Infinitely lost in the toy aisle...

On the way back from doing a little bit of computer tech work this morning, I thought I would peek my head in the local ToysRUs. I thought that it might not be a total madhouse, since even though it was getting closer to Christmas I still had the advantage of it being both Sunday and lunchtime.

While they had a good special on games (buy one game $19.99 or under get the second 40% off), the majority of the games available on special were games that I had already purchased. The one game that stood out as something I might play (Midnight Club Los Angeles - Complete Edition) is tainted by the fact that I only got to the end one of the three versions of Midnight Club that were on the PS2, and I don't really think that I unlocked everything even in that one. As I might have mentioned before, I already have plenty of things to play.

ToysRUs has made most of their stores work in a loop fashion, similar to the layouts of Harmon Face Value Stores and Bed Bath & Beyond. At the beginning of the loop are usually seasonal and promotional items, so while you might have found Halloween costumes there two months ago, the front area is now filled with Christmas candy and new offerings from their featured vendors including LEGO, Skylanders, and a large (15' high by about 18' wide)  Disney Infinity 2.0 display.

I had previously mentioned to my children that the reason we didn't play Skylanders is that at the time (2011) was that it was the most expensive game at retail. ("Steel Battalion" by CAPCOM used to have that distinction because of the ridiculously expensive custom controller.) The basic game was similar to the Gauntlet series, where you got a bunch of characters together and tried to fight your way through a series of levels, using the power of the skills of the different characters. The reason I discouraged my kids from this game was that to be able to play every thing that was already on the game disk, it would cost over $300 (and this was just for the first Skylanders game), and you could buy five or six other new release games that didn't do that to you for that amount of money, and maybe ten or fifteen games if you picked them up used or waited for the price drop. Why so expensive? It's expensive because they sell you in-game characters a la carte as plastic toys with computer chips that stored your data in them that range in price from $8 to $15 each, and only certain characters types can unlock and play certain missions.

Now, Disney/Marvel has jumped on this bandwagon and created Disney Infinity, now on version 2.0. Taking elements from both their own and other "sandbox" style games, they have combined it with the same RFID/toy technology used in the Skylanders games and their own gigantic stable of Disney and Marvel characters. (The first Infinity game was only Disney/Pixar characters.) While it may be cool for an eight year old boy to play as a giant spore-shooting mushroom, or a big muscular brawler that looks like an eyeball, it's going to be really hard to compete with a game where you can play as Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor, Elsa,  Anna, Merida, Sully, Mike Wazowski, Buzz Lightyear, or Malificent (and dozens more). The same rule as Skylanders applies - if you want to play as a character, you need to buy the corresponding plastic toy for $14.

Maybe this would be easier if you could see it in action. This is from Disney Infinity's own Youtube channel.



Perhaps this is a hard concept to convey, because since you can do all sorts of things in the Toybox mode of Disney Infinity, it's almost easier to say what the game isn't than what it is.

So, back to the loop thing. The way the ToysRUs is set up puts the expensive "R" Zone items (electronics, most of the video games, tablets, headphones) at the end of your loop so you can't second-guess yourself as you go around the store, and also so the employee that has to take things out of a locked case for you can then just ring up your purchases at that point. The video displays that they have in the store include a setup for Infinity 2.0 and a setup for Skylanders so that parents and kids can get an idea of what the game is about. But, if you ran into Disney Infinity at the beginning of the loop and didn't know what it was, do you supposed that you could find out what that game is about? Probably not. Even though it should sell enough copies this year to make an amount of money for Disney/Marvel that would make Scrooge McDuck a little envious, most of the ToysRUs employees aren't in the right demographic to get any firsthand exposure to these games. I saw a couple over by the big display out front that were struggling with understanding even the most basic thing about the game. They were a little exasperated that the employees didn't know that much. I was happy to help them pick out the PS4 version today along with Anna and Elsa figures, and answer a few easy questions for them. Since the questions are relevant, perhaps they are worth including.

