Gaming, Cubing, and Rambling

Cubes from the holidays...

2012-02-05T15:26:00.000-05:00

Although I don't edit it as much, this will be one of those times where it might be easier to show something instead of explaining it. If you're not familiar with Eastsheen (or perhaps East Sheen, hard to say...) they're a company in Taiwan that makes toys in the same vein as the Rubik's Cube.

I got this as a gift over the holidays, but as it's a 2x2x2, it's inherently difficult to show off since it seems simple.

Two Wii things worth mentioning.

2011-12-27T21:45:00.000-05:00

One - If you are hooking a Wii up to a TV that uses the 'Y' (green) channel of the component video input for also decoding the composite video input, expect it to look dark if you use the Wii's composite video cable. Obviously if you have the component video cable for the Wii, you should use that when possible. I happened to notice it over the weekend when my son got to play Sengoku Basara on the TV at my Dad's house. I presume that it's because there's less signal to go around, so the TV assumes that the picture isn't as bright (even though I'm sure the TV's electronics are fully capable of compensating for it.) I had the chance to go get the other cable, and turned progressive scan back on, and the picture was pretty much back to normal brightness. If you were confused by the use of the words 'component' and 'composite' in this context, refer back to my post about HDTV.

Two - If you didn't have the Netflix channel loaded on your Wii before you put in The Legend of Zelda:Skyward Sword, the Wii will do a 'System Update' that adds it for you. Funny, I just checked for a new system update the other day when I reset my router.

Gaming Things I did in 2011

2011-12-25T20:14:00.000-05:00

I finally set Urban Reign to 'Easy' so that I could finish the story mode and unlock Paul Phoenix and Marshall Law. I was stuck on a board just before the end that featured Golem and Napalm99. Yes, I realize it's an old game. It was already an old game when I picked up a couple of copies of it upon its arrival in the discount bin.

I finally changed the settings of Street Fighter 3:Third Strike on Anniversary Collection to 1-star difficulty and 1 round matches so I could beat Gill with the last few people I hadn't finished with in order to unlock Gill as a playable character. Since I was trying to work through the characters in alphabetical order, I hadn't really used Yun and Yang that much. Once I unlocked Gill, I discovered that since I had been playing SF4 occasionally elsewhere my Ryu skills had improved. I was finally able to get a high enough score once I set the game back to its default settings that I was able to fight against Q. (I even finished the game with only 3 continues and a C++ ranking!)

I finally warmed up to Sonic games. I had a hard time with Sonic Riders and Sonic Heroes, and I had a really hard time with Shadow the Hedgehog, but I started to warm up to the Black Knight game, and I really like Sonic Colors (which my older son is playing right now while I'm typing this.) My older son is really the one that got me started, since Super Smash Brothers Brawl piqued his interest in Sonic in the first place.

I finally played NBA Street, which honestly seems an awful lot like NBA Jam with better music. The character animations don't seem to hold up by today's standards, and the voice-over is a little... unnatural. The game is fine, and considering that I paid around $5 for it, I'm pretty sure that I will get my $5 worth.

I finally accepted the fact that I like using Dan in Street Fighter IV, and I'm now comfortable telling people that's who I use. I seem to have a thing for Dan and Sakura since they're both Shoto-misfits. Sean from Street Fighter III hasn't managed to make me feel the same way about him, though. There's something about his rushing tackle move that makes him seem too different to me. I also know that when and if I ever get my own copy of Street Fighter IV, I'll have to endure endless requests to play as Hakan from my younger son. I played Dan because I have an odd sense of humor, so it makes sense that my younger son would take it one step further.

I also finally purchased a Pokemon game - but it wasn't for me. So, 2012 will be filled with frank discussions about evolution of water types versus dragon types, and what moonstones are for - if we can ever stop playing Skyward Sword.

Everything happens during the holidays.

2011-12-18T20:11:00.000-05:00

As usual, it's been too long between blog posts, but I think that it's better to have too much real life going on instead of too much internet life. I have also decided to be more inclusive of my musical life in this space.

The band that I'm in is losing its keyboard player, but we seem to be making the adjustment. I have talked to a few people about the position, but I have not spoken to anyone that I thought would be a good match yet. We're in no hurry to put a new keyboard player on board unless they're really going to work out. For what we do, we need someone with traditional piano skills and modern keyboard chops. Despite all the kids that get forced to play 'Fur Elise' until Zombie Beethoven rises from his grave to eat their fingers off, it's harder than you think to find a substantial keyboard player. And even if you have classical chops - it's no guarantee that you also have the funk.

A big part of what I like about the holidays is that I get to help other people with video game shopping. I was happy to play the demo of The Legend of Zelda:Skyward Sword at the Nintendo Wii kiosk at Walmart this week, but not as happy as my son was. I only played part of one of the dungeons, but the demo also includes a bird riding section, and a boss battle (and my son played all three sections). We explained to a few passers-by that you needed the Wii Remote Plus for the game, but that it improves the swordplay a lot. I had to stop playing after a couple of minutes since the controls are slightly different from Twilight Princess and I didn't want to pick up any bad habits just yet. I was also a lot happier being able to recommend the Xbox360 or the PS3 to people with younger kids now, since Microsoft and Sony have made real strides in the last year in widening their audience. But, my most favorite thing this holiday season is being able to answer the question "Is that Batman game any good?" with "Yes, it's awesome" after so many years of telling people to stay away from any licensed games that weren't "Goldeneye" for Nintendo 64. Oddly, the first Batman game in that series (Arkham Asylum) didn't spend too much time on Walmart's shelf, and I can't even tell you why. It's just as good. Maybe it's because the original game wasn't a holiday season release, or maybe it's because there was some Gamestop promotion that overshadowed anybody else selling the game.

Other than doing some random cubing demos at the local elementary school holiday breakfast while all the kids were throwing snowballs, and at the top of the bridge at our local boat parade, my cubing activity has been somewhat minimal.

Ok, this is really about Sengoku Basara.

2011-10-23T20:13:00.000-04:00

After having been reminded that I had not talked about it very much, except to cryptically refer to it inthe title of an April blog post, it seems I should get around to talking about Sengoku Basara, and its predecessor, Devil Kings.

When I got a PS2, it was the Christmas after it launched. I was all excited to finally have a DVD player and Tekken Tag Tournament and a way to play PS1 games that didn't involve putting the unit on its side. Despite the good reviews, I had avoided Dynasty Warriors 2. I somehow had gotten the impression that it was a strategy game and you were not directly controlling a character, but merely giving orders to an army out on a battlefield and watching it play out. When I first saw Command and Conquer on PC, I was turned off by the indirect control and didn't want to play a PS2 game where I just clicked on a map and shouted at the screen about how bad my troops were. So, I skipped the Dynasty Warriors series because of my misconception about the game, even though it had gotten good reviews. It wasn't a tough thing to skip this game as there were lots of other good games for PS2 that I hadn't played. Since I had skipped this I opted to also skip Capcom's Devil Kings when it came out, since the way it was marketed I thought that they were similar games. As it turns out, they are similar games, but I was wrong about both Dynasty Warriors and Devil Kings.

It is true that Devil Kings takes place on a large battlefield with many characters on screen, and there is some strategy to it, but for the most part, you control a single character and your so-called allied troops don't do a doggone thing other than get in trouble and make you have to rescue them. Most of the weapons in the game are fantasy versions of feudal weapons, and the characters that you play as all seem to have some supernatural power tied in to them. The Dynasty Warriors games are similar in that you control a single player on a large battlefield, and try to meet certain battle conditions. The biggest difference is that the Dynasty Warriors games take place in China around the end of the HanDynasty and into the Three Kingdoms period. Devil Kings takes place in Japan nearly 1200 years later in the Sengoku, or Warring States period.

A friend of mine had played Devil Kings because it had made it down to the bargain bin and it was a Capcom game, so he gave it a try. When he explained the game to me from his perspective, it seemed a little less like a strategy game and more like a conventional action game. I had mostly forgotten about the conversation other than to remember that he had a lot of fun playing it, and went back to playing whatever it was that I was playing. At the time, it was probably Devil May Cry 3 or Pikmin.

Some time later, probably around the time I was looking for a Gamecube copy of Killer 7 last year, I had spotted both Chaos Legion and Devil Kings for PS2 in the really cheap bin in a GameStop that I was driving past every Friday at the time. I couldn't remember with 100% certainty which of the two games my friend had already played, but I thought it was Devil Kings. Then, I couldn't remember if he had played Chaos Legion or not, but both games gave off a Devil May Cry vibe. Devil Kings goes so far as to use the same font for the title that Devil May Cry does. The character on the Chaos Legion box has that same steely gaze as Devil May Cry's protagonist, Dante, and it has some blurbs on the back imploring people that liked Devil May Cry to try Chaos Legion. Since they were both Capcom games and bargain priced besides, I picked up both of them. I didn't want to get one only to find out later that I should have gotten the other one. I started both the games, got a basic idea of the gameplay, and then called my friend back. He confirmed that Devil Kings was the game that he played, and that he had not played Chaos Legion. I got the idea from the opening movies that the art style of Chaos Legion would be much to my friend's liking, so I sent Chaos Legion to him later. (I never did hear if he liked Chaos Legion or not.)

So that leaves us with Devil Kings. As it turns out, the game is a lot of fun, and I had not played anything on PS2 that was anything like it except for the God of War games. Certainly, God of War does a great job of making you feel like you have to fight against an entire army yourself, and I really like the feeling of being able to tear into large groups of enemies (and not have the game slow down like Gauntlet:Dark Legacy does). I looked up some things online about the game, and found out that it was an overly Americanized version of a game they had made for a Japanese audience called Sengoku Basara. They changed the names of all the characters to presumably suit an American audience, they tweaked the attack system a little to make it more stylish like "Devil May Cry", and they made the map of feudal Japan into a more generic looking land mass so Americans wouldn't have to feel they were playing something based on history in the slightest.

Looking at it now, the game looks a little dated, with enemies popping in to view once you get close enough, and some fog in the backgrounds, but the gameplay is still fun. Each level has a map up in the corner to show you where you, your commanders, the enemy commanders, and where the bosses are. The camera is situated behind you and slightly above. It feels like a brawler, or like the aforementioned God of War, as you fight through hordes of enemies with swords and pikes and various other weapons from the era. (Of course, since I tend to play games without cultural context due to playing them at different times as everybody else, I was unaware that this and Chaos Legion is part of a genre referred to as 'hack and slash'.) A couple of characters have guns, but thankfully you are spared the tedium of endless reloading that the single shot rifles of the feudal era would have required. As you fight, you build up Fury Drive, filling up a bar that lets you unleash a super attack when completed. The controls involve two attack buttons, the fury attack button, a jump button, a block button, and a button that modifies your two regular attacks into some alternate attacks. There are a dozen or so characters to choose from but not all are available at the outset. Each time you play through the story of each character, you level up their attributes a little more. Nothing stops you from playing through on Easy a bunch of times to level up, but you only get 70% of the experience points that you would get playing on Normal, and you don't get the better treasures when you play it too safe. As you level up a character you can pick different weapons and different alternate attacks for them. Also, some treasures collected in levels help you modify your attack and defense attributes as needed, and you are given an opportunity to change them around at the beginning of each level. You are given your pick of enemies at each stage, usually one of two or three, but bear in mind that anybody that you don't fight could come up again later. By the last stage, you have no choice in who to fight since they'll be the only opponent left. You can't save in the middle of a stage, but typically the stages last only a few minutes. I really like that you can play a single session and still make progress. I also like that you can play the same level in different ways and potentially reap different rewards. Some levels even give you experience point bonuses based on meeting certain battle conditions.

The game got horrible reviews at the time, partly due to the heavy-handed localization. This seems ridiculous to me, since people playing Devil Kings were largely unaware that there was a corresponding Japanese game called Sengoku Basara, so I can't see why the localization mattered that much to the review score. The Japanese game has characters pulled from history - the leader Nobunaga Oda is the character in Devil Kings called Devil King.

So since Devil Kings was so fun to play, my older son and I were so excited that Sengoku Basara 3 was made available on Wii as Sengoku Basara:Samurai Heroes. The graphics are greatly improved, due in to no small part to Capcom porting their MT Framework engine to Wii as MT Framework Lite. (There is also a PS3 version, which runs on the full-size MT Framework engine.) Two player splitscreen co-op was included, many more stages are available, more items and weapons were included, some characters were added, although a few characters from Devil Kings are now NPC's, and an Ally system was added to single player mode. As you progress through the game, in addition to collecting items, you can collect allies. When playing in single player mode, you can take one ally with you. As you use them more, they level up their particular attribute. Some Allies are suited to fighting on certain types of stages, some have elemental attacks, some are suited to fighting certain types of enemies. Another thing that I really like in the game is being able to see on the map by color what areas you have already captured, and where the enemies are. All the character names reverted to the original Japanese names, so now my son and I now have confusing conversations involving Japanese names and the corresponding stupid American names from Devil Kings.

A little preoccupied, I think.

2011-10-10T21:46:00.000-04:00

I had been working on a blog post for Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 for quite some time, and had failed to remark on what I was actually doing in the game arena altogether. Also, I have been playing more music lately, and that seems to eat into my blogging more than gaming itself does.

Last Saturday, I picked up my third copy of Soul Calibur 2, the GameCube version. I really enjoyed the PS2 version, and didn't seem to enjoy the XBox version as much so far. Not that the XBox version is bad - it's just the only difference in the XBox version is Spawn, who I didn't really 'get' as a Soul Calibur character. The GameCube's exclusive character is Link from the Legend of Zelda. With all of the Twilight Princess and Ocarina and Phantom Hourglass nonsense going around at the house, I felt like I should see what Link was like in Soul Calibur, and I felt confident that we would get our $8 worth out of it.

Last Sunday I managed to get two completely different things done in the gaming arena. First, I went back to Sengoku Basara and finally unlocked Nobunaga. As soon as I did, I was asked by my older son to turn off the Wii so that I wouldn't start a 'Hero's Story' with him. Second, I went back and took another swing at New Super Mario Bros. Wii, only to finish the game and discover a couple of extra boards that I had missed. It's really easy to skip World 8-7. There's still a lot to do, but I was really impressed by how Nintendo managed to keep people engaged during the credits, and give players a substantial reason to get all of the star coins beyond just opening up the various hint movies.

I hadn't really played either game in quite a while, and I think the only thing I had going for me was a fresh approach - but sometimes that's all it takes. I always hear that the number of gamers that finish games is a really low percentage, I never believe the numbers, and I'm always disappointed.

Summer Vacation in Hyrule

2011-08-28T16:34:00.000-04:00

After being disgusted with the nature of Virtua Fighter 4 – or more importantly, disgusted with my inability to do the moves, I decided that it was time to get back on the Zelda wagon. I had finished Twilight Princess some time ago, but #1 son had made it about as far as the Gerudo Desert only to find that the disc stopped loading that area, and that we had a short circular scratch on the disk. Since Twilight Princess became one of the Nintendo Select titles, it was a little less painful to get another copy of the game. We both decided to start new games. Thanks to a mad rush to get through the game before school started a week ago, he is all the way to the last area – but I think that there are several battles at the end that have no intermediate save point, so I'm not 100% sure how close to the actual end of the game he is. He got frustrated with the last battles, and I encouraged him to go back and get the rest of the golden bugs, and to do the clawshot minigame. I am not nearly as far along, both because he has been playing a lot, but also because my younger son has started playing it.

There are some things that #2 son can't do that well, but they don't bother him much. #1 son did most of the boss battles for him, and some parts of the dungeons, but #2 son just wants to run around in the towns. He's not quite reading yet, so he doesn't really interact with the information on the screen that much. He's still excited about being able to chop a wooden sign in pieces with his sword. He discovered on his own that you can pet the goats at the ranch. Even more surprising, he discovered that if you attack a chicken enough times, you can control it for a few seconds. I know that he discovered it by himself, because if #1 had read it on the internet and told him, he would have thought that you had to attack the chicken with your sword (which is much harder than it sounds). #2 son figured out a much easier way - Z-target the chicken and attack it with the Clawshot. I was unaware of the glitch myself – and when a 4-and-a-half-year old says "Dad if you shoot the chicken with the clawshot enough times you can control him" it's typically going to be met with skepticism the first time.

So, it got me thinking. As a gamer, trained by previous Zelda games, or Doom, or Quake, or Metroid, we're conditioned to 1) figure out where we need to go next, 2) go as far as we can until we reach some obstacle, 3) get the thing that allows us to overcome the next obstacle – be it a key, or a weapon, or some device that shows us a passageway that we couldn't detect otherwise, 4) surmount obstacle, and 5) repeat. This series of steps creates very linear gameplay, and it also creates a system where designers shoehorn a bunch of things into areas of the game to make sure you have all the weapons or items you're already supposed to have before you proceed. It doesn't always work – there are lots of fans of certain games that delight in finding and exploiting 'sequence breaks' – but it works most of the time if the person playing the game is trying to play within the perceived 'rules'. Sometimes it would be more fun to just be able to play around, but often we're so conditioned to doing things a certain way that you can't (the designer is too conditioned) or don't (the player is too conditioned) really do that.

I really enjoy playing golf games, but only the 'cutesy' ones. (Does Outlaw Golf count as cutesy?) I don't want to have to mimic a perfect golf swing, I just want to strategize how to get through a fairway and on to the green without hitting poor little animated squirrels in the head. My current game is Capcom's "We Love Golf" for the Wii, and I have to say that it was totally because Chun-Li and Morrigan are unlockable characters (and it was on sale). Often times, I have played these games wondering why they won't just let me wander around the course. You could switch between a walk-around mode and standard golf mode, leave collectible items around the course for you to find, post a sign somewhere on a shed about game techniques, or even put a little bit of extra fan service in terms of locations. You could get to play on the Racoon City Country Club course, or perhaps a series of locations from Street Fighter or Zack and Wiki. I suppose the reviewers would complain that "The only way to get all the extra bonus items is to wander around aimlessly in first-person mode, which is a complete distraction from the actual golfing." I don't like that Gran Turismo can't just figure out what cars that you have are eligible for the race that you just tried to pick and let you select one of them instead of the car that you just switched to three screens ago in the "Garage" because you thought that it was eligible for the race you just picked, but hey – that's just me. One guy's fun new mode is another guy's ridiculous distraction. (Did you know that there are people that have Smash Bros. Brawl and have never played the Subspace Emissary mode?)

I guess what I'm getting at is that it would be fun if we could just get back to the play aspect of playing games. I get annoyed when developers seem to forget that part, and sometimes I am envious of my younger son for being able to do that, even in the most linear of games.

Two New Fighters - Well, not really new.

2011-07-19T19:17:00.001-04:00

I started playing two new fighting games, except they're only new to me. One of them has the number 4 in the title and a Greatest Hits label on it - Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution. The other one is a release from last summer, Tournament of Legends. Both of the games have a SEGA logo on them, but I would argue that it's of no importance in at least one case.

I had played the regular PS2 version of Virtua Fighter 4 many years ago and couldn't get into it at the time because I was playing a lot of Tekken and I seemed to have bad habits from Tekken that prevented me from really digging into VF4. It also didn't help that VF4Evo came out for PS2 just weeks after I finally bought a cheap copy of VF4. In disgust, I traded in my copy of VF4 the next time I unloaded some games. I had only traded in games a couple of times, mostly to thin out my collection to stuff that I'm still willing to play , and I was clearly not playing VF4. I have tried this series several times, and it doesn't seem to click in like Tekken or Soul Calibur or the Street Fighter games do. I suppose that it could be argued that since I haven't been playing Virtua Fighter since the first one, some of the standard conventions of the game are foreign to me and it would take me a while to get into them. This makes sense, I seem to have a similar problem with the King of Fighters games.

So, I suck at it. I can't do the moves where you have to press two buttons and let go of one of the two buttons after a single frame. I haven't found a character that makes sense yet enough that I can move past the button presses and just play the game. But, I can see that this is a great game with lots of depth and strategy because I am familiar enough with Tekken and Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive to see that Virtua Fighter does a lot of the things that those other games do. In several cases, they are more simply and cleanly done in VF, largely because of the 3-button interface. I have a harder time with the combos in VF because they don't match into the muscle memory of the other fighters I have played. I decided to start with Goh, since he is a new character in this version of the game. I have even fewer expectations about him than I might about the other characters, and a strange fondness for him because he reminds me (appearance-wise) of Brian Fury from Tekken a little bit. They have the same manic intensity in their eyes.

As a side note, during the time that I was writing this, I got to play a little Tekken 6. Bryan Fury plays mostly the same, but for some reason he doesn't look as good. Something is wrong, perhaps he fell down in the 'uncanny valley' a little. My favorite new character is the quick and versatile Alisa Bosconovitch. The yodeling music on the sheep board is a laugh riot.

The other game, Tournament of Legends, was originally just supposed to be a gladiator game, made especially for Wii in an attempt to get the Wiimote and Nunchuck controls acting like your sword and shield. The preview of the graphics were somewhat impressive for a Wii game, but as I recall all of the characters were human. Before they had a distributor, the game was just called 'Gladiator A.D. '. In finding a distributor, developer High Voltage went with Sega again, having distributed some of their other more recent games. Around the time of making that decision they ended up changing the game to have more mythological characters in it. I can only presume that Sega wanted them to broaden their audience and go for a 'T' rating. The weapons and the attacks that were shown in the original version of the game were not changed much, only the characters themselves seem to have changed. It probably made the story of each character a little more interesting than if they had just been random gladiators or barbarians. My older son likes the idea of the game, especially being able to switch the weapons and attributes among the characters. While he is perfectly happy using the Wiimote and Nunchuck to control Tatsunoko vs Capcom, he switched to using the Classic Controller for Tournament of Legends after just a few playthroughs. I warned him that we might have to switch, especially if he felt like the motion controls weren't doing what he wanted. My biggest problem with the game is that the camera is placed oddly for a fighting game. The original 'Gladiator A.D.' version of the game put the camera mostly behind your character for single player mode, making your character slightly transparent so that you can see the stance and the movement of your opponent easily. Its revision moves the camera off-axis a little more than that, but it's more like 35-40 degrees now instead of 15 or 20, and the foreground character isn't transparent. Also, you are not always the foreground character, so depending on who is ahead in a round, sometimes the viewing angle switches. If there is a massive swing in the direction of a match, there is a massive swing in the direction of the camera. It's odd enough to play a fighting game from a wacky diagonal perspective, it's even odder to have to play it with your character sort of facing you and not being able to see what move the computer controlled character is about to do because one of its hands are being shielded by their body.

Between the attempted implementation of motion controls and the odd visibility issues, the game is not as engaging to play as most fighting games. The background elements are interesting, as each one has its own quick-time event required to dodge away from various environmental hazards, but after a while you start rooting for the Kraken or the Giant Crab to just take out the two fighters and end the match. The armor system for the characters is also innovative and interesting, but it's hard to direct an attack to a specific area of your opponent when the controls are hard to deal with in the first place. It would have been nice if they had taken advantage of the Wii Motion Plus technology, or at least offered it as an option, but there is the concern that it would 'break' the game and confer too much of an advantage to a Wii Motion Plus player against an opponent with the standard controls. Ultimately, my problem with the game is that it's a step backwards in many respects and High Voltage could theoretically gotten some help in that regard. There's no particular reason that a fighting game for Wii has to look worse than the GameCube version of Soul Calibur. Granted, High Voltage is not NAMCO, but there's no reason they couldn't have gotten some help from Sega. The controls feel sluggish – again, Sega could certainly helped them out with this as well. How a fighting game plays has so much to do with the feel of the controls and the pacing of the action. I'm sure that Sega's AM2 team was busy with Virtua Something-or-another, and I'm sure that even if AM2 had given High Voltage some pointers, they wouldn't have seemed as important as ideas that came from within the team. I really wanted to like this game, and I will still hold out hope for new companies to make a good fighting game every once in a while. Maybe High Voltage Software can take what they learned in making Tournament of Legends and refine it into something that will get their partners at Sega to take notice.

Cubing in Public Places where Alcohol is served.

2011-06-27T21:25:00.000-04:00

Cubing in public where alcohol is involved is a hit-or-miss endeavor. For me, operation of the cube itself doesn't seem to suffer at the one drink level, which is about as many drinks as you will ever see me have. Since I'm still just trying to solve it in the 30-40 second range, but while talking, answering questions, being distracted, or working with really bad lighting conditions, one drink is not going to mess me up as much as other things might.

At a private party where everybody knows half of the other people there and many friendly conversations are bound to spring up, my Rubik's cube schtick is usually fun for a few minutes. People that might be inclined to coolly dismiss my demonstration as intellectual grandstanding when sober might be more vocally appreciative after a couple of martinis. One or two people may be really motivated to learn something. I don't know if that's still the case once the alcohol wears off.

In public venue where alcohol is involved, you have the same challenges with the sober crowd, but magnified. Since I had taken up cubing again, it had happened rarely, but I did have to deal with it a couple of times in the last month or so.

As it happens, I play in a band on weekends. We've just gotten to the point where people know who we are and want to listen to us, but it's not like our fan base is universal. A big chunk of the music we play is stuff that was popular 25 years ago, so the average twentysomething may not appreciate us that much if they rebelled from their parent's taste in music. It also might be noted that for whatever reason, a bar crowd may tend to want heavier music to listen to than the standard radio pop fare. Since we play 80's music, I bring a handful of cubes with me in case a fit of nostalgia breaks out, and some people that I knew from high school don't even recognize me without a cube in my hand. There is a bar that is local to us that we have played at a couple of times with mixed results. We didn't even think that they liked us at first. But, they asked us to come back, and my real cube anomalies were both from that second evening.

We showed up around 11 o'clock, which for middle aged people with kids and day jobs is clearly after bedtime. We were scheduled to go on at midnight, and did not really bring any of our own fans that evening. (It's probably past their bedtime, also.) The band that was already playing sounded to my old ears like early R.E.M. They were a 3-piece with a really big guitar sound, but the vocals were hard to discern. It was loud enough that it's hard to talk to the person in front of you without leaning in and talking directly into their ear. I was listening to the band, standing next to the guitarist and saxophone players from my band and nonchalantly fidgeting with one of my Rubik's cubes. One of the women who was playing pool there walked past us, and gave me a derisive look that let me know that I should not talk to her and how dare somebody try and foist a cheap trick on her or subject her to intellectual grandstanding while she's trying to drink and play pool.

Leon, our guitarist tried to liven things up by suggesting I give her a quick demo. "He's really good at it," he says to her.

I stupidly try to open with the same phrase that I would if there were a normal amount of background noise and I were dealing with a person receptive to the idea in the least. "Satisfy yourself that the cube is really scrambled." She has no idea why I am saying this to her, and I am stupid enough to repeat myself, so she grabs the cube from my hand, annoyed, stuffs it in the layers of her shirt like it was her wallet, and wanders off back to her pool table and the drunk guys in the back playing with the punching bag machine. I was later able to retrieve it once I spotted it on a table in a back corner. Luckily I was able to do so without uttering a word or walking into the back corner, and she treated me condescendingly like I was one of the frail, nerdy kids in high school that she use to spit on during her smoke breaks. She doesn't know the half of it. I kept my distance from her the rest of the evening, and tried to concentrate on playing a good set.

After we played, there was a couple that seemed interested in our band, and we all tried to talk to them while we were breaking down from our set. I gathered that they were not quite as old as we are, but older than the majority of the bar patrons there, and they seemed to like our music. At one point, while we were talking about the 80's music in particular, I showed them my Rubik's cube prowess briefly. They were adamant that if we played a show for them in the future, that I bring a cube with me and show their kids. Then, as a spur-of-the-moment thing, the wife in the couple grabs the cube from me and hides it on her person. I think the intent was to dare me to retrieve it, and having gone through the indignity of the similar situation not hours before, I didn't even have enough of a sense of humor about it to find it funny. The guitarist quickly attempted to retrieve my sense of humor, and sensing the awkwardness, my cube was handed over. In this second case, I'm sure the behavior was intended as playfulness, in stark contrast to the first situation where the interaction shouldn't have happened since the other party had no actual interest in the information available.

For those of you trying to satisfy your morbid curiosity about the music side of me that I don't normally talk about in this space on my blog, check out our band website at www.reverbnation.com/pwl, or find Pee Wee Lewis & The Hues on Facebook.

Wait, here I am!

2011-06-08T07:12:00.000-04:00

So I haven't been blogging lately - my plate has been full with non-gaming things like going to the beach and band practice. As far as gaming goes, I have been lucky to play a quick round of Pikmin or Pikmin 2 challenge mode just before bedtime. My younger son Bubba has been hogging the Wii lately despite his lack of platforming skills and only wants to play Super Mario Galaxy 2. Since the game has been in the machine a lot, sometimes Bubba tells me he wants to see me play. I finally beat the last Bowser battle only to find that there's another galaxy waiting for me.
I was pretty excited to hear Nintendo's official announcement about their new console. I am glad that they decided to make it compatible with both the old controllers and the old games, because if I had to go through another cycle of buying controllers in this economy I really don't think I could. The only problem I'm having is that the new name. "WiiU" - am I supposed to think of college, Homer Simpson, or what I now have stuck in my head?

 Just like

Just like I already have the remix of the Yoshida brothers song "Kodo" completely associated with the Wii, Blur's "Song 2" will be stuck in my head just for the "Weeee Ooooooo" right at the beginning of the song.

Don't say I didn't warn you...

2011-05-11T21:46:00.000-04:00

...but if you are unfamiliar with Angry Birds, or at the very least annoyed by the fact that the only way that you could play Angry Birds would be if you had a trendy Apple portable device that just isn't in your budget these days, you need to try the in-browser version of Angry Birds at chrome.angrybirds.com. Yes, this does mean that you will need to use Google's Chrome browser. I had not played it at all before tonight, and I have to say that it has all of the hallmarks of a good game. 1) It is easy to learn. 2) It is difficult to master. 3) Most objects are self-explanatory. The game does also explain the few things you need instruction for with simple pictographs. My older son was yelling "Kill those pigs!" after just a couple of minutes of watching, and I expect he will give it a whirl tomorrow. It really sucks you in - so keep a clock handy.

Even I have a limit.

