to Mass Effect — which I think was like this, but I don’t recall dying much in that game.
• It’s a darker game — there is this foreboding seriousness that drips all around this game… sort of a depressed/angry/suppressed feeling — I dig it, it makes the times seem more dark and intense.



• You can TOTALLY burn other NPCs in conversations. There are a lot of great choices to retort with like “Why don’t you shut your mouth before my sword shuts if for you” — so if you like playing like a dick, you will likely spend a lot of time laughing.
• Combat was confusing — I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to Final Fantasy-esque RPG attack mechanisms, but I found myself juggling controls a lot during combat trying to figure out how to make things die.



• You can play ANY member of your party, not just the “hero”. At any time you can switch to the other characters.



• The attack styles of the different members of the group is very different.
• Attacks are not as action-oriented as Mass Effect, they are some hybrid between World of Warcraft (timing/targeting/recharge cycles) mixed with Mass Effect (live-action, you can run around during). It felt odd… I think you can pause time during attacks in this game as well like Mass Effect.

Overall I’m cautiously optimistic about the title — it looks like easily a 20-30 hr game straight through with some good story elements to it. Caring about the Gray Wardens cause (that’s the group of soldiers you play) will be part of connecting with the game and the story and I’m not sure that clicked for me.

Abusing my squad-mates and killing innocent people (which I did during the demo) is hilarious and could be funny to watch unfold… I rarely play evil in these types of games.

If you have already decided you are picking this up for PC, don’t forget to grab the Dragon Age Character Creator software for the PC to start working on the character you want to import into the game on release date.

Also if you are excited about the game and want to talk with other fans, BioWare has a community setup for that as well.

Introduction

This document will cover both how to get your Google Ion into Recovery Mode as well as a few other clarifications to HTC’s Google Ion device instructions for installing Android 1.6 that caused me pain during this process.

If you are like me and have an Android device, more specifically the Google Ion Android developer device from the Google I-O conference, then you are likely excited about the Android 1.6 release that is available and want to install it.

I’ve actually been sitting here waiting and rebooting my phone all week thinking that T-Mobile would push that update OTA to me like it did my wife’s phone and all my friend’s Android phones — unfortunately not, if you have a Google Ion phone, you will not get the Android 1.6 update over-the-air from T-Mobile.

So I set out to figure out how to install it myself. Fortunately HTC provides a very specific Google Ion device page showing you how to install different types of platform software on the phone. Unfortunately the page is geared at Android developers and some of the terminology used on the page will be confusing, so I’ll clear it up for us normal folks that just want to update their phone with the new Android OS:

Summary of Page for Normal People

• Download the “Radio Image” package
• Download the “Recovery Image” package
• Read the clarifications below FIRST, so that page and future instructions make more sense.

Once you’ve done that, the rest of the instructions on the page, about installing the Android SDK and using the abd tool all work great except for a few factual omissions that drove me crazy and I’m hoping to save someone their sanity by posting them here.

Don’t Mount as USB Storage

This isn’t specified anywhere, and is self-explanatory for some folks, but not everyone. When you are connecting your device to your computer, ignore the “Mount SD Card as USB storage” prompt on the phone. Leave the phone connected as a normal USB device.

You Probably Need the WinUsb Driver

My install of Windows 7 didn’t see my device when I connected it to my machine. After some digging around online and finding some seriously complicated solutions to getting Windows to load the right Android USB Driver, I found 1 sane users that pointed over to the official “Installing the WinUsb Driver” doc from the Android group — low and behold this worked just fine. I found the Unknown Device in the Windows Device Manager, right-clicked on it, selected Update Driver… and selected the path to the /usb_driver sub-directory under my Android SDK install directory and Windows took care of the rest (found and installed the USB driver).

Booting the Google Ion into Recovery Mode

This was maddening and took me about an hour to figure out. The instructions on HTC’s Google Ion device page specifically say you reboot the phone into Recovery Mode by doing the following:

Reboot the device into recovery mode by holding down the HOME key during reboot. When the device enters recovery mode, it displays a “!” icon.

This is crap — not only is it confusing (e.g. How do I know what phase of startup is considered ‘during reboot‘?), but it’s also wrong.

The correct way to boot your Google Ion into Recovery Mode is as follows:

Thanks to Vladimir Kelman and his insistence that HTC’s instructions made no sense. (Additional Link)

1. From the desktop, hold down the END/Power-Off button (to bring up the Phone Options menu)
2. Select the Power off option
3. Click OK on the Power off confirmation screen
4. NOW, immediately press the HOME-button and END/Power-Off button together at the same time — the phone’s “Shutting down” screen will continue to show, and you may see your Applications slider pop open in the background, but just keep holding these 2 buttons.
5. The phone will shutdown like normal, but instead of staying off, it will immediately kick into the that white “Google I-O” boot screen.
6. After a few more sections, a screen with a “!” inside of a triangle will appear, congratulations, you are in recovery mode. It looks like this:
   



7. You can now press HOME-button and END/Power-Off button together to bring up the recovery console — but the rest of the HTC Google Ion device instructions work just fine so you can follow them now.