Christmas Movie Blowout

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

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.

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!

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?

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

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!

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.