What is Disney Infinity 2.0? It's an open-world/sandbox game where you can explore, race, shoot stuff, build buildings, and all kinds of things. Some specific missions go with some spefic characters, and that unlocks more things that you can use in the Toybox mode.

What's the difference between the Marvel Super Heroes version of Disney Infinity 2.0 and the Toy Box Version? The biggest difference is the starting characters. The Marvel Super Heroes version comes with three of the Avengers (Iron Man, Black Widow, and Thor), and the Toybox version comes with Merida from "Brave" and Stitch from "Lilo and Stitch". The game disk is the same, the Infinity base is the same, and what happens from there depends entirely on what characters you have. The reason for the two versions is just that it makes more sense to start you with a few Disney characters or a few Marvel characters, and the things available to do in the game vary based on what you start with.

What platform should I get it for? Get it for the newest platform that you still intend to be playing a year from now or are comfortable with your kids hogging all the time. The PS4 is going to run a lot smoother than the PS3 version and be able to do a lot more visual effects at once even though the basic style of the graphics will be the same.

I learned later that the PS4 version will be capable of building much larger Toybox areas, since the machine has more RAM available to do that. The same is true of the XBox One version over the 360 version. Sadly, the WiiU version is more on par with the PS3/XBox360 versions in that regard.


If you want to learn even more about the game, you should probably check out more of the videos on the Disney Infinity Youtube channel. I don't think we'll be picking up the game here since I don't want to fall in the Skylanders trap, and I will have my own problems with amiibos on the WiiU by the time Christmas rolls around.

As part of my usual schtick, since I do identify myself as SuperMonkeyCube to people when I meet them in person in a situation like this, I did do a quick(ish) Rubik's cube demo for the couple that I helped. (Three unseen mistakes, still finished in 37 seconds.)

Things to be thankful for...

So, it's Black Friday weekend, and all of us have been trying as hard as we can to get screen time. Everybody was on their DS on Thursday since we spent a lot of it in the car. My older son is working on Pokemon Alpha Sapphire on his Nintendo 3DS, and my younger son was playing more Scribblenauts and some Desktop Tower Defense on his 2DS. About the only thing that I bring to play on DS is my Korg DS cartridge, and I had fun figuring out how to make some drum noises that don't really sound like drums.

My older son and I are still trying to unlock all of the characters on Hyrule Warriors, and it seems like we've had to do a lot of repeated boards to get our characters leveled up enough to face the later challenges. I still have a long way to go on the WiiU version of Bayonetta and the new Bayonetta 2. I was in Gamestop the other day and my regular cashier asked me if I had started the new Smash Bros. game for WiiU, and my exasperated answer was that I still had a long way to go on the last two games that I got! We haven't even talked about the new LEGO Batman 3 game, since my older son and I are casually pretending that the game's not out yet so we're not inundated for requests from my younger son to pick up the game some weekend with Christmas on the way.

The first add-on pack for Mario Kart 8 came out a couple of weeks ago, and the playable Link character and the Hyrule Castle board are both nice additions to the game. I haven't played with the Tanooki Mario or Cat Peach characters yet, but I did see that some of the other courses make for some multiplayer insanity.  The Excitebike course has super-long straightaways leading to lots of shell-flinging shenanigans. Ice Ice Outpost is full of multiple paths most of which require rather precision driving or you will easily find yourself taking an ice bath.

So, even though I haven't picked up either of the newest systems, the PS4 or the XBox One, it still seems like there are plenty of games to play. There are still games coming out for the PS3, and the WiiU seems to have a steady stream of new releases coming out soon to be bolstered by the presence of the newest addition to the WiiU system, the amiibo.  Similar to their Skylanders and Disney Infinity counterparts, an amiibo is a plastic representation of one of the Nintendo characters with some electronics inside that will identify it to the WiiU. Unlike the Skylanders and Disney Infinity characters which each require their own portal, the Amiibo can talk directly to the WiiU gamepad. There is a newer model of the 3DS that has not been released yet that will also be able to read the amiibo information. For the 3DS and 2DS units that are already out, there will be an external  peripheral that will be released next year. Even more curiously, the amiibos do different things in different games. In Smash Bros., they become a specific character that you work on leveling up, in a very similar fashion to how they work in Skylanders and Disney Infinity. In Hyrule Warriors, different amiibos interact with the game in different ways. Some amiibos of the Zelda series characters give you weapons, and from the in-game description it sounds like some of the other ones give you random gifts (which I can only presume are materials to craft upgrades from). In Mario Kart 8, you can customize your Mii racer with an outfit based on the character that your amiibo is based on. I hope that they find other interesting ways to utilize these.