2011-05-10T18:00:00.006-04:00

After I finished No More Heroes 2:Desperate Struggle on its easy "Sweet" mode, I thought that I would give Suda51's American debut, Killer7, another try. I had heard so much about it before I played it, and had agonized over purchasing it several times but had passed over it in favor of more action-friendly titles like Devil Kings, Sengoku Basara, and Ghost Squad. Once I finally purchased it, I played about as far as the first puzzle and stopped. My kids clamored for me to put Pikmin back in the Game Cube so that they could watch it. It's more soothing and pastoral than Killer7. Killer7's visuals, although mostly flat-shaded polygons reminiscent of Star Fox for Super Nintendo and the old I,Robot arcade game from 1983, still have some appeal since they were done with so much style. The sound design is good, and the story is wacky enough that even Twin Peaks and Lost fans need to actively pay attention. Sadly, it's not enough.

I had been reminded before that bad controls can ruin a game. I wasn't that excited about Resident Evil 2 at the time that it came out, because the loading screen between rooms and the tank controls were a big turnoff, especially with having to fend off zombies. Even though RE2 had made big improvements over the first game, it wasn't enough for me to want to play it because during the few instances where combat was required, I felt totally ineffective. Since one of the two characters you play as in RE2 is a cop, you would think that feeling ineffective would be a bad thing. The designers played it off by saying that the control scheme increased the player's fear, making something that was only slightly scary somewhat scarier. For me, that wasn't it. It was feeling like I wasn't really controlling the character that kept my immersion level in the game pretty low. I liked the story and the characters, and I even played the Resident Evil light shooter game Dead Aim, since you could actually aim at your targets in a useful way. When Resident Evil 4 came out, I thought that most of the problems that I had with the controls had been fixed. When I tried to show RE4 to my buddies, however, they viewed the game in the context of first-person shooters and were annoyed that you couldn't strafe or even shoot while moving. I was too excited about an over-the-shoulder camera to care at that point. The Wii version of RE4 did me one better by allowing direct aiming with the Wiimote. (Awesome!) So, I was immersed in the game sufficiently.

Now, let's go back to Killer7. Moving the character in that game is mapped to what normally would be the action buttons for a Gamecube game, A and B. A to go forward, B to turn around. Any feeling of directly controlling the character with the... , controller, goes away. You only use the analog stick to aim while shooting, or to pick a direction to walk when there is more than one way to go. Like Resident Evil, you can only shoot when stationary, and you to have to use the R trigger to ready your weapon (which is oddly similar to RE4). Add to this that most enemies are invisible until 'scanned' with the L button, and it starts getting a little silly. So, the controls are wacky to me, and I'm never really 'in' the game. The other disconcerting thing is that the other members of the Killer7, the group that your character is part of, have unique abilities, and you have to run back to a save room to switch when you need to use that ability, and it's another thing that takes you out of the game. In the majority of games, you have a main character that the player identifies with for most of the game. I don't really mind the occasional side mission with another character - The Onimusha series and the Ratchet & Clank series both seem to do this well - but seven feels like too many and potentially distracting. If you could start with anybody from the very beginning so each individual gamer had somebody they could identify with, maybe it would be better, but it's hard to say since I haven't played though enough of the game to really get the big picture on how the 7 different personalities all fit together.

I really like what Suda51's Grasshopper Manufacture team did with the two No More Heroes games, and I know that he worked alongside some of Capcom's people before. I would have liked Killer7 better if it had used the same game engine as RE4, even if only so that I could move the character a little more directly. As it turns out, Suda51 and the Resident Evil team are working together on a new game that should be out pretty soon - Shadows of the Damned. (If you're afraid of Electronic Arts or depictions of demons or sidekicks that are actually weapons that have double entendre-laden names, don't follow the link.) As usual, it will be a while before I play it but the trailers are promising to have horror, action, and Suda51's trademark wackiness.

I also got to see a Nintendo 3DS handheld in person (finally) and was unimpressed with the 3-D. Yes, it's 3-D, but as usual all of the visual cues for depth are coming from the edges of objects and not the surfaces of objects, so we see them as layers like a pop-up book. I did like that Super Street Fighter IV did not try to make anything closer than the plane of the screen, though. (Maybe it's where I had the slider set.) I also like that it had enough horsepower to match SSFIV's painting-influenced visuals. I don't really like playing fighting games on a handheld, though. Usually there aren't enough buttons, but that is not an issue now. Now the only issue is that I didn't like the D-pad that much and the circle pad seemed to only be helpful for fireballs but not dragon punches. If I had chosen a character with 'charge' style special moves like Guile, it might have been easier. Even so, I would rather have a more fighting-game-specific controller in my hands. My current faves are the Nubytech/UDON controllers - I have a Ryu one for PS2 and an Akuma one for XBox. So, as usual, it seems to be all about the controller. I hope that the 3DS controls work better for their first party titles like Pilotwings Resort and The Legend of Zelda:Ocarina of Time. I would expect them to, as they are more suited to those kinds of games than they are suited to Street Fighter. I'm sure I'll eventually deal with it, but if it's too wacky and unintuitive to control I can't be bothered. After all, as much as I like these games, I do have a limit.

We want cake! Where's our cake?

2011-04-20T22:31:00.000-04:00

By this time, I would presume that everybody that had preordered “Portal 2” has had a chance to start digging into it. I really liked the original “Portal”, but I'm not sure what to do about the sequel.

“Portal” places you in a testing facility under the supervision of the Aperture Science Corporation. They are trying out a new handheld device that allows instant teleportation between two surfaces. The device shoots two different colored portals, and only one portal of each color can exist at a time. Your entrance velocity into one portal is your exit velocity out of the other portal, although the relative direction of gravity will sometimes change on the transition between portals. For example, you see a deep chasm below you that you can't jump across. Shoot one portal on the floor of the chasm, and another on the wall above you, and jump down into the chasm. The acceleration due to gravity increases your velocity, and your exit out of the other portal flings you across the chasm that you wouldn't be able to jump across. Granted, this may not be the only way to proceed, but it's nice to have those kinds of options.

As it stands, I could just get the PC version of “Portal 2” at some point over the summer if I think that I will have time to really dig into it, and it wouldn't matter so much when I play it. I'm not that worried about spoilers. I can hold my ears, or not – it won't matter so much since I heard the internet meme of “The cake is a lie” for so long before I actually played “Portal” that I wasn't even sure what it really meant by the time I played the game. It's like when you look at a familiar word too long and start to break it down into letters, or like when Vizzini starts second-guessing himself endlessly (to his peril, I might add) in “The Princess Bride”. Was there really a cake, or did they want me to think that there was a cake? But if that's what they thought I was going to think, then was there any need for an actual cake? Or perhaps there was a cake but also a specific reason for making me think that there wasn't a cake, making me want the cake more knowing I couldn't have it?

Needless to say, I played “Portal” unencumbered by the thought of cake – trying to think in portals was challenging enough. I had even played the predecessor to “Portal” - “Narbacular Drop”, but that game while sharing the basic mechanic of a portal gun, doesn't play that much like “Portal” due to a less interesting set of physical rules. I am looking forward to returning to the world of “Portal”, even though GlaDOS, the computer that runs the testing facility in the game scares the crap out of me.

(Side note: I answered the phone at work one afternoon about a month ago, only to find that I was being robocalled. Not just a crappy recorded message to tell me to refinance my mortgage – but high quality voice synthesis, and an adult female voice just a little too close to Ellen McLain's, the voice actress who played GlaDOS in “Portal”. I hung up the phone and had to get up and walk around to shake off the feeling of dread.)

The real problem for me is that of the expanded game this time. No, I'm not talking about all the new game elements, because any series of games will always add or subtract elements as it progresses. I expect that. I'm talking about the cooperative mode. It would be one thing to just wait for the right moment to play the single player game and immerse myself in the experience, but now I fear that if I wait too long to play it, I may rob myself of the opportunity to play the co-op part of the game. I hear that the console versions have split screen local co-op. Maybe I'll have to teach my older son to think in portals.

Follow your instincts.

2011-04-10T20:01:00.001-04:00

There was a day, years and years ago, that I thought that I saw an upright bass in a pawn shop quickly through the open front door as I drove by. As it was around the corner from the house, it was easy enough to go and check on what I thought I saw. Oddly enough, what I thought I saw turned out to be a large camera tripod that had been fully extended - but they did have an upright bass in the store.

For me, this was an important lesson in following my instincts.

So, today when the little voice in my head said to stop by the Play N Trade store because I'm never usually near it, I listened. I scored the DS version of Desktop Tower Defense, which my son was pretty jazzed about, but what I was really excited about was scoring a copy of Metroid Prime Pinball, also for the Nintendo DS handheld. I had given up on this game since it was released pretty close to the original release of the DS. One of the nice things about Play N Trade are that they still have games and accessories for older systems there - there were a few dozen N64 games, quite a number of PS1 and XBox games, and I even saw a few Dreamcast controllers thrown in there along with the pink Xbox360 controllers that some retailers are having a hard time moving.

This is not about Sengoku Basara.

2011-04-07T14:38:00.000-04:00

I have been trying to work on a big writeup of Sengoku Basara, with a whole compare and contrast to Devil Kings section in it, only to realize that it's getting in the way of me actually playing the games. I think I need to go back to shorter blog posts for a while.

Over this last weekend, #1 son and I went to get Okamiden and No More Heroes 2:Desperate Struggle at our local Gamestop. Since I waited so long to pick up NMH2, which came out at the same time as Tatsunoko vs Capcom, it was only $13. I was completely losing my mind when the clerk asked me if I wanted a used copy for a dollar less, and I know they make more money from used copies, but I did not want to be their test pilot for a used copy only to save a dollar.

Since the weekend, #1 son has spent a lot of time playing Okamiden, predicated on finishing his math homework first. I even got him to finish his weekend math homework Saturday morning before he ate his breakfast because I told him that I wanted him to get that out of the way before we purchased Okamiden.

Okamiden is a DS game that is a sequel to Capcom's Okami. You play as Chiberatsu, a pup of the wolf goddess Ameratsu featured in the original game. Evil once again rises up in the land, and Chiberatsu solves puzzles and meets friends to help combat the menace. Since a main feature of the game is using written symbols to interact with your environment in a variety of ways, it is quite suited to the Nintendo DS and its touchscreen. Instead of drawing symbols with an analog thumbstick or drawing in the air with the Wiimote, the stylus and the touchscreen allow you to draw more naturally. In battle mode, just drawing a slash across the screen is an additional attack. If you need the sun when it is dark, draw a circle in the sky. If there is a crack in a wall, draw a circle with a diagonal line through it (like a Q, but upside down) and a small cherry bomb appears to open the wall for you. As you go through the game, you find more friends and brush techniques that allow you to make further progress. I can wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone that liked Okami, and to anyone who likes action/adventure games, unless you're stylus-averse.

Once we got back to the house Saturday with both games, #1 son quickly absorbed into his DS, and I didn't really talk to him that much the rest of the day unless he was laying in the way. I didn't start No More Heroes 2 until both kids were otherwise occupied, and I had dishes to wash anyway.

No More Heroes 2:Desperate Struggle is the sequel to Ubisoft's critically acclaimed Wii game by Suda51 and his team at Grasshopper Manufacture, No More Heroes. Our protagonist, Travis Touchdown, gets back in the assassin business about the same time he discovers that his one real friend in the city of Santa Destroy has been brutally murdered by a group of thugs. Armed with a beam katana (that's what you call a l*ghts*b*r if you don't want to have to pay George Lucas a nickel every time you say it or swing it around) and an array of wrestling moves learned from countless hours of TV wrestling, Travis once again works his way back up the assassin ranking ladder to fight the #1 assassin and avenge his friend.

It's very easy to pick back up, even though it feels like a long time since I've played the original No More Heroes. The biggest difference I noticed was how much harder it was to recharge the sword. In the first game, you aim the Wiimote skyward, hold the 1 button, and shake the Wiimote back and forth. (You can keep the jokes about what that looks like to yourself.) In this game, all of that is the same but it seemed like it took a lot more effort. Of course, it could be that me shaking a virtual beam katana handle to recharge my virtual batteries were beating the heck out of my actual Wiimote and the actual batteries. I had to swap batteries at least once, although the state of all the rechargeable AA batteries in my house probably has more to do with a few marathon sessions of New Super Mario Bros. Wii than anything else. The one thing that I don't like about the game is that you can't just walk around the city any more, but the giant empty city was the biggest complaint that most reviewers made about the first game. I really like the empty city and driving the motorcycle around, or even walking. It made the city seem more real and gave it a sense of place. Now, that is replaced with a menu system overlaid on a map of the city. I might have preferred the option of going places instantly via the map when I wanted to, but also being allowed to venture out into the city when I wanted to. Some of the things that you found by wandering around the city in the first game are in treasure boxes in the boss levels in this game. I haven't figured out how to view the collected items yet.

I can only recommend this game to adults that have a firm sense of reality, since this game is fairly detached from reality in quite a number of ways. There is an excessive amount of violence, a fair amount of profanity, and a couple of unrealistic characterizations of female characters. While it is not required, the game will make a little bit more sense if you have played and finished the first one already.

In other news, I finally got a new set of wheels. What am I excited about? I am excited that all the doors open, the A/C works, I can fit stuff in the back, and there's a 1/8” Stereo jack marked “AUX” that I can hook the audio from the Nintendo DS into. I sense a mobile session of Korg DS-10+ in my future.

Today is the beginning

2011-03-27T07:18:00.000-04:00

of the 3D revolution. North American retailers are going to have the Nintendo 3DS handheld game system for sale starting today! While I am not one of the people that will be buying one today, I feel oddly compelled to go watch the carnage. Also, I'd really like to see the 3D for myself if possible.

I think this may have repurcussions in some of the big box stores - it might actually hurt their 3D TV sales a little, as some customers knowing that this new technology is now available will wait for it to trickle up to larger screens instead of dealing with glasses. I will be listening for store employees that make odd comments about that, also.

Viva la 3D Revolution!

P.S. My older son is _really_ going to bug me for Okamiden if we go out to the store to look. I can hardly blame him.

New Street Fighter Characters! + News from the Kiosk.

2011-03-12T10:12:00.000-05:00

New Street Fighter Characters!

Well not really new, but how on earth would I know? Thanks to the sad state of the American arcade, it would take quite a bit of driving to get to an arcade where I could play Super Street Fighter 4 instead of just down to my local mall or movie theater - and I haven't been to the movies in months, so if they had put in a SSF4 machine I still wouldn't know.

In December of last year, an Arcade Edition of Super Street Fighter 4 was released that includes Yun and Yang from the Street Fighter III series, Evil Ryu from the Street Fighter Alpha series, and a new version of Akuma simply listed as "Oni". "Oni" loosely translates to English as "ogre" - fans of one of Capcom's other series, "Onimusha" may already be familiar with the word. I was hoping to include a link to some video - there's lots out there on Youtube, but since most of it is shot on handheld cameras it's not quite as good as some of the demo videos of the other characters that are available that are direct video feeds. The other problem is that Capcom has been taking down some of the videos of Oni Akuma and Evil Ryu, although it's hard for me to figure out how they choose which ones to take down. It's easy as pie to just search "Oni Akuma", and they're not all taken down, just some of them. As of this writing, there are still plently there to see.

Yun, Yang, and Evil Ryu play largely as expected. While not 100% identical to their counterparts in previous games, it's close enough from what I am able to see.

Oni is a little different and should not be mistaken for Shin Akuma. His super moves are different, and some of his strategy has changed because of changes to his special moves. He doesn't have a 4-way teleport move like regular Akuma does, ((f,d,df or b,d,db) + (PPP or KKK)), but he does have an air dash, and a new move (d,df,f + K – strength determines distance) that moves him forward quickly with a rushing punch. The Roundhouse (Heavy Kick) version will cross up if performed close. It's no teleport, but it could get you out of a corner in a jam. It's hard to tell how safe this move is if blocked because people seem to want to show video of it connecting more than video of it being blocked. His (f,d,df +K) move has been changed from its usual diving kick guessing game to a high-hitting smash that can be used as an overhead if done as an EX move (two kick buttons instead of one, uses one level of meter).

Word is that these additional characters will be available for download for consoles at some point in the future for owners of Super Street Fighter IV. The original Street Fighter IV console version was not programmed in such a way so as to allow additional characters, but apparently Super Street Fighter IV is. Let's hope.

News from the Kiosk

I noticed something new at our local Walmart game kiosk - they had the demo version of LEGO Star Wars 3 for PS3 and for XBox360. My older son and I fired it up on both units in an attempt to see how they looked. Sadly, the XBox360 was not set up for maximum resolution and it looks rather fuzzy compared to the PS3 version. There was no way to adjust the XBox's output resolution from demo mode. I just know that the PS3's video output was set correctly because I was there the first morning that they fired up the PS3 and know that the TV was correctly set for some flavor of 1080. Sadly, the XBox360 looks like it's running in standard-def because it was only scarcely better than the Wii running Mario Sports Mix on the other side of it.

But what about Mario Sports Mix? I have played the hockey and the dodgeball parts at the kiosk. The dodgeball did not have intuitive controls, so I floundered against the computer. The hockey had great controls, so I thoroughly trounced the computer even though I started from way behind (0-3) at nearly the end of the first period. I think I finished the second period with a score of 15-5. I'm going to pass on this game unless someone else can convince me otherwise.

Emergent Gameplay

2011-03-06T19:45:00.000-05:00

I talked with a co-worker after work the other day about bout Super Smash Bros. Brawl in comparison to other fighting games. I like to talk to him about it because he is more skilled at the game than I am, and I can gain some insights into what makes the game tick. While I am certainly no expert at Smash, I admire the straightforwardness of it. Smash Bros. takes a different kind of strategy than traditional fighting games. We digressed into talking about what makes a great game, and I think that we were both able to agree that the games that were the simplest in premise but that had lots of options as to what could happen were the most satisfying games for us. I rattled off Katamari Damacy and Tetris right away, because they are games that you can explain easily. We quickly realized that we could have easily been talking about baseball or soccer or basketball.

My co-worker suggested that American Football had no hope of ever really catching on in other countries to the degree that it has in America because its rules are too complex to easily explain and games tend to run long. Then it occurred to me that those restrictions had never stopped cricket from being spread across the globe everywhere.

Then, I got to thinking about fighting games again. Why was Street Fighter II the game that took off and not Street Fighter? Why didn't they just come out with Darkhorse vs Data East 4 starring the dudes from Karate Champ, Fighter's History, Diet Go!Go! and Tumblepop squaring off against The Mask, Hellboy, Abe Sapien, and The Goon? Aside from the fact that Data East has been defunct for several years?

It's not special moves, Street Fighter had them. (Heck - Atari's incredibly lame Pit-Fighter had 'special' moves.) There is no difference between Ryu's fireball motion in Street Fighter and Street Fighter II. You rotate the joystick from the crouch position to the direction that your character is facing, and then press one of the punch buttons. The difference is that Street Fighter II had gameplay that evolved beyond the rules that the programmers gave it. It didn't hurt that it added variety in the playable characters, and made playing against human opponents more of a focus, but the animation programming of the game led to certain things behaving in unexpected ways. In Street Fighter, if you do the motion for a fireball with correct timing, a fireball surges forth from your character's outstretched hands. If your timing is incorrect, then you only see the animation for the punch button that you pressed. In Street Fighter II, if you press the jab button (the quickest, least damaging punch) quickly while doing the fireball motion, you may see a couple of jabs come out, and then the animation of the fireball motion cancels out the animation of one of the jabs. In addition, the logic for determining if you have done the motion for a special move correctly also accepts letting go of the required button instead of just pressing it, giving you a second chance to finish the motion correctly. Many special moves in Street Fighter II can cancel the animation of some of the regular moves. Also, when an attack lands on an opponent, there is a window of time where the opponent is stunned, allowing for another move to be landed in quick succession. This is referred to as a 'combo' although it has very little to do with cheese filled pretzels or how you get your school locker open. When Street Fighter II was programmed, these combos were another unknown. Hit stun and block stun were designed for making the game feel like the programmers wanted the game to feel. The combos that emerged from it were only discovered by people actually playing the game against each other. Other annoying little things were discovered like tick throws - getting your opponent to block a normal attack and then throwing them during the time that they are stunned from blocking the attack - and other variations on exploiting stun and move canceling.

Certainly, this is not the only way you come up with emergent gameplay. Sometimes, it's just as simple as leaving a bunch of objects in an environment with known individual properties and waiting to see how those things react with each other. The Grand Theft Auto games from GTA3 on are a good example of this, because the wide variety of items and environments combined with pedestrian AI behavior, although we have seen things like this before on a smaller scale. In Adventure for the Atari 2600, the erratic behavior of the bat flying around and swapping objects can turn success into death or failure in seconds.

I would contend that unanticipated behavior can come from any sufficiently complicated system. If you have only one thing in an environment, then you have only one interaction. If you have two things in an environment, you have each thing interacting with the environment plus one more interaction of the two things interacting. Three things, six interactions. Four things, ten interactions. The number of interactions increases as the square of the number of objects.

Warning: Math Content - For x objects, the number of interactions is x squared plus x all over 2. With five objects, we take 5, multiply it by itself, (that's x squared) and get 25. Add 5 more to get 30. Divide the whole thing by two, and that's 15 interactions. For ten objects, ten squared is 100, add 10 to get 110, and divide by two to get 55. There is no danger of getting half an interaction, even though we're dividing by two at the end since we're dealing with integers (whole numbers). If x is odd, x squared is also odd, so adding them together is an even number. If x is even, x squared is even, so adding them together is still even.

For those of you that skipped the math paragraph above, suffice it to say that with more stuff comes a lot more complication. Also, remember that this math having to do with interactions technically also applies to the code used to write the game in question. If the designers of a game are looking for a finely crafted experience, they usually make an effort to play test (or get their stable of testers to play test) through most of the possible interactions both as a way to make sure the game has as few bugs as possible, and to make sure some unforeseen interaction doesn't totally break the game. The play testers also have to deal with design and difficulty elements of the game, so it's not like looking for glitches are their only emphasis. With the limits of time available to make a profitable game, this means that there is limited time to do play testing, so sometimes games will ship with bugs or glitches. Sometimes the glitches are minor, and sometimes you're up to version 1.7 and every patch description starts with "Fixes exploit where..." Now, as far as I know, the Street Fighter games haven't needed major patching - even if the game has been slightly unbalanced, we as players have managed to deal with it. In light of that, maybe Capcom needs to make a first person shooter with Hadoukens.

Marvel vs Capcom 3, February 2011 edition

2011-02-23T06:55:00.002-05:00

So, Capcom's new fighting game Marvel vs Capcom 3 has been out for a week or so, and I forgot to mention about the last two characters that were included in the game. Hsien-Ko is a character from the Darkstalkers series, and you may remember Sentinel from Marvel vs. Capcom 2.

Sentinel seems just as in-your-face as ever, even for being a rather large, slow character. He has a wide variety of beam attacks and long-range punches to make up for his slow movement speed, and one of his super moves is a large ball of electricity easily as big as Chun-Li's 'Kioushou' move and pushes opponents into the corner from mid-screen. In the X-Men comics, the Sentinels were sent out to crush all the mutants, whether they were X-Men or not. In Marvel vs Capcom 3, Sentinel is out to crush everybody like he did in MvC2.

Hsien-Ko is a nice change, since she is unlike the majority of Capcom fighting game characters in that she has a move that reflects projectile-type special moves. My older son reminded me that Karas in Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom can reflect projectiles also. It is a little odd, with her being a jiāngshī, or "Hopping Corpse" and with her sister taking the form of a piece of paper on her hat. Her inclusion in the game has less to do with zombies being the 'in' thing right now and more to do with her being a popular and unusual fighting game character.

The final boss of the game is Galactus, world-eating enemy of the Fantastic Four, but no members of the FF are directly in the game for reasons unknown to me. Super Skrull has all the moves of the Fantastic Four, but that's about all you get. Capcom apparently tried to build a Silver Surfer character, as he is a friend of the FF and usually warns people about Galactus eating their planet for lunch, but they weren't able to make it work with the surfboard and didn't want him to look like Iceman. Maybe we'll see them in the endings.

So, I have already seen a great deal of complaining posted on the internet regarding this game.

Couldn't they have come up with something better since Marvel vs Capcom 2?

No. This game wasn't even in the works until after other developer licensing agreements expired in 2008, and Capcom got them back again so it could republish MvC2 as a downloadable game. Capcom wasn't even ready to officially announce MvC3's existence until 2010. Just because fans had been whining about it for years, didn't mean anybody with any authority had been working on it.

Why doesn't this have more game modes? Can't they change it up more like Smash Bros., Mortal Kombat, or Tekken and have more game modes?

Let's take this one in three parts. Believe it or not, despite the great number of game modes available, any group of Smash Bros. Brawl players that I've come across tend to have items turned off if they're playing "seriously", because they don't want random item drops to ruin their skill. Correspondingly, they will likely have a favorite stage that they tend to play on to nullify any perceived undue advantage some character might have. So, despite the numerous modes available, I've seen very few of them used.

Mortal Kombat has had an adventure mode crammed into several of the versions (although the first one in Mortal Kombat:Deadly Alliance was just an overgrown training mode), and a simple Kart racer, and a rudimentary puzzle game. Come to think of it, they even managed to make a battle chess game in Mortal Kombat:Deception. Compared to Mortal Kombat:Shaolin Monks, where the adventure mode was the entire game, you might think that the Mortal Kombat fighting games suffered from having some of the staff work on the extra modes.

Tekken's extra game modes have been the best ones, but still aren't quite as good as the fighting game itself. Tekken Force Mode in Tekken 3 was mandatory to unlock one of the characters. I have no explanation for Tekken 3's Tekken Ball mode other than to say that it's volleyball for crazy people. Tekken Bowl, a bowling game on the Tekken Tag Team disc was fun, and it was too rudimentary a game to be sold on its own disc so I find it better that it was included with Tag instead of being a bargain bin title. I almost think that it was some sort of a tech demo for their developers working on the PlayStation 2 for the first time. Tekken Tag Team also included a training mode with enough hand-holding for new players, which seemed like a good choice with new people coming on board for the PlayStation 2. Tekken 4's Tekken Force mode made a lot of improvements from Tekken 3, and still managed to use the characters in mostly the same way as they do in the regular part of the game. However, for all of the improvements with Tekken 4's Tekken Force mode, they abandoned all of that for a Jin-only side quest for Tekken 5. Thank goodness that they included the arcade versions of Tekken 1, 2, and 3, and StarBlade in Tekken 5 - well, I'm not really that excited. Tekken 3 is adequate, but Tekken 1 and 2's visuals don't hold up well against the modern games. StarBlade's visuals are even lower fidelity than Tekken 1, but since it's a space shooter, it suits it well and so the gameplay isn't dragged down by old-school visuals.

So, with all that being said - it does still beg the question of why they couldn't have at least included the same modes that were available in Super Street Fighter 4. I don't know if a bevy of complaints will get them to release a patch, but I seriously doubt it.

Why is there a simplified control scheme? I want my six buttons back!

I think I covered this before, but Marvel vs Capcom 2 already had a simplified control scheme. (Medium attacks were removed to make room for two Partner buttons.) The new one allows for three attack strengths more easily to accommodate fireball traps and attack range variability. It worked well in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, and once you got used to it, it was more reliable than Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (for me, anyway).

I have been pleasantly surprised to see that now that the game is out, people are not complaining about the graphical style. I would be surprised at a $5 costume pack that comes out March 1st and only covers six of the characters, but since it's Capcom I'm not so surprised. That does seem to be the way they handle DLC. My sincere hope is that the game sells well enough that they decide to make a Wii version and decide to include the DLC characters. What? It could happen.

Marvel vs Capcom 3 was released February 15, 2011 for Playstation 3 and XBox 360 by Capcom and is ESRB rated "T".

A clear case of fatigue.

2011-02-15T19:11:00.000-05:00

The long time music game series Guitar Hero is getting the ax. Should I have said 'axe'? I guess it's no surprise. It's the same reason that we're not buying Tony Hawk Skateboarding games like it was 2001. It's game fatigue.

Colored dots come streaming down a screen, and you play the dots as notes in time with the music that your are listening to via a guitar-like plastic controller, and it's basically the same from Guitar Hero 1 on. From Guitar Hero 1 to Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, not counting DJ Hero or handheld releases, that was 12 games in the span of almost five years - from November 2005 to September 2010. What makes that even more ridiculous is that Guitar Hero (2005) and Guitar Hero II (2006) were the only releases of their respective years, which means the last ten games were crammed into the last three years of that. By comparison, the last ten Mario games stretch all the way back to 1988 - although that's only Mario platforming games and doesn't count all the sports titles, Super Smash Brothers, or Mario Party games.

Of course, it's no coincidence that Activision took over the series from the original developer in 2007. Harmonix had been purchased by MTV Networks/Viacom right after Activision acquired RedOctane. RedOctane was the other half of the original Guitar Hero/Guitar Hero 2 dream team, the half involved with the plastic guitar controllers. Harmonix went right to work on a conceptually identical competing game, Rock Band which added drums, bass, and vocals to the existing guitar paradigm. Guitar Hero was quick to add the other instruments in an effort to keep up.

In an eerie parallel to the previous Tony Hawk situation, Activision brought in developer Neversoft to work on Guitar Hero once they took it over . Also, similar to the Tony Hawk scenario, they dedicated themselves to cranking out sequel after sequel. I'm not sure about Tony Hawk in this respect, but a real problem with Guitar Hero is that playing it against an opponent doesn't do anything for its replay value. Once you really learn the song in Guitar Hero, that's pretty much it. The competitive aspect shoehorned into Guitar Hero 3's so-called 'guitar battles' helped put me off of Guitar Hero for good. Well, some of you would say - but Guitar Hero is so much fun at parties when there's a group playing! That's correct - but that's cooperative, not competitive. So probably there are a bunch of agreed-on songs that everybody likes, and you play those, and that's about it. If you do it again, the experience is largely the same. Even in a platform game, it's harder to replicate the experience exactly and additional playthroughs may yield some new area you didn't find the first time, and it's not like there would be a hidden alternate ending of a song if you changed one chord at a certain point to something that wasn't on the screen. Well, there could be, but since a musician thought of it instead of a game designer, it can't be in the game. There aren't new special moves to learn, or an added-in character in the new version that forces everyone to re-learn all their strategies, or a game-changing new weapon to try. If you want a new song, that might be something genuinely new, but it's a lot of work for something that only a few will purchase as a download, and many will resent as a standalone release.

