Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Security Breach

Today at work I was moving computers out the old offices for a while. I wasn't allowed to hook any of them up (read: official Wal-Mart computer guy does that), except for one that is never hooked up to the network. I booted it up, only to find that it was not password protected. Obviously the alarm was going off in my head; no work related compy should be so unsecured. I told this to three different managers. The best response I got was "it doesn't matter, only managers can get into that room anyway." Too bad then that after I plugged the machine in I was able to sit down at it for nearly fifteen minuetes, in the comfy office chair no less, before anyone even saw that I was in there. And when they did see me, their only reaction was to continue walking. Granted, everything is still in construction, so no one is thinking of the office as having any sort of restricted access yet. But I had plenty of time to do some malicious things to that computer if I was a disgruntled employee or hacker in disguise, and the idea that regular employees will never step into there is laughable. I'm going to try to convince someone in management to put a password on that, but I doubt it will make a difference. I suppose this is my first example of just how insecure company hardware can really be.

Over the last month I've been asking myself, "What's been going on with Final Fantasy 12?". Now I know the truth: the original team is practically gone, the director may have gone crazy, and the entire thing is now in the hands of the man who made the Saga series, one of the worst piles or crap in the RPG genre. Oh, and the combat is now a blatant ripoff of Knights of the Old Republic, and the release date is pushed back until march 2006. This was supposed to be the first FF game good enough to warrant a purchase on the first day. It was supposed to be the triumphant return of the FF Tactics team. Instead it has become a shipwreck trying to salvage things together and limp into port. I don't see bright things on the Square side of Square-Enix in the next generation, though one can really only guess.

Started dipping my feet into Virtua Fighter tonight. Easily the deepest fighter I've seen since Soul Calibur, and a dauntingly difficult game to boot. That only gives me more reason to push on, since I always enjoy a good challenge.

P.S.- note to fighting game developers (especially devs of fancy 3-d fighters): you automatically lose a star from me if you can't include a practice mode that is even half as good as the one in VF4 Evo.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

i will wager any amount of money that the password they will place on the computer will be, in fact, "password".

christian wolfe said...

I'm not a betting man, but that's probably correct. My guess is that they'll use something like wm2064, which is the acronym for the store plus the store number.