I am also looking forward to Street Fighter IV's upcoming Omega Mode patch, which will add a different version of each of the World Warriors to the line up, with different special moves and inputs. While the existing version of Ultra allows you to play as any previous Street Fighter IV version of any of the characters, the differences between those four versions are rather subtle and are just adjustments to the nuances of the game's balance. The Omega Mode versions are rather different, as you can see here.

So, what am I thankful for (as a gamer) this holiday season? I am thankful for the fact that there are more games out than I have time to play. That reminds me. I need to get ready for band practice.

Why Comic Books and Coffee Mugs Prove I Don't Understand Feminism or Marketing.

I want to be able to say that I'm not sexist. I'd like to think so. Every once in a while, something will set me off and I tailspin into some remarkable rabbit hole of self-loathing that makes me think that either I'm some sort of naive idiot or some evil monster.

This time it was a coffee cup.

I saw Guardians of the Galaxy a few weekends ago, and I really liked it. That's not really noteworthy, since it would seem that lots of people went out to see a movie that most people would have laughed at the premise of ten years ago. In fact, it's so many people that it's the number grossing summer film in the United States. In an effort to be additionally supportive, and to give me a frequent reminder of the film, I purchased a coffee mug that has four of the characters from the film on it.

So now I hear Peter Falk's voice in the back of my head going "Sorry to bother you, but there's one thing that I don't understand there. Aren't there five members of the team in Guardians of the Galaxy?" (For those of you too young to get the Columbo reference, just have a look on youtube.)

Who's on the coffee mug? Well, Star Lord has to be on the mug. It's practically his movie from start to finish. The bounty is on him, it's his spaceship, and it's his mixtape. Rocket and Groot are on the mug because they carry a lot of the jokes in the film. Drax is on the mug because he's awesome and nothing goes over his head. (Side note: Drax is so awesome that they also have a mug that's just him. I presume that the marketing department thinks that coffee drinkers identify with Drax.) I ask my wife while we're in the store - "Why isn't Gamora on the coffee mug?" - to which she wittily replies, "Gamora doesn't need coffee." She's not a fluff character in the film, by any means. She gets lots of screen time and several awesome action sequences.

So, then I start considering possibilities and the rabbit hole starts opening up on me. First, I think that they really did leave Gamora off of the mug because she's a girl, but then that would imply that the marketers think that comic books fans, especially ones that drink their own coffee but go the movies won't be accepting of her. Then I think - but I noticed that she was missing, and aren't I part of the intended demographic of both the movie and the coffee mug? So then that means I must feel guilty that a woman wasn't included, when women wouldn't actually want her to be on there to be objectified, so I'm bad for trying to introduce gender into a discussion that it shouldn't even have been in in the first place? It's not like the marketers can be wrong - after all, any time I don't get a commercial it's not because it's a bad commercial, it's because I'm not the intended demographic.

Don't comic books play into male adolescent fantasy a little too often for women to not be included, even if they're present for obstensibly the wrong purpose?

Then I think about it some more - Gamora is being played by the same actress that plays Lt. Uhura in the new Star Trek Films, and the lead Na'vi character Neytiri in James Cameron's Avatar. Is there a coffee-drinking man or woman that watches science fiction films that would decline to buy a coffee mug if she was on it? I think not. At a certain point, I have to abandon trying second-guess a feminist viewpoint and go back to trying to see the fan viewpoint. They're a team, she's on it, she should be on the coffee mug.

There's contact information on the bottom of the mug for the company that made them. Since it's here in America, I guess I will try to talk to them.