At a certain point, I would guess that fans of the music game genre were starting to wonder if they should run down to their local Guitar Center and pick up some guitar stands. If you had the original PlayStation 2 Guitar Hero guitars, they didn't work on PlayStation 3, so you might have been better off buying new guitars with the sequels. If you switched to Rock Band at some point, you had to buy new guitars for that, also. Then, the newest Guitar Hero games included super Expert Plus modes for even more plastic button pushing, and Rock Band fights back with MIDI-compatible instruments with more realism and little 25-key keytar. Did I mention that there were drumsets? Do you even have enough room to set up a fake plastic drumset where your game console is without moving a couch or a bed? I wonder how many people opted to set up their Guitar Hero rig in a garage so that they could get the full garage band experience. Also, did these new little faux-garage bands take advantage of the newer features of the Guitar Hero games? Are these the sort of people that would get extra mileage out of the game by creating their own music? At a certain point, playing Guitar Hero makes me just want to practice real guitar more instead of playing to the canned tracks - perhaps they could have garnered my favor with a substantial version of "21st Century Schizoid Man" in Guitar Hero 3 instead of waiting until Guitar Hero 5.

At a certain point, I think the audience was sick of paying over and over again for ostensibly the same experience every time. There's a sweet spot - games like Perfect Dark (that Rare made right after GoldenEye) and Super Mario Galaxy 2 have it - where all the things that you wished that you could have put in the first game end up in the second game. It was the same experience, but better, richer. Once you get past that sweet spot, it seems like some publishers just crack the whip on the developers for frequent sequels to get the short-term cash in lieu of building a long-term brand.

So, dear readers - what game genre or brand will get ruined next?

Never say never, Mr. Bond... I mean, Mr. Ebert.

2011-01-31T08:42:00.000-05:00

Since I assume that I am brain damaged in some way, I can rarely tell the difference between genuine conviction in an idea and the low-down dirty attempt to invoke or simulate conviction for the benefit of some greater force. Every once in a while I run across a carnival barker or used car salesman that lets me see behind the curtain of deception a little, and I gain some tiny insight into how that mechanism works. But, it's not foolproof, and I am often tricked into thinking that I'm being tricked.

Had he not tried something similar before, I would not question Roger Ebert's recent declaration that 3D Film will never 'work'. Had he not made a bold statement some time ago that video games could never be art like a movie or a book or a painting, I might have believed unquestioningly that there were no larger forces at work and his current Luddite position against 3D movies was completely sincere. The house of cards that his video game argument was built out of came crashing down, and he even went so far as to apologize and admit his foolishness in breaching the topic - but it got thousands of comments and many times more page views in the meantime. Why shouldn't I think that he has an ulterior motive again?

Mr. Ebert has made some improvements this time. This time he has the opinion of a film editor to back him up, and not just some guy that worked on two effects shots for a direct-to-DVD horror film. He has the support of Walter Murch, editor and sound designer on some of Hollywood's most visually and sonically impactful films. To summarize Mr. Murch – the basic flaw with 3D films, in his expert opinion, is that we're asking our eyes to focus at one distance (the distance from your seat to the screen) and converge at some other distance (the distance from your seat to the perceived object on the screen where your eyes think they are looking). This is mostly problematic when the perceived object is well in front of the plane of the screen, asking your eyes to converge well ahead of the focus distance. I'm sure there is a substantial crowd of people that will cry foul at Mr. Murch's assertions on a variety of grounds. The first and most obvious point will be that similar complaints were lodged against sound and color when each of those were introduced to film. Another point is that a conventionally filmed movie already does funny things to our sense of perspective, focus, and convergence anyway so why should the 3D part matter? Yes, some people walk out of 3D movies with headaches. It may be that some people's brains aren't happy with the effects of simulated 3D. I would argue that those people now know not to watch movies in 3D, and in most instances can go watch the same feature in 2D in the same theater. I would love to do a thorough survey and testing of people that have issues with 3D films, but I'm guessing that the MPAA has no interest in a study being run by an engineer/mathematician/film nerd with no neurology credentials.

Part of the reason Mr. Ebert has to say this now and loudly enough for his peers to hear, is because Nintendo is about to put glasses-free 3D in the hands of hundreds of kids fairly soon. The handheld Nintendo 3DS comes out in March of this year which includes a glasses-free lenticular 3D top screen and adjustable depth slider. Nintendo is already adding 3D photography and looking into movie releases on the system. If you can't deal with the 3D, you can turn it down to nothing. If it turns out that it's a horrible flop, he has to say something now to look like a genius. Of course, if he turns out to be wrong, there's no harm because everybody will just go "Oh, that Roger Ebert. He's just a grumpy old man that doesn't get it." I think we heard that cry from the commenters before on the video game/art thing. The other part of the timing of this had to do with Mr. Murch's letter to Mr. Ebert primarily being a response to a tiny side note in Mr. Ebert's review of the new "Green Hornet" film where he complains about the 3-D film being "dim" - and we're talking about apparent brightness and not about a plot written for morons. I think on a certain level, we 'get' that there won't be quite as much light heading to our eyeballs since we're wearing glasses that are intentionally keeping some of the light from our eyes - the image that's for the other eye is kept out by polarization. That particular problem is surmountable, seeing as there have already been great strides in improving the reflectivity of movie screens since we started watching 3D movies. I think the biggest problem, and perhaps it is a problem that Mr. Ebert himself does not realize (or has blocked out in some strange case of dissociative amnesia), is that he has watched a lot of lousy 3D movies thanks to their recent resurgence. Walter Murch worked on one of the most-watched 3D movies of its era, Captain EO. But, like most of the other badly constructed 3D movies, they stupidly try to send a meteor way out in front of the screen, causing the very focus/convergence problem that Murch is complaining about. Another issue that I would take with the current crop of 3D movies is that many of the big-name films that were done in 3D were actually shot in 2D and had the 3D done in post-production, which is about like trying to take a still picture and turn in into a pop-up book, which looks like, a movie made out of a pop-up book. Everything tends to look like flat planes. Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton - that one's totally your fault), several Harry Potter movies, The Last Airbender, Superman Returns, G-Force, and the lousy (no offense to Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, or the late Pete Postlewaite) 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans were all shot in 2D. I find it sad that Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil film team has to show up all of the alleged A-listers by using James Cameron's most excellent camera system.

Knowing that I was going to attempt to write about this, I trotted down to my local Sony Style store, and the kids and I put on some funny shutter glasses again and looked at a few things on the 3D TV's in the store. 3D TVs are inherently different from the movie experience - liquid crystal shutter glasses synchronize to the quickly alternating frames displayed on the monitor so that each eye only sees the relevant frames of the film.

We gave a nature documentary a try, and a little of Alice in Wonderland - I think it was the scene where Alice meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee while she's still small - and a little bit of Gran Turismo 5. Alice in Wonderland comes off very unreal - Tim Burton spends too much time trying to break the plane of the screen, and having things fly around in the foreground. Looking at the screen without the shutter glasses on, the objects on the screen are very far apart, much farther apart than they would be in your normal field of vision unless they were only a foot away. Gran Turismo 5, on the other hand, was hard to tell that it was in 3D unless you put the glasses on - and then the landscape was so well-rendered that it actually made it easier to drive because I had a better sense of the space. The nature documentary was somewhere in between the two in 3D quality - I am always wondering how they aim cameras in a 3D system, and whether there is any convergence, or whether they just aim the cameras straight ahead and make you slowly crazy with the unreality of it. The 3D needs to be a positive experience for the audience, and add to the experience, and more importantly not take you out of the experience.

Most people that I know that have had a positive experience with 3D movies have had their most positive experience with animated features. How to Train Your Dragon, Legend of the Guardians and Coraline were all mentioned. James Cameron's Avatar is easily at least half animated CG. Of course, in a computer animated feature, it is comparatively simple to add a second virtual camera to the performance data, and render the film in 3D. In processing a 2D film, you would almost have to create a CG wire frame virtual set and map the 2D film back on to it, draw in a bunch of missing textures not normally visible, and then add in the second virtual camera. The flaw in a system like that is that the natural variations in lighting in textured surfaces would not occur correctly and it would still have the flat, pop-up book effect. Conversely, I found that Legend of the Guardians had a very natural 3D look most of the time, largely due the the wood and feather textures giving the viewers very good visual depth cues, and most of the shots were at a distance that helped that work. I don't remember them breaking the plane of the screen except possibly in the opening credits.

So, I contend, that it is possible to make a good 3D film. Certainly, some things need to be done differently - maybe there should be less things jumping out of the screen, maybe there shouldn't be so many jump cuts in a 3D film. People seem to show up and pay for the bad ones that are out now, so I think to say that they don't 'work' is a gross overstatement that some box office numbers would certainly disagree with. A problem like that should not keep us from our path of self-improvement. Additionally, learning how to make a quality 3D film may give us important insight into the nature of vision and how the brain processes it. Just because a new media possesses some new technical challenges is no reason to dismiss it out of hand.

Marvel vs Capcom 3, January 2011 edition

2011-01-25T18:42:00.001-05:00

Over the holidays, without much fanfare, they added Haggar and Phoenix to the roster for MvC3. Haggar is finally making it to a fighting game long after his Final Fight compatriots Guy and Cody. Guy first appeared in a Street Fighter game in 1995 (Street Fighter Alpha), and Cody followed soon after in 1998 (Street Fighter Alpha 3). No, I don't consider Saturday Night Slam Masters a fighting game, it's a wresting game which is arguably its own genre.

Haggar certainly has a lot of moves that are similar to Street Fighter's Zangief, but the Red Cyclone never had to whip out a big lead pipe in the middle of a combo.

The powerful and beautiful Phoenix finally graces the screen, waiting for us to be able to handle her awesome power. She has homing fireballs, air fireballs, giant Kikoken style fireballs, flaming rushdown moves, and great range on the ground. I guess if Capcom's Dante and Trish are fair game now, there's no reason to hold back on Marvel's mightiest mutants.

Akuma and Taskmaster were just recently announced, but it took a few days for them to show up on the Marvel Vs Capcom 3 website. Akuma is simple - he's been in so many games that most people expected to see him. He's more of a draw for flashy players than Ken is, with his more varied moveset, air fireballs, and punishing super moves. Typically, this is offset by Akuma taking more damage from opponents. True to his original nature as a hidden character, Akuma is an unlockable character based on accumulating 'play points' during the course of playing through the game, similar to the home versions of Marvel Vs Capcom 2. Akuma is packed full of more moves than ever, and his air combos look pretty vicious. Here's his trailer.

Taskmaster is getting the same unlockable treatment as Akuma. In the comics, he's a mercenary with the uncanny ability to mimic anyone's moves in battle - just the sort of thing that reminds you of Mokujin from Tekken or Olcadan from the Soul Calibur games. Here's Taskmaster in action.

You'll see him doing a lot of Cap's and Spidey's moves here, plus some serious arrow action. I wonder if that means we should expect to see Hawkeye later, since this game is already Avengers-heavy.

On a side note I'm pretty proud of #1 son for finally defeating Megahammer in Super Mario Galaxy 2 after being stuck on that board for weeks.

Bowling in Video Games

2011-01-04T22:00:00.021-05:00

I have a great interest in bowling, although I don't own my own ball or shoes. Part of the game's appeal for me is that it's simple in premise but there is great depth to it. This also explains why I like the Katamari games and Tetris. The physics of bowling is complicated, but not so much so that you can't get your mind around everything that's happening. This is the sort of thing that makes a game a likely candidate for video game simulation. However this has not been without some major missteps.
Bowling for the Atari 2600 was a joke - one of my bowling teammates from school had mastered it within weeks. She explained to the rest of us that as long as you stood in one particular spot, you could get a strike every time. That feature notwithstanding, it also rarely left spares typical of actual bowling based on where the ball hit the pins. I ignored bowling video games for a while, hoping they would eventually catch up. I picked up Gotham Games' Big Strike Bowling out of the PlayStation 1 bargain bin, only to find that they incorrectly spaced the pins making it basically unplayable. One of the Spiderman games for the PS2 had a mode where Spiderman swung down the lane, swinging into a group of webbed-up enemies arranged like bowling pins. I think Bruce Campbell's voice-over was better than the game, but to be fair I am a big fan of Bruce Campbell. I was somewhat satisfied with Tekken Bowl in Tekken Tag Tournament. Despite the fact that the pins were top-heavy and the lanes had no gutters (errant curve balls just head off into the crowd), it felt a lot more like bowling than a lot of the previous games that I had played. Even so, I managed to bowl at least one 300 - since I figured out Gun Jack's aiming system. Now, some of you will probably mention that they had come out with some serious bowling simulators that I should have been more satisfied with - for whatever reason I passed on all of these, instead opting for only semi-serious bowling games. This is in keeping with my overall character with a gamer - on the golf side, I like Hot Shots and Outlaw Golf a lot more than that Tiger Woods game. I also enjoyed the bowling modes in Super Monkey Ball, SMB2, and SMB Junior . There was still something not quite right about these games, but there was not a real way to fix it - after all, it's not like they could rig up a mock bowling ball full of sensors and let you swing it around the living room or anything.

So, that brings us to Wii Sports - or if you are just now playing Wii, possibly Wii Sports Resort. Each has a bowling mode in it, but they are not the same. Wii Sports has a fairly simple interface, and the controller doesn't really allow for too much nonsense with how the ball is released down the lane other than liberally allowing you to loft the ball. Wii Sports Resort, since it uses the Wii Motion Plus controller, is a little more advanced in its interface and allows you a choice between manual ball release and automatic ball release. If you played the original Wii Sports, you are already comfortable with the manual ball release. Automatic ball release it what it says, I will discuss it no further other than to say you lazy slackers should be using manual ball release.

For those that are unfamiliar, here's the basic motion. You start by holding the Wiimote upright (the nose of the controller where the IR sensor is pointed at the ceiling) and holding the B button. (It's the trigger-shaped button on the back.) You swing your arm back like you would if actually bowling, and your character starts walking forward on their own. As you swing your arm forward again, you release the B button to let go of the bowling ball. The speed of your forward arm swing and the timing of the release determine the initial velocity. Here's where it starts to diverge between the two versions.

In Wii Sports, a somewhat late release of the B button will give the ball some loft - in other words, it will carry through the air a little before it lands and the static roll angle of the controller (presumably at the instant you release the B button) determines how much spin there is on the ball.

In Wii Sports Resort, a late release of the B button does not appear to yield any loft, as I have been unable to do it at all. Spin on the ball is determined in a more dynamic fashion, by how much roll and in what direction happens to the controller during your throwing motion. A slight amount of tilt on the controller yields almost no spin now, or a negligible amount. Let's imagine the face of a clock, and the hour hand is the normal vector to the plane of the surface of the Wiimote where the all of the buttons (except for the B button) are located. If the controller were face up, we'll call that twelve o'clock. If the controller were face down, where the only recognizable feature was the B button, we'll call that six o-clock. For example, if in Wii Sports you were curving it a couple of dots to the left by angling the controller to ten o'clock, in Wii Sports Resort, you would have to go from twelve o'clock to ten o'clock during the swing to achieve a similar effect.

This simple change, going from a static to a dynamic input for curving the ball, makes Wii Sports Resort even a little bit more like actual bowling. The amount of curve you were able to put on the ball in Wii Sports was not anything like what you might see from a pro bowler. Now, the experience of cranking a killer hook deep into the pocket can happen in the living room without one of the kids breaking a lamp. (Maybe.) My typical hook is from ten o'clock around to four-thirty - I have to stand way to the left to make that work, but the pin action is much more impressive than if I just throw a straight ball into the pocket.

My other favorite addition to the bowling in Wii Sports Resort was the 100-pin game. It's still ten frames, but it's 100 pins instead of 10. The score is computed the same way, so a perfect score is 3000 instead of 300. Converting spares of more than three pins are nearly impossible unless they're clustered together. And what's even better, is that this awesome bowling game comes with a bunch of other games - Ping-Pong, Archery, Basketball, ~~Beating Cartoon Avatars With a Bamboo Stick~~ Fencing, Wakeboarding, and a few more. So, if you have a Wii and liked Wii Sports, you should get it. If you don't have a Wii yet but want to get in on the bowling action, the new bundles include both Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort (unless you get the Mario 25th Anniversary Red Bundle in which case I would guess you're not going to be doing much bowling even if you do get the regular Wii Sports).

Adventures in Travel

2010-12-31T09:04:00.005-05:00

I took a day over the New Year's weekend to get out with the family. My wife and #1 son had gone to a really cool place on the other coast called Mote Aquarium, and they wanted all of us to go this time. They have a tremendous emphasis on husbandry, so they raise a lot of the species that they have on display instead of going out to capture everything.

I was the most impressed with the cuttlefish. They also have an octopus there, and the octopus certainly seems smarter than the cuttlefish, but he's shy and doesn't interact with his toys all the time. The cuttlefish are five in a tank, and they interact with each other a lot.

In addition, they have a lot of the scary/ugly specimens like frogfish, rockfish, fire worms, and a stargazer. In the same room as all the ugly guys, there's a big tank that makes some jellyfish circulate around without touching the sides like they were in a clothes dryer or something.

They had some giant squid, but as they don't really keep in captivity they were all preserved specimens. Also, they're bleached out and kinda creepy.

After the aquarium closed, we went to a nearby beach that Google maps gave astoundingly bad directions for. Despite the bad directions, with a reasonable idea of where it was that we were supposed to be headed, we managed to get there before it got dark. On the one hand, I want to say what beach it is so I can specifically complain about the directions in the hope that they will get fixed, on the other hand if they get fixed I worry that this beach will get overrun. So, I will just be vague and say that it's more a place for finding shark's teeth than laying out and getting a tan.

#2 son wanted a water fountain, we found a rather simple one on the side of a wooden walkway leading to the restrooms, We also found two large women washing their feet in the water fountain instead of the Dalek-looking shower devices by the beach - they were redoing the boardwalk so maybe they weren't working yet. A smart-looking Japanese-American man in a Callaway Golf pullover showed the two women that there was a hose bib at foot level, much better for washing their feet off, and they kept on with their slow efforts at the water fountain. We interjected between washings to take a drink. #2 son had a little, and said he didn't need any more. I tried to ask him what it tasted like, but with the two women there, he wouldn't say anything to me. One of the women answered for him and said "Yucky." Since #2 son wouldn't spit it out, it couldn't have been that bad. I tasted some, and it was somewhat metallic - not unlike the majority of well water in most of Florida. I told the women that it wasn't that bad, slightly metallic tasting, and that I had done a lot worse for water in the middle of nowhere. I picked up #2 son and started walking away. It had been enough time that the second woman would have finished washing her feet - and then I heard the water run again, a slight pause and a lot of spitting and choking. Presumably, they were not from Florida.

SuperMonkeyCube, Toy Consultant

2010-12-25T21:56:00.005-05:00

Typically, I am asked about video games and computers by coworkers, friends, and family for suggestions and advice. It has only been in the last ten years or so that I've become comfortable enough with talking to people that I am willing give a hand to random shoppers that look like they need help. The holidays is when it's really needed - people shopping for TV's don't always know what they're getting themselves into, and some parents are largely uninvolved with what their kids play so subsequently have no idea what they're doing in the video game aisle at all. Someone has to do it - the employees are more worried about making sure they don't run out of things and have the right prices posted, and I can certainly understand their priorities.

This year, I think I managed to do some good without feeling like it was ruining anybody's day. The most disappointing thing I had to tell anyone this holiday season was that they still don't make Halo 2 for Mac - but you would think that Apple owners have been used to that kind of disappointment for years. One good company (Bungie) dedicates themselves to making a good first-person-shooter for Mac, and Bill Gates had to go and buy them so the second game was a XBox/PC exclusive. So exclusive, in fact, that they had to give longtime Windows XP users the short end of the stick with their first, misguided forays into the brand of 'Games for Windows'. If you wanted to play Halo 2 on PC, you had to upgrade to Vista. At least these days, Boot Camp or Parallels can get you around a problem like that. When Apple was still using PowerPC CPU's, it was not the norm for Apple to get games ported over from the PC version.

I had to tell a woman looking for printer ink that she had to go to the local office supply store since Walmart doesn't stock that much Epson compared to the other brands that they have - she didn't seem that upset about that since she was so happy with the printer in general.

I explained some of the mysteries of the XBox 360 to an actual Microsoft employee early one morning before having any Mountain Dew. He was lost looking at all of the plastic cards for points and Live subscriptions.

My favorite one of all this season was getting someone in the LEGO section at ToysRUs to consider the more technically difficult 'TECHNIC" line of products instead of just getting their kid larger and larger regular LEGO sets that really don't increase in difficulty much. Hopefully, there's a kid somewhere putting together a backhoe that really moves like a backhoe - and it's my fault.

Holiday Cubing, and a lot of explanations.

2010-12-22T19:08:00.003-05:00

I hear the same things over and over from a variety of people when they see me manipulate a Rubik’s Cube in public.

“There’s like a mathematical formula to it, right?”
“I used to just take the stickers off.”
“But how do you know where it’s supposed to go?”
“I can only get (two/three) sides.”
“I could never do it.”
and the variation
“I tried looking it up ( on the Internet ) and I still couldn't figure it out.”

I will address these here as well, but I was so excited about a new question that it compelled me to talk about this topic at all. I finally got a new question the other day, standing in line at a local big box store in the supposed “Express” lane.

“Is there a rhythm to it?”

I’m sure that this is a reaction to the way that I do some of the multiple-move manipulations (known to cubers as “finger tricks”) in a way that doesn't bind up the mechanism of the cube. If you try to do some moves too fast for a given cube, the pieces just hang up on each other and don’t turn or possibly you will pop a piece out. In a competition, I suppose that you would want to push yourself as much as possible, and the occasional pop would be acceptable if it meant you had other fast times. In line at the store, popping a piece is largely unacceptable to me and it detracts from the showmanship aspect. If people are entertained a little, then it’s rewarding. It’s a nerdy sort or rewarding, but I’ll take it. If I’m digging under the edge of a cash register for a plastic piece, it’s a headache. So, the solution is to keep it at the speed that you know the cube will work well at. For me, even if they’re timing me, it’s better to keep it at a reasonable speed most of the time so I can look ahead to see the next thing to do.

So let’s go back to these other ones.

“There’s like a mathematical formula to it, right?”
The answer is “Yes”, but I always tell people “No”. That mostly has to do with the fact that I’m not able to easily explain why small groups with limited transformations behave in a complex way with rigorous constraints. Maybe I need to re-read all of my set theory and the Christoph Bandelow book “Inside Rubik’s Cube and Beyond” again. The other reason is that when most people say "math", I assume they're talking abut square roots, long division, and ax²+bx+c=0. I never assume they're talking about set theory, bijective functions, or anything with the word 'abelian' in it.

“I used to just take the stickers off.”
I typically tell people that adhesive never works as good once it’s been exposed to air. If you take the stickers off, not only will they likely be misaligned, but they will never stick as good as they originally did. When I re-sticker a cube, it involves cleaning the cube down to the plastic and sometimes even some light abrasion so new stickers have a fighting chance on a new surface.

“But how do you know where it’s supposed to go?”
This is the part where I start showing people - often by removing a piece of the cube - that there are edge pieces and corner pieces, and the center pieces attached to the framework in the middle of the cube. Explaining to them that the center pieces don't move relative to each other is somewhat difficult - I try to relate it to a die. One is always opposite six, five is always opposite two, three is always opposite four. No matter how you turn a die, the relative positions are still the same, and the framework of a Rubik's cube is no different. So, knowing the particular combination of colors on an edge or corner piece dictates where it should go. This is about where I start losing people, because once I pop the piece back in and start turning the faces of the cube, most people see 54 stickers again instead of eight corners, twelve edges and six centers.

"I can only get two sides."
This one I can believe, since it is possible to get two adjacent sides with only three pieces (two corners and the edge between them) completely correct. Those three pieces would be the pieces that comprises the edge between the two correct faces. The remaining ten pieces could be incorrectly placed. If the remaining pieces were correctly placed, there would only be two corners and five edges left, and if they were able to get as much as that done, they would have a real chance at the entire cube. Getting two opposite sides correct might be more difficult since 16 pieces would have to be correctly oriented, but no pieces would have to be correctly placed. This scenario seems unlikely for someone that can't actually solve a cube, I'd have to see it firsthand.

"I can only get three sides."
For as many times as I've heard this one, I never believe it. I'm going to have to start calling people out on this one, or at least pressing them for more details. It involves far too much of the cube being completed. When I solve a cube, the only time I have three sides done is when I am left with only two edges both of which are correctly placed but incorrectly oriented. Again, if you can get this much of the cube done, it seems unlikely that you would be completely unable to do the remainder. Most of the people that I know that have tried to solve the cube on their own fared much better once the corners were resolved, as a lot can be done with a cube without disturbing the corner pieces to move edges around.

This seems like a good time to mention that a cube cannot have only one edge flipped, or only one corner twisted. Edges flip in pairs, corners twist in opposite pairs or three in the same direction. You also cannot have only two pieces out of place. You can have three edges or three corners out of place, or two corners and two edges out of place. Those are the minimums. If you take a cube apart, and reassemble it at random, you only have a one in twelve chance of putting it in a solvable state. I suppose that some of these people that have done two or three sides are fighting against a tampered-with cube, but I don't really know.

"I could never do it."
You could be right about that, but it's true for a lot of things that if you think you can't, you can't. I don't find it to be any more challenging than playing bass or typing, and I would think that playing violin or trombone would be a lot harder than doing a Rubik's cube.

“I tried looking it up ( on the Internet ) and I still couldn't figure it out."
This is the part that I can understand - the standard notation for cube moves is not intuitive to everyone, especially when you're not thinking of the cube as having fixed sides. So if you see

RUR'URU2R' (or R'D'RD'R'D2R if you're old-school top-down) and you don't understand it, but you want to - feel free to ask.

Completion Bonus?

2010-11-27T07:11:00.005-05:00

The day after Thanksgiving doesn't always feel like a Friday. Sure, I could go out to the stores and score some awesome deals, but I think it's the sort of shopping one would have to do without kids in tow. Frankly, I felt a little zombified - or maybe it was food coma, nobody was going to school, I wasn't going to Walmart. It seemed more like Saturday than Friday. I did a little bit of laundry, wrestled with the weed whacker, and put up a few strands of Christmas lights.

In between loads of laundry, I decided to pop in Pikmin 2 into the GameCube. Like its predecessor, once you beat the main game once, it opens up a "Challenge Mode". Where Pikmin has you play in the various areas from the single player game and try to grow as many Pikmin as you can in one day, each of Pikmin 2's challenges has you completing a small underground dungeon. Olimar and Louie command a small army of animal/plant hybrids that they call Pikmin - they are able to manipulate objects in the environment, and you cannot. You call them to you, throw them at objects to make them attack or carry them, and you have to figure out which of the five types of Pikmin are suitable for the task at hand. You get points for hauling back treasures, time left on the clock when you finish, and for how many Pikmin you have when you're done. There are 30 of these, unlike Pikmin's 5 areas in Challenge Mode. They are not all available at once, so you have a screen that shows you a leaf for each board that you have available, which turns into a white flower once you have completed it. If you are able to finish a board without losing any Pikmin in battle or to environmental hazards, it shows a pink flower instead of a white one. So, for years I had 24 pink flowers and 6 white ones on that screen. At some point I came back to the game and reduced it to 2 white ones, and then over the summer I reduced it to only one white flower.

Now where was I? Yes, in between loads of laundry. I pop the game in Friday, thinking I will give that last white flower another chance. Why do I bother to get them all? I bother to get them all because I know that the game has one more cinema that I haven't seen that is only unlocked by getting all pink flowers in challenge mode. I know that this movie is called "Louie's Dark Secret". I'm sure I could have just gone on youtube and watched the video, but I felt that it would be more rewarding if I actually did it myself. Happily, I finally got it - I went a little quickly and skipped a few treasures in the interest of having more time on the last level of the dungeon, and it paid off. My score was not as high as it could have been, but you get a pink flower for not losing Pikmin, and the score doesn't really matter. I'm not going to spoil it here, since I don't want to ruin it for anyone else. However, I will say that actually getting a perfect run on the last board was way more rewarding than the bonus movie. The one that I had not done until yesterday is the Emperor's Realm, and there are lots of opportunities to screw it up. The first four levels of the dungeon are easy enough, but each one has things that will trip you up and lose a Pikmin or two if you're not careful. The last level is genuinely difficult in the face of the time restriction. There are only three enemies, but only one of them has the key to the exit. A little bit of luck helps. If you don't get the key the first or second time, you don't have quite enough time or opportunity to defeat the third Emperor Bulblax.

Pikmin 2's bonus movie was cute - I think it might have been funnier for me if I had gotten it while I was still playing the game all the time and was more wrapped up in the storyline - but it wasn't much of a reward for mastery. Resident Evil 4 had the Handcannon that you got for skillfully getting a 5 star ranking in all of the Mercenary Mode levels, and that seemed like a reward. It actually gave you a reason to go back and replay the single player game, especially if you were able to upgrade it to infinite ammo. It completely changes the dynamic of the game without having to change any other part of the game - because you go from carefully conserving ammo to John Woo-style shell casings everywhere. Yes, it makes the game easier, but if you have already completed the game the hard way, it's a fun reward.

HD Radio's last stand

2010-11-17T14:45:00.005-05:00

HD Radio - which is neither High Definition nor Hybrid Digital, but instead just a brand name intended to make us think they meant one of those two things - was really trying to get people interested this holiday season. I really have to hand it to the consortium behind HD Radio. They're trying awfully hard to make their system viable for consumers. It's inexpensive, there's no subscription fees, it gives people more choices over things to listen to, and there are even hand held ones about to be available, but I suspect that they may have missed the proverbial boat.

Sadly, like over-the-air digital TV, there are a large number of people that could take advantage of it, but most of those people are paying a monthly subscription for a slightly better service, even despite the current economic climate. Some are just choosing to do without entirely. ( I think I am in the second category because I can't be bothered to change the stereo out in my car.)

I guess in the case of HD radio, the impediment for me is that between my CD player and analog FM, there's usually enough for me to listen to most of the time that I don't feel like I need to upgrade. Sure the sound is better, but that strategy stopped working a while ago. I cite as evidence the low adoption rates of SuperAudioCD, HDCD, and DVD-Audio and instead a move to lower fidelity mp3 players.

