I’ve been a big fan of Showtime’s Dexter since a friend recommended the series to me during the summer months. After getting hooked on the pilot episode, I quickly ate up seasons one, two and three, relishing every episode for its amazing cast, beautiful photography, and its, erm, killer script. I’m going to share with you some of my thoughts, covering a bit from each season, but I’ll leave out the specifics so as not to offer any spoilers.

Season 1

The first season does a great job of introducing the star of the show, the world he inhabits and the secret he keeps. The show uses a saga format, blending each episode into the next, giving the viewers a personal and engrossing experience throughout. The parts of the first season that I enjoyed the most were the little moments where Dexter tries to blend in as an ordinary, quiet forensic specialist amidst a group of overzealous cops trying to find killers who are just like him. There’s also quite a few comedic moments, which helps to lighten the otherwise dark and grizzly nature of the show.

Season 2

Season two starts with a bang that’s so loud you’re basically guaranteed to watch all 13 episodes after the opening scene! In stark contrast to the first season, Dexter’s sophomore outing begins at a much faster pace. With the kid gloves off, the reserved, careful plodding of the first season’s storyline is completely abandoned for a much faster velocity. A host of new characters are swiftly introduced and many interesting interactions take place.

Some people have remarked that season two loses some of the first season’s purity, but others protest that the quicker pace is simply a natural progression if you view both seasons as one continuous storyline. Seen in this way, the first season does a great job of setting things up, with the second season allowing the fireworks to really light up. Opinions aside, season two is a wild ride with Dexter being attacked from all angles. Often it feels like he’s juggling chainsaws on top of a house of cards; you really begin to feel that at any moment his web of lies, cover ups and murders will come crashing down upon him.

Season 3

Season three has just completed, and I can say that they’ve returned the series to a style and pace more reminiscent of season one. Because of this, I initially felt that the writers had burnt themselves out, as not much was happening and some segments were – dare I say – boring. But as the pieces were being set and the story began to unfold, I realized that they were simply focusing on a cleaner storyline with less subplots and characters to muddle things up. In doing so, they’ve created a highly polished product that I think is unparalleled on television today. The level of acting, directing, and script writing is nothing short of phenomenal.

In retrospect, season three seems to assume that you’re already a fan of the show; they don’t compromise their method of storytelling by forcing cheesy moments and injecting meaningless action. The result is a deeper and more believable world for Dexter to inhabit. Sometimes I stop and think about how every character, relationship and setting is geared towards creating this reality. Eventually, you really begin to feel as if Dexter’s secret is your secret.

Are you a fan of Dexter? What’s been your favorite season or moment so far?

After a full month on Youtube my faux unibody MacBook Pro review has broke 7,000 views and has garnered over a hundred interesting comments. I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I posted the clip, just days after the notebook arrived in my hands, but I knew my review would stir the waters with its unorthodox mix of facts, fantasy and pure flame bait!

A few people seemed to have grasped that it’s impossible to take my review seriously if you actually consider what I’m saying and doing in the video (like ‘docking’ a load of Apple crap onto the display!), but apparently many others are completely oblivious that my piece is purposely ridiculous. Indeed, I didn’t want things to be too obvious. Where would the fun be in that?

What I was hoping for was to bait a variety of emotional responses, and judging by the vociferous nature of the comments posted thus far, I’ve certainly succeeded. From barely legible insults to congratulatory praise, I think I’ve heard it all. But the best comments are those that scold my incorrigible parlance to butcher the names of various Apple products and my inability to recognize that the English pronunciation of ‘aluminum’ is the exact same element used to make pop cans and car frames.

Right now I’m sort of torn between continuing with this series of misreviews or just keeping my content straight and honest (as it is with anything that I write for this blog). Having said that, it’s kind of hard to stop when I’m having this much fun and apparently entertaining a good portion of viewers as well!