Let's try this in the contact form and see what happens:

I recently picked up one of the Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy coffee mugs from my local Wal-Mart retailer and opted for the "Character" mug over the "Drax" mug just to have more of the characters but I was still a little disappointed that Gamora was not included. I have been often reminded that I don't really understand marketing.  In those cases where I don't understand the marketing it's often the case that I'm not the intended demographic anyway. I don't actually drink coffee, but I got it for my wife who does. We're both over 40 and have a couple of kids and we all enjoyed the movie.  So - is it because I'm not the standard demographic for this product, or is it because of some marketing reason that I'm unlikely to understand that Gamora's not on the "Character" mug? (Or is there some simple explanation that I've entirely overlooked?)

I'll follow up on this post when I get some sort of a response from the mug manufacturer.

Heavy on the rambling

I managed to finish "Ghost Rider:Spirit of Vengeance" and "John Carter", despite thinking that I wouldn't. The second half of the Ghost Rider movie was much more focused, and all of the things that they set up in the first part of the film paid off. The influences from "Crank" that the crew carried in became more pronounced, and Nicholas Cage had a little bit more one-on-one time with the other characters to develop a little more perceived chemistry.

With "John Carter", I actually had to re-watch a couple of chapters to figure out why I wasn't getting it. I realized that being distracted by my kids talking the first time through caused me to miss a couple of big chunks of dialogue. Once I solved that problem, I liked the movie a lot more.  To be fair, a lot of the scenes that followed the spot where I stopped the first time are more dialogue driven and only have a few characters in them, so they were inherently less confusing than some of the early action-based sequences where we were still trying to figure out the characters. It's still no Pirates of the Caribbean, but considering that this was Andrew Stanton's first go at a real big-budget live action feature, and he was trying to make a movie on par with Star Wars, it was a gutsy attempt. Yes, I realize that it was a box-office dud and expensive to make. (It cost $250 million to make - nearly 4 and a half times as much to make as Ghost Rider:SOV at a paltry $57 million.) If I was the head of the studio, I would have sent Stanton to go make some music videos or some commercials before I bet the farm on him, since directing animation is not the same as directing people. However, having watched the movie I can't point at something in the film and say that there were any specifically bad performances. Certainly, all the main actors in "John Carter" outshine any of Hayden Christensen's "Star Wars" performances.  It's possible that different editing and screenwriting could have tightened up the film some, but ultimately this is down to the story. Sadly, Pixar is usually really good about refining the story first and I think that's the lesson that Andrew Stanton may either have forgotten or didn't have time to realize. I did see that some critics complained that it was derivative. Did they forget that the whole 'space opera' thing practically started with Edgar Rice Burroughs?

So now the real question is, now that Disney is Pixar is Marvel is Lucasfilm, will we see some consistent improvements in their filmmaking?

Movie watching, heavy on the rambling.

I have been trying to make good use of our public library as a resource for movies that I think that I want to see but have no current intention of owning. Every once in a while I get lucky and find a movie that warrants repeat viewing, but I'm perfectly fine with some movies just being a one-shot deal.

Since I own the first Ghost Rider movie (Don't laugh. I got it for $4.00.) and have been trying to keep up with the current wave of Marvel movies I figured that the second Ghost Rider movie "Ghost Rider:Spirit of Vengeance" was worth a watch. I didn't notice right away that the producers of the film thought that it would be important to say "From the guys that brought you Crank". I found that rather odd, seeing as 'Crank' isn't exactly in the superhero genre, but I presume it's to attract the 20-something male audience that thinks that they're too cool to watch a superhero movie. Between the cold open that's supposed to tell you something about what Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider (played by Nicolas Cage) will have to deal with later in the film, and the long expository narration during the opening credits, it's clear that the story is not particularly streamlined. It also suffers from the possibility that hardly anybody watched the first film so they have to re-explain a lot of things in a way that develops the character but without making too many specific references to the first film. I have made it approximately halfway through last night and don't particularly care if I watch the rest of it now.  Since Ghost Rider is sort of an antihero, it's hard to care whether he wins or not, and the chemistry between Mr. Cage and the female lead is not as good as it was in the first film. (Actually, the chemistry between Nick Cage and anybody in this film is not as good as it was in the first film.)