What's even more amazing about the current batch of HD radio ads that I hear on the radio is a lack of a specific product. At least when you watch a Pixar movie on DVD, they're hyping how awesome Blu-Ray is, and telling you what Disney and Pixar movies you can get on Blu-Ray. With the HD radio ads, it's more like:

"HD radio is awesome. Just ask us and we'll tell you. Go buy one anywhere!"

I used to hear Circuit City branded ads for HD radio, and I've been hearing a few for Radio Shack, but in addition to those, I've also hear a lot of generic unbranded HD radio ads (presumably bought by the consortium to increase their reach). I guess that this holiday season is some sort of all-out-last-ditch effort to get people on HD radio.

I suppose it couldn't be worse than the sky-is-falling approach they took on TV's "Switch to Digital!" But my real question, now that some of the holiday tinsel has cleared - did anybody actually get HD radio as a present? Do you even know anyone who has it?

MVC Novermber 2010 update

2010-11-17T08:17:00.009-05:00

I was happy to see that She-Hulk made the official roster for Marvel vs Capcom 3 - maybe not as happy if it had been a surprise, as she was another character that had been on the leaked list months ago. I was a little surprised to see Zero on the Capcom side, since he got such a lukewarm reception in Tatsunoko vs Capcom 3 (although not as bad as Volnutt's) even though he was on the leaked list. I am under the impression that people want the plain, vanilla, regular, standard issue Mega Man before any of the other guys from the franchise show up. Certainly, I would understand fan's annoyance if it were one of the other franchises - like if a game had Gouken and Sean in it, but not Ryu, or Nero and Arkham, but not Dante.

The thing that cheesed me the most about the most recently posted roster was not the fact that the inclusion of Spencer from Bionic Commando escaped my notice, but the three little letters next to the newly posted Jill Valentine and Shuma-Gorath.

D.

L.

C.

I'll show you the one for Shuma here.

It is my opinion that having DLC characters in a fighting game splinters the audience, and makes playing online more of a pain in the neck than it needs to be. I have no issue with DLC outfits, since they don't affect the gameplay.

And of course, if you get the crazy special version that includes a one month unlimited subscription to Marvel digital Comics and a fancy art book, they'll include the Jill and Shuma-Gorath DLC when they come out. It's a $70 version, though. (I presume the regular version will be $60, of course.)

I hope that for a $10 premium we can at least get a Jill Valentine with that cute beret that she had in MvC2.

A quick video- Cubing with restrictions.

2010-11-13T13:42:00.001-05:00

I brought the nerdy cube stuff today. It's a cube that's partially superglued together so you can only move two adjacent faces. I've had this for a while, and even though people talk about this particular subset of possible Rubik's cube moves from a mathematical sense, I haven't seen much in the way of discussion of how to solve it or its features. We'll declare the right face (yellow) and the down face (red) the two movable sides. Once both the URF corner and the URB corner are correctly placed, all of the corners are correctly placed. Once the three right face edges UR, RF, and RB are correctly placed and oriented, the remaining edges are all correctly oriented. So, the solution usually is:

1. Solve edge UR.
2. Solve the two corner-edge pairs (URF + RF) and (URB + RB).
3. Orient D corners (they are correctly placed automatically).
4. Permute D edges (the are correctly oriented automatically).

If there are any new-school cubers out there, you might make U and R the movable faces and solve DR first - upside down of what I just said. I originally started with the Nourse method, so I'm a little biased to R and D moves, even though it's a little harder to see what you're doing. Amazingly enough, this bias has overcome everything - even the fact that I'm a lefty who cubes right-handed.

Cheese or Twinkies?

2010-11-10T12:22:00.000-05:00

I may have a problem with food.

I say this in particular because this morning I was madly searching my office for a cheese stick that I, in fact, had already eaten minutes before and have no recollection of.

Certainly, this is not as serious a problem as anorexia or bulimia, and I don't expect there to be a telethon for cheese amnesia anytime soon. Also, I'm calling dibs on "Cheese Amnesia" as an album title or a song name. It makes me think of how I fondly recall some things from the 80's until I actually see how bad they were.

But, back to the food thing. So I realize that while large portions of the world are undernourished because they don't have the sort of land that's conducive to farming, or don't have the resources to farm on the sort of scale that would actually feed the citizens, in America we tend to have the opposite problem with a similar result. We have so many food choices, and they are wildly stratified by price. What tends to happen is that inexpensive foods are consumed because we feel hungry, but the actual nourishment is a little secondary to price concerns. Who wants to go through the bother of cutting open an avocado - if it's even ripe enough to eat in the first place - if there are some perfectly formed Cheetos in that bag over there? Who wants to make a hummus wrap and take it to lunch if you can get tacos easily in the drive-through? Why would I want to have Lipton Brisk that tastes like instant tea instead of real tea?

Now if it's been shown that we're willing to forgo a lot of things to gain convenience, why hasn't someone made really healthy eating more convenient? Oh yeah - there's no money in it. The most important things that most people could do to improve their heath are quitting smoking, moderate exercise, and eating less. Not less butter, not less red meat, not less soda - just less anything. Figure out how many calories you normally have in a day, and pick a number a little less than that, and see if you're losing weight. Think I'm crazy? Check out Mark Haub's Twinkie Diet.

Taco Bell news, hot off the packet.

2010-10-30T07:04:00.001-04:00

Our regular trio of taco sauces Mild, Hot, and Fire (although that's a stretch since the only difference I can discern between Hot and Fire is Hot has more water added to it) now has two new partners in the condiment bins - Verde and Fire-Roasted. The astute among you will notice that the packets are the same size as the other sauce packets, but say Border Salsa at the top instead of Border Sauce. Verde is in a green packet, not unlike the color of Kermit the Frog. Fire-Roasted is in a maroon packet, or maybe garnet. (Not ready to go out on a limb and say that it's purply-brown.)

Taco Bell has had "Green Sauce" for as long as I can remember, but they have always done a poor job of letting customers know that they have it, so it led a meager existence on the steam table with a small ladle in it, getting baked half to death. It was mostly a green chile sauce, and didn't really have much in the way of a tomatillo flavor. The Verde Border Salsa has tomatillos as its third ingredient, after water and green chiles. While most of you that have had real Mexican food will look down your nose at this packet with its soy additives and preservatives, this is a real leap forward for salsa verde in general. I think that if the public warms up to this newly accessible flavor, it will mean great news for tomatillo growers and aficionados (except for the if-you-like-it-now-because-I-liked-it-before-then-it-sucks hipsters).

The Fire-Roasted salsa has a smoky flavor, like what you might expect from a sauce that said "adobo" or "chipotle" on it somewhere, but the ingredients seem to indicate that the tomatoes are fire roasted. This isn't a bad flavor, but it's not for everyone. If you have inclinations for barbecue sauce and hot peppers, you might see if this is for you.

Unfortunately, between this newness of the sauce and the general popularity of Taco Bell on a Friday at lunchtime (especially the store in question), it was difficult to decide whether drive-through or walk-in was the better bet, but I took my chances with walk-in so that I didn't leave the car running. The drive-through line was backed up well past the speaker, but I also saw once I got in that they were similarly backed up inside the store. I saw six or seven people standing around by the counter and a couple more at the soda fountain. As it turned out, only the person in front of me had not ordered yet, and he tentatively went up to the counter to order shortly after I got there. He kept looking over his shoulder the whole time, like the Feds were watching him and he was just waiting for them to close in. I can't hear what he orders as the store is quite loud, and the man in front of me is ordering in broken English. I also can't make out what the cashier is repeating back to him, since she speaks a different variety of broken English.

Then, the source of the backwards looks appears - the man's wife walks into the store. He goes to talk to his wife for a second, away from the cash register. The talk, nod heads, and he turns back to the cashier and starts walking away, with an open hand that he waves as if to say "No, no, forget my order, we have to go". This is the part that I am most surprised about. The cashier gives him the most exaggerated "No, you didn't" look, including the side-to-side head move. Somehow, she calls him back to the register to make him finish placing the order that he has not even paid for yet. After watching him be bullied by the cashier in front of his own wife, I decide that perhaps I should go to my safer neighborhood Taco Bell and order through the drive-through.

I did grab a couple Verde packets before I left, though.

Is it really HDTV?

2010-10-12T22:30:00.003-04:00

It is currently estimated that around 10-20% of people paying for High Definition TV, and have a TV that could support High Definition, are still not actually watching any HD programming because their equipment is not correctly connected. What's odd, of course, is they haven't really noticed the difference. I would imagine that there is some amount of placebo effect – you are paying for HDTV, so it would be horrible to admit that you're not actually watching HDTV. On some level, perhaps some of our 10-20% know that there is something not quite right, but they don't know how to express it or they don't have any basis for comparison.

It doesn't help that between the switch to digital television, several format wars, and no less than six ways to hook up a television to a signal, the average TV watcher isn't really sure what the right way to connect the equipment is. Also, with the wide variety of devices out there, it's hard for the average person to know what the best way to hook them to their TV.

Coax – When we think of cable, as in cable TV, this is usually what we're talking about. This is the most common way that we get TV signals around in the analog world, but that's not to say that we can't get a digital signal through it. If you plug a coax cable into a device with a coax input, there's no guarantee that you'll get a visible signal, because the device you're plugging into has to be able to correctly decode the incoming signal. It's the proverbial box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get.

Composite Video – This is an RCA connector, usually marked with a yellow connector body or a yellow strip around the connector body. This is the lowest tier of analog video. I remember that this one is the single video cable because a 'composite' is something that is formed from more than one ingredient and the ingredients remain distinct. In this case, the ingredients are the brightness signal and two signals of color information all multiplexed together into a single signal. (You don't need three signals of color information because you can figure out the third signal of color from knowing the brightness and the other two color signals.) In decoding these signals from each other, there's a small amount of inaccuracy which mostly occurs in sharp transitions from one color to another or from light to dark. We perceive this as softer edges when we're viewing a video processed this way.

If you're watching something on a VHS tape, this is as good as it's going to get. A better cable won't help.

S-Video – This is a 4-pin mini DIN connector – if you didn't know it was supposed to be plugged in a television, you might think it was for a PC mouse or keyboard. (Pro Tip – Don't try it, you'll bend the pins.) This is a little better than composite video, because the brightness signal has been separated from the two color signals. It's a little sharper than composite because the brightness is separated out, but the TV still has to decode the color signals from each other. This is mostly found on larger analog TV's and older DVD players - although some of you may remember the awesome Commodore monitors that were small TVs that supported S-Video.

Component Video - Technically this should be called 'YPbPr video', but I've never heard anybody actually call them 'Yipper' cables and it would take somebody a lot more pedantic than me to call it something that strange. I do see 'YPbPr' marked on the jacks on TV's and DVD players. These are RCA connectors, just like the composite video cables, but they're marked with Green (Y) Blue (Pb) and Red (Pr) This is one step farther than S-Video. The brightness signal gets its own cable, and the two color signals also both get their own cables.

It is not until you get to this point that you can really expect anything like an HD signal making it to your TV, but as always, consider the source. If you have a Wii or one of the previous generation consoles (Xbox, PlayStation 2, or GameCube ), and a TV with a component video input, getting the console-specific component video cables will insure that you can get the best picture possible. One caveat - GameCubes manufactured after May 2004 were made without the output jack marked "Digital AV Out" and thereby cannot have component video cables connected to them. Nintendo made it so you had to buy the component video cable from them directly instead of making it available in stores, and then wondered why hardly anybody bought them, so they stopped making GameCubes that could output better video.

DVI - This stands for Digital Video Interface, and the likely place to see this is on a computer video card. There are a couple of different versions of this connector, but it's hard to tell them apart without counting all the pins on the end of the connector. The connector body is the same in all cases, it's just not all of them have all of the pins connected. It's a large connector, almost as big as the old 36-pin parallel connectors that printers had before USB. Some early cable boxes had this, presumably so you could show off your brand new digital cable on a LCD computer screen. If you are connecting a computer to a large flat screen display, DVI is the way to go - but if the display only has HDMI inputs, it is possible to convert a DVI signal into an HDMI signal - but just the video part, of course. You probably will want to know your display's native resolution before you try to hook it up - if you're not sure what that means, ask questions before buying cables.

HDMI - HDMI stands for High-Definition Multimedia Interface. It's been designed to support a wide variety of video modes, and even allows devices hooked up via HDMI to communicate with one another for the purposes of detecting the correct video mode to display. If you have it available, use it. It also supports multichannel audio, but since I'm trying to keep the focus of this on video, we will save that discussion for later. Some newer DVD players use this connector, and most Blu-Ray devices and HD cable boxes use this connector.

Whew. I managed to make it all this way without using any of the video mode descriptors, but now I must explain them. The first two words I need to explain are interlaced and progressive.

A standard-definition TV picture as it is currently broadcast has 480 lines of visible resolution. Imagine 480 lines drawn horizontally across your TV screen, each one below the next. We'll call the line at the top of the screen "1" and the line at the bottom of the screen "480". Most television signals are 30 frames per second, so that's 30 pictures per second of TV, but the way that it is drawn is not 30 pictures in a row, one every 30th of a second. What happens is that all of the even lines of the first picture are drawn in the first 60th of a second (so that's line 2,4,6,8, etc. all the way to 480) and then all the odd lines of the first picture (1,3,5,7,...479) are drawn in the second 60th of a second. Then all the even lines of the second picture, then the odd lines of the second picture, and so on. This is called 480i. The '480' represents the 480 lines of resolution, and the 'i' lets us know that we're talking about interlaced video.

Alternately, there are video modes where all of the lines of the picture are drawn in a single pass. Your computer monitor does this, whether it is CRT or LCD or something else. The advantage of this is that contours drawn on the screen tend to look less flickery or less jagged. In interlaced video, a sharp line horizontally across the screen may seem to flicker up and down slightly, a diagonal line may look slightly jagged, and a vertical line might look ghostly. With the entire frame drawn at one time, these effects are reduced. Once you start watching DVDs in a progressive video mode, you might actually be able to read the credits instead of squinting at all of the blurry white letters on a black background! With DVD players that support progressive scan, you will have to use either the component video connectors or HDMI connection (if available), and then enable that feature in your DVD player's menu. This output will be 480p. 480 lines of resolution, and progressive scan output which means every line of video is drawn in a single pass. This, by the way, is still not HDTV. They give 480p a little bit of a break and call it 'EDTV'. The 'E' stands for 'Enhanced' - you can make up your own pharmaceutical joke here if you'd like.

If you're paying for HDTV, you're going to see that some of the HD channels are 720p, and some stations are 1080i. The nomenclature is the same - lines of resolution, and then an 'i' or 'p' to indicate whether it's interlaced or progressive scan. Of the two resolutions, 720p is better suited to fast-moving action like a football game, and 1080i is better suited to fancy-pants nature programming where the images don't change quickly and the camera pans slowly across the breathtaking landscape while Sigourney Weaver narrates.

Since the electronics industry can't leave well enough alone, they had to go and make the Blu-ray video format, which is best viewed on a TV capable of 1080p.

So, to categorize -

480i

Standard-definition TV, VHS, older game consoles.

Connects with coax, composite video, or sometimes S-Video.

480p

DVD players, Wii, GameCube, PlayStation 2 (but not all games), Xbox (all games)

Connects with component video cables.

720p

Sports HDTV, Some Blu-ray movies, Most PS3 and Xbox 360 games

Connects with component video cables or HDMI

1080i

Most HDTV

Connects with component video cables or HDMI

1080p

Blu-ray movies, some PS3 and Xbox 360 games

Connects with HDMI

Any higher resolution than 1080p, for now, assume that it will also connect with HDMI. Also, bear in mind that HDMI and component video can do lower resolutions, but they're overkill. Also, PS3 and Xbox 360 can display 1080i resolution, but most games are natively in 720p and would be rescaled slightly to display 1080i. While this is a long and involved post, I have not covered every possible scenario by a long shot. My intent is to cover the more common configurations.

And to recap - if you're not using HDMI, you might not be getting HDTV. If you don't know, have a look. If you can't tell what you're looking at, I hope you have enough information to ask the right questions now.

Pinball Wizard? Perhaps not.

2010-09-28T12:22:00.002-04:00

Well, I hadn't been blogging. But, I have been playing stuff. I played MadWorld long enough to show the wife a little of it, and got annoyed about not targeting enemies correctly again. I may have to play the first level over again so I get the tutorial.

I played a little bit of Link's Crossbow Training, because number 2 son says that that is "his Zelda game". Never mind the fact that he can't actually hold up the Wii Zapper or aim at the screen. He'd be just as happy with one of us playing Twilight Princess, but it has a circular scratch on it (again!) which has rendered the Gerudo desert unplayable.
What I really got sucked back into again is pinball. Not real pinball, mind you, but the simulation thereof. I have Pinball Hall of Fame:The Williams Collection for PS2 (I think I paid $10 for a new copy), and I have Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection for XBox (also purchased new, for less than $5). The game engines are identical, and the software was done by the same teams as far as I can tell. The visual fidelity is similar, but I am playing both games on the same old standard-def TV. I have seen both the Williams collection and the Gottlieb collection for Wii, but I haven't bothered since I'm concerned about the viability of using motion controls to nudge the table.

That brings me to my annoyance with the XBox version. Despite how similar the two games are, I am completely unable to nudge the table on the Gottlieb Collection without immediately getting a giant TILT displayed on the screen. I have played other games for XBox and seem to be able to use the left analog stick properly there (Ninja Gaiden comes to mind), and I have no problem with the nudge on the Williams collection, also done on the left analog.

In the interest of disclosure, I am a lefty, and I have been playing these games with a Pelican wired controller for XBox, and a Logitech cordless PS2 controller.

So, what gives? Is it the game, the cheap controller, or the guy holding the controller?

Spyborgs followup, and more MvC3!

2010-09-18T19:10:00.003-04:00

This morning, #1 son got as far as board 3-4 of Spyborgs without having to adjust the difficulty downward - he started on "Casual". (Casual is one easier than the middle difficulty, 2 out of 5 if you want to look at it that way.) I played some co-op with him on the same difficulty, and it wasn't too bad. I wish the camera would come into the gameplay a little closer during regular melee combat, so I could see when I need to block and when I need to just get away, but when you're playing co-op and you need to scout the screen for invisible objects all the time, you need the camera pulled back for that. I still feel like we're getting our $4.99 worth.

I saw that no one had bothered making a FAQ for it on Gamefaqs.com. Even though there are lots of unlockables and achievements in the game, the game seems to spell out what they are, so maybe there's no reason to type up a FAQ.

In Marvel vs Capcom news, Tron Bonne (MegaMan series) and X23 (XMen comics) were announced last week as playable characters for MvC3. Wesker (Resident Evil series)

and Spiderman ( straight out of Stan Lee's brain)

were announced this weekend at the Tokyo Game Show. Spiderman is no surprise whatsoever, as he has been in all of the vs. games that they can cram him into. Tron Bonne was in MvC2, so also not much of a shocker. X23 appears to play similarly to Wolverine (What would you expect from the female clone of Wolverine?), but she is a lot better looking than grumpy old Logan. Wesker is figuring more and more prominently as the Resident Evil series goes on, so I can understand Capcom wanting him there - you can see from the video that he's quite the rushdown character.

OK, gotta go play more Spyborgs.

Customer Service, 3rd Party.

2010-09-17T20:56:00.003-04:00

So I went on an adventure this afternoon - I had to drive #1 son to a doctor's appointment. It was in a part of the county that I don't normally go to, and on the way there #1 son had seen a Gamestop on the way out. Despite a dissenting vote for Burger King, we stopped at that Gamestop on the way back, after the appointment. It was a fairly busy store, mostly families, and the employees didn't seem to notice us. They had a copy of Killer 7 for Gamecube - a game that I had been looking for ever since I played No More Heroes. It was fairly cheap, $8.99. I couldn't bring myself to get it. There is no multiplayer, it's over-the-top violent, it acts sort of like a rail shooter, the plot is bizarre, and it's the sort of game that even if I explained to you why it's so good you might not believe me because half the things I would try to explain don't make any sense.

My original plan, which I reverted to, was to pick up a copy of Spyborgs from Best Buy. Also a Capcom game, but developed by a totally different team - this game had two major advantages. One, all the game reviews said that it was much better played by two people and I expect that I will be able to play this with #1 son. Two, the game is $4.99. New. The last time I was there there were only two copies that I could see. Today I just grabbed a copy and stuffed it under my arm without looking to see if the other one had sold or not.

#1 son played the Kraven the Hunter level on Spiderman:Shattered Dimensions and did just fine, despite only a little experience with a regular XBox controller and no XBox 360 experience. #1 son liked how Spiderman moved and reacted to the controls - the only thing that annoyed me when I watched him was that the camera wasn't always that smart. I was trying to play Sin & Punishment on the Wii kiosk, but I had to rejigger the controls once and then I was distracted by a couple of employees trying to help a customer with Wii accessories. I was getting a weird vibe from them (the employees) and had to go see what they were trying to do to their ~~captive~~ customer. I jumped in and (I think) did a better job of answering his questions - I also had to remind him that Nintendo's not a big fan of third party power supplies when you're having to deal with them on a warranty issue. What would have been great for him to be able to get was the Migration Kit, but Nintendo doesn't sell them outside Japan and they have a composite video cable in that pack instead of a component video cable.

He suggested that I should work there since I knew more than the employees - I reminded him that the main function of Best Buy employees was to sell extended warranties, and that most of them didn't have/play Wii, so they wouldn't be as familiar. Just to give him the whole SuperMonkeyCube experience, I threw out the Rubik's cube for a quick solve - I don't ever know if that confirms that I'm a nutcase or it confirms that I'm not a nutcase.

After we got home, #1 son finished the first section of Spyborgs while I made pizza, and it wasn't horrible. (The game. No, the pizza wasn't horrible either. Pepperoni, Olive and Broccoli, since you asked.) So, I'm pretty sure I'm going to get my five bucks worth. I'm looking forward to co-op.

Cubing in a strange place

2010-08-31T21:02:00.003-04:00

So, I escaped my local orbit over the weekend and slept in a different city Friday night. That city was Daytona Beach Shores, just south of what most people understand to be Daytona Beach.

I had not been to Daytona for a while, and it was a little sad not to see some of the buildings that I had seen there in previous trips to the city over the last 30 years or so. There are only two arcades left on the old part of the boardwalk - video game arcades, I mean. I do not refer to those slot-machine-for-dinner-coupon gambling establishments as an 'arcade', even though that word is used for that other purpose*. No, I mean Tetris, Ghost Squad, the not-so-new but still awesome Terminator Salvation light gun game, Skee-Ball, sit-down driving games, and a pinball machine or five. I was hoping to show Bubba a Pac-Man machine in the wild, but both arcades had a non-functioning Ms. Pac-Man machine and no other Pac-related games. It's cool that they put in a Ferris Wheel and a G0-Kart track, but all of the mini-golf has been relegated to the other side of the road and they are all required to have a large volcano replica, a crashed airplane replica, and live alligators (not replicas).

It was nice that Pizza King was still there - they make a great pizza with a crust reminiscent of fresh-baked French bread. They have a giant Hobart mixer there in the kitchen that's about the size of a residential refrigerator. Another thing that was somewhat the same? Parking. If you have a hotel right on Daytona Beach, you may not notice, because you have hotel parking - but if you need to go anywhere farther than you can walk, you quickly notice that you can't park anywhere worthwhile without paying for it until 9PM. We luckily found a space that allowed 30 minute parking from 9AM to 9PM at about 8:30. At the same time we pulled in, a rather rowdy group pulled in the space in front of us - the three of them had loudly congratulated each other and my wife on their excellent parking coup. One of them commented on my cube, and I did a quick solve for them while the wife and the children snuck away from the rowdiness undetected. I had forgotten how amazed the slightly inebriated can be with a cube demo. One uneasy high five later, I ran to catch up to the family already making a beeline for Pizza King.

After the evening pizza adventure and subsequent disappointing hunt for a Pac-Man machine, we watched a little beach volleyball and some guy with a bunch of snakes, three lizards, and the fattest skunk I have ever met. He was making some money by getting people to pay $10 for a picture with one of the animals. I didn't see anybody with the skunk - the albino Burmese python seemed to be the favorite, perfect for teenage girls to dare each other into a frenzy with.

The next day, my cube and I were on the beach for about 8 hours - and I only dropped the cube in the sand once. I have cubed at the beach before - usually I just have it in my hand while I'm walking, but if somebody asks me about it I'm happy to give a quick demonstration. At Daytona Beach, my cube was largely inconsequential other than as a distraction for me, and that was quite OK. Dropping the cube in the sand was not so OK. The difference was in the sand. Here at home, the sand is very coarse. If I drop a cube into the sand, it's actually difficult for a piece of sand to get in the cube because the grain size is so large. At Daytona, the sand is very small and enough stuck to the cube to worm its way inside rather quickly. Even though my cube got a thorough cleaning when I got home and a fresh application of silicone lubricant, it still has the tell-tale whooshing sound of plastic with grooves in it.

*If I am ever elected to a public office that allows it, I will mandate that the use of the word 'arcade' in signage for a public business require at least one working Pac-Man machine on the premises.

Thank goodness school is back in...

2010-08-23T19:29:00.002-04:00

#1 son just finished Capcom's "Okami" (Wii version). I am proud of him for finishing it, because the only things that he wanted help from me on were the timed races. He gets a little freaked out on missions where you are timed, so it's understandable that he can't really do them. It's easier to play a race or two for him and let him take over again when he's ready. We might have looked up a puzzle or two, but I am impressed that after showing him a little bit of technique on one of the first bosses he did every subsequent boss battle himself.

"Okami" is an adventure game like the Legend of Zelda series games, but the game has more of an emphasis on character interaction for completing missions, and has an art style that makes it appear as an animated Japanese watercolor painting. Another major difference between "Okami" and the Zelda game for Wii "Twilight Princess" is that when you aim the Wiimote at the screen in "Okami", it's only to use the game's magic system. The Celestial Brush, when activated, is how the wolf god Ameratsu interacts with her surroundings. You pull the B trigger on the Wiimote, time stops in the game, and you draw various symbols on the screen to achieve various results. Lighting fires, blooming flowers, making the wind blow, and delivering quick slashes to enemies are all done in the magic system. The other fighting moves are done with buttons and shaking In "Twilight Princess", the slingshot, boomerang, and bow and arrow are all aimed on-screen with the remote in real time during battles. It's great for someone like me with lots of game experience, but it's not so great for a 9-year-old that gets anxious when he's trying to aim at something that's shooting back.

Finishing "Okami", I think counts for more than finishing one of the LEGO games - there aren't too many boss battles in the LEGO games that can even compare.

When I asked him if he wanted to finish some other game now that he finished "Okami", he said that he wanted to play "Okami" again so he could find all of the stray beads in the game. Luckily, this will be a good bargaining tool to get him to finish his homework.

A little run-in with the locals...

2010-08-20T13:52:00.004-04:00

I had to yell at an apparently intoxicated or otherwise mentally impaired woman today because she had to get in my face and tell me that my sweet Border Lab was actually a Pit Bull and if it got off the leash or bit her or her dog that she would sue me. If she was that concerned, she should have stayed on the other side of the street where she was. Oddly enough, she did not deny that she was intoxicated when I asked her. I guess 12:45 isn't too early to drink on a Friday.

I had just come back from and errand and lunch with #2 Son and Suki the Wonder Dog. There is a woman with a dog in my field of vision, something I am used to looking for with a dog in tow. I see her walking on the sidewalk on the other side of the street as I am getting out of the car. She is shorter than me, but a little taller than my wife. She is normal weight, which is not so normal these days. She is older than me, perhaps she is in her late 40s or early 50s. She has fairish skin with spots - she looks like she has spent her fair share of time outside, but she does not seem to tan. She is wearing a shirt that goes to her elbows, some random or tie-dye pattern, and maybe some sort of dark colored Capri pants or cargo shorts that go to her knees. Her dog is small, black and white. The dog's ears look like the Batman cowl ears from the 70's costume. Perhaps it is a French Bulldog, I cannot be certain until I spend more time with Google Image Search.

Realizing that I had not taken the recycling out, I grab the bins while I still have dog leash in my hand. Suki sniffs around the yard while I take her back and forth from the side of the house to the road. As I get the second bin to the front, I see the woman crossing the road, dog leading. So far, this is normal dog owner behavior, and I expect people to ask me about Suki because she's a little bit small for a Lab, and her face is a slightly different shape.

"What kind of dog is that?"

"A Border Lab."

"A what?"

"A Border Lab." I say it slower because I worry that I'm not enunciating.

"A what?"

"Labrador. A Border..."

"That's a pit bull. You're a liar." Until the moment that she calls me a liar, I was assuming that I was having a normal conversation with a sane person.

The conversation gets complicated at that point, because we're talking over each other a little. She continues to assert that I am a liar, and that if that dog gets off the leash or bites her that she will sue me. I ask her if she is intoxicated, and if I might have to call for a D&D (drunk and disorderly). She suggests to me that she might call her lawyer. Judging from her behavior, it seems plausible that she both has a lawyer and has his number memorized. At some point, her belligerence puts her face in the proximity of mine, and I mentally check the way that she is standing against the way that I am standing. I am worried that she will decide to kick me in the crotch. I am worried that I will not show proper restraint. Since yelling may still be covered by the First Amendment I opt for standing to my full height in front of her and saying:

"GET. OFF. MY. LAWN."

She complies, punctuated with a disgusted "Fine". She mutters something else about a lawyer, and yells back to me to ask if I thought she was stupid.

"No, I think you're intoxicated."

Before she is out of visual range, but well past earshot, I catch one of the other neighbors out walking his dog, an old retired guy. I ask him if he had seen that woman walking that dog before, and he said that he had not, and he mentioned that she was muttering to herself the whole time about "Doesn't he know that thing is dangerous?"

The radical fetishization of game cases.