A game that’s sure to get a lot of play on the PC this holiday season is Call of Duty: World at War (COD5). The multiplayer beta has been available for a few days, and already I’ve logged a good couple of hours in online matches.

COD5 is an excellent test for the late 2008 MacBook Pro’s discreet graphics chip. Overall, I found the nVidia 9600M GT to perform quite well, rendering the game with a high amount of detail at comfortable frame rates.

For the deathmatch purist, having beautiful graphics is a distant second to having silky smooth frame rates. For my tests, I kept this in mind, but I was also thinking about the single player aspect, where graphical detail is important for providing an engrossing experience.

Starting at the highest resolution, a native 1440 x 900, the game felt a bit choppy and textures looked flat and lifeless at their lower settings. Dropping down to 1280 x 720 and having the details maxed out to ‘extra’ produced a gorgeous palette of colors and textures, but the frame rate took a noticeable hit any time the scene had to render a lot of objects. Working down to 1152 x 864, I found this to be the lowest acceptable resolution for the MacBook Pro’s 15.4” screen; any lower and the graphics looked too blocky, muddy and aliased. At this resolution, I chose a combination of medium and extra detail settings. The result produced acceptable frame rates for online play with graphics still pleasing enough to showcase the 9600M GT’s abilities.

Further tweaking and running the final code of the game may produce even better results. I can’t wait for Call of Duty: World at War to be released now that I’ve tried the beta. It might just give COD4 a run for its money!

Slightly higher quality video here.

How does a new unibody Macbook Pro compare to an older Santa Rosa Macbook Pro when it comes to gaming? I put these two MBP’s to the test, running the Far Cry 2 benchmark for a head-to-head faceoff. The results were dramatic.

The late 2008 MacBook Pro loads the Far Cry 2 benchmark over 50% faster (37 seconds) than the older MBP model (58 seconds). One could say that the faster 2.53Ghz Penryn CPU trumps the slower 2.2Ghz Merom processor, but this alone can’t account for such a large discrepancy in loading times.

During the startup sequence for most games, vast amounts of data must be decompressed and transferred from the hard drive to the system RAM and video RAM. It appears that the 120GB Fujitsu HDD that comes standard in the older MBP is quite a bit slower than the 320GB HDD found in the latest MBP, although they are both rated at 5400RPM. In addition, the latest unibody notebooks feature a faster (1066mhz) system bus and use RAM operating at this high speed. These improvements combined, allow the newer MBP’s to internally transfer data faster than the older Santa Rosa based notebooks, which can lead to faster game loading.

During the actual game sequence, the late 2008 MacBook Pro produces much smoother frame rates than the older Santa Rosa model (averaging 30 FPS versus 18 FPS, under medium settings at native resolution). Similarly, in synthetic benchmarks, the 9600M GT outperforms the 8600 GT by around 45%.

For most modern games, the bottleneck in performance lies with the GPU. It is a bit surprising then, that the older 8600M GT performs so poorly compared to the 9600M GT, as both GPU’s are similar, and each have 32 shaders. Thus, it would appear that nVidia’s successor to the 8600M GT has 3D performance optimizations beyond its modest boost in core and memory frequency.

To get playable frame rates (29 FPS) on the 8600M GT, the screen resolution needs to be lowered to 960 x 600, but this also made the graphics look blocky and heavily aliased. Perhaps a significant contributor to the performance limitations of this particular GPU is its miniscule 128MB of VRAM. It would be interesting to benchmark a 512MB version of the 8600M GT to remove this variable.

So far, my findings indicate that those interested in gaming should definitely consider upgrading to the new unibody MacBook Pro; the speed benefits are greatly noticeable. In addition, it has been widely speculated that future driver support from nVidia will further enhance the GPU’s used in the Pro and also help to optimize its logicboard chipset. These parts are still very new and there is plenty of room for improvement. Geforce Boost anyone?

Do you own a MacBook Pro, new or old? How do you like it for gaming?