If the guys that brought me "Crank" learned anything from making that film, they should have learned a) have a good idea to center the film around and b) stick with it. "Crank" had a very clear albeit ridiculous premise, and they didn't take too many unnecessary side trips. "Crank 2" was actually better since it was more tongue-in-cheek than the first one. So, even though "Crank" is a ridiculous action film with a low maturity level, the story keeps cooking along, stays focused, and holds your interest. I cannot say the same for "Ghost Rider:SoV", so perhaps Jason Statham will be getting a pass from me more often than Nicolas Cage. At least I know exactly* what I'm going to get with a Jason Statham movie.

Tonight, instead of attempting to finish "Ghost Rider:SoV" we tried to start "John Carter". It starts with a crazy story-in-a-story exposition, and then gets around to telling the story. It's very visually polished, but there's a tremendous number of characters introduced over the course of the first act. By the time John Carter figures out the Deja was a princess, my kids were playing with plastic army men and ignoring the movie at point-blank range, so now I am wondering if we're going to finish that one either.

On the good side, the Ghibli animated version of "The Borrowers" by Mary Norton called "The Secret World of Arrietty" turned out to be fantastic and my younger son watched it a second time the day after we watched it the first time. It has very cute animation as per Ghibli usual, most of the story focuses on the title character, and the fantastic world portrayed feels totally natural in the context of the film instead of self-referentially being amazed at its very existence.

*Jason Statham film summary - He's a regular dude with a checkered past, or possibly a hidden past, some stuff happens to him, and then he beats the tar out of everybody that screwed him over so he can finally go on that vacation at the end of the movie.

Cubing without even trying to.

I got my 25th Anniversary Rubik's Cube fired up again the other day.  One of my kids prompted me to get it going again. I had shelved it for a while because one of the yellow stickers had delaminated, giving the appearance of a white sticker. As the 25th Anniversary cube has no white side - the side that would normally be the white side has silver shiny stickers on it - it was theoretically no barrier to operation, but I robbed a yellow sticker from one of my other out-of-commision cubes so it didn't confuse me.

Its mechanism is better than most of my other cubes, only surpassed by the DaYan, but as I misplaced my DaYan some time ago this will have to suffice. I had it with me tonight when I went to go pick up some pizza at a place I used to go to every Friday, and now only go every three months or so since I have been dedicated to making pizza myself when I can. As the order was already made when I got there, having ordered ahead of time, I headed back to my car rather quickly with no time to stand around twisting the cube. Apparently, some of the other employees noticed me there with the cube anyway. As I am about to start the car, the assistant manager that handed me my pizza comes out to talk to me.  My first thought was that there was some mixup with the pies and I ended up with somebody else's.  My fears quickly subsided when the assistant manager says to me "One of the employees here was just telling me that you're really good with that Rubik's cube..." So, I give him as much demonstration as I can in two-and-a-half minutes. Typically that's one solve, one solve with explanation, and a quick demonstration of  the concept of a move and its inverse.

Once home and distributing pizza, I realize that I had not gone to the bank and it was not yet closed. Forgetting my cube entirely, I go to the bank branch that I would normally go to much earlier in the day. Once there, I am in more of a line that I would normally be. Two or three of the tellers notice that it's me right away and I'm a little surprised that they have zeroed in on me as I do not have a cube on my person. They assure me that someone will be with me right away and I get ushered down to one of the tellers that noticed me. I make my deposit, and I then get handed not one, but two miniature Disney picture cubes. One is black plastic with Mickey, Donald, and Goofy stickers. The other is white plastic with Minnie and Daisy stickers. They're approximately the size of a keychain cube, and of similar manufacture. The bank tellers had been eagerly anticipating my arrival all day. My instructions - they would like to see them solved. No hurry, of course, I can bring them back in a few days. Why me? Because I'm the only person they know that can do it. It's not like they don't know where to find me.

Pictures will follow once the Disney Cubes are solved.