2010-08-08T13:25:00.002-04:00

On my usual Friday trip to Wal-Mart, I added a CD organizer thingy to my shopping list - not like the big Rubbermaid photo&CD organizer totes that I have been getting, but one that just has little sleeves in it for the discs. I took 2-1/2 bins of PS2 games and condensed them down to something the size of a large hardback book, with 1/3 of a bin now being taken up only by what game manuals came out of that stash. A success overall, as it now allows me easier access to a lot of games that I don't always go digging through the bins for - and I even got so crazy as to alphabetize them. I had a couple of games that I couldn't bear to take out of the cases - no, they weren't Street Figher Alpha Anthology or Capcom Fighting Evolution - actually they are R-Type Final and Mister Mosquito. Too wacky to mess with, I suppose. I was surprised by a few things - I forgot that Death by Degrees had a demo disk for Tekken 5 in it, I forgot that Ribbit King had a second disk of bizarre movies on it, and I forgot that Barbarian was made by Titus, the same people that made that awesome Xena:The Warrior Princess fighting game for N64. I have no idea what has kept me hanging on to plastic cases all this time, but I think that part of it is how fragile the first era of CD's were.

At some other point on Friday, I wandered into out local Gamestop with the kids in tow. #1 son and I looked around in the Wii games, and we were looking at Sega Superstars Tennis as a light and fun way to break up our overly serious Okami adventure. I was a little annoyed with the employee on duty - it was a middle-aged woman. I don't mean to be ageist or sexist, my annoyance stemmed from the fact that she gave off no 'gamer' vibe at all. As a matter of fact, that particular store has had, in the past, quite a number of female employees that were gamers - and even one female general manager that was rather knowledgeable about intricate details of Final Fantasy that were even a little scary (in a good way). In general, I have found female employees a little easier to deal with largely because they tend to be a little more professional. Also, you would think that a store staffed with female gamers would be sure to attract the attention of the predominantly male gaming audience and be a little less off-putting to moms of gamers when they have to make a trip there to ask an employee something about a game. I'm sure that Gamestop's rigid rules and procedures will continue to produce their desired employee churn and anybody good they ever have will leave as usual. We bought nothing and left - we may consider the tennis game later, but it's not going anywhere.

By the time I have all of the games out of their plastic cases, I was starting to think that just putting them all in the recycle bin was the wrong move - so I called Gamestop to see if they wanted them. I got Middle-Aged-Non-Gamer-Woman on the phone, as I had suspected that I would. I pleaded my case for not throwing out cases, and suggested that they could make good use of them. She plainly stated that she got all of her game cases from corporate.

After a subsequent phone call, I think that one of the local Play-N-Trade stores has warmed to my idea. Where's the sense in putting game cases out for recycling when they could just be re-used directly without all that processing?

Also, Cherry Crush is awesome, and so are Ketchup flavored Pringles. I would advise, however, having them separately.

Legend of Zelda - The Skyward Sword Official Trailer

2010-07-30T07:02:00.004-04:00

While I am not always in favor of realism in games, I am looking forward to the fact that the new Legend of Zelda game uses the Wii Motion Plus to improve its swordplay (and a couple of other things).

The swordplay in The Legend of Zelda:Twilight Princess was fun, and that game did a good job of doing a lot of different sword and shield moves with the motion controls. The slingshot and bow and arrow seemed like much more useful weapons because you could point the Wiimote directly on the screen to aim them. So, it would seem that a natural extension of that would be to make the swordplay more direct.

From the official trailer, we see that some enemies are specifically tailored to be defeated by sword attacks at a specific angle. Also, we see the slingshot, bow and arrow, some awesome bomb bowling, a whip - new to the big versions but previously used in the DS game The Legend of Zelda:Spirit Tracks. Most crazy of all is the new remote control flying scarab beetle - check Link poised to fire it up at 1:06 in the video. My older son made some sort of squealy noise when he saw that for the first time.

The only things that I might not be looking forward to
are:

The boomerang, and
playing lefty.

Depending on how they implement the boomerang, it may be fine or I may be throwing it backwards all the time, and I presume that partly because of being a lefty. Being a lefty will affect the swordplay as well. Even though Link has been a lefty for a long time, they changed it for Twilight Princess on Wii because they were worried about how it would feel to be swinging the Wiimote with your right hand and seeing the on-screen character swing the sword with his left hand. However, since the controls are indirect and not direct, I didn't find a problem the other way around. It remains to be seen whether it will screw me up on direct controls. I will definitely be looking to play this at a store kiosk before I buy it, as I doubt Nintendo will be giving people a choice between lefty and righty in the options menu. It's not like it's a bowling game, for crying out loud.

2010-07-27T13:24:00.005-04:00

Spiderman hasn't shown up yet on the confirmed characters list for Marvel vs Capcom 3. I was only capable of expressing how I felt with action figures.

New Marvel vs Capcom 3 characters announced at ComicCon

2010-07-23T10:47:00.001-04:00

So I wake up Thursay morning, blearily stare at my computer screen, and see that they have announced more characters for MvC3!

Chun-Li is no surprise, as I had surmised before that she had been in too many of the other crossover games to not be present in this one.

Doctor Doom, the main enemy of the Fantastic Four, wasn't much of a surprise either since he was a interesting character to use in MvC2.

Super Skrull was not that much of a surprise, but only because I had heard talk of his inclusion when the original silhouette was posted on the MvC3 official page. It makes it easy to include the Fantastic Four, which were previously difficult to use because of licensing deals, because Super Skrull has all the same powers as the members of the Fantastic Four.

Trish is a little bit of a surprise to me, but a welcome helping of fan service in a cute leather outfit indeed. It would be even more awesome to have a Dante/Trish/Lady team, but I'm guessing that's overkill.

Trish's outfit in MvC3 looks more like the Devil May Cry 1 and 2 model than the one she's wearing in DMC4. That's fine by me, as I really learned to appreciate Trish more when I unlocked her as a playable character in DMC2. For some reason, I expected Capcom to take the macho route and include Vergil or Nero instead of Trish.

Included in the first video above - the word "Viewtiful" (Look after Doctor Doom lands that 36-hit combo - around 0:26). Decide amongst yourselves what the implications are. Not included in the MvC3 video above but otherwise announced - Thor and Ameratsu. There are some screenshots out there. I'm excited for the new characters, although I'd really like to see some footage of one of the larger characters against Ameratsu, just because I suspect that a lot of their standing regular attacks will just whiff over her fluffy white head and Ameratsu will be well suited to giving the big guys the rushdown and biting their kneecaps off.

In anticipation of all of the fighting game goodness to come, and also because I don't have SFIV, I dug through my box of fighting games and threw Tekken Tag Tournament, Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, Tekken 5 and Arcana Heart in the PS2 for a few minutes each last night. Tekken Tag looked a little dated, as the character models look a bit better in Tekken 5. Tekken 5 annoyed me only because I never finished that stupid "Devil Within" mode - I liked Tekken Force Mode in Tekken 3 and 4 so much better because they were straight-up brawlers that left the moveset of the Tekken characters intact. "Devil Within" is a different control scheme, and full of jumping puzzles. Also, there is a limit to how many times I will re-fight True Ogre before it starts feeling pointless. Neo Geo Battle Coliseum felt floaty and "off" a little. I keep trying to play SNK fighters because there are legions of dedicated KOF fans that swear by those games, but something never feels right. I even picked up a couple of the 3D King of the Fighters games, which I liked a little bit more, but I never really connected to. It's sad that I would rather play a deeply broken Mortal Kombat game with good characters than something with more critical acclaim that I just can't connect with.

Arcana Heart perked me right up after all of that, though. While it's slow compared to a lot of the other games and the arenas are large, the graphics are excellent for a PS2 game, and the fighting mechanics feel more solid than the SNK fighters. The idea of having separate sets of super moves and normal moves is interesting, it gives people a chance to build a character to their play style a little more. It only has three normal attack buttons and one special attack button - maybe it's the perfect game to get me warmed up for Marvel vs Capcom 3.

So what does "Mature" mean again?

2010-07-18T07:23:00.002-04:00

This weekend is a buy 2 get one on used games at Gamestop. Saturday's purchases were:

MadWorld for Wii
Wall-E for Wii
Scooby Doo: Night of 100 Frights for Gamecube (I always tell #1 son that if we can get a game for PS2 or Gamecube to get the Gamecube version.)

Two for the kids, one for me. At first, we were going to get No More Heroes 2 instead of Wall-E, but I felt like that No More Heroes 2 would be around for a while. My reasoning for getting MadWorld was that if I really want to experience what the Wii has to offer hardcore gamers, I should pick it up before it disappeared. Since No More Heroes 2 is a more recent release I wasn't worried about it going away any time soon. Also, I thought it was somewhat unfair to double up on UltraVoilence, since I'm not the only one that plays Wii in our house by a long shot. I had played the demo of the Wall-E game for PC, and it wasn't horrible, so I figured it was worth a try. It took us a while to decide what to get, and it took a little longer because #2 son kept bringing me cases for PSP games. "Bub, we don't have PSP. Leave 'em on the shelf". I would also like to thank Chrisitan at our local Gamestop for being a good sport while I did Rubik's cube demos in line at the store.

Eventually, we got home to play stuff. While it doesn't look as good as the PC version, the Wii version of Wall-E seems to play OK but we didn't delve very far into it. The controls showed a surprising amount of depth, even going so far as using the Wiimote to look around. As soon as we got home, #1 son fired up my Gamecube and got right to work on the Scooby-Doo game, and noticed that it was full of jumping and part-collecting. It also has a lot of well-arranged incidental music from the cartoons in it, so it definitely gave off the Scooby vibe. #2 son sensed the Scooby vibe and went in to watch him play, so I switched out discs and got started with MadWorld.

I have always been a big fan of brawlers, I think my favorite one in the arcades was The Combatribes, although I did play both Streets of Rage and several of the Final Fight games on the 16-bit consoles. I also played Double Dragon on a green screened Compaq portable at some point in the 80's, and I also remember getting my butt kicked by some stupid game on NES or SNES called "BattleToads". Stupid jetbike levels killed me every time. But, I digress.

The conceit of MadWorld is that you're an entrant in a city-wide televised combat spree called "DeathWatch". They play it up like it's a highly rated TV show and a terrorist plot all at the same time, especially since the island that the game takes place on had all of its bridges demolished all at the same time, right before the show starts. It implies that some big players are involved behind the scenes - it also implies that our protagonist might just be more than he appears.

Just because a game is rated for mature audiences is no guarantee that what you are experiencing is mature subject matter, or intellectually mature, or has mature gameplay. This is the most profanity laden and unapologetically violent game that I have played, but I hear that House of the Dead:Overkill (another game I haven't gotten to yet) actually has more profanity. Even Resident Evil 4 hides some of the decapitations with blurry cameras and slight cutaways, but Madworld includes a couple kinds of impalements, bisections, fire, getting run down by trains, getting thrown into saw blades, and being crushed with a two-ton metal ball - and that's just in the first level. Now while this sounds a bit gruesome, bear in mind that the entire world is rendered in a graphic novel styled black and white, full of deep shadows and punctuated with the occasional red and yellow. It is reminiscent of Frank Miller - perhaps the target audience for the game is people who enjoyed Sin City? Level two has a game called Man-Darts partway through, and while I can only explain it by saying that it involves a big baseball bat and a thirty foot high dartboard that you whack enemies into headfirst, it's a lot more fun than it might sound even though I had to fight the camera more than my opponents.

The voice actors that play the two play-by-play announcers in MadWorld are John Dimaggio, voice of my second favorite American English speaking robot, and Greg Proops, voice of my favorite non-alien speaking Podrace announcer.* In the first few minutes of the game alone, the two announcers drop F-bombs like it was February 1945 over Dresden. They start repeating jokes pretty early on, so you may just turn them down as soon as you're tired of them. I was very pleased to see that the announcers had their own volume slider. The enemies swear at you all the time too, so don't think turning down the announcers will help. After you turn down the announcers and the enemies, you will notice that the game's music is a flavor of hip-hop that includes at least a third as much swearing as the announcers. At this point, I was hoping for a button in the options that said "Instrumental & SFX Only". The violence I am used to but it probably doesn't annoy me because it's ridiculously over-the-top. The constant barrage of profanity annoys me, though. I'd like to be able to play the game without getting everyone within earshot annoyed. The music part of the music is well done, and the sound effects are meaty and solid.

It was also nice to hear that the voice of our protagonist Jack is played by the same actor that played protagonist Brad Hawk in Namco's Urban Reign, Steven Blum. The opening narration for Urban Reign was a standout piece of the game, and he gave you the inspiration to kick butt just from his voice alone. He serves a similar purpose here, to let you know that Jack is not a dude to be messed with.

My biggest issue with the game is that while it has many similarities to No More Heroes with even more swearing and the swordplay and the beatings and the ranking system and the on-screen controller motions for finishing moves, it misses the mark on the controls a little. It's difficult to stay locked on to the bosses and mini-bosses, and when you're not using the lock-on feature, the game often whiffs a punch into the empty space right next to an enemy if it thinks you're actually trying to get some other farther away enemy that's at a different angle to you. If your character is such a bad motor scooter, how could he mess that up? After having played games like Rygar and Devil May Cry and God of War that get that right a lot more of the time, it's sad to see a good developer miss the mark on that.

I hope all you people out there playing Heavy Rain appreciate what you got - that may actually be a "Mature" game. For that matter, Shadow of the Colossus and Sly 3 show more emotional maturity than MadWorld does. Heavy Rain may have a more choose-your-own-adventure game interface, and isn't as much of an action game. From a gameplay standpoint, MadWorld has a lot of things that I like in it, but a lot of the game's overall tone looks like it was just there for shock value and not because it fit with the game's story.

Maybe what I really want is a cartoony Devil May Cry game on Wii, rendered like Under The Skin or Viewtiful Joe. Enemies explode into red orbs (Devil May Cry's currency) upon defeat. Nero, Lady, Vergil, Trish, Leon Kennedy, and a few others show up as drop-in-drop-out team mates. Lots of action, some difficult puzzles that don't require jumping, minimal swearing, music that you need a subwoofer for, and some extra multiplayer modes. Dante runs an "agency", so why not let him do some detective work? Of course, if Capcom made anything like that they would be berated for making "LEGO Batman meets Carmen Sandiego".

* John Dimaggio's Bender is my second favorite American English speaking robot because he loses out to Robby the Robot from "Forbidden Planet" - nothing against John DiMaggio, Robby has a cooler hardware configuration. Also I had to specify American English because Anthony Daniels just slays both of those guys, and R2-D2 doesn't even speak English. As far as Greg Proops (the English speaking half of the podrace announcer) goes, it's just sad that he's at the top of such a very short list.

An overview of Sly Cooper...

2010-07-05T20:46:00.001-04:00

...from someone who just got around to playing it.

Despite numerous attempts to stop me, I played through all of Sony developer Sucker Punch's three Sly Cooper games from Memorial Day to the 4th of July. I only played through the main game, I didn't complete any of the Master Thief challenges. I'm sure I could have completed them sooner, but I played some Street Fighter 3:Third Strike and a few other Capcom fighting games inbetween sessions, just to break it up a little.

I have played all of the PS2 Ratchet and Clank games (that's not true - I didn't play any of the PSP ones that got ported to PS2), and had played the first Jak & Daxter, so I felt like I had missed out by not having played the Sly Cooper games at all. Given the opportunity to pick them up cheap, I got all three of them - although in retrospect I should have picked up new copies of all three. Sly 3 I picked up from Gamestop as a used copy, and since the only thing I got was the disk for $10, I missed out a little. ( More on that later.)

The first Sly Cooper game comes off like Nintendo's early Mario games. Levels have a beginning and an end, and you're supposed to 1) go quick, 2) don't get hurt at all, and 3) get all the stuff. Similar to Mario, some boards allow you to go at your own pace, and some boards put time pressure on you. There's at least one board in every group of levels that has non-platformer gameplay, like one where you pilot an undersea sub and shoot crabs trying to take treasure chests. The controls for that are identical to the old school Robotron 2084 but these days that's referred to as a "twin stick shooter" since it seems like most of the people that Microsoft and Sony market to these days weren't alive in 1982 when that game came out. Some of the other non-platforming boards include racing levels and turret gun levels. Unlike the Ratchet and Clank's turret levels, where the object is to shoot down a lot of enemies, the Sly Cooper turret levels involve providing cover fire for a teammate so that they can proceed through a level. The only thing that I found odd about the game was that there was one powerup that was inaccesible until you had completed the main game, and it made the powerup completely pointless because it can't effectively be used in completing the Master Theif missions.

The second Sly Cooper game, Band of Theives, takes place in a series of cities around the world. While many of the missions take you into building interiors that are otherwise inaccessible, a fair portion of each city's missions are in the city itself. I liked that the cities had some purpose instead of being a glorified level select screen. The game added a currency system, stealing treasures and returning them to the safe house in a limited amount of time, added pickpocketing as both a side way to make money and a feature of getting through some of the levels, and purchaseable powerups. Sly's teammates Bentley and Murray get more of their own missions now, where you're controlling them directly. The conceit of the driving missions in Sly 1 was that Murray was driving - when Murray actually gets out of the car, it's already a cutscene by then. Now you get to use the might of "The Murray" directly to pound foes too tough for Sly, and Bentley goes through small spaces that Sly can't get into so we can hack the enemies' computers. Bentley also has very effective sleep darts and bombs. The game is a lot more fun than the first one for me because the locations seem a little more "real" - I enjoy a game that has a sense of place. It's nice to get to know where you're going after a while. In the name of variety, this game also has some turret missions but they're more like the Ratchet and Clank ones this time, and Bentley's hacking games play a little like old-school Omega Race. Other non-traditional levels include attacking foes using an RC chopper or an RC car. The best thing was having a regular health bar instead of the 'one hit and you're out' system from the first game.

By the time the third game (Honor Among Theives) rolls around, Sucker Punch has figured a few things out. None of the loot that you find has any impact on the game other than how much money you have, so making you go through the extra step of cashing it in was unneccesary. Now, loot instantly adds to your currency total. All of the powerups become purchaseable. The missions are a little more streamlined, but not as much as Sly 1. The endless looking around for clue bottles has gone, though. (I kinda missed them.) On the other hand, some new things got thrown in for reasons I can't fathom. Four more playable characters, inclusion of 3D in some levels, and a rather involved pirate boat combat simulator. I did like the storyline of 3, but I didn't like switching to characters with rather different control schemes. At the risk of it being a little spoilerish, Carmelita's controls were the ones that really bugged me. The plane levels were fun - the demo disk for Sly 3 included a version of one of the aerial battles - although I had to pass on the 3D version of the last dogfight since it's harder to tell a red plane from a black plane with anaglyph glasses on. In general, I used the 3D glasses that I had laying around the house for the platforming levels, and passed on it for the boss battles. Had I purchased a new copy of Sly 3, perhaps I would have the exact 3D glasses that I needed, but the ones I had were close enough. I would have liked some sort of calibration screen for the 3D, or a displayable test pattern so I could check that the 3D was set up correctly without having to do it in the middle of a level while perched on a spire someplace. One new thing that they added that was somewhat fun was some cutscenes had a dialogue tree to do - I wouldn't want them to make a whole game of it, it was just fun when they threw it in a few times.

Those of you that have still missed out on these games and have a PS3 can take advantage of the The Sly Collection coming out. I'm sure that it will be easy to render at higher resolution, but I wonder if they're going to keep the 3D the same.

And, for the record, I liked the voice actress for Carmelita Fox in the second game (Alesia Glidewell) the best. And that was without realizing that she plays the protagonist Chell in Valve's Portal!

Marvel Vs Capcom 3

2010-06-30T21:36:00.003-04:00

I would have posted this sooner, but between playing the Sly Cooper games and my older son's discovery of websites like ninjakiwi.com, I haven't been on the computer as much. I will talk about my impressions of the Sly games pretty soon.

Marvel vs Capcom 3 has been announced, and they've been showing some gameplay footage already.

Overall, I seem to like it. I'm glad that they listened to the fans and included Dante from 'Devil May Cry', Capcom's stylish action series. I'm glad that they managed to keep the 3-on-3 format from 'Marvel vs Capcom 2'. I was surprised to see Marvel's 'Merc with a Mouth' Deadpool included at first, but I was reminded by the guys at the comic book store that everything seems to get Deadpool added to it these days.

There are a few camps of haters -

"OMG BlazBlue is so much better why don't they make it 2D" I do realize that other companies are still making sprite-based fighters, and my hat is off to companies that are still making that work. Capcom has a variety of series going on now besides the Street Fighter games, most (all?) of which are done with 3D modeled characters because the game environments are 3D. The skill set of their employees and the design of their development tools probably totally slanted towards 3D. We've already heard this complaint directed towards Street Fighter IV, and I have to say that Street Fighter IV's use of a moving camera during special attacks has added a measure of excitement to matches that you can't get from a 2D fighter. And when I say that you can't get it from a 2D fighter, I mean that if you do move the camera around in a 2D fighter, it's like you're watching cardboard cutouts fight. I realize that it's not substantive and doesn't affect the actual fighting mechanics, but I like it. Capcom's old tendency to re-use sprites between games had gotten them in a bad place with Street Fighter fans, especially by the time 'Capcom vs SNK 2' made it to consoles in 2001. There were brand-new SNK characters right next to sprites of Darkstalkers' Morrigan that they hadn't updated since 1994, and it looked terrible. I hope that their use of 3D character models helps them keep up graphically without looking dated.

"I hate this cartoony looking junk." I can think of at least two significant reasons to do a cartoony art style. Marvel characters are from the comics after all, but that's not why. With characters from both comics and a multitude of games, each with its own art style, it's probably more visually consistent to make everybody look more like they just stepped out of a comic book. That way, the game has a unifying visual style that people will associate with the game. Also, if you're going to have six characters on the screen, I presume that the simpler rendering style helps keep the framerate consistently high.

"Why did they simplify the controls? Street Fighter is supposed to be six buttons." I hate to tell you that MvC2 had somewhat simplified controls. While it was still six buttons, the MvC2 layout has two buttons specifically assigned to tagging out to your two partners. The punch buttons and kick buttons were reduced to two each. Not being able to simply have three different speeds of projectile attacks seemed to be the most annoying feature of this change to me. According to the preliminary information, the buttons are three attacks and one exchange button, similar to Tatsunoko vs Capcom. Having played TvC, and being satisfied with how the controls work, I have to say that I like this better than MvC2's controls in this regard. The other major reason to simplify the controls is to help maintain a broader audience.

For years, fighting games had relatively simple controls until Street Fighter. While people were largely unaware of the original Street Fighter, these special moves carried over to the very popular Street Fighter II. These, in turn, influenced Mortal Kombat and other some games in the genre, but not all of them. For whatever reason, the Street Fighter Alpha series started more and different controller techniques, taking its lead from the last Street Fighter II game, Super Street Fighter II Turbo. The Street Fighter Alpha included Alpha counters and multi-level Super moves, and Street Fighter Alpha 2 included the Variable Combo attack. As more and different kinds of special attacks were added to the game, it became more of a barrier to entry for new players. By the time Capcom finally made Street Fighter 3 (1997) and added the Parry system, it was no longer enough to know all of your character's moves. To be proficient at Street Fighter 3, you had to know the precise hit timing of all of your opponent's moves. This was made worse by Street Fighter 3 only having a home version on the Dreamcast for the first few years and was not released to the more widely popular home systems (PS2, Xbox) until 2004. Another setback was removal of a lot of fan favorites from Street Fighter II and too many new characters. This narrowing of focus made Street Fighter 3:Third Strike a technically great game, but not played by a wide audience, and not easy to get into for new players. Capcom had explicitly stated during development of Street Fighter 4 that they wanted to bring their fighting games back to a wider audience, and they have done a great job with that – and it's even more important in a game like Marvel vs Capcom 3, because they need to bring in new Marvel fans into the fold and make it easy to get into the game.

I'm sure that some of you can come up with more objections, and feel free to comment away – I'm going to get on with the roster analysis, though.

The characters that have already been announced are: (Game Series in parenthesis)

Chris Redfield (Resident Evil)

Dante (Devil May Cry)

Felicia (Darkstalkers)

Morrigan (Darkstalkers)

Ryu (Street Fighter)

And on the Marvel side:

Captain America

Deadpool

Dormammu (villan from Dr. Strange)

Hulk

Iron Man

Wolverine

Based on the rosters of past games, there are some reasonable assumptions, and some not-so-reasonable assumptions.

Looking at "Marvel vs Capcom" and "Marvel vs Capcom 2" only, a presumption might be that anyone that was in both of the other games would be in this one. If that turns out to be true, then we could expect to see Gambit, Spiderman, War Machine, and Venom on the Marvel side - although Gambit's somewhat of a longshot (and personally I'd rather see Longshot although I have no idea how you could implement his powers in a fighting game). On the Capcom side, that would put Captain Commando, Chun-Li, Jin, Mega Man, Roll, Strider Hiryu, and Zangief in the lineup. Even though he was sort of the Capcom mascot, since Captain Commando has a bunch of other teammates to model, I'm going to say unlikely to him. Chun-Li and Zangief are already modeled in SF4 (and Chun-Li has also been modeled in TvC) so they would be easy enough to do. Mega Man seems likely, but I'm going to say maybe not Roll since I'm hoping they have enough sense to keep super-short characters out this time. Jin and Strider Hiryu have not been featured in any modern games, so they may be out too.

Looking deeper into the previous Capcom superhero fighting games (X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs Street Fighter, and Marvel vs Street Fighter), a few more characters may get considered. Blackheart has been in three previous games , although perhaps he's not relevant as a bad guy any more. The same thing could be said for Omega Red. Juggernaut has been in a few times before, is a fun character to use, and still manages to be relevant in the comic books. I would say that he's got a good chance to make the cut unless there's some storyline related reason for him not to be there. Shuma-Gorath has made some previous appearances but is another Dr. Strange villan. (He looks like an octopus with a giant eyeball as a head.) Unless they're willing to put Dr. Strange in, I think Dormammu's appearance will keep Shuma-Gorath out. If they go for more X-Men involvement, Cyclops, Magneto, and Storm, could end up in the game. On the Capcom side, Akuma, Cammy, Charlie, Dhalsim, Ken, and M. Bison have all been in their fair share of the crossover games. Should they go in again, or is it time to let some more new characters in? Blanka hasn't made it into any of the crossover games yet and I would like to see him make it in one. Leon Kennedy from Resident Evil 2 and 4? Maybe he's redundant with Chris Redfield already there. Samanosuke Akechi from Onimusha? It's not like he'd be the only one with a sword. Zack & Wiki? The little devil dude from Bombastic? The white wolf Ameratsu from Okami? No, no, and probably not. It's not like Capcom has a shortage of characters, but a lot of them are too short. I realize that the Vs series games has had more of an emphasis on having fun and wacky characters than having a well balanced roster, but I tire of playing against short opponents. Based on my past experience with the Vs games, I'd rather fight against the Hulk than Servbot.

I also wouldn't be surprised to see some appearances by newer characters from Lost Planet or Monster Hunter, or perhaps some more Darkstalkers characters to try and stir up interest for a new Darkstalkers game using the new game engine.

At this point, I would encourage anybody interested in Marvel vs Capcom 3 to keep checking Capcom's website at www.marvelvscapcom3.com for new characters as they're announced. And, after all this typing, I may post an abbreviations guide for Capcom fighting game titles so that I'm not retyping them constantly.

Sly Cooper and a theory about gamepads.

2010-06-05T17:00:00.002-04:00

Last weekend, I used the Memorial Day holiday to take my two kids and a musician friend of mine on a routine shopping expedition. I was hoping to get another swing for the yard, and the one I wanted was a likely candidate at the big regional ToysRUs. Success! Swing obtained! The down side was, they also had Sly Cooper 1 and 2. I really wanted to pick up a Wii classic controller, but for the same money I could get two more games! A few minutes later, we were down the street having lunch at the local mall food court. After we ate, I figured that we should locate the Gamestop in the mall because I'm always hoping that I'll accidentally find the Gamecube version of Killer 7 or some other treasure like that. But, since my older son has that tendency towards completion, he spotted Sly 3 and was pretty much adamant that we get it. After all, the easiest way to annoy some people is to take something that there are n of and have or obtain n-1 of them.

My reasoning behind the classic controller (which I still did not get) mostly has to do with Samurai Shodown Anthology for Wii. While Tatsunoko vs Capcom allows for a Gamecube controller, and controls OK that way, SSC does not. While it's adequate for Samurai Shodown 1-5 to use a Wiimote plus Nunchuck, it's less than ideal. As a lefty who has always played fighting games with a gamepad, I've gotten quite used to character control with my left hand. My stupid right hand doesn't always get combo timing perfect, but I can usually pull off the controller motions on a regular basis, even on an unfamiliar controller. On the Wii, I am used to Wiimote in my left hand and Nunchuck in my right - perhaps I should switch but it feels creepy. (I even get mad about some of the Wii Fit games that use the Nunchuck not letting you swap the controls.) Of course, right handed people have had to put up with having the D-pad on their non-dominant had for years, but maybe this is why the fight stick is so popular. So, my theory is this. If you're a lefty that didn't play fighting games much in the arcade but a lot at home, you're more likely to prefer a gamepad. If you're a righty in the same boat, you're OK with a gamepad but you would rather have a fight stick.

Of course, the other reason I want a Classic Controller for Samurai Shodown is that Samurai Shodown 6 needs more buttons, and the easiest way to annoy me is to take a fighting game that needs 5 buttons and make it so I can only reach 4 of them - or put six games on a disc and make it so I can only play 5 of them.

I am willing to be wrong...

2010-05-29T09:38:00.002-04:00

...as long as it doesn't matter and I can keep going.

I realize that people sometimes get the wrong idea about me because I can get in a mode where I have to do something my way. It's not because I think that there's only one way to do it. Usually I get to a point where I come up with a solution that I know will work even if something were to go wrong while I'm trying to do it, and I can adjust and keep going. This is probably more important in real life than in any sort of game space - in a game situation I'm OK with trying something a bunch of different ways because the consequences are usually pretty minimal. I only get locked into a specific method later after I have had time to refine a technique.

If there are any consequences, I get spooked - especially if I've never had to face the specific consequences in question. My best example of this in real life is the express lane at the store. If the express cashier tells me to come to their lane having seen the contents of my cart, I will. But if the person behind me in line suggests that I should go over to express and I know I have more than the requisite number of items, I won't.

"You could go to express... You don't look like you have that much."

They're all small items, and I know I have at least 16 items. I don't even turn to look at my antagonist - all I know from her voice is that she is female and older than me. My younger child is crying on the store floor because I won't let him tackle his older brother while we're in line.

"I'm not going over there. The last thing I want is some blue-hair complaining to me that I have more than ten items. You can break the rules if you want to, but I'm not going to."

Clearly, my motivation is to not be hassled by strangers (yet ironically, it has happened anyway).

So the other part besides the consequences, is the ability to keep going. I was typing a response to a youtube comment that the studious among you can find yourselves, but when I hit the 'enter' key, it said "Error - please try again." Since there's no accounting for dropped packets and network topology I restarted my browser and went directly to youtube instead of replying from the notification. Since I had remembered to hit Control-C before I restarted the browser, I didn't have to retype my comment. "Error" again. No helpful message, like

"Don't use a special character in a filename, knucklehead"

or a blue screen with

"Windows is totally sick of your crap and will be restarting in 5 seconds if it can close all of the spyware processes you started by clicking on that Megan Fox link."

As it turns out, my well-researched comment was failed by youtube because I included a web address in it. Would it have been so hard for it to tell me why it didn't want my comment? The error was so generic so as to make me wonder if my internet connection was even working, so it resulted in me doing the same thing over and over again, expecting something different to happen.

I don't know what art is...

2010-05-08T14:47:00.003-04:00

So I finally played the 2005 PlayStation 2 game "Shadow of the Colossus", Fumito Ueda's second game as director. I completed the main game on the normal difficulty setting, so I have seen all of the story elements. There is still a harder difficulty level available, and extra challenges I could do to gain some extra weapons if I wanted them, but I am not compelled to do more at the moment. It is one of the most satisfying game experiences that I have ever had - I would put it up there with "Devil May Cry 3", "Katamari Damacy", "No More Heroes", or any of the Mario games. "Shadow of the Colossus" is much better at emotionally involving you in the game than most of those other games. The only other game that has ever gotten me that emotionally involved was Fumito Ueda's first game "Ico".

I played "Ico" over the course of two weekends in 2002. I didn't own it, I played a friend's copy because he was insistent that we play it. For something that I played years ago, the game's visuals and design stick in my head. "Ico" has no on-screen status indicators of any kind and very simple controls. Parts of the game that are in bright sunlight get washed-out for a moment, especially when you are moving from a dark area to a light area. The visuals are similar to things that happen when shooting movies on film and other things similar to the human eye's reaction to light, but also have some of their own touches that make it unique. The only thing that takes you out of the game environment at all is that there are stone benches strewn about the game that if you sit on, take you to a 'Save Game' screen. Most of the game is very simple. You have a guy with a stick, and you have to lead someone to safety that can't jump, climb, or wield a stick. You have to ward off enemies, pull your companion onto ledges that they can't climb but you can, and solve environmental puzzles that allow you to proceed forward. Other than the occasional groups of enemies, the landscape is otherwise empty. There are old, crumbling buildings, trees, grass in a few places, but no animals to speak of. There is very little dialogue between the characters, and nearly all of the storytelling in the game is done visually. What dialogue you do hear is done in a language made up just for the game which results in you hearing the emotional tone of the dialogue mixed with the body language without really needing to know exactly what is said.

"Shadow of the Colossus" has some of the same elements as "Ico" - similar landscape although populated with a small number of animals, dialogue in the same made-up language, film-inspired visuals, one companion with you most of the time (but this time it's a horse), a standard visual landmark as a save point, and a simple goal. You must defeat 16 gigantic opponents with a sword and a bow. Where "Ico" is a deconstruction of a platform game into simple elements, "Shadow of the Colossus" is a deconstruction of an action game into simple elements. Instead of giving you hordes of intermediate enemies and new weapons to collect that allow you to proceed to the next area like "Metroid" or "God of War" might do, "Shadow" is only about the boss characters. What is so masterful about these games is that they are short, intense experiences that deliver most of what we like about gaming. By stripping away a lot of the ancillary elements, it gives the game designers comfortable room to insert a story worth telling. Amazingly enough, most of the elements of the stories are pared down to a minimum and improve it as well. Since not everything is explicitly told to you as the player, it gets you to interpret the experiences based on your own ability to interpret the characters presented, and you tend to see the story how you want to. This is key to these games' ability to tap into the emotional response of the player.

On a technical note, the visuals of "Shadow of the Colossus" hold up well by current standards, if only for a PS2 game. It has support for both progressive scan and 16:9 widescreen. Playing the game in progressive scan seemed to reduce the amount of noticeable texture pop-in. The game increases the level of detail of textures as you approach them, and it seems more overstated in the standard-def presentation.

I finished "Shadow" two weekends ago, and dove straight into the 2004 Capcom samurai-vs-demons-plus-time-travel-and-Paris action game "Onimusha 3". "Onimusha 3" feels like a popcorn flick by comparison to "Shadow" feeling like an art film. Sure, "Onimusha 3" has Jean Reno in it (who only does his own French dialogue but not his own English dialogue...disappointing) and lots of dialogue, and brighter colors, but it feels canned and corny. (A can of corn?) The action is good, the puzzles are interesting, but after playing "Shadow" it's both good and bad because it's exactly what we expect from games, instead of trying to be more. The only thing that made me laugh so far is a gag involving a panda costume (not that that sort of game is supposed to be funny).

So, as far as that stodgy film critic that says that games can't be art goes, I would say that most games are not art. As long as he's willing to admit that the film version of say, "Wild, Wild, West" is not art, and we can agree that "Marvel vs
Capcom 2" is not art, maybe he should consider the possibility that Fumito Ueda does, in fact, create art. MvC2 isn't really art in the way checkers isn't really art. It is a game, in the strictest sense, built for competition with a concrete set of rules, and only really meaningful with two human opponents. That's not to say that watching experts play it won't yield some transcendent moments where their mastery of the game evokes some emotional response, but that has more to do with the player than the game. "Wild, Wild, West" conveys a story, but its execution is so distracting from the progress of the story that the only thing that the movie seems to do is to try and make you keep watching it until it's over. If there was any moral or issue embedded in the plot, or any emotional response that occurred, it would be more likely an artifact of the viewer than an intended feature placed there by the director. But in "Ico" and "Shadow of the Colossus", the game has a narrative, and in completing the game the narrative is revealed. Neither game is so much of an open sandbox situation that multiple paths to victory are possible - the story goes exactly as the game director intends, and the games are simple enough that achieving this goal isn't daunting or too frustrating. They're just difficult enough to make you feel like you accomplished something.

#2 son pushes the buttons

2010-04-16T21:38:00.002-04:00

Although he doesn't game, #2 son had a bit of a meltdown in the R-Zone this morning. I had already driven all over without purpose to his mind, because I headed south a little early and the two places I wanted to go weren't open yet. Once the Asian grocery store I go to opened up, the way was clear to get some sushi supplies and some Pocky-like confection that Meiji makes. We got Strawberry and Cappuccino Creme. Next order of business, seeing if we could find a DC Friends Superman at Toys 'R' Us. No dice on that, so we sifted through the R-Zone. All the cheap games were buy one, get one half off. I was looking at "The Force Unleashed", "Sonic Unleashed", Capcom's "Spyborgs", and a couple of other things. They had several copies of "Mushroom Men", so perhaps I'll have to encourage more people to pick that up. No "Ghost Squad" or the House of the Dead game for Wii with more swearing in it than anything except that David Mamet film about real estate.

#2 son saw "Namco Museum Remix" and "The Force Unleashed" and brought them to me. I tried to put them down when he was looking at something else but I was denied. He's only three, but he knows what Pac-Man is.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Really? They haven't done this yet?

2010-04-12T20:49:00.003-04:00

I was somewhat amused by this assertion when I read it the other day:

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/38108/No-Twilight-game-has-lost-millions

If you don't follow the link, it's a tirade about how some industry analyst thinks that the video game industry is missing out on millions of dollars because there isn't a 'Twilight' video game.

This theory is either brilliant, or know to be untrue by the author and just put forth to drive comments to his website. I'm probably making it worse by using his link here.

His logic: It's a movie, it's making a ton of money right now, there needs to be a game of it so those people plus part of the video game industry can make more money.

My logic: If Avatar, the #4 most expensive move of all time (as of this writing) can't even get a game with 70 out of 100 on Metacritic what hope does Twilight have? Wouldn't a mediocre - to - crappy game do what it always does, dilute the brand and create the feeling that it's a quick and dirty cash-in instead of lovingly crafted fan service?

Looking back at the more successful movie-to-game conversions, it would seem that the movie has to have some sort of plot line that works well with an established game genre. Goldeneye (The Nintendo 64 one, Metacritic score of 96) lent itself easily to the first person shooter genre, and Peter Jackson's King Kong (Metacritic score of 77-82 on consoles, worse on handhelds) was easily crafted into an action/adventure game. It would be great to create a new game genre that works with the film's plot, but it's difficult enough to make a game that draws outside the lines of convention without the additional pressure of trying to release it at the same time as the film.

So now it comes down to - what sort of movies are the 'Twilight' films and where does that place a game to go with it? Twilight is essentially a teenage romance with supernatural content. Romance games don't seem to sell here - Japanese developers do make 'dating sims' but for some reason or another they're not in the American market. The "Twilight" audience skews heavily female, but the only games with market-tested sell through to girls and young women in America that I'm aware of are "The Sims" games. Also, many good games have a substantial number of female players. The Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises, Nintendo's "Zelda" and "Mario" games, the better role-playing games including "World of Warcraft" and "Everquest", and even some first person shooters have substantial contingents of female players. On the flip side, most games marketed specifically to girls are not much better than the crop of shovelware movie license games - made just because someone feels the have a niche to fill, and not so concerned with just making a good game that people want to play. The pessimistic side of me thinks that what would really end up being made out of "Twilight" would be some sort of plot-driven fetch quest game like the game they made for Spiderwick (Metacritic scores of 59-64).

If someone does make a Twilight game, I hope they have the courage to make something that gives people the same sense of place that the books and the movies do. I hope that they have enough sense to build to a budget, but not to a deadline. What I really hope is that they not do it unless they have an actual, workable idea at the core of it.

Food, Food, and... almost food.

2010-03-27T07:58:00.006-04:00

I have three things to report in the food arena. Two of them are undoubtedly, unquestionably, food. The third thing, I'm feeling like it's not really food, even though it's something I write on the grocery list on a regular basis.

On the way home from work the other night, I asked my youngest child what he wanted for dinner. Typically, there are only two answers. On weekends, he seems to ask for macaroni & cheese with SPAM in it. The other answer is "Hangurgers". Yes, that is how my three-year old pronounces it. I am going to have to call Steve Martin about that and see if that gag in the sub-mediocre "Pink Panther" remake was his or the other writer's gag.

In an effort to appease both the adults and the children, I did the unthinkable in this economy, I applied the "separate but equal" treatment. It was not my original intention, but I didn't really think that I wanted plain old greasy french fries, and I spotted something in the freezer section that made me think that doing a separate dinner for the adults would work.

Alexia spicy sweet potato fries.

They were good by themselves, as long as they were just crispy enough (don't kill them in the oven, though). They were also good with mayo. The chipotle flavor doesn't make sense with ketchup, though. The kids had tater tots instead - sweet potato fries are 'weird' and chipotle is too spicy for them anyway. These fries I will definitely get again.

The second thing I would like to report in the food arena is Taco Bell Shrimp Tacos. Six shrimp, lettuce, mayo, and pico de gallo. Overall, the flavor was very balanced - the shrimp worked very well with the pico sauce. There was nothing spectacular about the shrimp, but they also were not as small as I had heard from initial reports from elsewhere on the web. In this particular instance, it make the steak soft taco that I had with it not seem as good. The person I was eating with commented that he had steak soft tacos from that same location a few days before and they were better, so maybe we just got a bum part of the cow, making for an unfair comparison. I don't know if the shrimp tacos are going to be a limited time item or not, but it may limit my ability to go to Taco Bell with my steak-loving wife, as there are lots of allergy warnings about shellfish and my wife is one of the afflicted in this case. Most of the time we don't have cross-contamination problems unless it's someplace like Long John Silver's where everything ends up in the fryer. OK, enough with the allergy talk. To sum up - not bad, not good enough to make up for the potential inconvenience to my spouse.

The third thing, and arguably not a food thing although I consider it so, is -
Metal Gear Solid Mountain Dew Game Fuel.

You will probably notice that most of the writing on the carton in the article I linked to is in Japanese - who knows if this promotion is coming to the states? Maybe everyone here will still be too busy with the God of War III promotion. The number of people that I know that have played the Metal Gear games is few, and the number that own a PSP is even fewer. I can only presume that this is an attempt to bring stealth action to a new generation. Since there are several collectible cans, and I only see one color, I assume it's only one flavor. Judging from the can, it's the one I wasn't as fond of from the World of Warcraft promotion. I guess we will find out sometime in June?

Social Gaming for the Antisocial gamer

2010-03-19T19:08:00.003-04:00

Welcome to SuperMonkeyCube's magical circus of broad generalizations.

"FarmVille is a giant waste of time and seems like work. "

See how easy that was? I will admit that that generalization is only true for some groups of people.

For my next trick, I will now lump everyone that reads these words into three categories. Watch carefully, as my fingers do not leave my hands. The first category is people who are reading this on my blog page, and with whom I do not interact with on Facebook. These people probably don't play FarmVille. They may not even know about it, or have only gotten sketchy information. The second category is people who are reading this on Facebook and may or may not know that they could read this somewhere else, but they are very aware of FarmVille because every third update on their Facebook home page is "'#FriendName' has just '#event' in FarmVille!". The third category are the people who are generating all those FarmVille updates on everyone else's pages and only stopped to read this because I put 'FarmVille' in the title.

At the Game Developer's Conference this past weekend in San Francisco, the two Facebook games that were mentioned the most were FarmVille and Bejeweled Blitz. Both games are doing something similar to a game model that is practically the standard in South Korea. The game is free to play. If you want cooler stuff for the game, you can either play the game a lot and get in-game rewards, or you can spend real money to reap the benefits right away. Typically, the numbers quoted for this sort of game is that 10 percent of the players actually fund the game for the other 90 percent that just play for free. (I'm sure it's another broad generalization.) Most of the reason that they were mentioned is that they are standout success stories, especially in light of the fact that they're free to play, and developers are talking about what it takes to make games in this space that are successful.

Bejeweled Blitz is a one-minute version of Popcap's game Bejeweled, a puzzle game where you swap two adjacent pieces in a large grid to get 3, 4, or 5 or the same kind of piece in a row. Unlike the regular Bejeweled, there is no fear of not having an available move. One is always available, so the trick is just to rack up score as fast as possible in the allotted time. In addition to your score, some pieces when cleared off the board yield coins that can then be used for power-ups in subsequent games. It is also possible to purchase coins with real money to get the same power-ups. This game, I like. Each game is self-contained. If I don't play it for a week, nothing bad happens in-game. I have noticed that among my friends, a surprising number of women are playing it, and they tend to be better than the men. I'm sure that has a lot to do with a self-selecting population - women who might only be mediocre at it may not tend to play as much or at all and would rather play something like Farmville where there isn't a score or a ranking ladder. Alternately, it might have something to do with the part of the brain that does pattern recognition being different in women, but I'm in no position to start funding a clinical trial.

FarmVille, on the other hand is structured around planting, raising, and harvesting crops, animal husbandry, and real estate improvement. If you neglect crops, they go bad. If you don't work on your field, it doesn't do anything for you. It does have the advantage of letting your virtual neighbors help you out, and a great deal of bartering and cooperation happens between people. The only console video games that this reminds me of are the Harvest Moon games, with a touch of Animal Crossing thrown in. After seeing what this was about, I opted not to play it. I didn't play it long enough to find out what you can do with real money. I can attest to the fact that easily 10 percent of my Facebook friends have played it at some point, and most of those people are not people that I would consider traditional gamers. Clearly it's more popular than something like Street Fighter - even though it's a flagship Capcom fighting game that just released a new version, I think I have a better chance at walking up to a random person under 40 that has played FarmVille than I do finding a person that's played Street Fighter IV.

This is not to say that people really want farming games. I don't think that's the driving force here. FarmVille is simple to operate, inherently networked, and easy to understand the concepts of. The last thing I want to see is the XBox and Playstation teams feeling like they need to get a farming simulator by fourth quarter this year, because that's wrong on so many levels. Nintendo has tried to make this work, since they have a fairly recent release of Animal Crossing for the Wii which includes a "Wii Speak" accessory - but Nintendo's online system is cumbersome for most. Connecting on most Nintendo games online involves having to obtain a "Friend Code" from your friends so you can connect to them, except that this code is different for every single game. Only the most dedicated Animal Crossing players will involve themselves. The "Wii Speak" allows people playing Animal Crossing online together to talk to each other over the Nintendo WFC connection. I don't think that this will help foster the same sense of cooperation that Facebook lends itself so easily to.

As usual, what I think that people that don't normally play games look for in games is a new experience. People that involve themselves in 'gaming culture' already have their preferences, and gravitate towards genres that they're already familiar with. Amongst those people, it takes a really standout game to get them out of their comfort zone. On the other hand, the novice gamer has fewer expectations, and has less reservation about throwing themselves in a new experience. Framed that way, it makes perfect sense that I would play Bejeweled Blitz over FarmVille - if I had wanted a farming game, I would have already played Harvest Moon and might even have thought FarmVille was inferior and not bothered with it. On the other hand, having played Tetris, Bust-A-Move, Chainz, and Collapse!, Bejeweled Blitz makes perfect sense and meshes well with my existing genre preferences.

So after writing this, I've decided to go easy on my Facebook friends that are playing FarmVille. While I've seen a bunch of people joining groups that sound like "I don't care about your farm, your mafia, or your cafe", I'm going to give that a pass. Besides, what's happening is that they're becoming social gamers.

(Is that like social consumption of adult beverages?)

Motion Sickness, or, Controlling Interest

2010-03-15T21:51:00.003-04:00

I had the most horrible dream Saturday night.

It is years in the future. I am in the upstairs press room in an old movie theater, typing up a movie review on a thin black laptop. It used to be the projection booth, but digital movie projection has gotten so small that the new projection booth is a closet in the press room with a rack full of servers . There are a few folding chairs and tables, a low ceiling, a great wireless internet connection, and a projectionist who is babysitting the press, the data rack, and a couple of security monitors. The projectionist answers a knock on the door, and greets someone presumably familiar to him and tells him to go to theater seven. After he shuts the door again, he tells me that it was the EA sales rep and the newest Madden football game has been released for press events. I'm supposed to go down to theater seven and play against one of the sports writers from my media group's website. Not only are we going to have the game projected onto the screen, but the new game comes with a new controller. When I get down to theater seven, I am relieved that no one is wearing 3-D glasses. The EA rep greets me and hands me a pair of clear polycarbonate glasses, and I get worried again.

"Don't worry. They're just safety glasses."

Why the crap do I need safety glasses to get my butt handed to me on a football video game?

"In case you're wondering, here's why you need safety glasses. Legal said if there are flying objects, you gotta wear 'em." He tosses me a foam football, which feels like it's got a controller embedded inside the foam.

The game isn't too bad, but I end up sticking to a running game after a few plays because pass plays require me to be able to throw the controller at the correct speed and direction. If I don't throw a perfect spiral, I get a wobbly football on the screen. Lucky for me, the sportswriter is having just as hard a time.

This is not the part where I tell you that the future is now, although most of the things in my dream were possible technologically. This is only a possible outcome in a world where game design sometimes gets driven by the marketing department.

This is what I fear - when virtual reality is embedded into video games so far that they become too much actual work. Don't get me wrong - the right kind of feedback is helpful. A force feedback steering wheel is a lot more helpful to drive with than the plastic Wii wheel, where you're just driving with the tilt sensor. I just don't want to get knocked out of my chair if I have to nudge the car next to me. I don't want my ability to make free throws in real life to impair my ability to make free throws in the next NBA Jam, NBA Street, or whatever it is that they might call it in the future.

I guess the thing that set me off on this rant is that there is a new Sony motion controller available for the PS3 called the Move. Since it uses the PlayStation Eye camera, it does a better job of locating the controller in space than the Wii does. It has a big lighted sphere on the end of the controller that alters its color to maintain contrast from its surroundings. It also has the advantage of recharging the same way that the PS3 controllers do, via a USB cable. But, I don't know if this was something that Sony needed to do, and it's not like that this has replaced the standard controller in any way. I fear that the Move has a real risk of becoming another marginalized product along with the DJ Hero turntable controller and the Tony Hawk Ride virtual skateboard. Not only is it an optional accessory, but it itself has its own optional accessory called the sub-controller that looks surprisingly like the Nunchuck for the Wiimote and serves a similar, if not identical, purpose. And, unlike the DJ Hero controller or the Ride skateboard, $100 bucks only gets you an Eye, a controller and a demo disk. (Sub-controller is extra.) At least DJ Hero and Ride are supposed to be full-game experiences at that price point.

Microsoft has gone one more step past Sony - with their Natal system, they're allowing an infrared camera to watch the player's movements and forgo a traditional controller entirely. If you are at the correct distance from the camera, it is able to determine independent position of each of your fingers. You could be typing in the air like Officer John Anderton of the Precrime division before you know it. (Philip K. Dick? "Minority Report"? Some crazy-pants couch-jumper played him in the movie version?)

I appreciate that Sony and Microsoft are trying to capture some of what has made the Wii a big success, but this will be an uphill battle for them. Right now, they are both presumably getting software lined up that will take advantage of the new controllers. Neither of them has been able to make much of a dent in the casual gaming demographic so far, even with the XBox 360 being as cheap as the Wii. Even if one of their software titles turns out to be better than sliced bread or hotcakes or whatever it is that will announce the second wave of new casual gaming that's not on Facebook, it still isn't going to gain ground against the Wii this generation. Once you add all the costs of the new motion controllers to a console bundle, it's not at the Wii's price point any more. I also don't think that too many families that have a XBox360 or a PS3 already are using it as their main, family friendly, game night console. I'd hazard a guess that the Wii leads in that regard, followed with the PS2!

So, in case I haven't said it enough - Move and Natal are capable tech, but run a very real risk of being another overpriced peripheral with little software to take advantage of it. If you want waggle, that's what your Wii is for.

Tatsunoko vs Capcom review (Wii, US version)

2010-02-26T18:47:00.004-05:00

While other people may have reviewed Capcom's Wii fighting game "Tatsunoko vs Capcom:Ultimate All-Stars", I feel like they glossed over some things. So, you may see me nitpick about the controls a little. I may gloss over other things, though. I am not going to explain the Capcom or Tatsunoko characters very much since the characters and their respective movesets could take up tons of space on their own but I might mention a few notable ones. If you are not a Wii owner, you may be lost by some of the minute details that I pick over but I will try my best to make it understandable. I may abbreviate the game's giant title as TvC, also.

PRECONCEPTIONS

The things that I knew about coming into the game was that it was a fighting game using a 2 vs 2 system, where each person picks two characters to use, the characters can be switched at anytime, and the match is lost when both characters are defeated. The health gauge of the character off screen refills slightly, similar to the previous "vs" game, "Marvel vs Capcom 2".

In an effort to accommodate the Wii, the buttons have been reduced to 4. The four buttons are Light, Medium, Heavy, and Partner. Since I recently had been playing "Samurai Shodown Collection" on the Wii, I was OK with the idea that there would be four buttons to manage, since most of the SNK games are 4-button, and "Samurai Shodown" did not seem tough to control. They have you attach the Nunchuck peripheral, and the four attack buttons are mapped by default to A (on the face of the Wiimote), B (on the back of the Wiimote), C, and Z (both on the Nunchuck), and the character movement is controlled by the Nunchuck's analog stick. It was my assumption that Capcom would do something similar.

DAY ONE (Friday)

It is my intent to see if I can make this game go without reading the manual. I toss the game into the Wii, pick the giant robot PTX-40A from "Lost Planet" who's too big for a partner and has to play by himself, and I am mystified by the fact that only A and B seem to do anything attack-wise. The analog stick on the Nunchuck does move the character, though. I also figured out that the minus button taunts. That was what I expected, at least. I got as far as the second stage of some giant spherical boss-like character without continuing. I opt not to continue further, and go get the manual to figure out where the attack buttons are mapped. I read the manual and lose my mind a little. After months of defending Capcom's decision to make a different game for the Wii instead of porting Street Fighter 4 with simplified controls, it turns out that if you play the game with the Wiimote or the Wiimote+Nunchuck combinations, you get simplified controls, and whether you want them or not. I look at the next two pages of the manual, where they show the layouts for the Classic Controller and the Gamecube controller. This is what I expected here. There are more than enough buttons, and the default option is logically laid out.

For those of you new to Nintendo, the Gamecube was Nintendo's previous game machine. Despite its small size and awesomeness, it never sold as many units as the Playstation 2. The
controller, while quite responsive and well made, has an odball layout and is not cordless.

Nintendo designed the Wii so that Gamecube controllers are directly supported - there are four controller ports under the side panel on the Wii. I go to bed feeling a little annoyed, and drop the manual between my side of the bed and the dresser partly by accident and partly because I'm too sleepy to care.

DAY TWO (Saturday)

After getting some of the house cleaned and some laundry folded in the morning, I tell my older son that we're going to play in 'Versus' mode on TvC. I have grabbed a Gamecube controller for myself, and I let him play with the Wiimote/Nunchuck combination. The only thing I tell him about the controls are that A attacks, B is for special moves, and to change players you hold away on the analog stick and shake the Nunchuck. Even with me picking Ryu on my team every time (or maybe because of it) we are pretty evenly matched. It's very easy to dish out the super moves in the simplified control scheme. Once #1 son had a team that he feels OK with (Tekkaman and Karas), I set him loose on single player. He had to continue a couple of times, but he was able to get to the end.

DAY THREE (Sunday)

I am busy doing chores and herding #2 son - I suggest that #1 son finish TvC with a Capcom character so we can unlock Frank West. He manages to finish with PTX-40A. Frank West seems fun, but he seems like he'd be more fun with the real controls. He manages to finish with Frank by himself using the simplified controls.

We managed to play sporadically after that, and the game doesn't seem broken. The special moves, while different for each character if you're not using the simple controls, aren't too hard to pull off. It's still simpler than a regular Street Fighter game. So let's go back and talk about the game overall.

Visuals

The characters and backgrounds are all 3D models, like the current Street Fighter 4. All of the previous Street Fighter and VS games were all 2D characters with either parallax scrolling multi-layer 2D backgrounds (SFA, SF2, SF3) or 2D characters against 3D backgrounds (CvS2, MvC2). The 3D character models aren't quite as detailed as their SF4 counterparts, but they still do a good job of looking enough like the 2D characters that they came from to know which previous game a particular character was taken from. The visual effects are done quite well
and don't seem to cause much slowdown except possibly during a couple of the super moves, but at the point that the slowdown might occur it doesn't affect gameplay. The character icon art(the 2D graphic art that displays the characters while the match loads) seems very similar in style to Capcom Fighting Evolution, and looks very sharp and clean on the TV.

Sound

I hate to say this, but other than breifly noticing that some of the background music seemed to be remixed versions of existing Street Fighter stage music, I didn't notice the music much. I don't think that it was because it was bad, I suspect that it was because we were too busy trying to play the game. The announcer voice over is better enunciated and a little more Western-sounding than the Capcom Fighting Evolution. The character voices seemed like a lot of them were different actors than usual, but everything was a lot more cleanly enunciated here as well. Even the Japanese dialogue was easier to understand, even though that's not much of a priority for a Western audience.

Gameplay

Despite my initial negative reaction to how the controls were done, the simple controls were easy enough for someone familiar with the simple controls of Super Smash Bros., and the more precise control scheme with the Gamecube controller was well implemented for seasoned "Vs" players. Even the wacky Tatsunoko characters were fun to play with. The boss is beatable, but not a pushover on regular difficulty.

In closing, I felt that this game did a great job of representing Capcom fighing games. If you are new to fighting games and are looking for somewhere to start, this is a great place to do it.

Two Quick things...

2010-02-24T09:38:00.002-05:00

I am working on a review of Capcom and Eighting's "Tatsunoko vs CAPCOM" fighting game for Wii, expect to see that posted sometime over the weekend. The short version - game is good, get your Gamecube controller out of storage to play it.

The other thing that I need to mention now is that all users of the Open Office productivity suite should update to version 3.2 at their earliest convenience, and if you haven't tried Open Office yet, it's a good time to do it.

People just don't understand English.

2010-01-15T12:51:00.002-05:00

...And I don't mean American English, in this case - I mean that American English speakers don't understand other-side-of-the-Atlantic English as spoken by regular people.

In support of my position, I give as examples:

1) The 1968 movie "Yellow Submarine" had non-Beatles playing the Beatles so their spoken dialogue would be understood by the audience.

2) Guy Ritchie's 1998 film "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" needs subtitles in at least one scene when shown to an American audience.

3) In the Dreamworks animated feature Monsters vs Aliens, dozens of people on the internet have to misquote Gallaxhar's best fake swear word as "Flagnog" or "Flagnnon" because they don't correct for the slightly upper-class fake English accent and spell it "Flagnard" like they should.

OK, so I checked the subtitles. I'm like that.

Now that I think of it, maybe Americans don't even understand regular American English. On the DVD of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, after you hit "play" but before the feature starts, there is a screen where they have two different stills of the movie that you pick one of. There's no explanation, just the two pictures that you choose one of. If you're watching the DVD on an old standard TV, you will probably think that you're choosing between full frame and widescreen. If you're watching the DVD on a widescreen TV, it looks like you're choosing between 1.78:1 and 2.35:1. As it turns out, it's the second one. Are we really there yet? Is everybody watching movies on widescreen TV's now? Are movie watchers afraid of math? Would have killed them to put a little bit of explanatory text on the screen, or does every interface have to be only pictures now? Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

Am I Trying to Ruin Christmas?

2009-11-20T09:37:00.004-05:00

I overheard a presumably uninvolved mom in the video game aisle at Walmart this morning, asking one of the older, more seasoned employees about the various video game systems. I heard the employee giving vague, noncommittal answers - but really what he should be trying to do (in my opinion) is to ask some questions that will allow her to make a clear choice so she can get what she wants and be on her way.

For a moment, let's forget the fact that Mom should have done her homework before she ever set foot in Walmart. Wait! The peanut gallery argues. Mom can't know what to get their kids, that's why they're asking the Walmart employee! That Walmart employee isn't any more of a gamer than that Mom is, even if he does work in the electronics section. He knows what he's been told, but he doesn't know much firsthand - or he'd been able to give more compelling, specific answers and guide her to a solution.

After I got involved, and came over to explain about friend codes for Nintendo multiplayer games, and how she shouldn't worry about her kid(s?) playing against random people on the internet, she expressed her concern about "Is it going to be fast enough? My son is always complaining about that on the computer."

After asking if they had other console gaming systems at home, I tried to reassure her that there was less of that to worry about on a console because he couldn't fill up a Nintendo DS with random programs like he had presumably done to the computer at home. After Mom explains that no, his computer is clean, but he screwed up our computer once, et cetera, then she mentions the other thing that she wants to get him. Xbox. (Which, at this point, is the XBox 360 - the second iteration of Microsoft's console.)

I almost never go much farther with anybody in this conversation without the following:

1) How old is the child in question?
2) What games do they want to play?

and sometimes a third followup question that's based around the answers to the first two. In this case, the answers were "twelve" and "Modern Warfare 2 and Halo". So, based on that, I asked

3) Would you let your kid watch "Saving Private Ryan"?

but not before I had said "Grossly Inappropriate" at least once. If the answers had been "twelve" and "Forza and Burnout", I might have been more encouraging. Perhaps if her child was older, or she said something about he did a big report on WWII for school and was really into the tactics of the eastern theater, I might have been more encouraging.

So, I discouraged her from Xbox360 , touted Nintendo's kid-friendly lineup, and ran away knowing that I was just going to keep saying "Grossly Inappropriate".

Don't get me wrong - the Xbox360 is a very capable piece of hardware, and there are a lot of family friendly titles for it - but if "Modern Warfare 2" is where you're headed, "Lego Indiana Jones" and "Rock Band 2" are just going to be little bumps on the road on the way to the M-Rated titles.

Don't you play a lot of M-Rated games? Aren't you afraid that your kids will be desensitized to violence?

Yes, I play a lot of M-Rated games. I also play a lot of other games, too. What does #2 son want to watch the most? "Pikmin". #2 son can say "zombies", and he is scared of scary music. When he wants to watch me play something, it's pretty pastoral by comparison to what he's aware of. On top of that - Pikmin is a really great game with lots of depth.

#1 son has been playing "Lego Batman", "Wii Play", and "Billy Hatcher". Sure, sometimes #1 son watches me play violent games, but not for very long. If he thinks that he is scared, he doesn't watch anymore and goes to do something else. We also talk about the scary stuff, and I feel that he has a good handle on what is real and what isn't - especially when we've talked about it. Inexplicably, he takes great delight in watching me play Wii Fit - maybe it's fun to watch someone else struggle foolishly with the pushup/side plank exercise.

So, now that I'm done rambling, and ranting, I can't help thinking that I might have ruined Christmas for some kid even though I tried to play by the guidelines and encourage industry sanctioned age-appropriate games. Alternately, I might have gotten his mother to be more involved in what he's doing.

Yep, ruined.

Tips for salesmen

2009-11-12T11:23:00.002-05:00

Here's some pointers for people new to sales or purchasing.

1) If you walk into the front door, asking about what used vehicles we might have for sale, and you portray yourself as being in that line of work, maybe you should know things like 'blown head gasket' + 'no compression' = 'not driveable' instead of asking the same question three times. Correspondingly, whatever it is that you sell, try to learn your product, and not get schooled on it by the person you're trying to sell to.

2) If you walk in the front door asking about one thing, and then feeling like you can't get what you want from that, start asking about seven other unrelated things, be prepared to be treated like a) an idiot b) a miscreant or c) both. If you don't like the vehicle we might be able to sell you, and you start asking about pallets and breakers and scrap wire - I might think that you're a junk dealer instead of a vehicle broker. If you pursue the issue further, I might think you're just a criminal casing the place instead of a junk dealer.

3) If you want people to think you're sincere, dress the part. I'm not saying business suits and ties are mandatory, because I wouldn't wish that on other people. A shirt with a collar goes a long way towards sincerety. A business card with real contact information wouldn't hurt, either.

4) Be straightforward. Saying you're in "the export business" in a vague manner may sound impressive to the guys at the bar, but it sounds like "I'm trying to be a tax dodger" to someone with some accounting knowledge.

5) Drive a sensible car to a business call. If you roll up in a luxury SUV with gold trim and fancy wheels it says "I milk everyone for so much money that I can drive an empty land yacht and don't care about gas mileage."

In the interest of disclosure - this is basically me ranting about someone who showed up where I work and proceeded to waste my time. I don't know if he really was a broker, or he was just a hoodlum, but now I don't care and will be letting less of them rob any time from me at all.

If we sell anything used direct to the public, we'll use craigslist like everybody else.

You're a nerd, go to Gamestop.

2009-10-14T19:56:00.002-04:00

I was going to dish out a giant rant about Batman: Arkham Asylum and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 each having their own Gamestop preorder exclusives and how I thought it was a horrible trend of having exclusives tied to stores, yadda, yadda.

I'm not going to bother, though for several reasons - for one, both games are quite good on their own, and the exclusives aren't going to make them or break them. The second reason, glaringly obvious, it that it's way too late to complain about this sort of marketing. If Namco didn't get a beatdown from fans two years ago for selling people game levels that may have been already on the retail disk of Beatiful Katamari but not unlockable until paid for, then I can hardly see how complaining would do any good in this case - and the Gamestop exclusive idea isn't nearly as evil as my example. I guess the third reason is that there are a lot of Gamestops out there. Gamestop does bill themselves as "the world's largest video game and entertainment software retailer" so I presume most people that can read this on the internet can either find a Gamestop at their local mall or preorder games from their website. Gamestop is certainly more nerd-friendly in general than my local Walmart. I had it in my mind that Walmart actually sold more video games than Gamestop does, but it hardly matters to Walmart if a game company tries to drag a few people across town to Gamestop, since a lot of those people are still going to Walmart for sundries and food anyway.

From a marketing standpoint, I would assume that game companies would rather have a Gamestop exclusive than a Walmart exclusive for action titles, since the perception is that Gamestop is closer to the true "hardcore gamer" demographic. What's Walmart ever had as a game exclusive? Chibi-Robo Park Patrol for Nintendo DS? (What's that about?)

Troubleshooting Windows... or is it?

2009-09-16T21:23:00.003-04:00

I had an interesting time this morning, working on a problem with Remote Web Workplace. For those of you who don't know, Remote Web Workplace is a feature in Windows XP and later where a desktop connected to a internet-connected server can be accessed via a web interface, and then turns into a standard Remote Desktop situation - so a home user could access their work PC, for example. The only way this works is through some fancy pants ActiveX controls, so Internet Explorer is the only reliable way to do it (and yes, I know some people have made ActiveX plugins for FireFox).

The problem becomes a little trickier, when the problem is on an Apple.

As it turns out, Apple has been turning out nice-looking hardware these days, and the nicer part is that the old excuse of "There's no programs for Apple that do X" is greatly diminished. Thanks to programs like Boot Camp and Parallels and the fact that Apple uses Intel processors these days, Windows can be run on a Mac either from a separate partition (Boot Camp) or as a virtual machine (Parallels).

The problem the user was having was that he was unable to do Remote Web Workplace through his Mac through Parallels. His purchase of a Mac and Parallels was somewhat predicated on the idea that he'd be able to do this. We were able to get to the portal on the server, but when it was time to actually log into his desktop, it always told us that the username/password combination was incorrect.

I spent a bit of time on Google seeing if there was a known problem with this, and tried to make sure that neither Windows nor OSX were blocking some port that I needed to make the computers communicate correctly. It didn't take me very long to find out where the Apple firewall was, and I'm glad I didn't need to adjust anything there because I felt like I would have left the machine vulnerable had I done so.

I even tried logging into my own desktop, and failed several times, adjusted some settings, and then I got it to work once. Happy that I had solved the problem, I brought it back to the user only to have it fail for him and then me when I brought it to his office. Maybe the WiFi signal isn't strong enough, I think. I bring the Macbook Pro to where the router is, prop an equipment rack door open, and then try again.

Same problem again.

I painstakingly check my typing, only to discover the oddest thing.

The Shift Key, it fails me. If I were to hold shift and start typing the letter 'a', I get 'aAAAAAA'.

If I pressed shift once, held it and pressed 'a', released both keys and repeated, I only get 'aaaaaaa'.

The only sure way to get a capital letter the first time was to temporarily engage CapsLock. Since Windows obscures the password as it's typed, there was no way to know that the password was wrong other than the error message. This was not a problem with the whole computer - the shift key worked perfectly fine for regular programs, and even the first login. Somehow, during the second login at the remote desktop, there were too many layers of computers there and some info was not passed. Once I discovered the CapsLock workaround, there were no more rejected logins.

This seemed like the computing equivalent of a Turducken. Bon Appetit!

More Proof that I don't understand Marketing

2009-06-10T13:18:00.003-04:00

(As if anyone needed it...)
Today's marketing anomaly is about the "Tie-in". This is where you take product and create an association with some other product, in hopes to generate some excitement about both products.

For example, 7-Eleven is frequently doing special Slurpee flavors or collector cups as a tie-in to various movie releases. (The last Superman movie and the new Transformers come to mind.) They have big window stickers on the storefront that advertise both the products and the movie, and the radio ads for 7-Eleven and the movie include some soundbites about the promotion. Presumably the movie website might have some info about product promotions as well. The idea is that people just going for a Slurpee get some information about the movie if they didn't know about it, and the people that buy Slurpees are people they want to go see the film. Also, people that were already going to see the film get reinforcement of their choice, making them feel better about wanting to see the movie and having a Slurpee. 7-Eleven figures that people going online to the Transformers website might want a collector cup, driving some business to their store. In theory, the tie-in works for both parties, if done correctly.

In thinking that I understood how this works, I am baffled by the current Mountain Dew Game Fuel tie-in to World of Warcraft. The flavors have been out for a while, but the only reason I'm even aware of them is because I went through one particular line in Walmart where there happened to be a poorly lit drink case with some 20 oz. bottles of the beverages in question. Based on spotty data on youtube, the new flavors have been out for two months and I haven't seen a stitch of marketing anywhere. To be fair, I don't play WoW, so maybe that's why - but I don't think that is a good reason.

When the Halo 3 Game Fuel tie-in promotion started, they were stocking 12-packs of it in the game sections of stores (especially Target), along with McFarlane miniatures of a bunch of the characters. Even though I didn't buy Halo 3, there was no way I could have missed the promotion. As I just said, I also don't play World of Warcraft, so this certainly begs the question as to why I'm even talking about this. There is a point to this - I drink Mountain Dew. Surely I shouldbe made aware of new flavors, if the marketing people are doing their jobs? Or perhaps, this is a one-sided promotion where WoW fans get served Mountain Dew ads only, and WoW has no interest in attracting other overcaffeinated persons to their game. Just more proof that I don't really understand marketing - or I'm doing exactly what the marketing people want me to do.

Don't you hate it when... Part II

2009-05-15T16:57:00.003-04:00

I finally got some insight into the reason the Guinness World record for most cubes solved in an hour is so low, and why the result seems so inconsequential. To satisfy the conditions for the Guinness record, all the cubes need to be brand new out of the package at the beginning of the event. Frankly, I've gotten some real duds that were nearly impossible to turn right out of the package. He had 5 cubes, and they just rotated them around. So, while I'm still not that impressed, I'm more annoyed with Guinness than anything else. I guess the next time I have a brand new cube, I'll see how long it takes me the first few times. I hope nobody tears a tendon trying to break the record.

Sometimes I forget...

2009-04-27T21:37:00.004-04:00

that Baseball is a game, too. Even though it took me years to become mediocre at it, I have always appreciated the game on a strategic level. Every once in a while, something comes along that really makes me notice what's going on. I missed watching this on TV, since I was too beat from band practice - but thanks to the internet, I didn't have to miss it. However, since I watched it this morning, all of the videos with adequate picture quality on Youtube were voluntarily taken down. Here's the link from the MLB page, I hope it still works. The picture quality is much better than the Youtube clips I saw anyway.

http://mlb.mlb.com/media/video.jsp?content_id=4317185

This sort of thing only happens only once every few years, if at all. Jacoby Ellsbury stole home base. This sort of offensive play, sneaky as it was, only served to highlight the difference between the current Red Sox and the Yankees. This was not taking advantage of a wild pitch, this was not beating the rundown. This was speed and surprise. But then, no one expects the Spanish Inquistion.

Tales from the Cube - Birthday Edition

2009-04-22T12:52:00.002-04:00

I went out to Moe's for my birthday with the family over last weekend. I enjoyed my giant tofu burrito immensely. I got run over out in the parking lot with a shopping cart. It hurt, but it was fun. Later, we walked over to Best Buy to see what they had in the bargain bin. We almost picked up Slither for $5, but if I'm going to buy it I'd rather have widescreen and all they had was Full Frame (which is probably why it was in the $5 bin.)

I tried to play PS3 Guitar Hero on Hard on some song I didn't know but I couldn't manage to get in sync with the game. For all I know the display guitar's strum bar was all beat to heck, but I don't really know what it was supposed to feel like anyway.

I also played the new Wii Control Pikmin at the Nintendo kiosk, but I didn't like the controls at first. The idea of the Wii Control re-releases is that they take a game that sold well or got lots of critical acclaim on Nintendo's Gamecube, and then freshen it up so that it has native Wii controls. I hope that the freshening up process also includes widescreen support. It's one of those things that might be better if I just started over at the beginning and re-learned it. I still have my Gamecube copy of Pikmin and still play Challenge Mode periodically - so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with the game - but I didn't immediately 'get' the new control scheme.

After #1 son and I got tired of picking through the game section, we found Mom and #2 son back in the camera section. Mom was disappointed that more cameras don't list their minimum focusing distance on their specification sheet. The only advice I could offer was to not look for anything that couldn't physically support a decent lens, and that if the megapixels were high enough, you could compensate for lack of zoom somewhat. While we were chatting about that, an employee spotted my Rubik's cube, and asked me about it, and I solved it for him. I assume I took forty seconds or so, which is par for the course for me if I'm talking up a storm while doing it. He was dumbfounded, and dragged me over to the front where the other associates are and the Geek Squad counter is. I handed it to the first employee to re-scramble, and he dragged out one of the other employees, presumably someone he had to show this stupid human trick (Sorry, Mr. Letterman) to. The other employee asked me if I'm a professional cuber, which I both denied that I am and also denied that there are. I suggested to him that there might be a few people that make some of their travel money back, but that nobody does it for a living. I knocked down a slightly faster time, since I didn't talk as much, and they were even more impressed. After I finished, I walked past the nerdy looking girl (Please, no feminist outrage. I had Dana Scully on my work desktop for a while, and I dig the big black glasses look.) at the Geek Squad counter and I asked her "You can solve this, right? Otherwise, they wouldn't let you have the shirt..." She shook her head no. Maybe I should have asked her what devices the first group of IRQ's go to or what the pinout and voltage for USB is.

Don't you hate it when...

2009-04-16T20:33:00.004-04:00

Everybody you run into has to tell you the same news story because they know that you're the person that would be interested in it? Over the last two days I had a half-dozen people tell me that some kid solved 100 Rubik's cubes in a minute, or some variation thereof. I did not happen to see the TV spot on our local CBS or Fox affiliate, since I was probably watching Cash Cab or Time Warp on the Discovery Channel. So, like the good research hound that I am, I try to hunt it down on the internet. No dice. The closest thing that I can find on the internet is that some kid in Washington State solved 64 cubes in less than an hour. The news article even said that he had 19 minutes to spare, and that the previous record was 42 in an hour. That may be the Guinness record, but I don't put much stock in it. Let's walk through the math.

Assuming I understand what was in the news article, I think that what it says is that he solved 64 cubes in (60-19=) 41 minutes.
41 minutes is (60*41=) 2460 seconds.
2460 seconds divided by 64 cubes is 38.4375 seconds per cube. I hate to even mention this, but that's slower than my average - we'll give him the benefit of the doubt since I've never tried to cube for an entire hour.

Since this seems insane to me that it's a bona fide record that's worthy of a spot in the books, I went to www.speedcubing.com to look to see if any of the WCA sanctioned (Yes, Virginia, there is a World Cubing Association...) record holders had done anything like this, officially or unofficially. My starting point will be Erik Akkersdijk, since he had the fastest official single time of 2008 of 7.08 seconds. Clearly, no one could get times like that for every single cube, because no competition average is that low yet, so I looked up his average. In a cube competition, that usually means 5 times reduced to three by throwing out the high and the low, and averaging the remaining scores. Erik has an official best average of 11.11 seconds. As a matter of fact, looking at the top 100, everyone has an average under 15 seconds for the format I mentioned. So it seems like to me that any of these guys in the top 100 could seriously sandbag and do better. Since there doesn't seem to be an official category for multi-solving other than blindfolded, I started looking at unofficial times on the speedcubing site. Now while they're clearly labeled unofficial, these are not likely to be bogus times - most of the same people who post these are the same people in the WCA sanctioned events. They're just not at the official events. On the 'Other Cube Records' page, there is both a 'Most Solves in One Hour' category and a 'Cube Marathon ( 42 cubes) category. The above mentioned Erik Akkersdijk has a time listed in the 42 cubes category of - are you sitting down? - 9:57.27. That's less than ten minutes, people. But hey - that's an average of 13.5 seconds per cube, which isn't faster than his official average. Of the times for 42 cubes posted, dating back to 2005, none is over 36 minutes!

Let's get crazy, and look at what's in the most solves in one hour category, shall we? There's a lot of names that no one will know on that list, and Erik wasn't on there to check against. However, all of those people that told me about 'That movie with Will Smith where he...' might eventually find me telling them about Tyson Mao and Toby Mao teaching Will how to solve a Rubik's cube. Wouldn't you know? Toby's name is on the list - with 150 solves in an hour. That's about 24 seconds apeice. Toby's best official average is 14.11 - but that's only for a few cubes. So, I think 24 seconds per cube seems rather plausible. To top it all off, Toby's not anywhere near the top of the list - Milán Baticz is at the top of the list with 245 cubes in an hour. He's no slouch, as he won or at least placed well in events all over Europe since 2005, and he's one of the few cubers to do longer marathons than an hour.

If anybody else has anything to say about 'that kid on TV' to me, I hope they come up with a better story than the one I found, and can tell me what his name is.

Catch-up, and Gaming on a Budget

2009-04-09T21:26:00.003-04:00

So, I haven't posted in a month. :( I feel bad about it, but at least it gives me quite a bit to catch up on.

The cover band I was in in High School has gotten back together, and I had spent a lot of time preparing material and acclimating to a new piece of gear - the Zoom B2 bass multi-effects pedal.

I still have other audio work to do unrelated to that band, hopefully I can get that knocked out soon. It mostly involves rescuing audio from cassette tapes - things people recorded for themselves from things they no longer have, some improv humor from their childhood, some stuff from vinyl that ended up on tape, and so on.

I picked up a great $10 PS2 game, which was the Williams Pinball collection. It's worth it for Funhouse and Pinbot alone. I'm looking forward to seeing that on a progressive scan TV soon, I've only played it on my old-school TV so far. It also has Gorgar, Space Shuttle, Black Knight, Whirlwind, and Firepower? I'm not 100% sure of the name of the last one, but I do remember that the game audio for that one sounds suspiciously like Defender. The controls are simple - flippers on L and R, plunger on the right analog, and nudge on the left analog.

Also in the 'gaming on a budget' vein, I obtained an original XBox from a co-worker who had long since abandoned it for a newer, more family-friendly console. The only problem with it that I had discovered is that I occasionally have to open the drive door with a paper clip. Dissasembly of the drive is not as easy as the PS2's drive, so I wasn't able to re-seat the little white pin back into the groove on the underside of the disk tray - which would be all it would need. It's working now, so I won't fuss about it too much. I used a PS2 power cord to power it, and it didn't even come with a controller. I didn't even know if it would boot until a bought a controller. (Pelican, Wal-Mart, $14.97) Once I was able to get it to come up and play an audio CD, I figured it was worth taking the chance on some game purchases. Thinking about what I wanted for XBox that was never made for PS2 was easy. I didn't know if I would want to play any of the Halo games, as I had no intention of hooking this up to the internet. However, the Tecmo games were worth checking out to me. So, I went to Gamestop and dug through the used section.

Ninja Gaiden Black, $19.99
Dead or Alive 3, $4.99
Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball, $3.99
SNK vs Capcom - SvC Chaos, $7.99

SvC Chaos came out for PS2 but only in Japan. In the US, XBox was the only way. Ninja Gaiden did come out for PS3 as Ninja Gaiden Sigma - but that definitely would break our budget here. I also picked up a Udon Akuma controller for $4.99. So, for around the price of a new game for a new system, I was able to get several decent games and two controllers for an old-school machine. Several weeks later, on a trip to our local Kmart, I found the game section that time forgot. I picked up the Gottlieb pinball collection and Big Strike Bowling for XBox for $2.50 each. The pinball game controls the same as the PS2 one I mentioned above - the only down side is that the included tables were ones I was unfamiliar with except for Black Hole. The bowling game seems a bit lame with Wii bowling as a comparison, but it's still worth the $2.50.
Of the other games, I'm playing Ninja Gaiden the most. Since I'm not an aw3sum l337 gamerz, I'm playing on Ninja Dog difficulty after getting decimated on the first boss battle several times in a row. Now that I'm most of the way through the game, perhaps I would consider replaying it on the regular difficulty. If the boss battles turn out to be too tedious, perhaps one time is enough. The other thing I can't help but notice is the extreme similarity, down to the menu screens, with Capcom's Devil May Cry. The controls are actually better than DMC's, but the basic formula of the game is eerily similar. We'll see if I say the same thing when Bayonetta comes out.

Street Fighter 4 - First Impressions

2009-03-04T19:24:00.003-05:00

In the interest of disclosure, I am playing Street Fighter 4 on PS3 with the standard controller in default configuration.  You may see some ranting on messageboards across the 'net that you really should play this game with some $80 (or more) fighting stick.  Since I spent the majority of my time learning Street Fighter 2 on the Super Nintendo and currently play Street Fighter games the most on Playstation 2, I would just play worse than I already do if I used some fancy joystick. 

I am not going to include a complete history of Street Fighter here for the uninitiated - Wikipedia does an adequate job in that regard.  If you are reading this and don't want to browse the Wikipedia article, suffice it to say that this game revivied arcades upon its release. It is a fighting game where you play best two out of three knockouts against a variety of opponents leading to a bout against the 'boss' of the game.  There are several characters to choose from, all with a mostly different set of moves than the other characters.  Most of the early matches are against the other playable characters.  The characters have a wide variety of punches and kicks involving single button presses, and special moves that involve particular controller motions plus a button press or combination of button presses.

The plan on Sunday was to 1) run errands, 2) have lunch, 3) play SF4 and finish with two, possibly three characters.  My friend had picked up SF4 specifically knowing that we would have a chance to get started on it together, and I might be able to do some things that he may not, and vice versa.  The thinking was that we would have somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours, and that we should at least be able to complete the game with Ryu and Ken, since we both know those two characters well.  We opted to start with Ryu, even though we might have done better with Ken.  My unbridled optimism made me think that we might have also finished with Chun-Li in that time, assuming we had finished quickly with the first two and hadn't unlocked Dan.  The sad truth was that we only finished with Ryu in that time.  It's not because the game was massively more difficult.  The moves that we learned and used for years are still there.  The crazy parry mechanic that was in Street Fighter 3 is gone, but the new Focus Attack gave the computer an effective way to counterattack some tactics that we probably tend to overdo anyway.  Since the focus attack uses up some super meter, it's not like the parry that can be done over and over again - so we didn't feel so cheated when the computer did it to us.

One of the reasons I did badly against Blanka and E. Honda was that the distance on the crouching roundhouse was not the same as what I had gotten used to for most of the other SF games.  When I tried to zone them away with slow fireballs, hoping that they would jump over and be hit by my crouching roundhouse, I often missed because I didn't get close enough.  Perhaps I need to dash in to get there in time.  Rufus was actually our biggest stumbling block collectively, as he changed up his tactics a lot and kept us way off guard.  Since he's a new character, we didn't know what to expect or even how to block some of his moves.  When he popped up on the VS screen, I thought 'at least he'll be easy to hit...' but I would be grossly mistaken. He was all over us like fat on a marbled steak.  Seth, the last character, took us fewer continues, but I don't know if it was because we learned or because he was actually easier than Rufus.  As a boss, he seemed more like a boss from one of the other company's fighting games, mostly because he had a moveset that was just good moves borrowed from other characters.  All togetether, it took more than twenty continues, and after I left, my friend let me know that he had finished with Ken with less than ten continues.  (Seven?)  When we finished with Ryu, it unlocked Sakura.  When he finished with Ken later, it unlocked nothing.   :( 

The graphics are great, even on standard definition TV.  The music was inoffensive unless you left the game parked on a menu where you had to listen to a short loop of something over and over.  A lot of the stage music was yet another remix of the classic tunes from Street Fighter 2.  I was not dissappointed.  The control was, even without an expensive fighting stick, exactly what I expected.  Honestly,  I would really enjoy a Sega Genesis 6-Button controller converted for PS3, or perhaps one of those UDON Street Fighter game pads for PS3.  The only thing that I couldn't do reliably was the double fireball motion for the Super and the Ultra combos.  Multiple button presses were easy as pie.  I hope that the reviewers that wanted the big expensive joysticks weren't compensating for something.

Net. Book.

2009-02-20T00:49:00.003-05:00

I guess I never noticed that a company called Psion ever made anything called a netbook in the 90's. The fact that they've issued Dell and others warning letters about that word that they trademarked in the 90's only makes me want to say three things.

1) Although I am familiar with laptops, tablet PC's, PDA's, the term 'netbook' only came into my usage in the last year - probably because of offerings from Asus, HP, and Acer and others trying to fit in the low-cost end of the computing spectrum. The word feels generic, eCost and other sales sites treat the word like it's generic, and everyone else gets that it's an interNET noteBOOK computer. I'm sure part of the reason that I'm unfamiliar with Psion's original netBook is because it was not that popular at the time, and the company is in the UK. As a matter of fact, the last time I touched something that that company made was probably the Chess game for the Timex Sinclair computer back in the mid 80's. Some of you may have phones with the Symbian OS on them, or some software written for that OS - but it would be hard to know that Psion had anything to do with it unless you spend your day picking through the fine print. The other reason you might be unfamiliar with Psion is that's it's been reorganized and spun apart a couple of times.

2) I'm surprised they haven't filed suit against Toyota for introducing the Scion brand of vehicles since it's pronounced the same.

3) Net Book. Netbook. Say it with me.

Netbook netbook netbook netbook notebook laptop desktop internet notebook netbook.

Klaatu barada netbook.
The NBC Nightly Netbook with David Brinkley.
You're watching the netbook channel.
All your netbooks are belong to us.

See? Perfectly generic.

We can't let people trademark stuff so easily. Sure, if it's a completely made up word like Narbacular, whoever made it can control it. Otherwise, Exxon is going to trademark the word 'biofuel' or 'gasohol' or 'corn' and the next thing you know, they'll have the Jolly Green Giant working at a truck stop fueling 18-wheelers because they own him anyway and it's more productive than him standing around in a field all day.

Mountain Dew and some reviews

2009-02-04T16:56:00.001-05:00

I had to run to the store early Tuesday morning for milk. CVS had stuff on sale, I splurged and still made it out the door for under $10 - milk, some cereal with raisins, a 2-Liter of Coke for my wife, and a cold 20oz Mountain Dew Voltage.

Voltage now tastes a bit more like Game Fuel than it used to (although it could be argued that it was the closest to begin with), and the ginseng aftertaste has been toned down from what I remember when I tried this before. Why do I still know what Game Fuel tastes like? Because other MD aficionados have carefully horded some, and I managed to have a can of it just last week.

Also, I just got my son Super Mario Sunshine for GameCube (I assume, perhaps wrongly, that most of you know about Mario?) - I'd never played it, and I didn't even play Super Mario 64 (gasp!) but #1 son had been playing it at a local McDonald's that still had it set up on a kiosk. Julian said that the version we got was slightly different than the kiosk version - the kiosk version resets when you die and starts in a slightly different place, according to #1 son. As I recall, not everyone liked it when it came out, and I don't know why I passed on it at the time. I never got around to playing it, so I skipped from Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island on SNES straight to Super Mario Galaxy. Now that I'm playing Sunshine, I see a lot of things that they re-used for Galaxy. In fact, there are a lot of things in Galaxy that I like better. There are some places in the game where you can just walk around before picking a level to go to where there are almost no ways to lose lives, but plenty of places to practice some of the tricky jumps and hover maneuvers particular to this game. In the hub world in Super Mario Galaxy, about the only thing you can practice is one type of wall jump and (super-late spoiler alert) flying. There aren't too many open areas of ground in the Galaxy hub world so if you get too crazy, you fall off and get reset to the nearest platform. In general, I can only assume that this game was poorly received because it wasn't what fans of Super Mario 64 wanted to play, but I am finding it fun, and my son is enjoying it as well (even though he needs just a little bit of help on this one part... and then this part...).

The other thing that I picked up recently was Arcana Heart for PS2. (I got it as a small self-reward for finishing my taxes.) It's a fighting game full of Japanese schoolgirls with mystical powers associated with supernatural forces called Arcana. Again, I am late getting to this as it has been out for almost a year in America. The only thing that I can say about it is that it doesn't appear to have made any major errors that I can detect on a first playthrough. It's a 2-D fighter like the old Street Fighter games and Guilty Gear. The music is not as engaging as Guilty Gear's metal anthems, but nothing is so bad as to detract from the gameplay experience. Even using a cordless controller, the game is snappy and responsive. I had read other reviews complaining about how floaty it is, but since I get the idea that they are playing on rather large backgrounds and have figured out that you can press a button to dash over to where your opponent is rather quickly, it only feels floaty if you try to do jump-in attacks like it was Street Fighter. The controls are a little simpler with only three attack strengths and a special button, which is a big help in an unfamiliar game. Each character has some of their own special moves, and they get other special moves based on which Arcana they use so it is possible that the game could feel like there are 121 different characters. However, the game's storyline implies that certain characters are normally tied to particular Arcana. I guess I'll find out later if it's possible to play against the computer using a non-standard pairing of character and Arcana. This is likely to be the one of the last fighting games on the PS2 unless they decide to put out Arcana Heart 2 or another Guilty Gear on PS2, and it's a somewhat disappointing end to the PS2 in that regard. If you're a fighting game fan that has to play them all, it will be amusing for a time. If you're an anime fan that's all geeked out about the schoolgirl part, you might enjoy this game more than the fighting game aficionados.

A sample week of cubing in public

2009-02-02T14:37:00.004-05:00

I really enjoy cubing in public. I don't just enjoy it for the occasional bonus, like a free hour of diagnostic time at the mechanic's shop, or the rare employee discount or free meal. Those are fun when I get them, but it's not really the reason. The reason I really like it is when I can give someone that moment where the light goes on in their head, and they get a glimpse of real understanding. That is not the universal reaction, however. A lot of the time it's just amazement or disbelief.

Let's compare a few scenarios. Last weekend at the fair I went to all of the usual vendors, and a few new ones. #1 son always likes to find one particular Ty (Beanie Baby) vendor at the fair because she's always got some that he didn't find elsewhere and he has a serious jones for stuffed animals. (They're so cute!) We have come by her booth at least the last four or five years. She remebers who we are because of the cube, even though she does dozens of fairs and shows a year. This year, she shows me off to the guys selling baseball memorabilia across from her. It's the standard bit where I hand them the solved cube, encourge them to mix it up, and I knock it down in about 40 seconds or so. They shake their heads in disbeleif and go back to their business. Later, I go look for one of the other booths by myself, and run across a local solar power vendor. I am interested and look over the booth, and I get the usual question.

"Have you ever gotten that thing?"

The guy in the next booth over starts watching and comments that he had solved the cube a couple of times, but didn't really know what he was doing. I explain a few more in-depth things that I don't normally bother with, like explaining the difference between an edge piece and a corner piece. These are guys that probably could solve it if they really wanted to, and perhaps I managed to turn some lights on in their heads. I tried to relate the edge and corner pieces of the cube to the perimeter pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Now the difference is that in a jigsaw puzzle, you can move all of the pieces independently, but at least they got the idea.

Thursday night out at a fundraiser, for the elementary school that #1 son goes to, I had the cube with me and managed to catch the eye of a couple of kids two tables over. Their older sister was unimpressed - as it turns out she could actually solve the cube, given a few minutes. I came over and sat at the end of the table for a few minutes and gave them a more though demonstration. I showed them the usual corners-first method that I do, and showed them what two-in-ones are (where you turn two adjacent faces in succession with a single hand motion). It felt like I was doing table magic, but without the intense pressure that comes with working closeup. I had nothing to conceal, and it was amazing all on its own. The youngest was a little older than #1 son, and #1 son came over to talk after a while, as the topic had turned away from the cube and over to school. After a little more chatting, and #2 son barrelling into the conversation, it turned out that the youngest kid had seen my wife and the kids walking to school a lot. So, we ended up turning the light on in a different way, by networking.

This past weekend at McDonalds, I sat between two groups of teenagers and #2 son took great delight in playing peekaboo with one of them. I'm not sure if #2 son was that hungry, though. After I finished eating, I went back to cubing, and got noticed. Oddly enough, the two guys behind us were semi-hanging out with a group of girls over on the other side. Once I had the guy's attention, they called the girls over. As usual, I hand off the solved cube to one of the girls to have them scramble it, so they don't think I've rigged it somehow. What is the greatest danger to solving a cube in McDonalds? French fry grease is. I still managed to solve it fast enough to be somewhat impressive, but I'm sure I could have done better. I lost control of the cube twice, but managed to reverse my mistakes quickly. Stage fright? Grease? All of the above? Maybe I'll have to film it sometime. Until then, I won't really know. Big thanks to Alex and Emily and their friends for indulging my crazy cubing skills.

Do I really have to say this again?

2009-01-26T11:50:00.002-05:00

I'm serious.
Really, really serious.
I can't stress this enough.
I've seen this several times.
It disappoints me every single time.
Pay attention, you will save eighty bucks.

If you own a laser printer, do not plug it into a battery backup.

If you have a battery backup where some of the outlets are labeled "Surge Only", then that's OK.
Just make sure you don't plug it in the battery side. It will cause premature battery failure, and no one wants that.

(Getting off of my soapbox now...)

Wii Fit: Incredibly Late First Impressions

2009-01-18T20:06:00.002-05:00

Since the employees at our local Best Buy seem to enjoy my Rubik's cube prowess, I was finally given the tipoff that there would be more Wii Fit today. The store opened at 11, I left the house at 9:15 with the two kids and a stop at Home Depot that I needed to make. One sheet of MDF that barely fit in the car later, I ended up at Best Buy around 10:10. Several people were already in line, luckily some of them just wanted Wii's and not Wii Fit. I got a ticket for one of the guaranteed 12 Wii Fits available. Yay! I burned the rest of the hour doing Rubik's cube for a few people ahead of me in line.

The board itself seems rather sturdy, the battery compartment door was easy to remove and snapped in firmly. The 'sync' button is inside the compartment, just like the Wiimotes. #1 son and I were set up in minutes, and we both stunk at the very first test trying to figure out what we were doing. It involved checking your balance, posture, and body control by having you hold off-balance positions for three seconds each.

Since the machine has your age and BMI before you do this test, we presumed that those things figure heavily in getting your initial "Fitness Age". I am a normal BMI, but only got through four of the five initial body control tests. The machine gave me a Wii Fit age of 42. (I'm not 40 yet.) By comparison, when my wife tried it later, her BMI was several points higher but she aced the body control tests with time to spare and was given an initial "Fitness Age" of 35.

We liked the wide variety of things to do on the game disk. The games aren't suffering from all being too much alike, and the Yoga, Strength Training, and Aerobic sections are easy to work into. Sure, there was one or two that I may not be ready for, but if I get better at the other ones, I'll be ready soon enough. The real question, will I be able to stick with it? Will I want to jog around my living room with a Wiimote in my pocket or do pushups on the balance board more often? Check back in two weeks.

Adventures in Tech Support

2009-01-13T13:56:00.002-05:00

File this one under "I wouldn't believe it unless I saw it myself."
I'm sure that many of you just expect your computer to work right and don't spend any time under the hood messing around with the parts. I'm guessing that more than half of you are using a computer that's a year or two old and has Windows XP on it. If any of you running Windows XP have less than 512MB of RAM, I would suggest you fix that if you can. 256MB is technically enough, but most days it doesn't cut it. With that in mind, here's my crazy tech support story.

I took apart a machine at the end of the business day yesterday to put some RAM in it. Our estimator at the office has been running an old AMD Athlon machine with only 256MB of RAM. He never turns it off because it's running his Blackberry redirector all the time, and uses a couple of fairly hefty programs on a regular basis including AutoCAD. He says that he has run two simultaneous sessions of AutoCAD before, even with other things running. On the down side, he's got a small hard drive that's almost completely full, and the machine took approximately fifteen minutes from hitting the power button to being able to work at the desktop. I even tried to get him to upgrade his machine last year and had the new workstation in the building, and he refused it because he didn't want to have to reinstall all of his extra stuff and sort through his files. I was able to use the workstation for one of the other users that really needed an upgrade, so no harm done overall. I subsequently decided that more RAM was the best solution for now, and I got him 2 Gigs which is plenty for Windows XP in hopes that his machine will now last until Windows 7 comes out. We shut down the machine, cracked open the case, and took the old RAM out. What I saw, especially considering that the machine was still running moments previously defies description, so here's a picture.

I was too scared to use the RAM socket that it came out of - luckily there were two other free slots to put the two 1G chips in. Like I said, I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself.

Short sparse games mean a lot.

2009-01-10T22:23:00.003-05:00

I started Valve Software's "Portal" for PC Saturday a week ago, and finished the main game Tuesday night. I haven't done any of the crazy challenges yet, and I haven't gotten through all of the developer commentary. Even without the extras, it was amazing. Sure, it won all sorts of awards last year and the year before, so that's not much of a surprise. Just in case you haven't played it, I'll try not to spoil anything important.

The only other game that I can compare Portal to is ICO for Playstation 2. Both games are short, sparse, and short on communication. ICO opts for having a few cutscenes of unintelligible dialogue, where Portal has no cutscenes, all story pieces delivered in the game, and a chatty computer with a lot of memorable monologue. In ICO, you have a stick and a helpless princess to drag around after you. In Portal, you have a Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device and a Weighted Storage Cube. As it turns out, you can do more damage with the portal gun, but it's not as satisfying as beating something with a stick (at least not at first). In both cases the game is short by modern standards - ICO took me around eight in-game hours to finish, not counting dozens of deaths and half a dozen sandwiches over two weekends. Portal has but 19 levels - and makes no secret of it. An expert could blow through the entire game in less than an hour without breaking a sweat.

By comparison, Resident Evil 4 is 20-30 hours plus cutscenes under normal conditions. A driving game like Burnout or Gran Turismo's Arcade mode is likely to be a lot longer - to say nothing of GT's Simulation mode with its insanely long endurance races.

Neither game clutters the screen with a health bar or a score. Portal's only got a crosshair on the screen that tells you which portal you fired last. I really applaud both ICO's developers and Portal's developers for conveying so much in such a short game without too many heavy-handed approaches that take you out of the game. They are two games that made me feel something by the time the credits rolled - and not just the feeling that I'd been sitting in my chair too long.

Sure, I get all emotional about Zelda:Twilight Princess during the closing movie, but there's been at least a couple dozen cutscenes to propel the story by then. It would have been more challenging from a design standpoint to have conveyed all of that information in-game.

In other news - I suspect my 1up blog is not long for this world as UGO's acquisition of 1up gutted many of 1up's news people and killed Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine. I'm liable to just bail and stick to this space as my main soapbox. In really other news, I got dragged into the future via Facebook. (Thanks, y'all.)

Holiday Gaming Wrapup

2009-01-03T22:57:00.002-05:00

My oldest son did well for the holiday, scoring two out of the three LEGO "Fill in the Movie Franchise" games for Wii, and I got both of the zombie light gun shooters for Wii. LEGO Star Wars is nice - they did well in getting the two other games in one disc, improving a lot of the textures and rendering over the PS2 versions (who says the Wii's not next-gen?) and adding some levels that got left out before. LEGO Indiana Jones is pretty good from what I've played, and has all of the visual improvements of LEGO Star Wars and then some, but the AI isn't as good at doing what it needs to when you're playing by yourself. It really should be played co-op.

Now, on to the zombies. House of the Dead 2&3 Return is solid zombie shooting fun, and I find that 3 is a bit better than 2 so far but maybe it's because I'm not so good with 2's pistol and I fare better with 3's wider shotgun shooting. To be fair, these are dated arcade games, so the visuals are not on a par with what the system is really capable of, but it's quite faithful to the original. I wonder why they passed on including House of the Dead 1 - it might help keep the convoluted storyline together better. On the other hand, if you're going to cut one, it makes sense to cut the worst looking one. Resident Evil:Umbrella Chronicles is much more difficult than HOTD, and the visuals are almost as good as the Resident Evil 4 visuals. I do like the fact that they're using RE:UC to fill in parts of the plot leading you to next year's release of Resident Evil 5. (Good luck convincing this Wii owner to buy one of the other consoles yet, though.)

We had two late entries on the gaming front - one was Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, which was a lot of fun both for us and the purchaser thereof, even though we spent an inordinate amount of time with the hammer throw and the javelin. I'm sure it will be a source of plenty of future screaming at the television. The other late entry was ZOMG PORTAL IS TEH AWESOMEZ BYE GG PLAY PORTAL NOW.

More Holiday movie watching

2008-12-31T21:20:00.003-05:00

I got my lovely wife the film Hot Fuzz for Christmas since she really liked Shaun of the Dead. Instead of turning the zombie genre on its head, Hot Fuzz turns the cop comedy genre on its head. That being said, this is not simply a film full of one-liners and big explosions. There are some slightly grisly scenes in there, more at home in a zombie film than in the action movies that Hot Fuzz tries to make fun of. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the bad guy is very bad, and the camera tends to show more than it hides.

I know, this movie has been out for a while, but like Shaun of the Dead, it's going to take time for everyone that should have watched this movie to see it. What I'd really like to be able to say is that the next time Edgar Wright makes a movie with Simon Pegg, if we liked these other two we should all see it right away because it's going to be brilliant and gory and hillarious - but the mere act of typing it may curse that somehow. By the way, that film is tenatively titled The World's End.

Simon Pegg will next be appearing in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek film, due out in 2009 as our favorite engineer Scotty. As much as I liked reading about this in the trade magazines, and as much as I would love to love a Star Trek movie again, I saw some trailers that filled me with hype, not hope. At least I can be sure that it won't be worse than Nemesis as I am certain that that is a mathematical impossibility.

Next post: Holiday Game Wrapup (If all of them are unwrapped...)

Christmas Movie Blowout

2008-12-25T23:21:00.003-05:00

As most of you know, there are only two things that you can count on being open on Christmas Day. One of them is the movie theater, and the other is Chinese restaurants. Sure, there might be a few other places open - I know some pizza places were - but it's not a given. I didn't really feel like Chinese food today, so we went to see The Tale of Despereaux.

My oldest son was excited to see it, and wanted to wait until we could all go even though he could have gone earlier in the week since school is out. Frankly, I was happy to go to the movies since I can't really remember what the last thing I saw in the theater was. (Cars? Monster House? Well, I know I've seen at least a few movies in the theater since we've had kids.)

We were initally nervous because the reviews that we read gave the movie poor scores and complained a bit about that there were too many characters to follow. We were also prepped for the reviewers to dislike the movie by the fact that our oldest was reading the book that this moive was made from at school, and the teacher handed him a worksheet to fill out about the differences between the book and the movie. Clearly, the book had been changed a little to accomodate a screenplay. I always expect that to happen because of the intrinsic differences between books and movies. Usually, since changes have to be made, and they weren't the ones that the reviewer would have made, there's going to be several reviewers handing out bad scores purely because of a lack of objectivity. As far as the too many characters part, I didn't think that there were any more characters to follow than some ensemble comedies. Granted, those are for adults, but since my oldest son didn't have any problem with all of the characters then I have to assume that the reviewer needed something simpler to watch, like Waiting for Godot or perhaps some off-Broadway one person show.

I enjoyed the film for what it was and was not encumbered by having to compare it to the book.

On the other hand, we watched the Speed Racer movie after dinner - and I have no idea what someone unfamiliar with the source material would think of the movie. It was very much like watching a video game during most of the action sequences and jumped into flashback quite frequently in the first part of the film. I'm thinking that someone that never saw the original cartoon has no clear idea what is happening until about 30 minutes in, and it's still dodgy at that point.

Now I'm going to go shoot zombies parasite-infested villagers zombies.

Pikmin, and other things

2008-12-20T23:34:00.003-05:00

Over the course of the last week, I improved my scores on three of the Challenges on Pikmin after no improvement for a month. This brings up several questions.

Why am I not playing something on the Wii instead of a Gamecube game from seven years ago?
Whatever happened to playing RE4 Mercenaries mode?
Didn't I have to start Zelda:Twilight Princess again becuase my save got erased?

The short versions are, I like Pikmin too much, I have to play through RE4:Wii at least once to open up Mercs again, and I did play at least a little Zelda today while the little guy was asleep.

The real qustion for me is, how much longer can I expect to improve at Pikmin without just copying what someone else has in their Pikmin strategy guide? I have been making some effort to be consistent in how I do things, but some things happen differently every time you play, and sometimes stuff just doesn't go right. I improvise, and I'm willing to do that. Maybe I should just be happy with that since I don't want to get in the habit of only having one way to do it and resetting the console every time it doesn't go that way.

Before I played Zelda today, I also took a swing at Chapter 3-1 in RE4:Wii, and screwed up royally (twice) before going back to Zelda. The thing that I noticed about Pikmin and Zelda today is that the controls are so natural that repeated playthroughs get better just because of the increased familiarity with the controls. Of course knowing where everything is helps, too. I'm finding with going from Gamecube RE4 to Wii RE4 is that playing through the initial scenario again is almost like starting over, since the controls are different enough to screw me up. (If I were a righty, however, I would notice no control difference at all.) I do really want to get back to playing Mercenaries mode, but usually when the living room TV is available people are sleeping. I could play during the day, but only if no one is watching - can't have the kids getting scared of ~~zombies~~ parasite-infested villagers.

Chicago politics is corrupt? This is not news.

2008-12-10T12:34:00.003-05:00

As disappointing as it was to see that the Governor of Illinois was attempting to sell President Elect Obama's vacated Senate seat, it was even more disappointing to see how many people across the internet had to jump in and make comments about how this reflected on our future president. Even though it seemed clear to me that Gov. Rod Blagojevich was only acting in his own self-interest and cared little about who actually ended up with the Senate seat, it was sad to see comments around the internet calling them "Democratic crooks" trying to lump the governor in with the President-Elect.

If Barack Obama had been involved in Illinois' corrupt political machine, wouldn't every other candidate have called him out on the character issue immediately? It's not like this is unknown to the rest of the country. If I hear people make jokes about "Vote Early, Vote Often" or things like "I'd like to move to Chicago right before I die so that I can stay active in politics", then I think that a fair portion of the rest of the nation is aware of Chicago's seedy political history.

Orange Mountain Dew!

2008-12-02T12:56:00.003-05:00

I managed to obtain some Mountain Dew LiveWire on the way back from Thanksgiving - even though I don't really like being in the big box stores on Black Friday. I hope that the person I got it for appreciates it. I had some myself, and it wasn't exactly what I remembered. I'm sure that the problem is what I remembered was the frozen concoction that Target had a couple of summers ago in their ICEE machine, which usually is a little more hi-test than the soda itself.

Style over Substance -OR- N Sixty-What?

2008-11-16T21:10:00.006-05:00

While the first part of my title seems out of place for most of things we deal with on an everyday level, it's not out of line looking at old games. Old games in a 3D graphic style seem to look more dated more quickly. It probably doesn't help if you're seeing ports of other systems' games either.

I fired up my old N64 over the weekend because my older son wanted to see The Ocarina of Time. He saw the preview of the Wii Virtual Console version on Super Smash Brothers, and he seemed interested since it was another Zelda game. I was excited that I didn't have to rip the cartridge apart and figure out if I could replace the battery that held the game saves. At first it looked a little odd, especially at the very beginning. The texture filtering during cutscenes and the fog in the distance just scream 1997. After we played it for a few hours, we stopped looking at the graphics, and it was more about the game. We took a break from that and I popped in a few other carts to see what I could get to work. Mario Kart 64 and Quake 2 didn't run. (Perhaps numerophobia?) BioFreaks and Mortal Kombat 4 did. (Well, there goes that theory.) BioFreaks didn't look too bad except for one character's lack of collision detecion on his own parts. We also picked the less human-looking characters. When we put MK4 in, I was pleased with the tight controls and the sound design that I remembered. However, the human characters looked wrong. Liu Kang's neck was a little underdesigned. His head was like a octahedron instead of, well, a head. Of course, it's possible that the arcade version of MK4 doesn't look as bad as that. I sincerely hope so.

When I get old Street Figher games out and play them, they don't feel so dated as these games do. Even the Zelda on GBA (which itself is a port of the Super Nintendo version) seems more crisp and fresh than the N64 one. I think a lot of this has to do with the art style. If you try to use an overly realistic art style, you set yourself up for looking dated down the road. I'm sure Pit Fighter was perceived as cutting edge at the time but looks laughable now. On the other hand , if the art is done with the hardware in mind, then the game looks nice even a generation later. Zelda certainly looked better than MK4, and I'm guessing that Zelda's character models actuallly have less geometric detail but have an easier time holding up in Zelda's slightly cartoony art style. I'm not really looking forward to seeing the N64 version of Quake 2 again, since I played Quake 2 on a fairly decent (at the time) PC and that's how I remember the game.

So, will Metal Gear Solid 4 and Resident Evil 5 still look good 10 years from now, or are we going to complain about the texture quality and antialiasing then? Also, will some companies keep making 2D games so they can keep recylcling the sprites over and over?

Games and Self-Selection

2008-11-15T07:59:00.006-05:00

Last weekend I played a couple of PS2 games that I borrowed from a friend. Actually, my older son played most of one of them. The two games were Teen Titans and Metal Gear Solid 3. If you look on Metacritic for their respective scores, Teen Titans got a 56 and Metal Gear Solid 3 (Snake Eater, to be specific) got a 91 out of 100. Oddly enough, both of the user ratings for this game were around 9 out of 10. So, is Teen Titans a bad game or not?

Teen Titans was finished in a day. We started Saturday night and finished by Sunday afternoon. It used the five main characters from the cartoon, and all of the same voice actors as the show. Mostly it's a 3D brawler - it felt like Gauntlet Dark Legacy to me a little. SPOILERS! The game's plot was a touch on the contrived side, but the fact that they had actually been crammed into a video game on the show once before kept it from being too lame. Right before the last boss battle, they manage to re-engineer the game to play pong and Space Invaders. (Heh. It's a two year old game. I should have seen it before now.)

It was a bit repetitive, and I did most of the boss battles since my son didn't quite get the 'move every character to their designated spot to do a team attack' part. Once we had finished the game, we looked at the 4-player battle mode and noticed that there were a lot of characters and stages from the cartoon show that weren't even in the game very long or at all and didn't have to be there, but they were. That was a nice touch, and would add to the replay value if we didn't have a game like Super Smash Brothers in the house.

We had a lot of fun playing it, even if it was short - and this is where the self-selection comes in. We talk about self-selelection in statistics to refer to a group within a sample that selects itself instead of being randomly selected. Usually the data only tells you something about the self-selection process and not the whole group. Since no one would doubt a bad review of a TV show licensed game, people that bought it, played it, and liked it would be more likely to submit a good review if for no other reason to justify their purchase to themselves and refute the low review score in some way. Real fans of the show probably like all of the fan service touches and might give it a good rating, too.

On the other hand, MGS3 is a little daunting. Clearly it's a game for people who played the other MGS games. People that play other action games like God of War, Ninja Gaiden, or even Zelda aren't really the target audience for this game. MGS is won by being sneaky and doing little. It's not even like Tenchu since in Tenchu if you successfully sneak up on someone you can eliminate them and don't have to worry about hiding from them any more. In MGS the best you can do is knock someone out for a little while and hope you're out of there before they get up.

Since I flunked out of MGS1 after a couple of Boss battles, I figured that I might make it to the first one. Of course it's hard to say how you're going to do, since there's a good half-hour between selecting 'NEW GAME' and actually playing. Since this game is primarily an outside game as opposed to MGS1 and 2 that take place in more urban settings, it's harder to gague how to play since you don't have reliable methods like building corners or storage rooms to hide in. I thought about using the in-game radar more - to make it a little more like MGS1 which has a radar system by default - but since it uses virtual battery power and I haven't figured out how I get that back, I haven't tried that yet.

The nice thing about MGS3 for me so far is the Snake vs. Monkey minigame since it's not quite as demanding as the regular game and it uses the cute mokeys from Ape Escape. Capture monkeys quickly is all you have to do.

So, for me, other than the monkey thing, it's not so fun. Would I post a bad user review on Metacritic? Probably not. With all of the critical acclaim the MGS series has gotten, I assume that the fault lies with me. After all, I'm not that hardcore a gamer( or at least that's what the 20-year-olds at Gamestop tell me).

I voted!

2008-11-05T10:20:00.005-05:00

Amazingly enough, for once the constituents seemed to be excited about the outcome.

This is preferable to the constituents being lukewarm and the candidate gleefully wringing his hands, trying out his best mad scientist laugh and yelling "I'll show them all!" as lightning strikes in the background.

Since I voted later in the evening, there were only a few people there and I had time to do an impromptu one-minute cube demo as I was leaving. I took a good-looking but slightly loose cube, which caused me to flounder uncontrollably into 45-second territory. The poll workers were somewhat appreciative of the stupid human trick as they were isolated from any sort of television or radio.

I also commented on how the black magic markers in at least one of the voting booths should be a little more accommodating to leftys. They were affixed to the right side of the booth where I was. The poll worker that I talked to about that thought that maybe she would put them in the center next time - I just worry that then they won't work for anybody. I can handle separate but equal in this particular case.

Cubing in Public

2008-10-28T12:44:00.002-04:00

I'm sure most of you that know me have seen me baffle, astound, or annoy others around me in public with my perpetual Rubik's cube solving. Ideally, I would view it as some sort of mathematical evangelism, but more likely it's just attention-grabbing behavior.

The last time I stopped to bring a paycheck to the bank, I went to a branch over by where I work, and where a few of the managers and tellers know me - and have seen my silly cube nonsense. Typically, I just hand the teller my deposit, and see if I can solve it by the time they have my deposit done. For some reason, I did not have my cube out yet, and I was next in line to go to a teller. One of the managers sees me, says hi, and asks where my cube is. I mentioned that it was safely in my pocket, and I produce it from my pocket in a scrambled state. The female teller at the end calls me over, but a male teller in the front that had just finished with a customer says to me:

"Give me two minutes and I'll have that solved for you." I figure the other employees either put him up to it, or they're just having fun watching me toy with him. I start walking over to the teller that called me.

"Two minutes?" I'm incredulous, but not for the reason he thinks.

"Two minutes."

"Two minutes? I'll have it done my the time she finishes my deposit!" I hand the female teller my deposit, and she starts clicking away. I'm a tad ahead of her, and once I can tell I'm on the last set of moves, I slow down enough so that I can put down the finished cube in time to take the receipt from her hand at the exact moment she offers it to me. Presumably, we're talking about 30 seconds or so, and that included my slowdown.

So now, the male teller is incredulous. We re-scramble the cube since there's no one in line behind me, and then I start asking him what method he used - and this is the part that really gets me - he's using the Lars Petrus method! (Quick version for those who don't follow the link - Form a 2x2x2 corner, expand to 2x2x3, finish two layers & orient remaining edges, and permute the last layer similar to the Fridrich method. The Petrus method also has multiple ways for some of the later stages to be combined, so it is a very flexible and capable method but leaves a beginner wondering what to do next a lot. Yeah, I know, that's still not a helpful description.) For starters, I hadn't encountered anyone out in public that used that method. What made it all the more strange for me is that since he didn't know the widely accepted name of the method, I can only assume that he had it taught to him by someone else, and had been cubing in isolation. It's not one of the widely known methods that was around in America in the first era of the cube in the early to mid-eighties. Typically I only run into people that do the regular layer-by-layer method, but I do know people that figured out how to solve it on their own and do corners first. After I watched him struggle with my beat-up cube and complain about how he can't tell the red apart from the orange, I show him how the corners first method works, although briefly, and then I show him how two-in-one moves work, where two cube face moves are combined into a single hand motion.

Maybe the next time I see him he'll be able to beat me. I would actually look forward to it.

While Wii were out...

2008-10-27T11:42:00.000-04:00

I may have mentioned that my Wii is out for repairs. I'm supposed to get it back today, but that's not the reason I'm typing this. The reason I'm posting is about the games that we played in my house while the Wii was out. Even though I have a Gamecube hooked up, we didn't touch it. Everything we played while the Wii was out was on PS2. My older son played a fair bit of both of the Lego Star Wars games, and pined for Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman every time it was mentioned/passed by in the store/shown on TV. Since he'd already beaten those games to death, I tossed him Rygar. I ended up playing all of the boss battles, but at least we finished it. He liked all of the exploring and the jumping and finding stuff in the rubble. I played through again on Normal, and did much better than I had the last time I played it. I even did the 30-level side mission!

The other thing I started playing was The Path of Neo. That game makes me appreciate how simple and intuitive Zelda's controls are. Every time I have to see a visiual indicator of what button I'm supposed to press it takes me out of the game a little.
(Funny, it happens all the time in Zelda and it doesn't bother me there.) Granted, the first two missions are training levels of sorts, and I did appreciate the glowing cubicle walls in the first level showing me where I should hide, but beyond that I was worried that I am going to spend the entire game fighting the controls. I've already flunked out of the first Metal Gear Solid because I can't beat Raiden, and I already abandoned the other Matrix game (Enter the Matrix) partway through the second character. I finished with Niobe, and got stuck on a Ghost mission because I didn't have enough ammo and didn't care enough about a tertiary Matrix character to keep going.

We'll see how long Neo lasts once I have a Wii again. (Maybe I should have played Sonic Riders instead of The Path of Neo.)

Perhaps I should get a Cintiq

2008-10-25T19:51:00.002-04:00

...because otherwise, I draw stuff on my son's Doodle Pro Travel size instead of on the computer. I might also consider more mainstream subject matter - but I'm pretty sure my brain doesn't work like that. Since a Cintiq is a little pricey I suspect that I'll have to make better use of my Graphire tablet, but I can't doodle out of the couch with it. Tablet PC? Just as expensive as a Cintiq. Anyway, here's my Living Color doodle (well, it's just Vernon Reid and Corey Glover...)

Shrinkage on the Beverage Aisle

2008-10-21T09:56:00.003-04:00

What does Pepsi do when they have a bad quarter? They start shrinking their package sizes! I was at the local Wal-Mart for some must-get items, and figured I would pick up some caffeine for the week while I was there. No Mountain Lightning, so I figure the real thing must be on sale. When I look at Pepsi's portion of the shelf space where the 12-packs would be, there were 8-packs. In place of the 24-packs? 18-packs. That way, they don't have to move the price point as far, and they ship a smaller amount of product. Since most people aren't bringing a slide rule to the store, they don't know if the new package size is a good deal compared to before or not! Additionally, Wal-Mart typically doesn't offer particularly good prices on name brand soda on a daily basis since they're pushing the house brand most of the time. Every once in a while, they'll put something on sale, but it's usually the 24-packs of Dew or Pepsi. Luckily, that was the case. I also noticed that several people had put their 18-packs back on the float that the sale-price 24-packs were on.

Clone Wars vs. Clone Wars

2008-10-18T07:05:00.002-04:00

Friday night during dinner, while we were waiting for Cartoon Networks' new Clone Wars show to come on - last week's episode is 8:30, new episodes are at 9:00 we watched the older Clone Wars from 2005 produced by Samurai Jack's animation team. The thing we appreciated the most about the new one now is that Anakin's got a less whiny voice actor. The action of the 2005 miniseries holds up well, and it doesn't hurt that Mace Windu get lots of lightsaber time in the old one, but the new Clone Wars seems surprisingly mature and well-acted by comparison. Maybe George Lucas is only writing plot outlines and is letting better directors and writers fill in the gaps.